IDSE202 Service Design

About This Course

Systems and service design are powerful methods for helping a company differentiate itself and evolve. The acknowledgement of a service as something that can be affected through design has grown over the last decade with Mary Jo Bitner’s seminal white paper, “Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation”, as a nexus between early academic work and current practice. During this course students will learn how to use service blueprinting to design the overall architecture for their business, product, or service. After learning the method, students will then have a tool for the iterative analysis and design of their offering and the ability to keep it relevant, valuable, and competitive.

There are three sections to this course:

Systems Foundation. We will explore a brief history of systems thinking and systems design. Based on the readings, students will write a position paper comparing traditional systems thinking to contemporary uses of it in design applications.

Service Foundation. We will be introduced to the field of service design and explore its role as an emerging design discipline. Based on the readings, students will write a position paper explaining the evolution, methods, processes, and distinct value of service design and how it differs from other forms of design.

Service Design Application. We will apply the theories of system and service design to the development of a service blueprint. Based on the readings and applications of service design theories, students will create and describe their service design blueprint for their projects on education.

Core Concepts and Ideas

This class emphasizes the following main ideas, themes, and concepts:

• Diagramming as both a philosophy and method for understanding the complexity of services and for proposing changes to these services
• Ecosystems and Ecologies as a way of framing large, multi-faceted, and often distributed problems

Reading List

• Bitner_ServiceBlueprinting
• ddo_article_ageofbiology.pdf
• ddo_article_convergence_2_0.pdf
• ddo_article_designing_service.pdf
• ddo_article_language_actions.pdf
• ddo_interactions_experiencecycle.pdf
• Designing_for_services_mulitdisciplinary_perspective.pdf
• Interaction_Design_and_Service_Design.pdf
• jay_doblin_a_short_grandiose_theory_of_design.pdf
• Machines_With_An_Attitude.pdf
• Pine_Gilmore_Customer_Is_The_Product.pdf
• Pine_Gilmore_Get_Your_Act_Together.pdf
• rheinfrank_design_languages.pdf
• richardson_ch4_convergence.pdf
• Service Design as an emerging field.pdf
• ServiceBlueprinting.pdf
• Shostack_Breaking_Free_From_Product_Marketing.pdf
• Theory_of_Change_A_Practical_Tool.pdf
• Thinking_In_Systems_The_Basics.pdf
• TOWARDS_AN_UNDERSTANDING_OF_EXPERIENCE_CONCEPT_DEVELOPMENT_IN_TOURISM_SERVICE_DESIGN_-28RIKON_Group-29.pdf
• Why_Systems_Work_So_Well.pdf