81533 Service Design Foundations

Description

Services are interactions between people who need help making a change and others who are prepared to help them. Service Designers help both the people needing help and the people providing the help to be more prepared for those interactions by making those interactions more routine, but also by anticipating non-routine events that may occur during those interactions. Though service designers use different material design practices to routinize services – communication design, product design, interior design, even fashion design – service design is different from other kinds of design because it involves the more direct designing of people, and not just contracted employees, but also unpaid customers, or community-members engaging in peer-to-peer interactions. This subject will teach you how to approach Service Designing from that foundation: that services are value-creating interactions between people, which means that they are always highly political. The first third of the subject examines the history of services and the rise of the service economy, extracting design principles that should inform more careful designing of services. The second third of the subject critically reviews key tools used in service designing today. And the final third of the subject works through issues associated with the management of services.