Stefan Holmlid

Bringing Service Design to Service Sciences, Management and Engineering

IBM has taken the lead in recognizing that college graduates need new skills to address business and technical issues in a service business environment. Because services depend critically on people working together and with technology to provide value for others, these new skills include the ability to integrate across traditional disciplinary areas to obtain globally effective solutions. Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) is one such approach to properly focusing education and research on services, and to preparing tomorrow s graduates to work in an expanding services economy. This contributed volume was developed from the IBM-hosted conference on October 5-7, 2006, designed to discuss the current status and foster the development and advancement of SSME. Contributions explore the ways SSME has been introduced into curricula, services research that is underway or is planned, and recommended actions for academia and governments to establish SSME as its own discipline.

Co-creative Practices in Service Innovation

This chapter is about co-creative practices that can be used for the purpose of service innovation. It starts with an introduction to our core assumption that innovation is a deliberate activity and can be enabled and triggered through staged co-creative practices. The main reasons for co-creative practices are first, bringing different people together to share, make sense and to collaborate, and secondly, to rethink current and explore future possibilities. In line with Kelley’s ideology, “You can prototype just about anything. What counts is moving the ball forward, achieving some part of your goal”. We highlight the open-ended exploration practices familiar to designers, in which the practice of identifying problems goes hand in hand with creating solutions. The basis for exploration in this chapter is in engaging people in reflective and creative dialogues, and to situate activities in order to set frames for reflection. In practice, the co-creative practices emerge and evolve in a non-linear progress of stages that are partly overlapping and in relation with each other. This chapter, however, is organised through the use of four lenses: (1) insight generation, (2) concept exploration and development, (3) converging towards a specification and (4) transformative and implementation processes. The chapter introduces a number of examples and applied co-creative practices from various fields of service design. They address the co-creative character of many well-known tools such as role playing, context mapping, design games and experience prototyping. Finally, the chapter sums up the main considerations for the applications of co-creative practices, defining the purpose, utilising co-creative characters and developing facilitation capacity.

Ethnography by Design: On Goals and Mediating Artefacts.

Design ethnography is the appropriation of ethnography for the purposes of informing design. This paper investigates the effects of these appropriations, through a comparative study of how designers and anthropologists approach the same field site and by a review of new techniques introduced by designers to do ethnography. The techniques reviewed all apply artefacts to mediate the ethnographic process. Conducting ethnography through artefacts can be done in a number of ways and three ways are discussed here, including techniques which remove the researcher from the context of study. The implications for design ethnography of the comparative study and the introductions of artefacts to facilitate ethnographic work are discussed. The implications focus on potential methodological pitfalls of the ‘designification’ of ethnography as design ethnography matures.

Analysis of precedent designs: competitive analysis meets genre analysis

Designers need to survey the competition and analyze precedent designs, but methods for that purpose have not been evaluated in earlier research. This paper makes a comparative evaluation between competitive analysis and genre analysis. A randomized between-group experiment was conducted where graphic design students were conducted one of the two analysis methods. There were 13 students in one group and 16 in the other. The results show that genre analysis produced more detailed descriptions of precedent designs, but its process was more difficult to understand. It is concluded that genre analysis can be integrated into competitive analysis, to make use of the strengths of both methods in the analysis of precedents.

Interaction design in procurement: the view of procurers and interaction designers

Among those involved in human–computer interaction (HCI) and user-centred design (UCD) the idea of co-design mainly applies to the software developer organisation and the users. In mainstream HCI research and in the literature only a few attend to the co-creation that occurs between IT acquirers and either users or software developers. Interaction design is central when it comes to designing a system that shows a high degree of use quality; often the interaction designer is working at the IT department and thus is ‘owned’ by the developers. This paper describes a case study of how procurers and interaction designers view the procurement process, the intention being to inform and improve the way that co-design is performed among procurers and developers. The study is conducted in an organisation that chose to include the interaction design competence as part of the software acquisition organisation; we look at how different actors in the organisation view interaction design and how interaction design contributes to the software acquisition process. The interaction designers wish to work with more experienced procurers who know what they want. The procurers, on the other hand, want more control over the initial process, but are worried about how to present their requirements to the IT developers.

Learning for usability: an explorative study of qualities in use

Efforts for creating usable systems which fulfill the purpose of being efficient and effective tools in an enterprise have been focused on the software itself. The study proposed here turns to the user, and to what the user contributes with for that use. The study explores the concepts of usability and qualities of software in use, and their relationship to end-users learning to use the software, in a case study approach. The understanding developed during this study will be used in an intervention study, which aims at proposing a way for formal training to contribute to usability and quality in use.

Discovering Service Variations through Service Prototyping

Abstract Designing services require embracing the variability that makes it unique. This paper investigates how the use of a service prototyping technique enables participants to explore the variations inherent in services. The video data are analyzed using qualitative content analysis and the articulated variations are abstracted as categories. The resulting categories are then mapped across the service logic framework and the corresponding provider, joint and patient spheres. This paper aims to contribute to research on service prototyping by augmenting the use of prototyping methods to gain an understanding of the sources and possibly types of variations in a particular service. It clarifies how prototyping a service allows people untrained in design to diagnose variations that may occur in a future service and the decision-making process in accommodating variation. Further, the knowledge gained enables improved value co-creation opportunities in a service.

Formative Evaluation of IT-based Services: A Case Study of a Meal Planning Service

To evaluate and develop a service supported by an IT (information technology) system the intentionto use the future service should be in focus. The technology acceptance model (TAM) and the theoryo ...

Embedding design capacity in research driven innovation teams

Design has in recent years increasingly been seen as an important support for innovation, or as a mean to drive innovation. Verganti [1] argues for design as such a driver by contributing to a shift of meaning, while Kumar [3] see design as a tool to identify and cultivate value. In contemporary innovation policy, innovation is regarded to be done in innovation clusters, innovation systems, or innovation networks. This stands in contrast to the industrial perspective where its often a single innovation actor. Given that innovation is a shared and distributed practice across several different actors, more knowledge needs to be created on the role of design in innovation in these innovation systems. Over the past two years we have followed a group within a Swedish research institute, working with high technology development. During these two years the organizations has been complemented with design competence that has been embedded within a development team giving us a unique opportunity to create an understanding for how design can contribute in such settings. During this period we have seen that different mindsets e.g. in regards to what different competences focus on in the development or see as audience in projects may cause frictions in the development work. In conclusion, it becomes important to notice and handle the issues of friction and gaps that may occur between different mindsets when embedding design capacity in order for design to be able to contribute in its full capacity.

Cognitive Work Analysis and Conceptual Designing for Unmanned Air Traffic Management in Cities

Cognitive1 Work Analysis (CWA) is an appropriate approach in high-stakes domains, such as Air Traffic Management (ATM). It provides focus on human expert performance in regular as well as contingency situations. However, CWA is not suitable for the design of a first-of-a-kind system, since there is nothing to analyze before the start of the design process. In 2017, unmanned traffic management (UTM) for intense drone traffic in cities was such a system. Making things worse, the UTM system has to be in place before the traffic, since it provides basic safety. In this paper we present conceptual designing as a bootstrapping approach to CWA for UTM as a first-of-a-kind system.