On February 5, 2010, at Interaction10, I presented Service Design: an Interaction Design Perspective.
Since studying interaction design and service design at Carnegie Mellon University, I have wrestled with the relationship between the two. During an interview with Jeff Howard, a few days after graduating, I tried to address this relationship. It was both a great privilege and opportunity to share my thoughts at Interaction10 two years later.
Talking about service design at an interaction design conference had its challenges. I covered why I thought we should be talking about service design, what service design looks like, how it’s different from interaction design, and what interactions designers can do if they’re interested in service design. I was happy to get a lot of positive feedback after the talk. But going in, I didn’t know what people would make of it.
This was tweeted from the conference the night before my talk. While no one shot at me, one audience member did say the talk rubbed him a bit the wrong way. And another person in the audience took issue with service design as an emerging field. He seemed to ignore that I said the design of services is not new. But the conscious application of design practice to services is new and emerging. Subtle but significant difference. I suppose this all supports some rumors I heard that my talk was controversial.
Good! I further heard that the talk generated a lot of good conversation. That’s what I hoped to do, so I am happy.
If you were there and have feedback, good or bad, I’d love to hear it. I spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between interaction design and service design, but it’s definitely a work in progress.
Finally, I’d like to thank Jared Cole, Kip Lee, Imran Sobh, Carrie Chan, and Susan Dybbs for their feedback.
Comments
6 responses to “Service Design: an Interaction Design Perspective”
At last, someone who sees service design as different and distinct from other kinds of design. Thank you. I’ve been designing services for years and I agree with everything you say, the fundamentals and the approach are broadly the same but but the end result will necessarily be different because a service will often have multiple touch points. The hospital case study is a perfect example of that.
Nice.
Excellent set of slides, thanks! I think the story of ID/UX people entering Service Design is most controversial to the people who are (unconsciously) designing services right now, and would hate to see their market change. :-)
Anyway: you use a linear timeline as a basis of your service coherence. I wonder if that could be a restriction if you plan to draw a touchpoint landscape, through which multiple routes are possible. Do you have any experience with that?
Thanks again,
Pieter
Nice one Jamin!
Nice slides. I appreciate the dialog, too.
What I’m struggling with, though, is why IxD and SvD aren’t both part of User (or People or Human or Carbon Life Form) Experience Design?
Pieter, I assume you are talking about the patient journey visualization. Or maybe the service blueprint? Each of those represent a linear progression that is relatively stable within the context of clinic visits. However, interacting with the clinic as a service outside of a visit is not so linear: phoning to make an appointment, visiting the website, or going to other appointment before, after, or in between. Due to the constraints of the project, we did not visualize all of that. But you are right in thinking that navigating the touch point landscape is not necessarily linear. Thus viewing if from multiple perspectives would be useful.
Joe, I should really write a post to address this question, because I have much more to say about this than is fit for a comment. Check back soon.
Hi Jamin,
yes, thanks, I was wondering about that. I still have to crack that nut. Multiple time lines for typical use cases don’t seem to cut it, but I really dont want to get into the realm of interactive 3D datavisualisation :-)
It will probably have to resemble a subway map or something…
To be continued I guess, thanks for now.
Pieter Jongerius