The Industrialisation of Services

Review of the conference paper - Beyond the experience. In search of an operative paradigm for the industrialisation of services.

The article aims to highlight the need for a universal framework for service designers and proposes a ‘toolbox’ to help bridge the gap between conflicting areas in the development of service design.

The first area is the need to develop methodological tools for analysing, designing and representing services – I see this as a theoretical aspect, or academic. And the second, focusing on real projects where service design thinking is used in the creation/development of the service  – so very much practical or occurring in industry.

User experience, co-creation and front and backstage aspects of services are discussed. It is stated that in practice the backstage of a service is often overlooked. I think it is too easy to focus on the frontstage activities when designing for user experience since front stage activities are where the user interacts with the service. I think this point is strengthened by the fact that many service designers do not have a proper design background and without a framework in place could find it difficult to use visualisation tools and looking at the service holistically.

Co-creation with the service stakeholders is hugely important in service design but, again, without a structured framework this could distract from the backstage elements of a service. If the backstage activities and supporting processes are not ‘designed’ in harmony with the frontstage interactions, the service probably won’t be delivered to its potential and could in fact be detrimental to the user experience. 

A final point discusses the need for designers to communicate with customers, and other stakeholders such as engineers, to make clear what their roles are. Representation or visual tools are a simple and engaging way of doing this. I have to disagree with the author that this is still a problem.  Having started to read around the subject it is apparent that there is a wide range if representational tools that are used across the service design industry and although each service design company and even individual designer may have their own take on the tools the end result is very much the same. The article is almost 4 years old so it is possible that developments have been made since the article was written.