Week 5: Service vs Service Design February 20, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : 4_ServiceDesign , trackbackThanks to Sonaar and Jeehyun for this week’s seminar. Please post your examples of the Borden tactics here once you can get online.
Before we get into designing services this week, we had to slash and burn our way through a thicket of definitions of “services”.
We’re settling on a mix of Bill Hollins’, Live|Work’s, Dan Saffer’s and Shelly Evanson’s descriptions of a service.
A service is “a chain of activities that form a process and have value for the end user”.
Services are inherently people-oriented, thrive as networked systems where an ‘ecology’ of providers may offer services linked to one another to provide a seamless experience to offer economic, social, eco- value to the subscriber; sustainability is also key to services since they deal in subscribing over time to repeat and complete actions rather than consumption of finite commodities.
They are embedded and characterized by context, systems of use; they are variously intangible, or immaterial though we may be access them through our interactions with products/people; they are co-created, in that they rely on interaction between provider and subscriber. Doctors don’t broadcast prescriptions, they write them for patients that present symptoms to them.
Services are typically provider-owned – subscribers don’t have to own the service to draw value from it, they simply use (often shared) resources, and may even come away with vended physical or immaterial products offered by the service provider that deliver specific value (e.g., the convenience of hot coffee on the go; access to movies on demand; the car for the duration of the journey).
Services are also time-based; chains of transactional events, where time has economic value – that is, if service is unused, that lost time can’t be recouped (as compared to a stock of perishable commodities which has a shelf life). Also, demand fluctuates over time (seasonally – accountants up to tax day, florists during wedding season, etc). That said, value can all be drawn from services without depleting resources other than using up human labor and time taken to carry out tasks (back to that idea of services as sustainable).
The success of a service is often measured in terms of how well a provider actively performs to meet a need, that is, by the quality of customer experience.
Services are both standardised for consistency but also flexible, in that they can be personalized, localized, time-sensitive, demand-driven, responsive to related services that connect to them.
We’ll return to a vocabulary of service design in a few weeks. First we’re getting back to the info/cityscape.
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