Stickdorn Marc - This is Service Design Thinking

This is service design thinking.

Basics Tools Cases

Published in 2011 by

BIS Publishers

Building Het Sieraad

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1057 DT Amsterdam

The Netherlands

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bis@bispublishers.nl

www.bispublishers.nl

First printing in paperback.

ISBN 978-90-6369-279-7

Copyright 2011 BIS Publishers, Marc Stickdorn, Jakob Schneider and the co-authors

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owners.

Preface

This book aims to be a textbook on service design thinking an interdisciplinary approach that offers great value for entrepreneurs and innovators in the field of services. No matter whether service design thinking already made it into your everyday vocabulary or you just hear about this the very first time, no matter whether youre a student, teacher, researcher, manager or company owner, and no matter whether your background is in design, management, engineering or any other profession, this book will serve you as an introduction, reference and case study book. Moreover, it is supposed to be a source of inspiration and motivation for your future work.

The book is structured into three main parts. Basics illustrates the fundamental concepts of service design thinking and its relation to service marketing. In particular, this chapter explains various gateways into service design thinking from backgrounds like product design, graphic design, interaction design and design ethnography, but also from strategic management and operations management and in addition rather new fields like social design. Tools explains the iterative process of designing services and shows methods and tools of service design as a kind of toolkit that we hope you will be able to implement in your own work. Cases exemplifies how the basics, processes and tools come together through five different case studies. At the end of the book, service design thinking is wrapped up in three articles on how motivation as a fundamen-tal component of human behaviour is a precondition for designing services, an overview of recent service design research publications, and through consideration of how service design thinking integrates with other philosophical approaches. However, before we start with the actual content, the design beyond the design provides a summary of how we adopted a service design thinking approach to the design of this book itself and besides that youll find a short description on how to use this book.

This book project attempted to follow the principle of practice-what-you-preach. It is not only created for the growing service design community but to a large extent by and with the service design community. Thus, we want to thank all our co-authors, contributors and everyone who provided feedback on the publication. We have tried to mention everyone who helped us during the progress of this project and we apologise if we have forgotten someone along the way. There are a few people, we want to thank personally. First and foremost we want to thank Fergus Bisset who supported the project from the start, by setting up the first crowdsourcing website, right through to co-editing most contributions. Furthermore, Bas Raijmakers, Geke van Dijk and Luke Kelly helped us reviewing, editing and illustrating the tools and methods. Finally, we want to thank BIS publishers, namely Rudolf van Wezel, for his belief in this project and his great support!

Mostly, however, we want to thank you the reader. Only your interest in this book and your interpretation of the information contained in it generates real value from this project! We thus look forward to hearing more about the people reading it, how you are using it and what you think about it. So, please keep in touch!

The editors, Marc & Jakob, October 2010

[Noot: www.thisisservicedesignthinking.com / @This_is_SDT / #tisdt]

The design beyond the design: A different approach to designing a textbook

Marc Stickdorn

Jakob Schneider

While colloquially the word design is used to refer to the appearance or styling of a particular product or outcome, the proper meaning goes far beyond that. In particular, the approach of service design refers to the process of designing rather than to its outcome. The outcome of a service design process can have various forms: rather abstract organisational structures, operation processes, service experiences and even concrete physical objects.

Since service design is a still young and emerging approach, service design education is even younger and just developing. There are various courses and recently even study programs on service design, but so far there are no textbooks explaining this approach. One could argue that an approach like this does not need a textbook, since it is something you potentially have to learn by doing. Without a doubt, you cannot learn what service design is and how to do it just from a textbook. You need to try, fail, learn from your mistakes, improve, try again and thus educate yourself.

Service design education is therefore rather a kind of briefing and tutoring process. Besides explaining the big picture, it is all about giving hints, proposing methods and tools, and showing how to use them while working on a project. The main question we asked ourselves in spring 2009 was how could we make teaching and learning service design easier and more pleasurable?

Motivation and inspiration

Based on the insights of a service design course Marc gave in spring 2009, we started a series of interviews with both service design course participants and educators to understand what the main difficulties are of learning how to design services. In this context we tried to understand who teaches service design? What is the content and how is it delivered?

In our interviews we discovered the need for a serious and static reference opposed to the ever changing blogosphere.

Who attends respective courses and workshops? Answering these questions gave us the motivation and initial inspiration to start this project. Following the principle of practice-what-you-preach, we applied methods and tools of service design on the process of designing this first textbook on service design. Thus we consider this book rather as a service to you the reader than as a mere physical object we offer for sale. The durability and experienced sustainability of print media made us do a book rather than a website or App. Moreover, in our interviews we discovered the need for a serious and static reference opposed to the ever-changing blogosphere. Besides, a book is still one of the most reliable forms of media; a book is portable, tangible, durable and never faces problems of low battery or bad reception.

Since service design is an interdisciplinary approach, different people teach and learn service design in different ways; all of them with their individual backgrounds and motivations. However, during our interviews we realised that they all share the same problem: they miss a textbook. This variety of people with differing needs led us to the question of which author has the knowledge and authority to write such a book? The author would need to share all these different backgrounds to exemplify the interdisciplinary nature of service design and in order to know all the methods and tools service designers use. We knew many authors capable of doing this: the service design community as a whole.

Experiences and expectations