Fact Check: Service Design

Service design is the activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication, and material components of a service in order to improve its quality, and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.

The purpose of service design methodologies is to establish the most effective practices for designing services, according to both the needs of users and the competencies and capabilities of the service providers. If a successful method of service design is adapted then service will be user-friendly and relevant to the users, while being sustainable and competitive for the service provider. For this purpose, service design uses methods and tools derived from different disciplines, ranging from ethnography to information to management science to interaction design. Service design concepts and ideas are typically portrayed visually, using different representation techniques according to the culture, skill, and level of understanding of the stakeholders involved in the service processes (Kruchen and Meroni, 2006).

Service design practice is the specification and construction of processes which deliver valuable capacities for action to a particular user. Service design practice can be both tangible and intangible, and can involve artifacts or other elements such as communication, environment and behavior. Several of the authors of service design theory including Pierre Eiglier, Richard Normann, Nicola Morelli, propose that services come to existence at the same moment they are both provided and used. In contrast, products are created and "exist" before being purchased and used. While a designer can prescribe the exact configuration of a product, he cannot prescribe in the same way the result of the interaction between users and service providers, nor can he prescribe the form and characteristics of any emotional value produced by the service.

Consequently, service design is an activity that, among other things, suggests behavioral patterns or "scripts" for the actors interacting in the service. Understanding how these patters interweave and support each other are important aspects of the character of design and service. This allows greater user freedom, and better provider adaptability to the users' needs.

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