Designing for Service: Key Issues and New Directions

Description

Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers. It is now a growing field of both practice and academic research. Designing for Service brings together a wide range of international contributors to map the field of service design and identify key issues for practitioners and researchers such as identity, ethics and accountability. Designing for Service aims to problematize the field in order to inform a more critical debate within service design, thereby supporting its development beyond the pure methodological discussions that currently dominate the field. The contributors to this innovative volume consider the practice of service design, ethical challenges designers may encounter, and the new spaces opened up by the advent of modern digital technologies.

Daniela Sangiorgi is Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Alison Prendiville is Senior Researcher for the Design School at London College of Communication, UK.

Few books are as timely as this one. Commercial and public sector interest in service design is growing rapidly, the impact of a service design approach is now well understood and many different forms of service design practice are emerging in different parts of the world. Daniela and Alison are two research practitioners who have been at the heart of many of these developments; in this book they both very generously share their perspectives and provide clear frameworks based on the insights of many other contributors. * Tom Inns, Director of Glasgow School of Art, UK * With the popularity and growth in the field of service design, we need more scholars to ask the harder questions about how interventions are made and what changes these are making to our lives. Designing for Service is a compelling collection of rich, insightful and interrogative essays that discuss salient issues and elusive themes in service design that few other 'how to' books have addressed. * Yoko Akama, Associate Professor of Design at RMIT University, Australia *