“Service Design is giving people what they didn’t even know they wanted, but when they experience it, it blends into their lives smoothly”. – Anouk Randag

“When you have 2 coffee shops right next to each other, that each sell the exact same coffee at the exact same price; Service Design is what makes you walk into the one and not the other.” – Marc Fonteijn

Description

Service design is a design discipline that focuses on planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication, and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and experience of the interactions between the service provider and users.

Originating in the marketing and business fields, and also in organizational studies, service design has emerged over the years as a design discipline. As businesses increasingly have come to realize that a single product is not enough to satisfy their customers’ needs and desires, the notion of service has taken over. From hotels, to airports, to hospitals, to supermarkets, to taxis, every product has been re-conceptualized as an end-to-end service. Hence, the design of these services, particularly in enhancing the experiences of the people using the services has become a very crucial element of being competent. The Service Design approach is uniquely oriented to service specific design needs and is rooted in the design culture.

Guiding principles

As Srishti, service design is understood and practiced as a design activity that brings together design research, interaction design, systems thinking, business understanding, visual and information design, product & industrial design in a creative and innovative manner to create a usable, desirable, feasible and sustainable service.

Type of work

Service designers produce a range of work such as:

Service concepts and scenarios

Service designers envision and communicate novel concepts of services in a compelling manner using multiple media such as animation, illustration, videos, etc.

Service blueprints and journey maps

Service designers chart the details of how a service should work so as to enable the desired experiences, both at the touch-point level (that is when the user meets the services), and also at the behind-the-scene level.