Challenge
Despite the Service Design discipline increasing its profile, there is still a lack of condensed and effective materials that clearly explain and communicate the value of Service Design specifically to the business sector. In order to ensure the growth of the industry, it is essential that the value of Service Design can be communicated.
As a multi-disciplinary team of five students during our Strategic Information Design module at the University of Dundee, we worked with Nile, an Experience and Service Design company based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Our brief was to design some form of media that communicate the value of Service Design to the business sector.
Approach
We began by looking and analysing the service design characteristics and applications from a company’s perspective. Also, in order to generate a far more holistic understanding of the field, we interviewed service design consultants and employees from multi-level companies who had cooperated with service design consultancies, about their experiences on the involvement of service design to businesses. That helped us to begin building up a picture of the characteristic of the audience, the language they use, their understanding of the value of service design to their company and which aspect of service design lacks understanding.
The insights and the research data informed the project’s vision and helped us to set the criteria of the visual we produced. With the need to create something human, relatable and communicative, which could still be taken seriously in a business context, we started by working on video’s storyboard.
The whole story consisted of real service design case studies from everyday human experiences. To make sure we convey the clear message that this new discipline delivers results we decided to use visual metaphors and simultaneously present concrete results. Service Design is centered on the human experience, and thus, we wanted to establish this approach by giving the viewer (businesses) a new lens to see how service innovation can be achieved.
Outcome
The desired outcome, through the active user engagement of our visual, is to pique curiosity and spark further mini-networks / communities of non- designers interested in Service Design approach. This achievement will create in a long term time the conditions for an effective collaboration between business and the service design community.
The final video first was released on June 2013 and is shared and used by and for the community.
"Build value not only for your customers but for the bottome line as well''
Design at: Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee
Design for: Nile Experience and Service Design; Service Design Network
Team members: Chengchen Zhang, Joyce Lee, Laura Malan, Nelly Trakidou, Wen Qiu
Design for: Nile Experience and Service Design; Service Design Network
Team members: Chengchen Zhang, Joyce Lee, Laura Malan, Nelly Trakidou, Wen Qiu
