Design Council asks what makes Service Design different

The Design Council tackled service design at the latest of its debates in the D-Futures series last week, with the question: Are you being served?

Dee Cooper of Virgin Atlantic joined Nick Durrant, a Design Council regular, and the three founders of Live|Work, a service design agency, to talk about the theme, before the night's audience of designers contributed their thinking.

'We all know the difference between a good service and a bad one, but what has design got to do with it? What's different about service design? Can you really design experiences? And how do you measure design's impact?' asked the Design Council.

Cooper described how Virgin had moved from viewing customers and staff as add-ons to the aesthetic of their products to a position where it is 'all about how the cabin crew makes that customer feel'.

She juxtaposed the good service that can be produced by good process design with the challenge of ensuring all staff were trained and ready to be good "people people".

Durrant took an overview and showed how service design differs from product design. He pointed out that while 80% of industry was now involved in services and 20% in manufacture, only 20% thought this way. The other 80% were using left-over manufacturing metaphors to think with. Service fails when one treats as passive the consumer of the thing produced, he argued. Service is a pull discipline, unlike products, and cannot be delivered, only performed.

Stressing the real-time nature of services, the goal of peace of mind co-created with the service user, and that mediation, not automation, is the way of developing them, he ended by likening their development to writing an improvisational score for music.

Chris Downs, Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason of Live|Work talked about the complexity of service design compared with more traditional forms, showing slides with a daunting number of participants and iteration loops on them.

Groups then discussed questions such as 'Can you prototype a service?' Answer in brief: no. And 'Can product designers also design services? Answer in brief: as long as they are good designers.

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