I’ve been interested in service design for a long time now and have been writing about it before, but the notion of designing services has been put into a much broader and more relevant context lately.
The other day Hans Henrik posted about the new report from RED about Eco-Design and Sustainability and a few days later I found Change Design which stresses the need for immaterialisation and sustainable consumption. Yesterday I had a really interesting talk with Mads Hagstrøm from FLOWinstitute about holistic design and business practise. All this plus the fact that I have worked along side and together with Index - design to improve life - for some months now gave me the feeling that the global macro/mega-trend of the political/conscious consumer and the need for thoughful and ethical businesses are ganging up on me. And that I like it! It makes sense to have a broader perspective on what you do because it makes what you do matter more.
The immaterialisation idea refers to the substitution of activities that do not require materials, for the consumption of products or resources. One way of doing this is to work with Product-Service Systems (PSS) and by replacing products with services.
But if services and the design of these are the way of the future how do you design them efficiently? There are some clear differences between the design process of a product and a service but the one that nags me the most is the validation of a fresh service concept? How do you test it to get customer feedback? How do you prototype a service?
I have some ideas on this along the way of role-playing etc. and LiveWork have some interesting views as well. Do you have any experiences with or thoughts on prototyping services and how this can be done in a viable manner?
3 comments so far
This is a really good question, and I bet that it’s the difficulty of prototyping services that makes it so difficult to create and support good ones.
Think of how you might do lo-fi paper prototypes of a user interface…could you “fake” the service in some similar way?
It’s very hard to think of an example of this, but how about building a “manual” version before trying to build the automated version? Could the service be delivered using “lo-fi” means like a telephone, courier mail, or in person?
I think this is what LiveWork means by “experience prototyping.”
Hey Magnus
Thank you for blogging this 
I just found a few comments on the topic over at Danny’s - http://www.odannyboy.com/blog/cmu/new_archives/000070.html
He states:
There are four types of service design at IDEO. For new services: service validation and service innovation. For existing services: service audits and service improvements. Alongside traditional design research methods, role playing plays a significant part of their design process. Prototyping a service typically means finding service moments (granular parts of the experience), then creating scenarios around those moments and acting them out with clients and stakeholders.
It’s important to remember that you aren’t just designing for the end user, but also for the people doing the service. You need to resolve issues with all stakeholders for a successful and satisfying design. The earlier you get the entire team and stakeholders involved, the better the outcome and buy-in will be. If your designs involve significant operational changes, you are going to need internal champions to enact those changes.
All the best
Hans Henrik
ok so i just came back from a trip to the Americas so im a bit slow in commenting but i think it is very important to underline something fundamental in prototyping services.
Having worked with Live|Work last spring i am quite familiar with the origins of “experience prototyping”. It is mainly about creating or prototyping to a level of great detail the material points which support an intangable service. This is not about faking, or acting out most of the time because the values and lessons leant from actually implementing a “fake” service with real people and potential users are so great and essential to the design process of a service, they cant be ignored. This technique would help many a service which are designed in a certain way for a certain scenario but dont cater or see opportunity in the funny and strange ways people might use them…
just a few thoughts…