Co-Creation in Service Design
Ben Fullerton

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[ 1] I use “static” here with advisement—the inference being that the user experience remains largely unchanged from one interaction to the next (I’d hope that my chair behaved the same way each time I sat in it.)

[ 2] Hollins, G. and B. Hollins. Total Design— Managing the Design Process in The Service Sector. London: Pitman, 1991.

March + April 2009

[ 3] Hollins, B. “What is Service Design?” Design Council, 24 November 2006.

When we look at design in all of its many forms, we find numerous examples of manifested, perceivable objects that demonstrate the vision of the designer. Sitting in an Arne Jacobsen chair, holding a William Morris fabric, or using the latest piece of technology from Tokyo, Seoul, or Cupertino, we are acutely aware of the sensibilities of the designer (or design team) that informed the form and the function of the thing with which we are interacting. Interactions like these lead to the notion of “genius design,” where the designer plays the role of an absolute authority whose natural instincts produce a considered, desirable experience.

Genius design may well work for something that will be built— whether software, hardware, furniture, an environment, or any other tangible form our design might take. But how well does it work when we design for less tangible experiences? If there is nothing that can be seen, touched, or used that clearly embodies the whim of the designer, how does the role of the designer change?

The (relatively) recently developed practice of service design seeks to address exactly these types of problems, concerning itself with applying the thinking learned from crafting well-considered, tangible experiences to those that do not terminate in a single product at a single moment in time, such as our experience of interacting with our cell phone

provider, using our bank account, or when we visit a hospital.

At first glance, the process involved with a typical service-design project doesn’t look too different from that of any other design project. Broadly, there are phases of discovery (learning about the context in which the service will be delivered), design (ideation and design of the service itself), and delivery ( delivering the new service concept to the client, and working with the client to implement it). In a project where the end result is a somewhat “static” experience, this usually results in a fairly clear set of end deliverables [ 1].

Services present a different challenge, however. They are produced and consumed in the same moment—an interaction with a service does not exist until a customer initiates it by phoning a call center or sitting down in a restaurant. In their book Total Design: Managing the Design Process in the Service Sector, Gillian and Bill Hollins outline exactly what differentiates a service from a product. A key distinction is that “the ‘people side’ of design is more important in a service product and must be considered right at the start of the process in the specification [ 2].” The point here is that the quality of a service experience relies, to a huge extent, on the people who will be involved in its delivery. Since very few—if any— services exist that don’t involve a person-to-person interaction at

some point during the customer’s journey through it, it is vital to ensure that those interactions are as carefully considered as any other digital or physical touch point.

So what implications does this have for how a design team works within the context of a service-design project? Because of the nature of the work itself— applying techniques and thinking learned from interaction design to business processes in order to deliver a customer-cen-tric experience—the deliverables are often quite strategic and high level in nature. (Bill Hollins also points out that “whichever form it takes, it must be consistent, easy to use, and be strategically applied [ 3],” “it” in this context meaning the service-design engagement itself). Typical deliverables of a service-design engagement include service blueprints (a document that “describes a service in enough detail to implement and maintain it carefully”), customer journey frameworks (that describe key stages in the customer’s journey through a service and the most important touch points at each of those stages), and a service ecology map (that describes the “system of actors and the relationships between them that form a service”). All of these deliverables could fall under the umbrella of “strategic,” intended for senior stakeholders within an organization. There may be communication vehicles