An Introduction to Industrial Service Design

Satu Miettinen, Satu Miettinen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317181743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Service design has established itself as a practice that enables industries to design and deliver their services with a human-centred approach. It creates a contextual and cultural understanding that offers opportunities for new service solutions, improving the user experience and customer satisfaction.

With contributions from leading names in the field of service design from both academia and international, professional practice, An Introduction to Industrial Service Design is engaging yet practical and accessible.

Case studies from leading companies such as ABB, Autodesk, Kone and Volkswagen enable readers to connect academic research with practical company applications, helping them to understand the basic processes and essential concepts. This book illustrates the role of the service designer in an industrial company, and highlights not only the value of customer experience, but also the value of employee experience in creating competitive services and value propositions. This human-centred approach brings about new innovations.

This book will be of benefit to engineers, designers, businesses and communication experts working in industry, as well as to students who are interested in service development.

Part I
Introduction to industrial service design

What is industrial service design?

1
Introduction to industrial service design

Satu Miettinen

Keywords: industrial service design, the role of designer, outside in, customer-centricity, design for change, employee experience, design for business, industrial service design process

The goal of this chapter is to introduce industrial service design. The making of the book has been an interesting process; the company case studies and the voices of the authors engaged with industry have had a central role. In the book, industrial service design cases present companies like ABB, Autodesk, Bittium, the Coca-Cola Company, L’Oreal, Tetra Pak, Volkswagen, as well as global service design agencies such as Designthinkers, Hellon, Palmu and Veryday. Well-established researchers on service design have contributed their research findings to the book.

The company cases and authors, both from the industry and academia, highlight current themes for industrial service design. They discuss the role of service designers, both in an industrial company, as well as from a consultancy point of view. Human-centred design, or human-centricity, is one of the central themes, along with service design for business. This introductory chapter picks up the themes and formulates the landscape of industrial service design. The chapter also follows up on the industrial service design process to highlight some practical aspects when applying service design in an industrial context.

The content of the book is divided into four parts: Introduction to Industrial Service Design; Industrial Service Design in Practice; Hands-on Industrial Service Design; and Tools for Industrial Service Design. Part I explains the basics of industrial service design. Part II presents and analyses practical service design cases with companies, as well as academic research findings around the methodologies and themes related to the cases. In Part III, experienced designers share their insights and findings related to the work they have been involved with in industrial companies. Part IV is about sharing tools for industrial service design.

While working on the book, it has become clear that industrial service design faces challenges. Many technology-driven companies are confronting a situation where a competitive advantage is gained based on a good customer-service experience. Industrial service designers are challenged to facilitate cultural and behavioural transformations in technology and engineering-orientated companies, which are changing from technical to human-centred thinking. Industrial companies are required to match production speed with market changes and the changing behaviour of customers. Communication and collaboration within large companies has become difficult. Companies have silos, and departments have individual budgets and strategies, which may conflict. It is hard to manage quality when dealing with the issue of outsourcing from a number of companies. For industrial service designers, this means considerable redesign work to accommodate new technologies, strategies and partners. Effective industrial service design can respond to these challenges.

This chapter discusses the findings and conclusions of the authors, and highlights some of the central themes that are relevant to industrial service design.

Service design

The aim of service design is to create customer- or human-centred solutions that make the service experience feel logical, desired, competitive and unique for the user, and boost innovation and engagement in companies and institutions while developing and delivering services. Services have become multi-channel. They are experienced and consumed in person, online or in interactions with robots, as in autonomous driving.

Service design connects the use of different practical design and design research methods, design thinking and various visualisation techniques, linking them with different stakeholders’ views during the service design process. Service design is about concretising abstract content into something that can be easily shared, understood, discussed and prototyped together. It is about doing, making and learning through practice. Service design encourages trying and failing early. Focusing on the iterative cycle of engaging users, using mock-ups and cheap prototypes, and evaluating the results in a development process, will result in customer-driven and usable service solutions.

Facilitation has a central role in service design. Designers work as coordinators between all the stakeholders in service-development projects, acting as overall choreographers of the service experience. Service design follows core principles like human-centredness and co-design, creating empathy (Postma et al. 2012), an iterative process with a great deal of prototyping (Blomkvist 2014; Miettinen et al. 2012), using and developing innovative design tools and methods (Løvlie et al. 2013; Miettinen and Koivisto 2009; Stickdorn and Schneider 2012), facilitation and peer-to-peer and practice-based learning (Kuure and Miettinen 2013) that guide the service-development process.

Service design is a new approach for developing services that are immaterial and abstract. Digitalisation affects user experiences and the ways in which experiences are consumed and enjoyed. A good film creates good feelings and memories, but the experience itself is consumed at the same time that it is experienced. Moreover, the ways in which a film can be experienced have changed in the digital economy era. Films can be viewed not only in a cinema but also on mobile devices such as iPads, both on the go and at home. Films are often obtained online through Netflix or from another service provider rather than rented from video/DVD rental shops. Business models have changed, and this is particularly true for services. Service design provides the design tools and methods to analyse and develop the service experience in a holistic and human-centred way. It also helps to concretise and visualise complex processes and ecosystems. However, service design and management are challenging since services are multi-channel. They are delivered in person and through mobile and digital channels. The aim of service design is to coordinate all these and make them understandable to the user.

Service design is an academic discipline (for example, Meroni and Sangiorgi 2011; Miettinen and Valtonen 2013), and has roots in design research, especially in the areas of empathic and participatory design. The other side of service design is a strong practice (see Løvlie et al. 2013; Stickdorn and Schneider 2012) with service design consultancies in companies. This book focuses on the practical side of service design, highlighting various industrial service design cases that illustrate how service design is applied. Companies and consultancies are developing new methods and applying service design in the development of services in a number of business areas, from software and hardware production and development to health care and hospitality. A significant portion of service design research is applied and based on case-study research or action research with companies or public institutions.

Role and work of an industrial service designer

The role of a designer has been scrutinised and researched for decades, both from design research and engineering points of view (Bayazit 2004). One of the main research focuses has been on how designers work and the organisation of the design process itself. Nowadays, the research focus has shifted to the role of design in the innovation process (Deserti and Rizzo 2014). A designer’s role now includes more research skills and tools, especially when the role of service design is discussed.

Service design is not only an operational activity where user insights are collected and new service concepts are produced. Service designers should have a role at the beginning of the process when strategic decisions are made (Wetter Edman 2013). This will facilitate the whole service design process and improve the understanding of projects, goals and outcomes. In industrial companies, it is important to engage in design and design thinking (Brown 2009) across a wide spectrum of design areas: service design, user experience (UX) design and product design. Often, service designers work with UX design or, conversely, UX designers work with service design.

There is still a lot of work to do to create awareness of service design and the use of this approach in the industrial context. This boils down to a service designer working to promote service design or design thinking across the organisation. The service designer thus helps to foster a deep understanding on the part of users, and improves functionality across the organisation, as well as partnering different sections. A service designer can promote user needs and find opportunities within those needs (Wetter Edman 2014). The role of a service designer is especially important in business-to-business service development, where the end-user’s needs are crucial but nobody is directly representing them. Service designers understand the pulse of industry and utilise this understanding in their work.

Changes in the current economy and business models have influenced both the role of design and the role of service designers. Design has expanded from concrete artefacts to abstract, social and digital content. One of the main activities that service designers are involved with is co-design with stakeholders. Service designers work with stakeholders (and especially users) to co-develop services using innovative tools and methods that often involve workshops (Sanders and Stappers 2008). The role of service design is constructed around the social context of designing for services. Thus, a service designer works as a facilitator, listening to people and trying to understand and learn from them (Steen et al. 2011). A service designer collects partial solutions and enables and encourages people to come up with more complete solutions. Co-design and workshops require considerable preparation and tools. Often, the methods and processes must be customised to fit the needs of the development process and the goals of the future service. In co-design and workshop processes, it is essential that the right people are recruited to participate and that everyone knows the purpose and mission of a particular workshop.

Customer-centric companies are looking outside in

Industries are branding and developing service quality and customer experience, as well as developing online-to-offline services. All these activities are focused on customer-centricity. The core of service design is human-centred thinking. Service design offers companies a new way to look at both their service development and service delivery processes (Kimbell 2009). In service design, both service development and service delivery are constructed around the user and their customer experience (CX). In practice, this means that the customer’s journeys are identified and create a flux: logical, enjoyable and memorable experiences that lead to recommendations and return.

The outside-in perspective means that a service designer uses service design tools to map the UX and its service opportunities, disseminating end-user motivations and journeys, including touchpoints and ‘as-is’ pathways, to corporations. This kind of outside-in service design (Bates and Davis 2009) requires taking a step outside the traditional method of designing a service around an existing process, and looking at the service offering from an outside perspective. Industrial service designers need to find new service opportunities and ways to create more competitive service experiences. Service design offers a number of tools to both analyse and reconstruct the customer journey (Miettinen and Koivisto 2009), such as service blueprinting, which involves analysing different phases and service delivery channels and structures, including employee activities, as well as customer activities and emotions during the service journey. Tools include the creation of personas, which describe the users’ characteristics and needs and the everyday context for service development, identifying service touchpoints through which the service is enjoyed and experienced. Creating an improved customer experience is one of the main goals of service design (Zomerdijk and Voss 2010). In industrial companies, service design tools are applied not only for recreational users but increasingly for professional users: doctors, nurses, maintenance staff and technicians. The professional user experience needs to be applied when using persona or blueprinting tools.

In practice, customer-centricity is constructed using service design tools. In this book, Veryday shares a Tetra Pak case study in which Veryday was given an opportunity to work around silos and create a service concept horizontally across the value chain, for markets in China and Brazil. Large amounts of customer insights were collected to create a credible data pool. The data were processed further to create value propositions. Tools such as video, scenarios and opportunity mapping were used in the process. In service design, co-design sessions typically occur during the design process. In the sessions, materials are both abstract and tangible: talking and doing. Many discussions take place during the co-design sessions, which materialise in Post-It stickers, notes, paper prototypes and experience prototypes. The storytelling and narrative method is central for creating understanding and insight. The stories and narratives construct a bridge between the customer and the service provider. Materials and documentation from co-design sessions carry a lot of meaning that is then interpreted. The interpretation process is important, and must be connected with value creation and business-case concept production and/or development. Notes and materials should be interpreted in a way such that business or value-creation opportunities are recognised in concrete ways; for example, locating or categorising materials and interpretations within these recognised opportunities. These opportunities can be created around the establishment or understanding of necessary service characteristics or ways of organising service production and delivery.

In industrial service design, it is crucial to ensure that an organisation is customer-centric at a practical level, not only in its white papers. Service design consultancies like Palmu encourage companies to think and talk about customers. To value customers, it is necessary to meet with them, and there should be spontaneous product testing and development in collaboration with customers. Customer-centricity is not only something that is visible to the customer; it is the core structure by which services are produced and delivered to customers (Teixeira et al. 2012). When a company is truly customer-centric, customer values drive the service-development process. As a concrete example described in the book of applying customer-centricity, ABB established a CUX (customer user experience) programme to support a change towards customer-centric actions and customer-centred thinking at ABB.

Designing for change and employee experience

Transformation and change are always discussed and implicitly present in industrial service design. The goal of the service design process is to create opportunities, develop and improve. Service design is an active process that creates pressure for organisational structures and processes; it is transformation design (Sangiorgi 2011). Transformation desi...