service design | Re-public: re-imagining democracy

Innovative Service Design for All – Part two

by Artemis Yagou

The second part of the special issue on Innovative Service Design for All complements and reinforces the first part (published on-line in July 2009), by providing six more papers on a fascinating array of topics. This collection of papers demonstrates the vitality and dynamics of service design in a range of contexts and from a variety of perspectives. Clune’s paper deals with the parameters of sustainability involved in service design and with certain misunderstandings in relation to what a sustainable service actually means. Gustafsson’s description of an interactive space in an Australian museum presents the challenges and pitfalls of designing services for the public domain, especially concerning the demanding group that includes small children and their families.

Stephen Clune – Service design: A critique from an environmental perspective

The move towards service design for the preservation of natural resources – in the form of Product System Services has been widely sited (i.e. Cook, Bhamra et al. 2006; Tukker and Tischner 2006) as a means to counter what Manzini terms Product Based Wellbeing (2003a), that is, wellbeing being derived from the purchasing and ownership of products, which is seen to be ecologically and socially unsustainable. Product Based Wellbeing identifies individual ownership of products as being the problem, the most prominent design response to which has been put forward in Product Service Systems (PSS), often referred to as a functional economy (Mont 2002). This paper engages in the complexity of Product Service Systems, to be able to deliver the preservation of natural resources they proclaim.

Krister Gustafsson – Designing the most compelling educational interactive spaces

The purpose of this paper is to look at the interactive multimedia play equipment, called the ‘Globe Trotter’, at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum (PHM), as an exercise in designing the most effective ways to deliver an educational health message to a public audience.[1]

The ‘Globe Trotter’ is part of the MBF[2] Magic Garden[3], a permanent interactive exhibition that has become one of the Museum’s main attractions since its launch in September 2008. Arguably, it was a first of its kind to inspire children and their carers to enjoy a healthy lifestyle of “Healthy Eating and Healthy Exercise”. The educational playground was developed in consultation with leading health experts to help visitors effectively combat the increasing health problems of Australian children, such as obesity and diabetes. The multisensory, high tech playground was designed to create an imaginative and immersive organic vegetable garden where children (ages 2-8) learn through playing with intellectually and physically stimulating activities, such as chasing fish in a digital pond and butterflies amongst conversational pumpkins. What is also special about these activities is that they are highly relevant to a variety of modern multicultural family settings. The ‘Globe Trotter’ specifically explored these themes through giving children a sense of travelling around the world (hence the name) to discover healthy traditional meals and healthy mealtime habits in places ranging from Greece to Australia, and even Alaska. However, its enjoyable reward system required patience to be activated unlike the other highly popular and intuitive exhibits in the playground.

Developing service design within the product design programme at Glasgow School of Art, involved exploring areas of commonality between product and service design and the parallel skills that can be applied to both. During this process, we had the opportunity to consider how we teach design in a service context and to begin the process of developing a common framework for a service design language within the department.

To help develop this knowledge and expertise and to complement design and social science skills within the department, service design professionals were brought in to share their professional practice and knowledge through workshops with the students. Projects were run with the year 3 product design students in collaboration with an external client to provide a real-world context, user-groups and stakeholders for the project.

Daniela Sangiorgi, Julia Gillen, Sabine Junginger and Roger Whitham – Personal development, participation and design

This article summarises a small-scale intervention within a large secondary school in East Lancashire. Our pilot project was inspired by the UK government’s goal to ‘put the learner at the centre’ and by the constant call for more personalised learning, which focuses on ‘pupil voice’ and ‘participation’. We used this study to explore different modes to involve students in the design of their education. In addition, we observed those factors in the school that supported and/or inhibited this level of participation, while reflecting on the possible synergies between personal development, design and participation.

Urban design has long been accused of being more ‘design’ than ‘urban’, more the province of architects than planners (Inam, 2002). Yet, as many communities face decades of economic decline and population loss, often visible in their physical fabric, there is a role for urban designers to help re-imagine the future of these cities and a need to frame urban design as service. This paper provides an opportunity to examine the role of service in urban design in two ways – as a service in an under-resourced community with a declining economy and population, and as a pedagogical approach.

The effect of globalisation such as borderless markets, increasing competition, rapidly improving technology and changing customer requirements has changed the nature of original equipment manufacturers. As equipment provision has become more complex and competition heightened, firms have felt the pressure to add value, predominantly through the provision of services. This has encouraged supply chain collaboration with other key network partners, depending on establishing relationships with key supply chain partners.

The network perspective provides a new approach to how firms might acquire and exploit the capabilities of multiple firms in supporting future products and services. It is therefore becoming important for supply chain partners to understand how to integrate processes across the network. As services represent a growing share of revenue for some manufacturing companies, the area of service supply chain (SSC), a key enabler of this transformation, remains largely unexplored.

Innovative Service Design for All

A call for papers is always an interesting experiment, an open challenge; one doesn’t know what to expect and only hopes for some exciting input. The present special issue of Re-public on Innovative Service Design for All was such a case, especially given the global scope and breadth of the field. The result has shown that Service Design is very active internationally; it keeps developing as a subject of academic study, as well as growing and expanding into different areas of application.

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