Merging theory and practice in service design

Part 1: Introduction

Welcome to the first part of my 7-part series exploring the Triality Framework, a comprehensive approach that merges theory and practice in service design. If you’re a service designer, a user-centred design (UCD) practitioner, or someone interested in how services can be better designed, implemented, and evaluated, then this article is for you. In this series, we’ll delve deep into how services, users, and contexts interact in a dynamic dance, shaping and being shaped by one another.

Setting the stage: why the Triality Framework?

In service design (SD), discussions often centre around the end-to-end service, examining its function within its ecosystem and the intricate web of interdependencies among various actors. User research complements this by delving into how users interact with services in their specific contexts. However, capturing and presenting the nuanced complexities involving more than just a user, a service, or the context often requires a theoretical foundation and scaffolding to help expand our mindset.

This theoretical scaffolding provides different angles for problem exploration and potential solutions during various phases of service design, implementation, use and evaluation. In my work as a service designer and user researcher, I frequently employ the Triality Framework as theoretical scaffolding.

The essence of the Triality Framework

Developed during my doctoral research, the Triality Framework highlights the interplay between the context, the service, and the user through their recursive relationships. It focuses on the dynamic interactions where each entity influences and shapes the others while simultaneously being shaped by them. This creates a web of complex interdependence, crucial for designing, implementing, and evaluating user-centred, resilient, and context-aware services (and products).

The 5 key questions

The framework encourages us to ask 5 main questions to explore these interdependencies:

1. How does the user perceive the service?
2. How does the user shape the service through interaction or lack thereof, and how do routines and rituals evolve from this interplay?
3. Conversely, how does the service influence the user’s behaviour, encouraging new routines, habits, or processes?
4. How does the surrounding context (including policy and economic constraints) affect the user’s interaction and engagement with the service?
5. How does the service alter the context within which it operates and is used, potentially leading to workarounds or unintended uses?

Triality Framework showing the interconnectedness of service design, user experience, and the broader context.

Structure of the article

This article will unfold over 7 parts, each delving into different aspects of the Triality Framework. Here’s what you can expect:

• Parts 2, 3, and 4: we’ll explore the three main recursive relationships and the theoretical models that help us understand the dynamics of each. This includes the relationships between the context and the service, the service and the user, and the user and the context.
• Part 5: we’ll expand the definitions of the context as a social system, the service as an innovation, and the user as a human agent. This helps develop a holistic and well-rounded understanding of the ecosystem in which services are developed, designed, implemented, used, interacted with, and evaluated.
• Part 6: we’ll examine the attributes (qualities) of each recursive relationship, enabling service designers and UCD practitioners to pose questions that address complex challenges in their work.
• Part 7: we’ll conclude with reflections on key takeaway points and the applicability of the Triality Framework in SD and UCD more broadly.

A note on terminology

Before we delve deeper into the next part, it’s important to note that many theories discussed use ‘technology’ as a basic entity due to their origins in the fields of Computer Science (CS) or Information Systems (IS). Readers are encouraged to think of ‘technology’ as synonymous with a ‘product’. This allows the extension of the term to include services that encompass digital and non-digital products as part of their overall offering, exploring the application of these theories to services within their ecosystems, where products are part of the service rather than existing in isolation.

Let’s dive in

Now, let’s begin exploring the three main recursive relationships encompassed within the framework. We start by untangling what the recursive relationship between context and the service entails in Part 2, and what that may mean in application from a service design perspective. Stay tuned!