Designing the Future-Service Design
We are seeing service design being integrated into diverse public facing organisations such as hospitals, libraries, galleries, banks, NGOs, and museums. It makes sense that these places are the first to take up service design because of the need/demand for a better more emotionally engaging consumer experience. Naturally the consumer in this instance is broadly defined as anyone accessing a service.
In addition, there is a demand to understand the people who are accessing the service and the different kinds of relationships they have with the service. Service Design uses various techniques to capture this. As Yoko Akama describes, the journey map helps to make the relationship visible. Then once the gaps become apparent the service blueprint pulls all the elements together.
To get there the designer starts with research that is often derived from ethnographic methods (sometimes broadly defined and interpreted). Ethnography involves the immersion of the researcher into the lives of those that they are studying. The researcher seeks not only to observe and enquire about situations people are faced with, but to participate within them. The nature of the participation is balanced with social and practical sensitivity, but will involve the researcher conducting ‘participant observation’ with respondents in different social environments. In addition to ‘participant observation’ ethnographic research can involves in depth interviews, focus groups, mapping, photovoice, and secondary data collection and analysis.
These various methods generate different kinds of information about a particular phenomenon. In Yoko Akama’s example of different community members coming together to build their own disaster preparedness, the aim of the research was to explore the ‘who, where and what’ of local knowledge.
In my next post I’ll look at the ethics of conducting ethnographic research and how we develop an ethical framework to make sure we respect the people we’re working with.