From Capability Training to Capacity Building

Service design is now firmly established as an important approach for driving innovation and change in the public sector. This is evident by the growing number of public sector service design projects, by the emergence of innovation labs in governments around the world, by dedicated events such as the 'Service Design in Government' conference in the UK (now in its 4th year) and an increasing body of academic research looking at the impact and value of service design in the public sector. One of the key barriers to service design implementation is the capability and capacity available to in-house teams of council officers tasked to deliver and improve the service. This is an important issue to address if service design is to truly fulfil its potential to drive innovation in the public sector. And yet, as a community of practice, we don’t often discuss the importance of service design training in the public sector. This article attempts to highlight a range of approaches to service design training and capability building in the public sector using examples from different parts of the world

Service Design Against Organised Crime

This paper proposes benefits of using service design against organised crime. As a vehicle to this discussion, the focus is an anti-child-trafficking project at Northumbria University in the UK, involving its multidisciplinary Northumbria Crime Prevention Network. The last 10 years have shown increasing evidence of people trafficking, internationally (DoS, 2010), generally for the purposes of illegal labour and/or sex. A significant fraction of those who are trafficked are children. The majority of these children are in their mid-teens, but some are as young as five years old. The C4 persona-based critical design process, (Hilton, 2008), is proposed to strategically enable a service design approach to counter organised crime, by first developing the required criminal personas in order to use their competitive perspectives in critical review of the preventative initiatives. Opportunities from such a service design approach, to child trafficking for example would include new means of: interruption or redirection of child trafficking services so that these children end up in legitimate care; also the proposition of considering new opportunities and improvements in child trafficking service routes and processes as a means of second guessing how and where Recruiters, Transporters, and Exploiters, (Van Dijck, 2005), might next be found operating, and then through border and security agencies successfully countered

Participatory healthcare service design and innovation

This paper describes the use of Experience Based Design (EBD), a participatory methodology for healthcare service design, to improve the outpatient service for older people at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. The challenges in moving from stories to designing improvements, co-designing for wicked problems, and the effects of participants' limited scopes of action are discussed. It concludes by proposing that such problems are common to participatory service design in large institutions and recommends that future versions of EBD incorporate more tools to promote divergent thinking

Valuing service design: Lessons from SROI

This paper describes lessons learned through the use of a Social Return On Investment (SROI) approach to evaluate a completed Service Design project with a large vocational training company. It is written by the Service Design team that led the original project and who subsequently used SROI to evaluate its impact. Experiencing the SROI evaluation process first-hand, in a live setting, is the approach by which the authors develop a discussion about its potential fit with Service Design processes. The SROI method enabled both the design team and the case-study organisation to acknowledge and measure additional social/stakeholder benefits created through the design work. These elements would not have been visible in a traditional ROI evaluation. There is the promise of a useful fit between SROI and Service Design in larger projects. The approach could be used as a framework for forecasting and evolving indicators for likely social impacts (and their financial proxies) throughout a Service Design project, to guide decisions at each stage. Its usefulness depends, however, on there being a will at Design Management level to rehearse the approach and develop tailored approaches towards it. In the current study, the method was found to be time-intensive for the Service Design team as lay-users and also for some key project stakeholders, but that could be better managed with experience. SROI will not suit every project, however may fit very well with those projects that already count a full business plan amongst their deliverables. One of the main limitations encountered in using the SROI process was difficulty identifying appropriate proxies for the calculations. It is proposed that social benefit might be expressed to multidisciplinary co-design teams through visual and emotive means rather than in quantitative, financial terms. Such ‘visual proxies’ would better fit with the semantic mode of design

Mapping and Developing Service Design Research in the UK.

This report is the outcome of the Service Design Research UK (SDR UK) Network with Lancaster University as primary investigator and London College of Communication, UAL as co-investigator. This project was funded as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Network grant. Service Design Research UK (SDR UK), funded by an AHRC Network Grant, aims to create a UK research network in an emerging field in Design that is Service Design. This field has a recent history and a growing, but still small and dispersed, research community that strongly needs support and visibility to consolidate its knowledge base and enhance its potential impact. Services represent a significant part of the UK economy and can have a transformational role in our society as they affect the way we organize, move, work, study or take care of our health and family. Design introduces a more human centred and creative approach to service innovation; this is critical to delivering more effective and novel solutions that have the potential to tackle contemporary challenges. Service Design Research UK reviewed and consolidated the emergence of Service Design within the estalished field of Design

Exploring where Designers and Non-Designers meet within the Service Organisation: Considering the value designers bring to the service design process

Service design is sometimes thought of as the interface between the customer and the service provider, a design process that exists between design thinking and business practices. Service design consultancies working with service organisations are increasingly attempting to develop design thinking alongside business processes within the organisation, but if everyone becomes a ‘designer’ what value is placed on the design-trained service designer? What qualities, knowledge and skills does a designer offer that identifies them as a valuable business asset who has an integral place within the business process, rather than as someone brought in when the organisation wants to be seen to be ‘creative’ or ‘innovative.’ The process of design for services is well documented, however there is not much debate around whether the service designer needs to be design-trained, or of what benefits they would offer if they were. It is assumed that design tools and methods can be introduced and disseminated to non-designers, but if tools and methods are all it took to design services, what is the future for the ‘designer?’ From observations of students studying service design at postgraduate level and a comparative study with design and non-design staff within a service organisation, this paper aims to uncover the value and ‘craft’ of the designer within the context of the service design process

Interdisciplinary working in service design: case studies for designing touch points

The paper argues that interdisciplinary design can be successful in services design. It offers information about 2 case studies in which interdisciplinary teams address design services problems. The paper explains the design method employed in the case studies. It also identifies “user design centred” as the main concept that drove the design approach. It explains the meaning of “user centred design”, of “services design” and highlights the importance of “interdisciplinary services design”. The paper also offers a framework for interdisciplinary working in service design. KEYWORDS: Service Design, Touch Points, Interdisciplinary workin

Service Design Capabilities

This open access book discusses service design capabilities in innovation processes, and provides a framework that guides design students, practitioners and researchers towards a better understanding of operational aspects of service design processes. More specifically, it revisits service designers’ capabilities in light of the new roles that have opened up in innovation processes on different scales. After years of being inadequately defined, the professional profile of service designers is now taking shape. Today private and public institutions recognize service designers as essential contributors to their innovation and development processes. What are the capabilities that characterize a service designer? These essential capabilities are what service designers should acquire in their education and can sell when looking for a job

‘One big wheel’: young people’s participation in service, design, development and delivery (Sharing our experience, Practitioner-led research 2008-2009; PLR0809/080)

How do professionals and agencies seek the views of young people moving from participation to the implementation of service design and delivery? The research involved six white British young people from the Camborne, Pool and Redruth (CPR) area of Cornwall who, with the support of a senior social worker within the Schools Multi-Agency Resource Team (SMART) and other members of the team, became researchers themselves. The young people were involved in the process of designing questions and conducting semi-structured interviews with agencies such as Children’s Social Care, the police and the fire service to ask how young people are involved in service design and delivery. In addition to the semi-structured interviews, creative and solution focused methods were employed to identify a young person’s perception of services. The research process highlighted some surprising examples of service delivery for young people from agencies other than those set up to deliver ‘youth services’. Why has this developed and what recommendations can be made for further service design and delivery on front-line and strategic levels to achieve a true model of integrated practice, ensuring young people have a voice and are heard? Natasha Jame