Redefining innovation processes: The digital designers at work

As design in digital innovation has become a thing, we highlight the inconclusive concepts that describe design activity in innovation processes. Proposing an alternative theoretical lens - a sociomaterial practice lens - we claim that this view can reveal the contribution of digital designers to the work of innovation. This paper draws on a research study with digital designers in the UK. At the same time as we begin to reconceptualise the ways digital design activity can be described, we also illustrate a theoretical framework based on 1) action and knowing as ordered by collectively produced objects, 2) sociomateriality and the configuration of human bodies and materials in action, 3) the co-emergence of objects and sociomaterial configurations where each is the condition of the other. This alternative way of looking at design activity may pose some challenges to the theoretical traditions in the field. We however believe that it contains immense potential too

Service design: suggesting a qualitative multi-step approach for analyzing and examining theme park experiences

This article proposes and applies a multistep qualitative approach for evaluating service experiences, adapted from the emerging field of service design, in a theme park. It is argued that service design offers effective methods for analyzing and developing complex service experiences. By applying ‘persona’, ‘observation’, ‘guided interviews’, and ‘visualization’ methods to a theme park at the Gold Coast, Australia, it is found that the multistep approach delivers comprehensive insights into customer experiences and identifies critical incidents that take place during the service experience. As such, this study suggests a new method of how to analyze and evaluate service experiences