Service design: Tuning the industrial design profession

Design is not only about the design and production of goods, but is increasingly addressing complex social issues nowadays. Roles of designers are becoming more and more varied, and at the same time other professionals are increasingly using design tools in their business, organizational or other innovation projects. New terms such as ‘service design’, ‘design thinking’, or even ‘co-creation’ are quite popular at the moment, but confusing as well: depending on the discipline people mean very different processes or methodologies with these terms. In this paper, we zoom in on the rise of service design. Service design is a user-centred approach to design, just as industrial design is. The contexts of users and their needs, motivations and feelings are starting points for the design process. In the form of a think tank, we critically reflected on current developments in design practice in order to tune the industrial design profession to the latest developments of design practice. Besides a better understanding of what service design brings and how it relates to industrial design practice, we explicitly formulated suggestions for current industrial design curricula, since many new graduated design students do projects in, and find jobs in service design projects.Industrial DesignIndustrial Design Engineerin

Bringing the everyday life of people into design

Products play a role in our everyday lives. Insight into the experiences of people in their everyday lives is of great use for designing products. For example, the contexts in which products are used (physical, social, culture etc.) and the state (excited, tired, concentrated etc.) of the users influence how they experience using products. However, in design practice using this type of diverse, subjective and multi-layered information, as inspirational input for the design process, is a recent development. In this research project, I explored how this information can be communicated in such a way that it supports designers (1) to empathise with users, (2) to be inspired to create new product ideas, and (3) to be engaged to use this information in their design processes. By a set of eight explorative studies in collaboration with industrial practice (varying from a small design firm to a multinational telecom company) the current situation in design practice is investigated, tools to communicate this type of information are designed and explored in use, and a theoretical framework is created to organise the elements which play a role in this communication. The filled in framework and a set of guidelines for practitioners to successfully communicate rich experience information in design are the results. The framework folds out how the three main qualities (empathy, inspiration and engagement) can be achieved by setting in mechanisms and means. The guidelines show various examples of how these qualities can be supported.Industrial DesignIndustrial Design Engineerin

Structuring roles in Research through Design collaboration

In Research through Design knowledge is generated, but not always captured and shared effectively. When working in a multidisciplinary team of, e.g. designers, design researchers, academic researchers and domain practitioners confusion aboutroles, processes, and results easily occurs. In a series of three Research through Design cases we developed a set of role descriptions to help structuring the collaboration in such projects, using different configurations of people, roles and documentation tools. We conclude with a structure for assigning roles that enables multidisciplinary teams to make their Research through Design process moreexplicit, reflect on their activities as part of process data, and propose moments to capture knowledge from all actors involved.Design Conceptualization and Communicatio

About evaluation in service design: As it is and how it could evolve

This paper reports on the role of evaluation in the service design field, reflecting in particular on contributions presented at the ServDes Conference 2018 in Milan, where the topic is explicitly introduced for the first time as a promising research and practical argument, to push the boundaries of the discipline and reinforce its legitimacy as a driver of innovation. It starts with a brief overview of literature on the topic, which highlights an increasing attention on measuring the value of service design and its impact on organizations, and goes on to examine some preliminary contributions on the evaluation of services as service design outcomes. After this, some reflections are made on how the papers admitted to the conference currently address these issues. Although we are still not fully aware of the evaluation potential and a shared vision still needs to be built, some trends on how the topic is approached by scholars can already be detected, and future challenges are envisioned for bringing the discussion to the next level

Op verkenning in het alledaagse: De gebruiker als expert

Industrieel ontwerpers maken al lang niet meer alleen fysieke producten. Ontwerpers leveren een bijdrage aan een oplossing voor een probleem of vervullen een behoefte. De oplossingsmogelijkheden zijn tegenwoordig veel groter dan alleen materialen en fysieke assemblage; het kan net zo goed digitaal, een ruimtelijke oplossing, een protocol, een dienst of een combinatie van dit soort mogelijkheden zijn.Industrial DesignIndustrial Design Engineerin

Meta-levels in design research: Resolving some confusions

Doing design and doing research are related activities. When doing design in a (PhD) research project, a number of confusions pop up. These confusions stem from the fact that most of the basic terms, such as ‘designer’, ‘research’, and ‘product’, have many connotations but not a shared definition. Because design research often happens in a multi-disciplinary context, the confusions can be even larger, as each discipline brings its own connotations and associations to the discussion without making them explicit. Especially when the researchers build on design skills themselves, and conduct researchthrough- design, it can be difficult to distinguish where and how activities are done to create new particular solutions for users or new generalizable knowledge for discourse. We present a visualization that has helped to clarify a number of these issues by separating out the different goals, roles, and activities in which we engage when we do design research. It takes the form of a diagram of six meta-levels, where at each level an actor works to develop both a theoretical insight as well as a practical application to be used at the next level. We discuss how the diagram helps to separate roles and persons, different levels of (academic and practical) discourse, and to clarify competing tensions within a research project, for instance when defending a design decision in a research prototype as serving the research goals at the cost of practical utility or vice versa.Design Conceptualization and CommunicationIndustrial Design Engineerin

Using Empathy-Centric Design in Industry: Reflections from the UX Researcher, the Client, and the Method Expert

Empathic design provides tools and frameworks supporting designers to understand users’ experiences with products or services. However, how does one hand over this empathic understanding of users to other internal stakeholders shaping the service experience? In this contribution, we reflect on a three-year implementation of an empathy-centric design approach in an industrial context with a low user experience maturity from three different professional viewpoints: ours as UX researchers, the one of a company manager, and an expert researcher on empathy in design. These narrative introspective accounts unveil some of the main benefits, opportunities, and challenges of implementing an empathy-centric design approach in the industry. We discuss and confront them to prior work.We contribute to the field of empathic design with rich in-situ research insights and principles for a successful empathic approach

Talking tangibles

This paper describes ongoing research in a 4 year PhD project that started in June 2009. With the computer becoming pervasive in everyday life, a need for new interaction styles has emerged. In the realm of the vision of calm technology [6], we see potential in interaction shifting to the periphery of the attention. The aim of this research is to study interactive systems designed for peripheral interaction by combining physical artifacts and audio

Designing for user experiences in specific contexts: Contributions from contextmapping

In saturated consumer markets, consumer choices often depend on subtle product differences that contribute positively to their user experiences. Hence, it is important for designers to be able to create products that elicit different experiences. In this chapter we discuss a design approach that takes the creation of specific user experience as a starting point. The approach aims for improvement beyond product functionality and user friendliness in order to make products that really fulfil important, often latent needs in people’s lives. Experience-driven design involves determining what experience to aim for and, subsequently, to design something that will evoke that experience.Industrial DesignIndustrial Design Engineerin