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

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

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

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

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

Let’s step into each other’s worlds: designing for local transformation processes

In our densely-populated cities, fostering harmony between differing communities is an increasingly difficult art, and one in which design can provide positive contributions. This paper describes a design project which aimed to decrease tensions between youth and residents in a city neighbourhood through an empathy- building process. Individuals from both groups were guided through the process of stepping into each others’ worlds (through Virtual Reality) and developing solutions together to address points of tension. Their individual transformative processes were tracked in order to make the implicit outcomes of such design processes explicit. Throughout this process new dynamics and connections emerged, revealing grounds for structurally decreasing tensions and promoting participatory approaches for local transformation processes.This paper describes the project and presents our learnings regarding (1) the transformative impact on the involved individuals from the neighbourhood and (2) reflections on the contributing roles of the designers in social innovation projects.Design Conceptualization and Communicatio

Towards Actionable Forms of Communicating and Sharing Design Knowledge

Design research aims to construct knowledge that is useful for designers and non-designers in the processes of designing for various types of challenges: from making products to solving complexsocial problems. Designers and non-designers seek information and inspiration for their work both in a non-design world, e.g., in films, illustrated magazines, and in various sources and forms ofdesign research. Conference papers are one of many sources of design research insights. Unfortunately, the textual format of conference papers does not allow to convey the richness ofdesign research insights and express them in forms that are actionable and available to others, e.g., non-designers. As a result, members of design teams might feel disempowered or do not trustand accept provided design research outputs. Therefore, they do not act upon the provided design research insights and find it challenging to apply them in collaboration.In this paper, we present the actionable palette that consists of nine qualities that act as building blocks of actionable forms of sharing and communicating design knowledge. Using the actionablepalette to review design research outputs from 51 pictorials, we identified six forms of capturing design research insights. We characterize these six forms and analyze them in terms ofactionability to inspire designers and non-designers to experiment with forms of sharing design research insights and first design ideas based on design research insights. Finally, we provide aset of guidelines to inspire and inform the process of reaching the particular qualities of actionability for design research outputsDesign Conceptualization and Communicatio

Actionable attributes of service design for business

The role of service deliverables in the early phases of service development has been studied both in academia and practice. We lack knowledge on the impact of service deliverables for the later phases of the service development process in which service designers are usually not engaged. In this paper, we aim to understand what attributes of service deliverables help business clients to act upon the deliverables on their own after service designers are gone. To elicit actionable attributes of service deliverables, e.g., reports, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five leading and recognizable service design consultants from Poland who lead service design consultancies. We identified three categories of actionable attributes of service deliverables: communication, contextual, and transformative attributes. The attributes might support service designers in empowering their clients to make use of the service deliverables in later phases of service development.dit congres zal uitgesteld plaatsvinden in 2021 maar de proceeding is in 2020 gepubliceerdDesign Conceptualization and Communicatio

MyFutures: Imagining speculative care and support futures in The Netherlands

In many Western societies, decisions about leaving home and spending your last years in a care home are often taken suddenly. Immediate health issues force family, friends and neighbours who offer informal support to ask for immediate formal support. Such urgent situations do not lead to the best solutions.Design Conceptualization and Communicatio