Designing for Service: Key Issues and New Directions

Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers. It is now a growing field of both practice and academic research. Designing for Service brings together a wide range of international contributors to map the field of service design and identify key issues for practitioners and researchers such as identity, ethics and accountability. Designing for Service aims to problematize the field in order to inform a more critical debate within service design, thereby supporting its development beyond the pure methodological discussions that currently dominate the field. The contributors to this innovative volume consider the practice of service design, ethical challenges designers may encounter, and the new spaces opened up by the advent of modern digital technologies.

Daniela Sangiorgi was one of the first scholars to work in service design research. With a degree in industrial design, she went on to study for one of the first PhDs in service design at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. She was part of the team of that set up the Service Design Network and the Service Design Research initiative. Her research has been used in design consultancy and for various EU projects, and she has received Research Council funding. She is the co-author of one of the first ever academic books on Service Design ('Design for Service', with Anna Meroni, 2011). She has taught service design at MA level in the UK, Italy, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, India and South Korea. She chaired the ServDes2014 international conference in 2011, and is currently the PI of an AHRC-funded research project.

Alison Prendiville has an MSc in digital anthropology from UCL, and her doctoral research was an industry-funded PhD with Thorn Transit Systems International (now part of Cubic). This was one of the first research projects to take a holistic view of engineering hardware and its effect on the passenger service experience. She was a researcher on the EU Framework IV programme MIMIC, which investigated barriers to the seamless transport journey at seven EU sites. Her recent work as deputy director at the Competitive Creative Design- a collaboration between University of the Arts and Cranfield University- has focused on facilitating collaborations between designers, scientists and engineers for the development of new product service systems. She is course director for the MDes Service Design Innovation programme at the University of the Arts London, and she works with various service design workshops at Cranfield University and at the Samsung Art and Design Institute in South Korea. She is also a judge for the Ordnance Survey's Geovation Challenge. Her most recent research focuses on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and their role in innovating public sector services.