Stakeholder Engagement for Service Design: How service designers identify and communicate insights

Abstract

Service design is a field emerging from the new-found interest in services as a design material by practitioners and academics of the human-centred design tradition.As such, the field can build on the knowledge from previous work in design as well as in service research.Introducing a new design material may however also introduce new challenges to practice.The research presented in this thesis investigates how the design research phase of the human-centred design process is affected by making services a design material.How users, staff and other stakeholders are involved in service design projects was studied in four studies.Two studies focused on getting a holistic view of how service designers engage stakeholders in their design research.The methods used for these two studies were interviews in one case and participatory observation in the other.The two remaining studies focused on specific aspects of the stakeholder engagement process.One compared how designers and anthropologists approach ethnography, whereas the second investigated the communicative qualities of service design visualisations.It is argued that service design is a stakeholder-centred design discipline.The tools used in service design are to a large extent borrowed from other qualitative research traditions, but design-specific tools do exist.By analysing and synthesising the information obtained, it is then Preface xi Towards the end of my fifth and final year as regular student, a PhD position in service design was announced under Stefan Holmlid (who had also taught the two service design courses mentioned above and the master's year).I decided to apply as I felt that service design had large potential and that it was where I wanted to work in the future.At the same time still was very much just getting started.No good literature on service design existed on the subject during my education and even research papers were still very scarce.I wanted (and still want) to help service design forward by contributing to knowledge on the field which can be built upon to take service design to the next level.Luckily, Stefan decided to hire me and in August 2008 I started my PhD position.It has been a fascinating journey over the past five years, in which service design has grown immensely.Looking back, it is almost hard to believe how much more attention the field has in practice, academia and media.The future is looking exciting for the field!A second study was thus initiated with the aim of investigating exactly what was communicated through the visualisations.For this study a set of visualisations from service design projects were collected, and then analysed with the help of two descriptions of how service designers visualise and two concepts of how to view services from service marketing and management.The outcomes of the analysis of the Stakeholder research for service designThe "classic" background chapter, introducing research within service design and related fields which are of relevance for the topics investigated.Two main sections exist; one focusing on tools for stakeholder engagement and one on how stakeholder insights are communicated.The chapter ends with expanded motivations for the research questions. Interviews with service designersThis is the first study of the thesis.The methodology is introduced, followed by the results of the two separate analyses.One focused on stakeholder engagement and the other on visualisation of stakeholder insights.The chapter ends with a discussion of the study results. Comparing ethnographic stylesThe study comparing how anthropology and design students approached the same field site with similar briefs is presented.The way of working of the two groups is described in the detail.The differences and implications thereof are then discussed.

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