Designing new customer experiences: a study of socio-material practices in service design

Abstract

Past studies on design and designers' work share an understanding of design as concerned with making and interpreting objects, including the finished articles -e.g. consumer products -and 'experimental' design aids -e.g.prototypes.Nevertheless, for over a decade design professionals have been extending their remit from the design of tangible objects to the design of intangibles -e.g.experiences, and services -as the result of the increasing part played by services in the world economy.This tension between tangibility and intangibility in design is particularly relevant in the case of the development of new customer experiences by definition intangible, fluid, and essentially subjective, and thus difficult to define and design.In this paper, building on an inductive study, we investigate how service designers design -with methods and processes originally created to design artefacts -a customer experience.Our findings reveal that the design of customer experiences revolves around three main set of practices, exploring the experience ecology, making experiences tangible, and communicating about experiences , and point out the prominent role of materiality in the design of intangible outcomes.

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