For the past two years, we have worked with Auburn university and Chris Arnold to run Service Design boot camps for his industrial design students.  Last year, Sarah and Chris co-wrote a paper for the Industrial Designer’s Society of America that was published in August 2010.  It reflects on the workshops we ran and how valuable service thinking and design can be for the discipline of industrial design. We produced a short synopsis to communicate the paper;

“Taking part in an intensive workshop held in Scotland during the spring of 2010, a group of undergraduate industrial design students from the United States received a first hand introduction to the techniques and mindset used in the creation of value added services. Based on this experience, the authors assert that the mindset evidenced in Service Design may enable students, even those in the early stages of their design education, to better identify, develop, and communicate solutions more fitting to ‘real world’ contexts. This is of particular importance in design education where students should receive substantive instruction, not only addressing the grammar of design, but also the purposeful application of its process. The ultimate goal and anticipated benefit of this workshop was not simply for these students to build skill in the application of service design tools, but in challenging each to think differently about the way that they approach future projects.

In the paper the authors share the practical knowledge gained, and observations made during the introduction of the service design mindset to an inexperienced, albiet design savvy audience. The structure and outcomes of this workshop are offered as a starting point for future discussion regarding the role of Service Design, and opportunity provided within the broad context of design and education.”

The year the paper was written we gave students a live brief to redesign the library experience.  Using journey maps to expand the students thinking and consider experiences, we sent them out ready to observe and document experiences to find pressure points in the system, or spot opportunities to do things better.

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We took students through persona building, to fully understand the people they were designing for and how to prototype their solutions.  We ended up with some great services and propositions from the groups including a new tourist/travel agent service inside the library which utilised the travel books and a smart advertising system to pull more users in.

You can download the paper here and view some of the student presentations.

Where do you see the links between industrial design and Service Design?