Beyond Blueprints and Basics: A Service Design Conference Report

Abstract

On October 29, 2010, the Service Design Network1 held a one-day intensive Service Design Conference in Cambridge, MA. The conference was hosted by Microsoft at the New England Research and Development Center and organized by Shelley Evenson, Jamin Hegeman, Mark Jones, and Birgit Mager. One goal of the conference was to formally extend into the United States the conversation around service design that has been developing in Europe.2 Another goal of the conference was to develop a community around service design by providing an opportunity for those practicing and interested in the subject to come together. The roughly 110 participants included practicing professionals from a variety of fields—healthcare, hospitality, government, public services, software development, and design consultancies—as well as academics from design and management schools. The participants also came from all over the United States, Canada, Germany, and South Korea. Some identified themselves as service designers in their line of work or inquiry; others have only recently become interested in service design. The participants embraced this diversity and sought new ways to find connections and common ground during the gathering. Although the conference did not have a specific title or theme, the nature of its content and speakers provides some insight into the issues that are of current importance, as well as the emergent issues in service design. The six presentation topics were “Service Design: An Organizational Challenge” by Oliver King, “The Behavior Chain: Linking the Tools and Methods of Service Design to Meaningful and Measurable Behavior Change” by Robert Fabricant, “Service Meets Social” by Shelley Evenson, “The Digital Service Experience” by Monica Bueno, “Architecting for Mass Collaboration: How Civic Hackers are Building Better City Services with Government” by Peter Corbett, and “Finding the Soul of Service Design” by Mark Jones. King emphasized the capability of service designers through the illustration of a successful project, Bueno provided heuristics for successful service design outcomes in the form of lessons, Corbett shared the experiences of civic hackers and the design of social technologies, and the other three presentations contained substance about the application of service design to social issues. In addition, a panel led by Lew McCreary had Chris McCarthy and Lorna Ross engage in a focused dialogue around services in healthcare innovation.