The core of service design

The objective

The objective of service design is to cause consistent service delivery with high levels of designed-in usefulness, usability, desirability, efficiency and effectiveness, and with resulting improvements in productivity. 

Three essences

1. A service is a product manufactured by human supplier(s) and consumer(s) at the point of service delivery.
2. Service design is the productisation of services, for consistency and productivity of service outputs.  

3. A service design is expressed in explicit service-design-enhanced process maps. 

Ten principles

1. The demand for services will continue to grow exponentially.
   • Increased consumer expectations and awareness increases demand for new and more specific services, in the public sector (e.g. health, education and provision for the elderly) and the private sector (e.g. financial, retail, and leisure). 
   • Technology developments create opportunities for new services and new delivery channels.
    
2. The problems or requirements for services never go away. 
   • Even the most effective service meets the requirements in the settings of its time, which change as time moves on.
   • Meeting individual’s service needs educates that consumer to expect additional or higher levels of service delivery.
    
3. Society will never be able fairly to meet rising demand for services across all communities unless a way is found to disconnect service-supply capacity from the finite number of available man-hours.  Policy makers are living in a world where the dire assumptions of Malthus are condemning part of the population to missing the service-benefits which improving expectations demand.1
   • There are already huge gaps between service demand and service supply.
   • National economic assumptions are that increases in service outputs are limited by the number of people and hours available.2
    
4. Services can be designed with the same precision as engineered products. 
   • Consumer service-needs can be defined explicitly, allowing matching of design to needs. 
   • Service delivery can be broken down into individual components, which are so supported by designed-infrastructure that delivery becomes as consistent from properly-trained individuals as manufacturing processes have been made consistent to high levels of exacting standards. 
   • This level of pre-delivery design is the only effective means of liberating service-deliverers to do that which only humans can do – interact with individual human being(s) receiving the service, to ensure that their individual needs are truly met. 
    
5. Achieving consistency of meeting demand and consistency of service delivery requires designs to encompass consistency of service touchpoints, service systems, and overriding service policies. 
   • The design of touchpoints can be referred to as D1.
   • The design of systems can be referred to as D2.
   • The design of policy can be referred to as D3.3
    
6. Matching real need and demand to productive service-delivery requires a consistent series of analysis steps from market analysis to the business justification of the designed services.
   • Identifying real needs and demand.
   • Creating a multiplicity of possible ways of meeting demand.
   • Narrowing down the possible ways of meeting demand to the most relevant few, based on objective criteria.
   • Completing the service design, with accompanying business case justification, and implementation plans. 
    
7. As in the world of product design and manufacture, service design requires a wide range of design tools: some standard and of wide applicability, many specialised for particular outputs.
   • A “tool” does either or both of two things: it increases the effectiveness and precision of the output of the tool-user; it increases the productivity of the tool-user. 
   • Any service-design-framework described in point 6 above must leave wide scope for the adoption and use of alternative or more specialised design tools for specific design requirements.
    
8. Because consumer needs are complex, service design is a complex series of activities, designed to lead to simple execution of the delivery of the resulting service.
   • “KISS”, “Keep It Simple, Stupid” can only relate to the resulting designed service.
   • All good design is complex analysis for simple execution. 
   • Misunderstanding this leads to the alternative explanation of “Kiss” – “Keep It Stupid, Simpleton”.4
    
9. Effective service design ultimately requires design at the level of great detail.
   • Consumer needs are aggregations of multiple detailed needs.
   • Engineering design goes from top-level concepts and functionality down to tens, hundreds or thousands of detailed drawings and process steps – all for the consistent fashioning and assembly of inanimate materials and objects. 
   • Service design needs the equivalent design precision, to enable the consistent fashioning and assembly of the human materials and outputs, which form the essence of service delivery.
    
10. Recognising the role of service design must become a national priority, for public and private sector organisations.
    • The productisation of services is the only way for society to meet the rightful growing expectations of its people. 
    • The service economy is the largest part of developed economies.5
    • Achieving developed-economy status is sought by all countries around the world. 
    • Service design offers the potential for exponential growth in service-supply output to meet exponential growth in demand. 

Harvey Dodgson

Written down first on 22nd June 2006, based on years of reflection and practice on service issues.
 
1 There is a Malthusian view of the limits of the capacity of the outputs of services to meet growing demand. (T. R. Malthus “Essay on the Principles of Population”, 1798.)   Demand for public services, like Malthus assumed population grew, grows “exponentially”. Increased expectations, fuelled by education and experience, increases the population’s desire for services greater than the numeric growth in the population.  

However, policy makers suggests the growth in labour productivity is limited, probably to the rate of arithmetic growth assumed by Malthus.  It was the apparent failure of the arithmetic growth of economic outputs to meet the geometric growth of population demand, which leads to the effect of diminishing returns.   
Service design across an economy could have the same profound effect on meeting, then creating, demand that the Industrial Revolution had on breaking the Malthusian constraints. 

2 See Professor Sir Tony Atkinson, “Final report” January 2005, p13, on behalf of the UK Government, which says “There is no reason to expect productivity to increase.  Many public services, like social services, involve an essential human input.  In the caring and teaching professions, there may be limits to which labour productivity can be increased”.   (“The expansion of public services may indeed be subject to diminishing returns”. 2.13, p13). See also Maynard Keynes quote: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money”, John Maynard Keynes, 1936, p 383.   

3 “Redesigning Design Education - the Next Bauhaus?”, Dr Bob Young, Andrea Cooper and Sean Blair, keynote speech for ICSID conference “Exploring Emergent Design Paradigms”, Korea 2001.

4 This understanding of complexity has long been known by serious thinkers.  Lord Saatchi credits Bertrand Russell with the words “To reduce the complex to the simple requires the painful necessity of thought”, Financial Times, 22nd June 2006, p17. 

5 Across the 30 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in 2007, the proportion of services of total national gross value-added ranges from the lows of 55.9 In Norway, 57.2% in Slovakia, 58.7% in the Czech republic, 60.0% in Korea, and 64.8% in Ireland, to the highs of the UK at 76.3%, the US at 76.9% and Luxembourg at 84.0%.  “OECD in Figures, Statistics on Member Countries, 2009 Edition”, p 17.