This is Service Design Thinking

Mark Jones, Lead of Service Innovation at IDEO, says that from his perspective the design process begins with understanding the product’s context of use,

Good service design projects can also help find answers to the customer’s present and future needs.

Brainstorming with the customer using storyboards is one of the service design methods used at KONE.

A successful service design project requires integrating stakeholders as early as possible in the project development process.

KONE is a business-to-business provider for complete solutions for the installation, modernisation and maintenance of elevators, escalators and automatic building doors (Kone, 2010a). The challenge is to communicate the service business that KONE offers to the customers.

Product Design: developing products with service applications
Satu Miettinen
This chapter looks at the influences of service production upon product design and considers the implications of the evolution of product designers from designing just products to designing services too.
Conceptual design and iteration
The roles of designers have changed as well as the methods they use in their design work. Valtonen (2007) demonstrates this in her study of how the role of an industrial designer has diversified. Designers are now working in managing design processes in companies, working as researchers and contributing to consumer research.
Product design, also known as industrial design, has undergone changes during past decades. The design of objects is no longer restricted to form, function, material and production. Design is arguably now focused on the interaction between people and technology, and products serve as platforms for experiences, functionality and service offerings (Buchanan, 2001). The Industrial Designers Society of America defines industrial design as a professional service of creating and developing concepts and specifications that optimise the function, value and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer (IDSA, 2010). Thus it can be perceived that industrial design is itself a service that benefits users and manufacturers of products and services.
Design seeks in practice to identify problems and latent needs in various aspects of people’s lives that can be used to inspire creative generation of artefacts. People’s needs and problems change as their social, technological, and economic living environments change. Design responds to the emergence of new environments and user needs. Designers study users and their usage of artefacts to develop better products and generate knowledge that can be embedded into artefacts. Users generate knowledge through interpretation of this embedded knowledge in artefacts. They need to be able to understand the value, meaning, and the ways to use the artefact in different situations of their daily lives.
The role of an industrial designer has diversified. Designers are now working in managing design processes in companies, working as researchers and contributing to consumer research.
The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) introduced a process guideline (ISO 13407) on “human-centred design process for interactive systems” with an emphasis on user participation in the system development process (Sato, 2009). The Human Centred Design (HCD) process model can be applied to organise HCD approaches into problem framing, information gathering and interpretation, solution ideation, development and evaluation phases. Each of these phases represent the different parts of the product and service development process that design can help inform.
Stakeholders’ activity levels can be used as an organising principle in HCD approaches to product and service development. Stakeholders in the design process can also be considered both designers and users whilst representatives of the design community can be considered to be design engineers, industrial or interaction designers or user researchers. They take part in the design process by contributing their expertise in defining and specifying technological solutions, helping define the key user characteristics or by articulating the visual appearance of the product.
Users within the HCD process can be considered as either anyone exposed to interaction with a product or service or so-called secondary users such as service personnel and employees of the service provider who are involved in the provision of the service. User expertise like these individuals may provide is useful in building a clearer picture of the contexts and practices in which users might interact with the product.
Other such stakeholders are customers, suppliers and third-party developers all of whom may participate in the HCD development process by contributing contextual information of domain specific expertise.

This is co-creative.
The concept of activity refers to participants’ interactivity, initiative and style of collaboration and contribution in design events. User roles may vary from proactive participation where users contribute to solving and framing design challenges to passive roles where designers instead interpret user data without any direct engagement with the user community (Keinonen, 2009).
Product design is always linked to a manufacturing process. Typically, there are a large number of engineering processes that have to be integrated to support the production of a complete product. By considering product design holistically as a service, it is possible to consider how all the processes are connected to the business of exchanging goods and marketing. Product design can, and must, therefore assist in the fulfilment of the demands of the delivery and maintenance processes as well as the user experience of a service.
The use of these human-centred design tools characterises the product design process. In turn these help facilitate creation of suitable product specifications to meet all relevant engineering and user specifications. Product design can also be used for corporate communications, brand building, technology development and marketing (Keinonen, 2006).
Conceptual product design focuses on combining several product design perspectives: a user-centred design approach, a variety of qualitative and quantitative research and data gathering approaches, and visualisation techniques such as sketching, imaging and prototyping. Where the product design process aims toward a product launch, conceptual design can play several roles in supporting a company’s business objectives and organisational processes. The objective of concept development is not articulation of a product specification that comprehensively defines a product as described previously. Instead, product concept development outlines the product’s characteristics and begins a process where the organisation can consider how it would need to evolve or adjust to accommodate actual development of this concept in the future.
Conceptual product design focuses on combining several product design perspectives: a user-centred design approach, a variety of qualitative and quantitative research and data gathering approaches, and visualisation techniques such as sketching, imaging and prototyping.
Product development concepts can make a major contribution to later phases of product development. Emerging concepts are created either as a result of technical research and development or through modification of existing products in an attempt by the organisation to enter radically different markets. They make user needs understandable and help the company’s learning and decision-making processes for future product generation. Visualisation of such concepts is typically accomplished through development of scenarios in anticipation of forthcoming technological development and future research. Very often these con-cepts are not aimed at implementation. Visions are also used to outline and communicate a company’s brand and future marketing strategies. (Ibid.)
Iterative design development helps to solve problems found in user testing. There must be a cycle of design, testing and measurement, then redesign, repeated as often as necessary. This is a way to incorporate results of behavioural testing into the next version of the system. Making a system user friendly and easy to operate is the goal of this approach (Gould and Lewis, 1985). I

Iterative design development helps to solve problems found in user testing

Conceptual product design focuses on combining several product design perspectives: a user-centred design approach, a variety of qualitative and quantitative research and data gathering approaches, and visualisation techniques such as sketching, imaging and prototyping

Product design can also be used for corporate communications, brand building, technology development and marketing (Keinonen, 2006).

Designers study users and their usage of artefacts to develop better products and generate knowledge that can be embedded into artefacts