I’ve been taking an online course on designing online courses. If that isn’t meta enough the online course I am learning to design is on design.
My course will be an introduction to service design, meant to introduce people who are contemplating or preparing to participate in a service design project how to think about and talk about service design, so they can feel comfortable with the idea of embarking on a service design project and participating in the process.
I’m putting the tentative outline of the course here, just in case anyone is interested:
Lesson 1: What is design?
- What we mean by design
- What we do not not mean by design (making functional things more appealing)
- What we also do not mean by design (planning out an engineered thing)
- Design produces dynamic systems of parts and participants
- Successful design motivates participants to participate
- Design is concerned with understanding and involving participants
Lesson 2: What is a service?
- What we mean by service
- What we do not mean by service (service as opposed to product)
- Service design’s much broader conception of service
- Some services don’t look like services
- Service generates, exchanges and distributes value of myriad forms
Lesson 3: What is the value of design?
- Quantitative value
- Qualitative value
- A business that fails to deliver qualitative value will not make money
- Experience is about qualitative value
- Design motivates participants to participate by offering good experience
Lesson 4: Good experiences in general
- Good experience is useful, usable and desirable
- Human-centered design (HCD) is a method for producing good experiences
- Overview of HCD (universal methodology for producing good experiences)
- Altitudes and granularity of experiences
- Beyond touchpoints
Lesson 5: Good service experiences
- Service experiences are a complex special case
- Service experiences have six characteristics, all of which must be addressed in a good service experience.
- 1. Services comprise multiple experiences occurring over a span of time
- 2. Services comprise experiences occurring across multiple delivery channels
- 3. Services comprise experiences interacting with other people
- 4. Services comprise experiences of aligned and misaligned interests
- 5. Services are experienced as partly exposed and partly concealed
- 6. Services experience is the result of how the organization operates
Lesson 6: The six dimensions of service
- Reflection on service experiences, good and bad
- Introduction to six dimensions of service (6DS)
- 1. Sequential
- 2. Omnichannel
- 3. Polycentric
- 4. Aligned
- 5. Semivisible
- 6. Operationalized
- Sorting good and bad experiences into the 6DS
Lesson 7: A typical service design project
- Introduction: from current to future state
- Understand internal perspectives
- Understand current service delivery
- Understand the current actor experiences
- Identify and prioritize opportunities to improve current experiences
- Envision alternative future experiences
- Evaluate and revise alternative future experiences
- Blueprint future service delivery
- Plan phased development of future service
Lesson 8: Some core tools of service design
- Introduction: current state, future state versions
- Current state ecosystem map
- Current state service blueprint
- Current state experience map
- Opportunity statements
- Concept sheets
- Future state experience (“story from the future”)
- Future state moment architecture
- Future state service blueprint
- Future state evolution map
Lesson 9: What it is like to participate in a service design project
- It is participatory
- It is collaborative
- It is multidisciplinary
- It is radically democratic
- It is anthropological
- It demands empathy
- It demands different modes of thinking
- It will demand different ways of working
- It changes everything
Lesson 10: How service design can help you
- Apply six dimensions of service to your own service
- Define a project