Service Design Books
Know of any great books about Service Design, Customer Experience or Social Innovation? Let us know and we’ll add them to this list.
Designing for Service: Key issues and new direction
Edited by Daniella Sangiorgi & Alison Prendiville
Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers. It is now a growing field of both practice and academic research. Designing for Service brings together a wide range of international contributors to map the field of service design and identify key issues for practitioners and researchers such as identity, ethics and accountability. Designing for Service aims to problematize the field in order to inform a more critical debate within service design, thereby supporting its development beyond the pure methodological discussions that currently dominate the field. The contributors to this innovative volume consider the practice of service design, ethical challenges designers may encounter, and the new spaces opened up by the advent of modern digital technologies.
Design for Services
Edited by Anna Meroni & Daniella Sangiorgi
In Design for Services, Anna Meroni and Daniela Sangiorgi articulate what Design is doing and can do for services, and how this connects to existing fields of knowledge and practice. Designers previously saw their task as the conceptualisation, development and production of tangible objects. In the twenty-first century, a designer rarely ‘designs something’ but rather ‘designs for something’: in the case of this publication, for change, better experiences and better services.
The authors reflect on this recent transformation in the practice, role and skills of designers, by organising their book into three main sections. The first section links Design for Services to existing models and studies on services and service innovation. Section two presents multiple service design projects to illustrate and clarify the issues, practices and theories that characterise the discipline today; using these case studies the authors propose a conceptual framework that maps and describes the role of designers in the service economy. The final section projects the discipline into the emerging paradigms of a new economy to initiate a reflection on its future development.
Related: Watch Anna Meroni’s talk for Service Design Melbourne and DESIS-Lab Melbourne.
The Design of Business
By Roger Martin
Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apple’s iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative-they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results. Why? In The Design of Business, Roger Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo.
The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design
By Ideo.org
At IDEO.org, part of our mission is to spread human-centered design to social sector practitioners around the world. The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design reveals our process with the key mindsets that underpin how and why we think about design for the social sector, 57 clear-to-use design methods for new and experienced practitioners, and from-the-field case studies of human-centered design in action. The Field Guide has everything you need to understand the people you’re designing for, to have more effective brainstorms, to prototype your ideas, and to ultimately arrive at more creative solutions.
Interviewing Users
By Steve Portigal
Interviewing is a foundational user research tool that people assume they already possess. Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone. You’ll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.
Related: Watch Steve Portigal’s talk for Service Design Melbourne and DESIS-Lab Melbourne
Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography
Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway and Genevieve Bell
With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of technologies. From studying online game communities, locative and social media to YouTube and mobile media, ethnographic approaches to digital and networked media have helped to elucidate the dynamic cultural and social dimensions of media practice. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, and conceptually cutting-edge guide to this emergent and diverse area.
Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
by Andy Polaine, Ben Reason & Lavrans Løvlie
Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that work for people. It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.
Related: Watch Andy Polaine’s talk for Service Design Melbourne and DESIS-Lab Melbourne
Book review: Read its book review in Design and Culture: The Journal of Design Studies Forum by Dr Yoko Akama
Service Innovation Handbook: Action-oriented Creative Thinking Toolkit for Service Organizations
by Lucy Kimbell
The Service Innovation Handbook provides a language and practical concepts to understand what is involved in designing innovative services; 15 practical tools to stimulate creative approaches at the early stages of designing innovative services; and 16 cases of how different kinds of organization have designed services. The book is aimed at people studying or working in organizational contexts trying to tackle complex challenges through service innovation, who might come from design, user research, IT, management, policy or entrepreneurship.
This is Service Design Doing
by Marc Stickdorn, Marcus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, Jakob Schneider
To be published April 2016
How can you establish a customer-centric culture in an organization? This is the first comprehensive book on how to actually do service design to improve the quality and the interaction between service providers and customers. You’ll learn specific facilitation guidelines on how to run workshops, perform all of the main service design methods, implement concepts in reality, and embed service design successfully in an organisation. Service design requires a common language across disciplines to break down silos within an organization. This book provides a consistent model for accomplishing this and offers hands-on descriptions of every single step, tool, and method used. You’ll be able to focus on your customers and iteratively improve their experience. Move from theory to practice and build sustainable business success.
This is Service Design Thinking
by Marc Stickdorn & Jakob Schneider
This is Service Design Thinking introduces an inter-disciplinary approach to designing services. Service design is a bit of a buzzword these days and has gained a lot of interest from various fields. This book, assembled to describe and illustrate the emerging field of service design, was brought together using exactly the same co-creative and user-centred approaches you can read and learn about inside. The boundaries between products and services are blurring and it is time for a different way of thinking: this is service design thinking.
Related: Watch Mark Stickdorn’s talk for Service Design Melbourne and DESIS-Lab Melbourne.
Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving
by Jon Kolko
It feels like our world is spinning out of control. We see poverty, disease, and destruction all around us, and as we search for ways to make sense of the chaos, we’re turning to new disciplines for answers and solutions. New, creative innovations are needed, and these new approaches demand different methods and different theories. This book is presented as a handbook for teaching and learning how to design for impact. In it, you’ll learn how to apply the process of design to large, wicked problems, and how to gain control over complexity by acting as a social entrepreneur. You’ll learn an argument for why design is a powerful agent of change, and you’ll read practical methods for engaging with large-scale social problems.
Tags: Alison Prendiville, Andy Polaine, Anna Meroni, Anne Galloway, Ben Reason, BIS Publishers, Books, Daniella Sangiorgi, Digital Ethnography, Ethics, Ethnography, Genevieve Bell, Heather Horst, Ideo.org, Jakob Schneider, Jon Kolko, Larissa Hjorth, Lavrans Løvlie, Lucy Kimbell, Marc Stickdorn, Methodology, Research, Roger Martin, Rosenfeld Media, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, Service Innovation Handbook, Steve Portigal, This is Service Design Thinking
