One of the most striking things about service design as a field is how diverse it’s applications and it’s impact can be. Makes you wonder what you have to teach anyone who want to get into the field. Should we only be teaching designers about services or businessmen about design? How does it have to be taught anyway? Is a service just another type of brief for a designer? Isn’t design such an alien thing to a businessman? Hard questions the world of service design will have to answer in the future if it wants to move beyond conferences where the same names are mentioned over and over again. It’s great that there are pioneers in the field, but where will the new blood come from?
Here are a few suggestions:
- Oslo School of Architecture and design
- Copenhagen Institute of Interaction design
- Northumbria Masters in Design – Service
- 10 touch points in Singapore
In the next few years, growing this academic community will be key in answering key questions like “what is service design?” because defining a curriculum will enable professionals and students to establish a “territory” for this field (something the interaction design community was always terrible at doing) and give credibility to the methods that service design promotes in order to adress some key global issues such as sustainability.
Note: We thank Alexandra for this second-guest blogpost, hopefully more will follow! Be sure to check out Alex’s blog and read about all the interessting things she does!
12 Comments
somewhat related this article is interesting in terms of questioning how we will educate the students of tomorrow
http://education.guardian.co.uk/ofsted/story/0,,2220249,00.html
Like this discussion shows, a Service Design project can require very divers skills. I agree that the question needs to be stripped down to what the core would be of an service design course. It’s an interesting discussion but maybe we should ask someone who had to crack this question before. There is a Service Design course at the Koln International School of Design, we could ask them :)
On the design background thing, let’s throw in design-thinking. What’s the overlap between creativity and design-thinking. Can you teach someone to be creative? Can you teach someone how to “think in design”? Before we get into semantics I looked up what wikipedia has to say about this:
Creativity
Creativity (or “creativeness”) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts.
Design-thinking
Herbert Simon, in the “Sciences of the Artificial” (MIT Press, 1969) has defined “design” as the “transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones” (p. 55). Design thinking is, then, always linked to an improved future. Everyone is a designer, and design thinking is a way to apply design methodologies to any of life’s situations.
Now that we’ve sorted out that everyone is a designer. We only need to know which specific skill are involved in the design of services :)
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