Service Design with Dom Burton
"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."
On the 28th January, Dom Burton of Live Work Studio gave a presentation on service design and its use for solving problems in today's world, giving several examples from both the public and private sectors.
The ones that stood out were NFC integration into our everyday way of life and HMRC's efforts to improve people's interaction with receiving and using their national insurance number. What ultimately interested me about the case studies he chose was that the majority of them were unsuccessful and made little progress, particularly NFC integration, which has still not picked up mainstream use.
At its core, service design is about the way in which people interact with daily services and a good example of this is Live Work's project of improving the image and user friendliness of the London Underground, where they tested out ideas in an abandoned station and eventually redesigned a functioning station. This was an example where they had seemed to make more of a difference, though if it is worth the cost is still up for debate.
This is a picture from www.liveworkstudio.com where they talk more about the goal of connecting the underground stations to their above ground surroundings.
