Service Design Research

This list represents a summary of the past forty years of service design literature. The citations were compiled from the Emergence conference at Carnegie Mellon University as well as the Designing for Services project in the UK, service design syllabi at CMU and independent research. I've included the abstracts and introductions to the papers and cross-referenced examples and concepts so that it's easy to follow the development of ideas such as "service blueprinting" across multiple papers.

Select any underlined term to filter the list, showing only papers that share that particular concept, example, author, journal or decade. If you'd like to help fill in the gaps by suggesting other canonical papers, e-mail the citations to service at howardesign.com. Thanks!

Key Concepts for New Service Development
The Service Industries Journal, 1996
Bo Edvardsson

From the article: "This article deals with service development from a quality perspective. Our point of departure is to build in the right quality from the start. The article presents a new frame of reference for new service development based on empirical studies in Sweden. It argues that the main task of service development is to create the right generic prerequisites for the service. This means an efficient customer process, that is to say the process must be adapted to the logic of the customer !v behaviour and a good customer outcome, i.e., the service is associated with quality. We distinguish three main types of development: the development of the service concept, the development of the service system (resource structure) and the development of the service process."

Example: Swedish Telecom

From the article: "The service concept plays a key role in service design and development. But while the term is used frequently in the service design and new service development literature, surprisingly little has been written about the service concept itself and its important role in service design and development. The service concept defines the how and the what of service design, and helps mediate between customer needs and an organization’s strategic intent. We define the service concept and describe how it can be used to enhance a variety of service design processes. As illustrations here, we apply the service concept to service design planning and service recovery design processes. Employing the service concept as an important driver of service design decisions raises a number of interesting questions for research which are discussed here."