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!

Filter: Papers from Production and Operations Management | View all papers
Experience, Service Operations Strategy, and Services as Destinations: Foundations and Exploratory Investigation
Production and Operations Management, 2008
Chris Voss
From the article: "This paper explores the customer experience paradigm as it pertains to service operations strategy and design. First, we operationally define and discuss the concept of customer experience. In this context, we propose a reframing of the strategic role of operations strategy as one of choreographing experience-centric services. We then introduce the concept of services as destinations as an emerging business model for classifying experiential service strategies. [...] Using this conceptual typology, we develop five propositions and use multiple cases to illustrate firms' use of these experience strategies."

Examples: Winter Sports Resort, Shopping Mall, Department Store, Bookstore, Tourism