Service Design
 and Design Thinking

Within Service Design, Service Interfaces are designed for intangible products that are, from the customer’s point of view, useful, profitable and desirable, while they are effective, efficient and different for the provider.
Service Designers visualize, formulate and choreograph solutions that are not yet available. They watch and interpret needs and behaviours and transform them into potential future services. In the process, exploring, generating and evaluating approaches are used similarly and a redesign of existing services is just as much a challenge as the development of new innovative services. (via Service Design Network)

Over the centuries, our western societies have evolved from creating the majority of their GDP in the agricultural sector to creating it in the manufacturing sector. Here the initial trigger was the industrialization in the 19th and 20th century. Through the decrease in the scarcity of products due to mass production and the reduction in prices the evolution kept on going towards a society creating their GDP predominantly through services. This is still happening today (DESTATIS, 2009b; Mager & Gais, 2009; Maleri, 1997).

These services usually are created out of a “gut feeling”, rather than through a structured process as it is done with products (Bullinger & Schreiner, 2003). This might also explain the massive discrepancies in spending on research and development (R&D) for products in contrast to the spending on R&D for services. In 2002, an average of about 3215€ was spent per employee in R&D in companies producing products in Germany. The figure for spending on R&D in the service industry was somewhere around 67€ per employee (Mager & Gais, 2009). At the same time, a nationwide study in the UK from 2005 showed:
 
 
“Almost half of all UK businesses believe that, over the past decade, design has become more important in helping them maintain a competitive edge.” (Design Factfinder, 2007, p. 8)
 
 
“In businesses where design is integral to operations, over three quarters say they’ve increased their competitiveness and turnover through design.” (ibid.)

 
 The opportunities for increasing revenue in services through the help of design are massive.

Harvard Business Review talks to Tom Malone, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of the HBR article “The Age of Hyperspecialization,” about why breaking jobs into tiny pieces yields better, faster, cheaper work.