In particular, services require designers to empathize with users, to understand interactions as a series of “touchpoints” and to develop a holistic understanding of the ways in which our relationships to services govern everyday life. The multiple ways this emerging field of practice relates to the rest of the design field are still in formation. So I sat down with several leading designers and researchers from universities in the US and Europe to start a conversation about what service design is, where it came from and where it is going. This interview expands on an event, “Service Design Performances” (PDF), which was held at Parsons The New School for Design in late May. The event, organized by the DESIS Lab, is the first in a series of activities around the topic of service design that are taking place in New York in the coming months.

Some Tools and Methodologies used in Service Design process via servicedesigntools.org

First of all, who has a need for service design?

Eduardo Staszowski (School of Design Strategies, Parsons The New School for Design): From the client side, many different types of organizations can employ service design, whether they are manufacturers or service providers. From services that are basically supporting a product (customer service) to public or consumer services, the application seems almost infinite. From personal services (hospitals and medical services, hair salons and spas, shoe repair) to collective services (public transportation, garbage collection), from household services (your Internet provider, plumbing repair and boiler installation) to financial services (banks and investment services) and from cultural and entertainment services (museums and cinemas) to hospitality services (restaurants and bars, travel agents, airlines and hotels), education (schools) and social services (welfare, homeless services). Some areas that can be highlighted as sectors that are already commissioning service design consultancies are: healthcare, education, public services and tourism.

Roman Aebersold (Lucerne School of Art and Design, Switzerland): And looking at it from the end-user’s perspective, services are often provided by people interacting with one another, so customers become co-producers. Thus, the design for the user (user-centered design, customer experience, etc.) is of utmost interest. A service is — like physical objects — perceived by the senses and should be attractive in order to be successful. This is why services requires designers’ skills for visualization, materialization, the aesthetics of interaction, etc.

Tools Provenance Map by Roberta Tassi. Click image to enlarge.

How did the field start to emerge as a specific body of expertise?

Eduardo Staszowski (School of Design Strategies, Parsons the New School for Design): As we know, the roots of industrial design are connected to the production and consumption of manufactured goods, communication and the constructed environment. Services have only recently been included as an area of design theory and practice. The first service design course was offered at Köln International School of Design in 1991. Live|work, the first service design consultancy, was founded in London in 2001. And in 2004, the Service Design Network was launched.

Lara Penin (School of Design Strategies, Parsons The New School for Design): The history of service design can be connected to three distinct lineages: service management, Product-Services Systems (PSS) and interaction design. In the mid-’90s, we started to hear the term “service design” mentioned in some academic and professional circles. However it only started to be recognized as a true design activity in the early 2000s with the founding of several pioneer consultancies in the United Kingdom.

Given that service design deals in multiple back-and-forth logistics and comfort-with-strangers… cities become the ‘material’ of service design.

Another lineage is Product-Services Systems (PSS), an approach that emerged as a promising strategy to reduce material consumption and emissions. For example, rather than buying products, consumers acquire access to functionalities — instead of buying a washing machine, I wash clothes at the Laundromat, or instead of buying a car, I access motorized transportation through Zipcar.

The third lineage that has influenced the field of service design is that of interaction design. Interaction is a major component that determines the quality of services. The quick development of information technologies created a significant demand for designing interactions with digital systems. This has been particularly important in the US, while, on the other hand, the roots of PSS are in Europe.

One reason that service design emerged faster as a recognized design field in Europe than in the States is related to the fact that Europe was faster in realizing the importance the service sectors play in its economy. Specifically, welfare states in Europe sought to reform their public services, which created a considerable demand for service designers. This was the case in the UK with health care, for example. Organizations such as the Design Council (the UK’s national strategic agency for design) continue to play an important role in promoting the service design culture and investing in research projects like RED, an initiative begun in the mid-2000s to transform public services through design thinking.

What fields have influenced the field of service design?

Anna Meroni (Polytechnic University of Milan): Service design is influenced by a large spectrum of different disciplines. Psychology and sociology, because of the relational and human-intensive nature of services; interaction and communication design, because of their interactive character; management, marketing and organization theory, because of their capacity of changing the current paradigms; and architecture, planning, environment and product design, because of their influence on the built environment. That’s why we prefer to speak about Design for Services, as it implies the overlap — the synergy — of different disciplines to outline the concept and the structure of a service.

Airport Parking Service Audit. Courtesy of Frontier Service Design, LLC. Click image to enlarge.

Why should architects and urban designers pay attention to an emerging field like service design?

Cameron Tonkinwise (School of Design Strategies, Parsons the New School for Design): The shift to post-industrial economies, predicted in the late 1950s, is now in full effect. It is not happening in some smooth progression as the tertiary service sector grows to subsume the manufacturing sector. It is instead happening unevenly and disruptively, with the government forestalling the sudden bankruptcy of the auto industry, large scale oil spills resulting from harder-to-get-at oil repositories, and the on-again/off-again of the digitization of music, books, and media in general.

Developing more sustainable societies will require getting the increasing urbanization of global populations right. Cities, because of their density, afford substantial eco-efficiencies. However, as a result of their ill-considered 20th century development, cities are yet to deliver on that promise. So cities need to be significantly, and rapidly, retrofitted. This is like calling for the repair of a car while it is speeding down a highway — it’s not like everybody can be shipped out of a city while the renovation is completed. This turns building professions into full-blown service industries, working out the logistics of rebuilding in and around people’s ongoing, everyday lives.

The age of cheap is coming to an end: whether that be cheap oil or all its construction material derivatives. Architecture is going to have to become the profession of retrofitting, and de-/re-construction. This is the kind of challenge for which a service design strategy is well suited.

Sample Service Design Diagram: Project, Implementation, Delivery by Roberta Tassi. Click image to enlarge.

What kinds of contracts are service designers getting?

Daniela Sangiorgi (ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University, UK): For a forthcoming publication on Design for Services (Gower Publishing), Anna Meroni and I collected and mapped out 18 case studies of service design projects in a variety of sectors such as education, transport, communication, healthcare, food provision, entertainment, security, and community services. These kinds of services differ immensely from each other depending on their complexity, heterogeneity, service provision or area of application.

Moreover, each project has been approached from a variety of perspectives, focusing on the re-design of service experiences or “touchpoints,” or on experimentation with new service models or system configurations. Designers also consider a different mix of variables such as service usability, feasibility, sustainability, modularity, or experiential quality.

So, what are the deliverables in a service design contract?

Daniela Sangiorgi (ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University, UK): Frontier Service Design (USA) and Huddledesign (Australia), two recently founded service design agencies, change their deliverables significantly depending on the individual project. Some examples of their deliverables are: service assessment, needs analysis, service blueprint, customer journey maps, ethnographic studies, concept sketches, mock-ups, feasibility study, business plan, communication strategies, etc.

Moreover, as described by Joe Heapy from Engine in an article called “Make Yourself Useful,” designers are working more and more within organizations to transform their innovation practices and organizational models. In this case, the design deliverables are changing from finished design ‘products’ to ‘knowledge transfer’ activities such as the formalization of innovation processes, pilot projects, training sessions or design toolkits.

Flickr user model diagram by Bryce Glass. Click image to enlarge.

How do service designers see the city in a unique way, and how does this enable them to develop new approaches to make them smarter, greener or fairer?

Cameron Tonkinwise: Given that service design deals in multiple back-and-forth logistics, the density of cities is a bonus to service design businesses. The social development of cities has also resulted, in most cases, in a cosmopolitanism that increases the comfort-with-strangers involved in most services. So cities become the ‘material’ of service design, and specifically ‘urban’ qualities become the field’s lingua franca. Conversely, successful service design makes living better with less (owned stuff) more convenient and productive. A future in which we consume fewer resources doesn’t have to mean a future of constant sacrifice — especially if we focus on the services we need rather than the products we want.

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Laura Forlano is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University and an Adjunct Faculty member in the Design and Management program at Parsons The New School for Design.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Are we growing more than plants?  This question — blown up in large pink letters on a white wall in a small gallery on the Lower East Side — frames the core of the Amplify exhibition. Like the Lower East Side, the exhibition, which is the product of over one year of planning, research and design, is undergoing a process of evolution and reinvention. The larger initiative, Amplifying Creative Communities, pioneered by the Design for Sustainability and Social Innovation (DESIS) Lab at Parsons The New School for Design, represents the first stage of a multi-year project made possible, in part, by the Cultural Innovation Fund of the Rockefeller Foundation.

As one of the installation’s curators, Lara Penin, an Assistant Professor in the Design and Management department at Parsons, describes it, “The exhibition is a research process, a process of interaction in which the content can change before, during and after the exhibit.”  So, like the plants on display at the exhibition that need to be watered in order to survive the August heat, the exhibition is designed to grow. The gallery offers a number of points of interaction where participants can contribute ideas, offer suggestions and “vote” on their favorite examples of sustainability and social innovation from around the world.

Photo: Eduardo Staszowski

For example, a large map of the Lower East Side printed on a tabletop, which was produced in cooperation with Green Map, invites the public to draw on their own knowledge to scrawl examples of innovative practices from the Lower East Side on specially-designed blue index cards and place them in the appropriate location on the map. In this way, the designers of the exhibit hope to gather more evidence of community-building, political-engagement and sharing-economies taking place in the neighborhood.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the site of much social innovation resides in the district’s over 40 community gardens. Yet, in September, a 10-year moratorium that governs the protection of the gardens is set to expire, leaving room for hungry real estate developers to turn [garden] “plots” into [condominium] “lots.”  On August 10th, hundreds of gardeners gathered and testified before the City Council in protest of lessening the current protections on the gardens.

As part of the research for the exhibit, the DESIS Lab worked with over 75 students enrolled in a course on “Design and Everyday Experience” to survey and document 17 gardens by interviewing members, taking photos and mapping them digitally using Green Map. Each of the gardens is represented in the gallery by an individual white crate housing a potted plant, some individually and creatively designed by the gardeners themselves. Several days before the opening, a “Happy Green Hour” event was held in partnership with the Lower East Side Ecology Center in order to plant the boxes that made up one wall of the exhibition.

Anyone who has spent time in the community gardens of the Lower East Side knows that their true nature is wild and arresting; many are filled with metal and wooden sculptures, colorful blinking lights, flags and Mexican papel picado (cutout paper) as a backdrop to the frequent community events, music and theater. Yet, the gardens of the exhibit are deliberate and designed. In fact, every element of the displays has been designed over a painstaking eight-month process.

Photo: Eduardo Staszowski

At the opening, which attracted nearly 150 people, a teenage girl from the neighborhood that volunteers with the Green Oasis Community Garden on 8th Street between C and D, beamed with pride and excitement over the miniature representation of her garden on display in the gallery. This is a small but telling sign that the “amplification,” a concept used by the designers at the DESIS Lab, of these activities can make a difference for gardeners and residents on the Lower East Side, participants and passersby that experience and interact with the display, design students as well as the broader design community focused on sustainability and social innovation.

The exhibit seeks to reframe sustainability as a social issue rather than a scientific one. At the same time, it attempts to translate individual and local instances of social innovation such as community gardening to wider and more substantive socio-economic issues. Images of local innovation in sectors such as food and housing from around the world displayed on wall-mounted iPods as well as large colorful design scenarios printed on posters and short videos on cultural diversity, caring for the elderly, eating healthily and living together, all of which were designed by students in an intensive summer course.

The week after the exhibition, the DESIS Lab organized a workshop for a small group of design faculty from around the country and the world, including well-known designer Ezio Manzini from Italy’s Milano Politechnic whose work has deeply influenced the Lab’s founders. The workshop began with a guided tour of the exhibition that spilled out of the windowed gallery and into the amphitheater where Wendy Brawer, the founder of Green Map, led participants on a walk through notable sites on the Lower East Side. The group examined the stickers on the door of activist-space ABC No Rio, nibbled on freshly-made matzo from Streit’s, browsed the stacks at Bluestockings bookstore and peered through the gates to catch a glimpse of the chickens at M’Finda Kalunga Garden.

The DESIS Lab will be turning their attention on a new neighborhood in New York for the upcoming year. The exhibition still has a few weeks to grow but the research process is only beginning.

Photo: Eduardo Staszowski

Amplify is on view August 5^th-September 15^th at the Abrons Arts Center, Henry Street Settlement, 466 Grand Street, New York, NY 10012.

Laura Forlano is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University and an Adjunct Faculty member in the Design and Management program at Parsons The New School for Design.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Work and the Open Source City. Illustration: Shumi Bose

One chilly Wednesday afternoon in late May, I joined a small group of technologists, researchers, architects and urban planners on a field trip through Lower Manhattan and three distinct neighborhoods in Brooklyn to get a glimpse of the future of work. The trip was organized by Todd Sundsted, an entrepreneur and co-author (with Drew Jones and Tony Bacigalupo) of the book I’m Outta Here! The group met around mid-day at New Work City, one of Manhattan’s first “coworking” communities. The space, located on the 5^th Fl. of the building adjacent to the famous music venue Sounds of Brazil (SOBs) on the corner of Houston and Varick, officially opened to members in November 2008.

New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge work among entrepreneurs, programmers, writers and even, as we learned during our visits, sustainable furniture designers. The majority of discussions of the social implications of the Internet on the evolution of work and cities revolve around concepts such as the virtual office, online collaboration, and telecommuting. But, coworking communities (and related phenomenon that have grown out of the culture of the open source movement such as MeetUps and BarCamps) illustrate the ways in which these emergent forms of organizing are deeply embedded in physical places and, at the same time, enabled by new technologies such as laptops and wireless networks.

New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

As the material artifacts of offices – messages, documents, photos and plans – are digitized and stored on servers, physical spaces have the potential to become increasingly open, flexible and sharable. Data security concerns aside, one can imagine a future scenario when most of the tools that we need to work effectively will be accessed and stored in “the cloud”. This allows the dynamic reorganization and co-location of people, firms and activities that have been separated since the early days of industrialization, the advent of the hierarchical firm and the rise of cities themselves. For example, an office building might house a conference room that doubles as an entertainment room for the co-located apartments. Such arrangements will require new ways of thinking about private and semi-private spaces, trust and security, and ownership and property.

Rather than lonely, pajama-clad programmers holed up in Grandma’s basement, a closer look at the nature of virtual work reveals that after several years of experimentation — ranging from working from home in relative isolation to slouching uncomfortably at Starbucks — mobile workers (including freelancers, the self-employed, remote workers and entrepreneurs) have begun to band together to form office communities of like-minded coworkers whom they don’t actually work with, but rather, they work alongside in order to “cross-pollinate.”

This cross-pollination comes in many forms, from the informal, water-cooler conversations about the last episode of Battlestar Galactica to intensive lunch meetings about bookkeeping for freelancers, and from quickly troubleshooting a Google Calendar feature to collaborating on events and projects. For example, while New Work City hosts regular workshops for technology entrepreneurs, it is also a hub for Open Government meetings.

In late January, on a trip to Kansas City to meet with the Kauffman Foundation, I stumbled into a Panera Bread directly across from my eco-friendly hotel in order to get some lunch within hours after landing. After devouring a bowl of chicken soup in one corner of the nearly-empty restaurant, I noticed two women and a man poised in front of their laptops with a small pink rectangle sign on the table that announced “Creative Club” in large letters and “Jelly” in smaller letters underneath.

Panera Bread, Kansas City. Photo: Laura Forlano

Jelly, founded by Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford in New York in February 2006, is a semiweekly casual coworking event that typically meets at someone’s apartment. It was only their second meeting, but nonetheless, to the surprise of the Kansas City group (a graphic designer, a public relations professional and a sustainable design consultant), I instantly recognized their effort and documented it as part of the larger coworking phenomenon. I presented it the following day at Kauffman.

In his work on social innovation and creative communities, Italian designer Ezio Manzini, presenting as part of the Stephan Weiss Visiting Lectureship at Parsons in early May, makes the point that small, locally-based initiatives such as co-housing have an unprecedented ability to scale globally. As such, the local is no longer an isolated, provincial village that seeks to return to the past but rather a connected cosmopolitanism according to Manzini.

In search of these small but scalable social innovations, our group squeezed onto the B train to Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn where we visited Ditmas Workspace, a coworking community for writers and researchers located on a “Am I really in Brooklyn, New York?” street lined with large Victorian houses garnished with expansive flowerbeds and trees. Interestingly, Victorian houses are not subject to the zoning requirements that separate residential and office uses of the built environment. This has allowed the 12 members of Ditmas Workspace, half of which are full-time employees working remotely and half of which are freelancers, to create an affordable workspace of like-minded colleagues in the neighborhood where they also live and raise their young children.

Ditmas Workspace. Photo: Liena Zagare

Liena Zagare, an urban planner who founded the Ditmas space in September 2008, emphasized the benefits of the cross-fertilization of ideas and the synergies that take place in the community as well as the need to separate “quiet work” like writing with “loud work” such as doing phone interviews, which they do through the designation of specific rooms for these dissimilar activities.

Our next stop was to Treehouse Coworking, a community for designers in downtown Brooklyn. There, Matt Tyson, a sustainable furniture designer at EcoSystems, which is currently located on the 4^th floor, guided us through all 7 floors of the building. We climbed top to bottom one cold, dark and dusty stair after another since we had exceeded the elevator’s carrying capacity. The building is completely and meticulously filled with art, objects, antique furniture, old mattresses and junk collected over 27 years by the owner. In describing his motivations for opening the Treehouse space to the coworking community in January 2009, Tyson said, “I want to be surrounded by really smart people…I have a strong affinity for community.” Treehouse will soon be offering classes at their woodshop in order to train people interested in learning new hands-on skills, a boon in the ailing knowledge economy.

Treehouse NYC. Photo: Matt Tyson

All this talk of cross-pollination and social innovation throughout the day recalled a very different experience that I’d had several weeks earlier while away at a Pervasive Computing conference in Japan. While I had survived the rigorous one-hour swine flu quarantine procedure resembling a scene from The X-Files complete with men in green cover-ups, goggles and masks that scanned the passengers with a thermo-sensing camera, I had failed to reserve a hotel with Internet access.

While at the Asakusa Shrine in Tokyo, I noticed that I was dangerously close to the limit on the 20 MB data plan on my iPhone 3G and sought out the nearest Internet “café” (if one could call it that). I would, I had decided, call AT&T on Skype in order to upgrade to a bigger data plan. However, upon entering, I was told by the attendant at the counter that I was not allowed to make calls while in the café. In addition, only one person was allowed to accompany each laptop computer into the space.

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge. Rather than spaces for mobile work, it is well-known that many of Japan’s Internet cafes are, in effect, living spaces for the country’s unemployed youth who have taken to holing up in private Internet cubicles about the size of an English telephone booth but without the distinctive red paint. The 24-hour cafes come equipped with instant ramen and vending machines, rows of pink comic books and showers; they even sell toiletry sets containing combs and shower caps for 160 yen in the women’s restroom so that their guests can freshen up in the morning.

But, rather than sites for community, collaboration and innovation (though I can’t claim that these qualities are completely absent after only a one hour visit), the spaces remain absolutely silent and devoid of social interaction, perhaps so as to not disturb the patrons that are sleeping? In the end, I found – to my utter surprise – that AT&T had finally created a page that allowed me to add and remove international data plan features without suffering through a redundant twenty minute conversation with a customer service representative. Problem solved, and without uttering a single word.

Back to Brooklyn. We ended the day, which was actually quite exhausting after all of the stairs at the Treehouse space, at The Change You Want To See Gallery in Williamsburg. Again, the conversation shifted to the importance of opening their space to coworking as a way of enabling collaboration on media interventions by artists and activists.

The Change You Want To See gallery. Video: Not an Alternative.

As we redesign our cities with these emergent open source models for the reorganization of knowledge / work in mind, we might ask ourselves about the changing nature of our relationship to our work that is reshaping our identities, loyalties and communities. In the future, New Yorkers won’t ask “What do you do?” over pints of German beer and currywurst in the East Village but rather “Where do you work?” Rather than merely a place to do work, the choice of a like-minded coworking community with the right amount of diversity and exposure to new skills and ideas could be as important as choosing a neighborhood to live in.

Laura Forlano is Kauffman Fellow in Law at Yale Law School. Her research interests include mobile and wireless technology, the role of space/place in communication, collaboration and innovation, entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, and science and technology studies.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.