Page 31 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

1. Introduction 19
such service to their customers, helped Rolls Royce to create competi- tive advantage (Calabretta & Kleinsmann 2017). Yet, because companies often lack the resources, motivation and capabilities to develop innovative services alone, companies have displayed interest in collaborating with design firms which can help business to develop better services for their customers. This has opened up a domain of work for designers, which shaped the occupational development of design.
1.5. The Emergence of Service Design
Along with the elevation of design in business, a new design occupation has been emerging: ‘Service Design’. While the term is explained in diffe- rent ways, there is an agreement amongst practitioners and researchers of the field that Service Design broadly refers to the creation of abstract outcomes like the design of an overall experience of a service, as well as the process and strategy to provide that service. Fayard and colleagues (2017: 272) explain Service Design as the occupation “which uses design principles to help clients improve existing services or develop new ones in instances as varied as the facilitation of a more patient-focused healthcare experience to the design of a unique travel experience for airline custo- mers (Mager 2004; Moritz 2005)”. In a similar vein, it is also explained as “the activity of organizing and planning people, infrastructure, communi- cation and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service providers and customers” (EU report 2014 ‘Design for Innovation’: 4). So, in this dissertation research, Service Design is used for an emerging occupation of design in which a multidis- ciplinary group of practitioners, including business strategists, creative technologists, and interaction designers, develops services for business clients with a human centered approach (Fayard et al. 2017; Michlewski 2016; Secomandi & Snelders 2011).
Instead of specializing into one skill-set and field of knowledge, service designers strive to develop a broad array of skills by borrowing techno- logies and methods from different disciplines such as marketing, mana- gement, research and engineering. They might use ‘the business model canvas’ from business studies, ‘ethnographic research’ from anthropology, ‘technological prototypes’ from engineers and ‘branding theories’ from advertising, among others. At the same time, Service Design maintains a hard core of design tools and techniques, such as customer journeys, service blueprints and user interviews (Dunne & Martin 2006: 518). Also, Fayard and colleagues (2017) have argued that Service Design differs from other occupations in its ethos. They suggest that Service Design stands apart in