The role of object in service design

Abstract

For successful service design, how to utilize users’ insight, knowledge and experiences are core factor to consider. How to facilitate the users’ value creation by providing and delivering resources and processes through interactions between service and user is also another key factor. Designers focus on designing the interactions- touchpoints/evidences- as important part of their work. Through the service design processes of exploration and creation, the designers design a physical-, visual- or virtual- object to facilitate users’ service experience.

However, the research of the designed object is limited only on their importance or a certain case. This study seeks different roles of the designed object in service design through case studies, which collected from three years of TOUCHPOINT- service design journals. Thematic analysis and affinity diagram tool were conducted to analyze collected data and categorize found different roles.

The study addresses five roles of the object: Empowering, Emotion, Enriching, Education, Enhanc-ing. Designed objects empower users and their rights, deliver certain emotion or solve emotional problems, enrich users’ lives by providing opportunities for users to interact others, deliver knowledge and share information and provide communication channels, and finally enhance service performance.

Furthermore an object sometimes takes multiples roles or changes its role to another. Designers bodily know how to utilize unique feature of the object in designing services. Some of objects enable co-creation and on-going service changes. The object and service element supports each other.

The study suggests that understanding the role of object in service design reinforces ser-vice designers’ competence in shaping users’ service experience.