Open this publication in new window or tab >>2019 (English)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Abstract [en]
This thesis explores and advances the evolving understanding of service design in service research. The study problematizes the prevailing view of service design as the design of service offerings to improve customer experiences. My work shows that this popular narrative does not adequately account for the situated struggles of actors when doing service design. As such, a more processual, embedded, systemic, and embodied perspective of service design is needed. In response, this thesis draws from the service ecosystems perspective of service-dominant logic, integrating insights from institutional theory, systems theory and design theory, to examine service design from an alternative perspective. This inquiry is supported through empirical inputs from a para-ethnographic study of Experio Lab in Sweden, a qualitative analysis of service design methods, and ‘research through design’ experiments. Through systematically combining these empirical and theoretical inputs, this work challenges the underlying assumptions about service design. Based on the development of alternative assumptions, this thesis builds an extended understanding of service design that unabashedly situates actors and their bodies within the dynamic service ecosystems they seek to design. Through this study, I formulate an extended understanding of service design that is referred to as service ecosystem design. Service ecosystem design is defined as the intentional and collective shaping of social structures, and their physical enactments, in order to facilitate the emergence of cocreated value-in-context. This thesis presents a process model for service ecosystem design that reframes service design from an iterative, linear, and phased process, to an embedded and ongoing feedback loop. This feedback loop involves the processes of reflexivity, through which actors build awareness of existing social structures, and reformation, through which actors’ intentionally reshape social structures toward preferred value cocreation configurations. Based on this alternative view of service design, this research offers a set of design principles and experimental approaches to help practitioners acknowledge and leverage the situated nature of their practice. By extending the understanding of service design, this thesis has implications for broader conversations about design, service, and systems change, and provides a foundation for future research at this intersection.
Abstract [en]
Service design has been hailed for its ability to drive innovation and transformation. As a result, there are growing investments in service design by organizations, governments, and communities around the globe. However, the popular narrative of successfully crafting new service offerings through service design is not fully reflective of the situated struggles actors face in practice. In response, this study builds an alternative understanding of service design, called “service ecosystem design”, which offers a more systemic and contextual perspective of the service design process. In this view, social structures – the shared and entrenched rules, norms, roles, and beliefs of actors – are seen as the central materials of service design. This research offers a process model for how actors can intentionally shape social structures to create lasting change within service systems. In addition, it offers design principles and experimental approaches for bringing this process to life.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Karlstad: Karlstads universitet, 2019. p. 217
Series
Karlstad University Studies, ISSN 1403-8099 ; 2019:17
Keywords
service design, service research, service ecosystems, social structures, systemic design, institutional theory, service-dominant logic
National Category
Design Business Administration
Research subject
Business Administration
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-71967 (URN)978-91-7867-024-6 (ISBN)978-91-7867-029-1 (ISBN)
Public defence
2019-06-14, 11D227, Karlstad, 13:00 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
Funder
EU, Horizon 2020, 642116Region Värmland
Note
Illustrations by Erin McPhee
This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 642116. It has also received financial support from the Region of Värmland and the Swedish Graduate School of Management and Information Technology (MIT).
Article 1 included in thesis as manuscript, it was published 2020.
2019-05-242019-05-052020-09-24Bibliographically approved