This is Service Design Thinking

This book aims to be a textbook on service design thinking – an interdisciplinary approach that offers great value for entrepreneurs and innovators in the field of services. No matter whether service design thinking already made it into your everyday vocabulary or you just hear about this the very first time, no matter whether you’re a student, teacher, researcher, manager or company owner, and no matter whether your background is in design, management, engineering or any other profession, this book will serve you as an introduction, reference and case study book. Moreover, it is supposed to be a source of inspiration and motivation for your future work.

The book is structured into three main parts. Basics illustrates the fundamental concepts of service design thinking and its relation to service marketing. In particular, this chapter explains various gateways into service design thinking from backgrounds like product design, graphic design, interaction design and design ethnography, but also from strategic management and operations management and in addition rather new fields like social design. Tools explains the iterative process of designing services and shows methods and tools of service design as a kind of toolkit that we hope you will be able to implement in your own work. Cases exemplifies how the basics, processes and tools come together through five different case studies. At the end of the
book, service design thinking is wrapped up in three articles on how motivation as a fundamen-tal component of human behaviour is a precondition for designing services, an overview of recent service design research publications, and 4 through consideration of how service design thinking integrates with other philosophical approaches. However, before we start with the actual content, the design beyond the design provides a summary of how we adopted a service design thinking approach to the design of this book itself and besides that you’ll find a short description on how to use this book.
This book project attempted to follow the principle of practice-what-you-preach. It is not only created for the growing service design community but to a large extent by and with the service design community. Thus, we want to thank all our co-authors, contributors and everyone who provided feedback on the publication. We have tried to mention everyone who helped us during the progress of this project and we apologise if we have forgotten someone along the way. There are a few people, we want to thank personally. First and foremost we want to thank Fergus Bisset who supported the project from the start, by setting up the first crowdsourcing website, right through to co-editing most contributions. Furthermore, Bas Raijmakers, Geke van Dijk and Luke Kelly helped us reviewing, editing and illustrating the tools and methods. Finally, we want to thank BIS publishers, namely Rudolf van Wezel, for his belief in this project and his great support!
Mostly, however, we want to thank you – the reader. Only your interest in this book and your interpretation of the information contained in it generates real value from this project! We thus look forward to hearing more about the people reading it, how you are using it and what you think about it. So, please keep in touch!