Design for Service Syllabus 2018
Spring 2018, Carnegie Mellon School of Design
Professors Molly Wright Steenson, PhD and Daphne Peters
TA: Vanessa Calderon
We all have an idea of what a good service is — when everything clicks into place, when you feel a little surprised and delighted because of the thoughtfulness and smoothness. And we know too well what it’s like when a service goes wrong: unempowered agents at the airport when your flight was canceled, waiting forever at the doctor’s office, a website or app being inappropriate or tone deaf in a sensitive situation.
This is where service design comes in. In this studio/seminar class, we will explore the fundamentals of service. In the first part of the class, we’ll begin with a set of modules on tools and practices of service design. Then, you’ll put them to use in a 9-week group project, in which you design and prototype a service. Our goals (and the objectives of this class) will be to learn service design fundamentals by hypothesizing, experimenting, building, testing our assumptions, sometimes failing, tweaking, and improving. Some great visitors will join us too, in person and virtually, to provide real-world insights about service design.
’Cause it’s getting kind of quiet in my city head
It’s a teen age riot to get me out of bed right now” —Sonic Youth, Teen Age Riot
Our theme this semester will be music services. Chances are, when you think of music services, you think of Spotify or Apple Music. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. How does a music service get its music? What happens in the music service backstage? How can a music service support and return value to the artist, while not falling into the “value gap?” What new niches and audiences might a new service serve? We will be talking to music and tech insiders as your explore this space, its business models, and its opportunities for service.
In this class, you will:
- Understand the fundamental tools and practices of service design
- Develop and present a service design case study in the music industry
- Learn and experiment with service design models
- Work on a group project to develop a service concept, scenarios, blueprint, maps, and prototypes that you test along the way
Fasten your seatbelts! This is a demanding class that will give you a good project for your portfolio and a taste of what design for complexity is like.
Course policies and grading for the class are here.
This page includes a detailed list of the deliverables for the class and its grading, as well as our policies.
Music case studies
Great job on the music case studies. They’re all in a folder here and will be a good resource for you as you design your services for this semester.
Service Design Project Schedule & Syllabus
Please review the deliverables you’ll be producing for the project, including your final video that pitches your service and your case study presentation.
Each week, we will focus on a different deliverable or phase of the service design project.
A successful service in this class isn’t about the mass market. You are not your primary stakeholder. That is, your primary user group should not be a generic undergraduate or graduate student. Instead, you should consider the possibilities for business-to-business, niche audiences in business-to-consumer services, or unique ways of working with music. The class’s case studies explored a number of these possibilities: use yours and your classmates’ studies as a jumping-off point. Your service must ultimately address the value gap where appropriate.
Design project teams
Design Project Schedule, Week 7–finish
Weeks 1–6 are here.
Week 7, February 27: PROJECT STARTS.
Tuesday: Initial team meeting. Share interests, ideas, review music case studies.
Thursday: Brainstorming initial ideas with your team.
- Begin to build your research plan: what analogous services in music and other verticals and businesses should you research? What secondary research (Internet-related research on your ideas—think to what you did in your music case studies as an example of how to begin) and primary research (user & stakeholder research). Start to execute on your research and share with your team.
- Getting your Medium page for your team set up: you must update it by Friday at 5 pm each week. You should update the research activities and the deliverables.
Week 8, March 6: Service research
- Tuesday: Discuss with your team what you’ve learned in your research. Determine possible directions for your team to pursue. Are there services out there like them? (You may learn that there are.) Are there services in other verticals (hospitality/travel? health? publishing?) that might inspire you?
- Here’s a piece from last week’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about positives and negatives of the local music scene. Would some of these speakers be people to 1) invite to class 2) seek out for your primary research?
- Thursday: outline targets for primary research and continuing secondary research to hone service proposition and concept. You’ll be leaving for a week, so note on your Medium page where your team stands so you can pick up when you get back. We will do a stand-up meeting as a class to talk about what your teams are pursuing (45 minutes).
Week 9, SPRING BREAK, NO CLASS
Week 10, March 20: Service propositions & scenarios
- Tuesday: Skype with Matthew Hawn, Audio Networks. Group work on service scenarios.
- Thursday: Speed dating. You will need to have scenarios ready to speed date test. Before this class, read: “Speed Dating: Providing a Menu for Possible Futures”
- And something fun to read: a piece by Austin Kleon about jamming on ideas. He was talking with the Dead Milkmen’s Dean Sabatino (80s/90s fun punk silly awesome ironic band) about jamming with a plan. Check out Steal Strategies: good for when you feel stuck
Week 11, March 27: Work in progress presentation & service experiments
- Tuesday, 3/27: Guest lecture, Simon King, Design Director, IDEO: Prototyping for services and beyond. Some notes from Simon’s talk:
“A prototype is a question, embodied.” —Diego Rodriguez
- Simon talked about different kinds of prototyping: probing, evaluating, and storytelling. Typically, we’ve tended to think of prototyping as storytelling (think of a concept car: it tells the story of the idea, but it’s not the testbed for it). But instead, we could think of a build to think mindset instead, where we build things to see how they work. It’s a matter of holding ideas loosely by building to think.
- We saw novel projection interfaces for a home improvement store, which IDEO began prototyping early.
- Sometimes prototyping leads to the creation of new roles and suggests approaches to role playing. What kind of interaction is called for? Does it need high or low touch? What kinds of artifacts (uniform? furniture? interfaces?) might be needed to support this role? Where physically does this person stand/sit/reside? Are they a cruise director or a team member? Do they stand next to the customer? Is there a counter?
- There are 3 types of fidelity: visual, data, and behavior. You can be “low-fidelity” and “high-fidelity” in each of these areas. How can you get someone you’re testing a hypothesis with to tell you that you’ve got it wrong or right?
- Boundary concepts help to explore the tensions and possibilities within a service concept by showing the ends of the spectrum. They aren’t meant to be directly applicable, but rather to examine the poles of the project. They might result in design principles or opportunities for discussion. We probably don’t ultimately need poems on our tires, for instance, but the idea could lead us to think differently about communicating the qualities of the tire to a customer.
A favorite IDEO example of build to think: this prototype for Elmo’s Monster Maker:
- Thursday, 3/29: Work in progress presentation. Present service proposition & scenarios
- All week: Begin to develop service experiments to see how your service concept works in the wild
- It’s okay if you’re feeling confused at this point: this is a difficult week as you move from concept to experimentation
Week 12, April 3: Value flow & service blueprinting
- Tuesday: Revisiting service blueprinting and service blueprinting toolkits.
- Review: Practical Service Blueprinting & Adaptive Path Guide to Service Blueprinting (BOX)
- Using blueprint to test your assumptions about your services: what steps do you miss? What critical moments arise?
- By now, you should be deciding what touchpoints you most want to prototype in your music service. You must choose at least two, though some teams may choose to design more.
Week 13, April 10: Service touchpoints and prototyping
- Tuesday & Thursday: workdays
Week 14, April 17: Service prototyping redux
- April 19, no class (Carnival)
Week 15, April 24: Video prototyping; putting together your pitch and case study
- This is where you put your service into a narrative to show it unfolding in time. Your video should be 3 minutes or less.
Week 16, May 1 LAST WEEK OF CLASS
- Wrap-up and discussion of semester
- Planning for Design Week presentations
Design Week (May 7–11): Pitches and presentations, Monday, May 7, 1:30–4:20
Service Design final deliverables
Medium blog
Week by week progress on Medium. Make sure this includes the primary and secondary research you’ve done, prototyping tests, etc.
Box uploads
- Final presentation PDF
- Final video
- Final blueprint and value flow diagram PDFs
- Anything else that supports your projects
FINAL PRESENTATION
The final presentation involves a “pitch” and a “story/case study” of your service design project. Each should part should take 5 to 7 minutes each for a total of 10–14 minutes (including your video, which belongs to the pitch). Every team member must speak. please arrive by 1:20 for a snack & to get set up.
The Pitch
This is the presentation of the service you’ve designed. These materials should make it easy for you to incorporate your project your portfolio to submit your project to design awards like the IxDA Awards, Core77, or Service Design Network student awards.
- Spend 1–2 minutes introducing your team members and service. Consider stating its mission, who the stakeholders are, and what value it provides. Don’t be overly redundant with the video (below).
- Show a video (max 3 minutes) that explains your service, demonstrates the experience of using it start to finish and shows the prototypes (2 minimum) that you designed. This video should include a voiceover and be clear enough that it can stand alone as an explanation of your service.
- Spend 1–2 minutes on a conclusion that summarizes your service, its value, the stakeholders, and anything that wasn’t fully covered in the video.
The “story/case study”
“And how we got here…” Now that we understand your service, spend 5 minutes telling the story of what you tried, what worked, what didn’t work, what you learned, and what you’d do differently. This is what we’ve been calling your “case study.” Rather than the week-by-week project blog you’ve been keeping, this is an after-the-fact story of your project. It will include your project deliverables (service proposition, blueprints/maps/diagrams, touchpoint prototypes), but it will tell a story. All of you have had twists and turns along the way, and this is an opportunity share what you’ve learned.
Here are some prompts below that you may choose to follow or use for inspiration (You’re not required to, but they may be helpful for your brainstorming or even your structuring of your story).
- First, we…
- We tried…
- We learned…
- We did…
- But then…
- And so we…
- We discovered…
- Although you’d think…
- We realized that…
- ___ was surprisingly easy. We…
- …. but ____ was difficult.
- Our hunches about ____ were correct, and our hunches about ____ were wrong.
- Finally, we…
- If we had to do it over again…
Required Reading
If it’s linked from here, you’ll find it here in our box folder: https://cmu.box.com/v/sxdreadings-2018
Course readings will be posted on Box and are available to CMU students and faculty
- This Medium syllabus and the Course Policies. I will update this syllabus multiple times a week. You should visit it as you prepare for every class session.
- You must purchase or otherwise acquire one book: Service Design: From Insight to Implementation by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, Ben Reason.
- Other readings on Box or elsewhere on the Internet, week by week (noted below)
Lectures
Your Professors & Teaching Assistant
This class is co-taught with Molly Wright Steenson and Daphne Peters. Our TA is Vanessa Calderon.
Molly is an associate professor in the School of Design. She was a radio DJ (University of Minnesota, WORT in Madison, Radio Free Burning Man) and music writer for over a decade for a variety of publications, including the Onion AVClub and MTV Interactive. The coolest job Molly ever had was in college, working at B-Side Records in Madison, Wisconsin (a store that’s been around for some 35 years). She loves indie rock, has a soft spot for late 70s and early 80s punk and new wave (especially in French and German), loves riot grrl, and more recently, electronica of different kinds, including some really bad trance when she’s on a deadline. You’ll probably run into her seeing live music, eventually. Molly wishes that bands wouldn’t skip Pittsburgh on tour.
Daphne is an assistant teaching professor in the School of Design. Her early music memories include her dad playing classical piano after dinner and her older sister playing Indigo Girls on repeat. For years REM was her favorite band and she was even part of the official fan club for a year, which got her front row tickets to one of their concerts at Jones Beach. Her taste in music is rather eclectic and her like of country was particularly confusing for her friends growing up in Connecticut. Daphne was in college during the rise of Napster and will admit to downloading tens of thousands of songs, along with at least a couple viruses. Her current favorite radio station is Chill on SiriusXM, which describes itself as downtempo/deep house.
Vanessa is our teaching assistant and a candidate for a Masters of Arts in Design. In 1987 she was born to the incredibly romantic tune of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by the king himself, Elvis Presley, and from that epic moment forward she did not become a singer or hard core fan though she did have that doll with the hips… She was raised on house dance music, 80s pop, salsa, and has whispy memories of her grandfather’s classic Mexican guitar strummings on holidays. She was trained as a mediocre clarinetist and loves the sound of the licorice stick. She’s come to realize that music for her is all about reflecting emotions. Luckily the world is full of interesting beats where she finds her mirror in everything from EDM to Jazz and is always on the lookout for something new to match her tempo.
