The rough model had seven parts to it, and each part had a customer’s perspective and an organizational perspective. I started to capture the aspects of services that had emerged for myself in our work at Meld Studios. Did we really understand the fabric or makeup of services? What was the form and material of our design? Did we really understand services as an object of design, or was service design being used as a label for the design of anything? The thing I was contemplating was “services,” a thing which we had been designing under the guise of service design. Just as different combinations create different chairs, different characteristics and factors of service create different experiences for those receiving a service and those delivering a service. I would need to understand these things singularly, and I would need to understand them in combination. What are the characteristics and factors that make up a service? For example, if I wanted to design chairs, I would have to understand form, function, materiality, aesthetics, ergonomics, bodies, colors…these are characteristics, or factors, or the material of design. I want to better understand what service is, as an object of design. To confuse it all, I would probably get clarification questions, like, “Do you mean customer service? The act of servicing? A service? Service management? Service delivery? Service design?” If I were to ask for a definition of “service” from a random group of strangers, I suspect I would get many variations in return. Exploring the characteristics of services

Flip Fashion by Lucille Clerc