Service Design
Service Design is a growing area both in design research and design practice.
ImaginationLancaster is working on research projects to develop Service Design discipline in connection with practitioners and other research centres and in relation to contemporary issues such as Sustainability, Digital Economy and Public Services reform.
We bring our wide range of competences together to explore:
- Emerging service models: due to the diffusion of social technologies, ubiquitous computing, the open source framework and concern for sustainability
- Change processes within service organisations: we work with and within service organisations to observe, evaluate and enable innovation and change processes
- Evaluation criteria and design approaches to service innovation: to raise service standards and awareness of innovation, and introduce user-centred and design-driven innovation approaches
- Service Design and visualisation tools: we bring together methodologies from service design, ethnographically informed participatory design and the arts to develop new service design and visualisation tools
Current Research Activities
Project report:
Development, Participation, Design (PDF, 2.7 MB)
Together with the students and their teacher, we explore how Personal Development Time, a daily non-curricular time period dedicated to the development of students' personal skills and character, can become more meaningful and relevant to the students. We use this project to test the relevance and applicability of service and participatory design theories and practices to the problems of secondary schools. The overall aim is to support desired changes in this school and to reposition education as a service.
Project Overview
We involved the students in a series of activities that allowed them to inquire into the topic of Personal Development themselves. The activities concerned the gathering and generation of “data,” i.e., materials and information relating to two key questions: 1) what is PD like today and 2) what is meaningful for students in their lives. This understanding supported the generation of ideas and an internal reflection with a group of PD tutors about PD time and the role of students in transforming education. The students actively engaged in interviewing, observing, collages, story telling and presenting. The activities provided students and teachers with new knowledge about their interests and dislikes and generated a number of ideas for content and structural changes to the Personal Development Time.
More Information
Contact: Daniela Sangiorgi
Flexibility and change for healthcare service providers
18 month research project as part of an EPSRC funded innovation centred called HACIRIC (Health and Care Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre)
The aim of the DFC is to investigate how GP practices are currently implementing the Practice Based Commissioning (PBC) framework, how they apply their knowledge into the design of new health and care service models and facilities and what creative and/or design skills could support this new role to make it more effective.
Project Overview
DFC research aims to investigate how GP practices are currently implementing the Practice Based Commissioning (PBC) framework. Under PBC, practices are given a commissioning budget and they have the responsibility to identify local needs, to create and provide the services needed. This allows local practitioners and stakeholders to apply their knowledge into the design of new health and care service models and facilities. The research project asks what creative and/or design skills could support this new role to make it more effective.
The demands on practitioners' skills of driving innovation are challenging, as there is a need to balance Government guidelines for future Health and Care service provisions with current and emerging health needs, infrastructure constraints, resistance to change and stakeholders' conflicting interests.
The research will investigate current NHS policies and methods related to service innovation with a special focus on PBC activities and case studies in NW Strategic Health Area. We will collaborate with the North Lancashire Teaching PCT and Coastal Medical Group in Morecambe in order to investigate current design practices and to explore and test out creative and/or design skills and techniques to envision future services.
More Information
Contact: Rachel Cooper
ImaginationLancaster has collaborated to the set up of an initiative on Service Design Research. It aims to collectively build an understanding and foster a dialogue on where ideas and concepts of Service Design have come from, how these evolved over the last two decades as well as report and review current research and service design practices. The motivation is to consolidate existing knowledge and to support the growth of a research community that engages in meaningful research relevant to the challenges design is dealing with today and in the future.
Blog
The ‘Service Design Research’ initiative has started as an online blog that will host interviews with key people working in the Service Design Research area. This sharing of knowledge, experiences and opinions on Service Design will allow us to compile downloadable reports, generate fundamental insights and create the necessary network and themes that will allow us to host an international “Service Design Research” conference. In addition, it will be a source and place for high quality publications, for a European Initial Training Network and other initiatives that will emerge gradually from the research community.
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