Background

Understanding and designing for experience is core to the discipline of service design. It is through experience that we determine the value created by the services we design. As Vargo and Lusch argue,

‘The customer is always a co-creator of value. Value creation is interactional” where “Value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary. Value is idiosyncratic, experiential, contextual and meaning laden (Vargo & Lusch, 2008, p.7).

Since experience is central to value creation, whether in public or commercial services, services designers need to develop skills in designing for experience, such as; how we talk about experience, how we talk to users about their experiences, how we go about understanding user experience, how we then communicate this lived experience and then in turn how we go about the task of developing, communicating and orchestrating experience in new service offerings.

As a designer, you will most likely have responsibility for designing how the service should be experienced. This means that you have to understand how people experience things, be able to describe and specify experiences, and be able to convert this into the design of journeys, touch-points, platforms, processes and organisations.

At the same time experience is deeply affected and informed by an individual’s and group’s socio-cultural context and background (Bruner, 1984) whilst Moggridge’s well known maxim that ‘the only way to experience an experience is by experiencing it’ makes designing for experience challenging when the experience being designed for is only experienced when the design is finally realised.

Service design has developed a set of approaches and tools (customer journey map, evidencing, service enactments, storyboards, etc.) for designing services together as a team. However, we believe that many of these tools are functional and need improvement to the experiential part of designing. We think that the tools can be improved experientially, and that there is also a need for new tools and for individual expression.

Course content

This semester allows master’s level students to build upon existing service design skills and already have an understanding and applied experience of the existing tools and approaches of service design to learn, explore and develop new approaches to the design and expression of experience in the context of service development.

Through a series of explorative and at times experimental modules the students will learn and contribute to developing new approaches that focus on the quality, feel and aesthetics of experience. They will consider new ways of expressing experience to more directly offer experiential insight of users’ lived experience whilst engaging in questions of diversity and culture.  Furthermore, they will consider the value and issues of larger cultural phenomena articulated through current and emergent trends whilst learning the material potential of other cultural phenomena such as ritual and storytelling.

Some of these modules will be delivered with professional partners (private company and/or a public organisation), where they will bring these emergent approaches and tools to designing in ‘real-life’ contexts.

Whilst the course’s orientation is explorative and at times experimental the content and learning is still very much grounded in practice, where students will gain knowledge and develop skills and competences that will expand theirs and current service design practice towards a greater experiential emphasis.