Service Design

“A Boston-based industrial design firm is shifting its focus toward designing experiences, reports Bob Parks in Bloomberg Businessweek (2/18/13). The shift, essentially, is from designing “objects to developing commercial spaces and services. The idea is to use the design sensibility — ethnographic field research, sketching, prototyping — to make a retail space run as smoothly as a high-performance car.” As Kerry Bodine of Forrester explains: “Instead of designing tangible things, it’s about designing all the interactions a customer has with the brand.” This emerging specialty is known as “service design.”

Continuum, an industrial-design firm, is applying service-design to brands including Holiday Inn, Bertucci’s and Audi. Its technique involves creating full-scale, foam-core prototypes. For Holiday Inn, the result was “a more social space where kids play video games on large-screen TVs, businesspeople check e-mail on kiosks near the bar, and vacationers socialize.” The key was a “more cramped” lobby where people are literally more likely to “bump into each other,” precipitating a “friendly conversation among strangers, lightening the mood and encouraging guests to sit down for a drink.”

At the first Holiday Inn where the new design was implemented, “beverage sales rose 36 percent, while food revenue grew 25 percent.” For Bertucci’s, the concept is for a new restaurant called 2ovens, and is based on the way Millennials eat out — featuring “smaller plates in a more social setting.” Audi’s dealership re-design is intended to create a tangible experience “that you can’t have in your living room.” Charles Austen Angell of design firm Modern Edge, likens the approach to crowdsourcing, versus “handing down a singular vision” ala Steve Jobs. “Most companies can’t be so lucky,” he says, and need to “create alignment across the different departments of the organization.”