ISSD Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Service systems combine and integrate the value created in different design contexts like person-to-person encounters, technology enabled self-service, computational services, multi-channel, multi-device, and location-based and context-aware. Most designers are familiar with some of these contexts, but few service designers are familiar with all of them. Because the design concerns and methods in one context can seem incompatible with those in others, there is relatively little work that analyzes design concerns and methods that span multiple contexts. Doing exactly that is the point of this course.

A more abstract view that focuses on the information required to perform the service, how the responsibility to provide this information is divided between the service provider and service consumer, and the patterns that govern information exchange yields a more flexible description of service encounters and outcomes that applies to all the design contexts.