Service design has sprung from user experience (UX) design as the scope of UX projects has become wider. It is slowly forming in Australia with agencies and consultancies offering it in their repertoire of services. UX designers know how to deliver on technology projects. But service design exists in a different setting altogether. To implement service design concepts must be delivered and embraced by staff. To sustain service design concepts the culture of organisations and work environments often needs to shift.

As I have realised this in my own work I have been looking further afield to business and management sources to inform how I might implement service design. This site is my archive of the most informative articles related to my projects.

Why Posterous?

This site is published on the Posterous blogging platform. It primarily serves as a link repository to articles found elsewhere on the web. Posterous is a tool that takes snippets from the web with incredible ease. It's designed for this, so its an easy choice to use it as a blogging platform. It also makes it obvious that the vast majority of content here is not mine. I will only post parts of articles with the occasional comment on why I think this reading is relevant to service design to encourage readers to go to the original source of content, and give authors and publishers their due credit and traffic.

Original content of any significance will also be cross-posted on my other blog.

About the collector/author

The "I" referred to on this page is Erietta Sapounakis. I am a User Experience Architect from Sydney, Australia. I also blog about the web and UX at www.eriontheinterweb.com.

After many years as a web professional I started working in teams delivering service design projects. These projects comprised of three parts:

1. Observational or ethnographic research with customers undertaking a process or otherwise interacting with an organisation
2. Forming strategy as a result of research findings and insights
3. Designing concepts to realise the strategy

What became apparent to me through these projects was that the most important touch point to design for was staff. Luckily through my work at Different I was given the opportunity to work on a succession of projects designing for staff specifically.

Soon enough I was collaborating with and talking to managers, team leaders, change managers and human resource professionals. After all, I was colonising their turf and needing them to buy-in to my ideas. But my ideas were changing too. The realm of design I was used to occupying -- websites, brochures, booklets, print artefacts -- was being replaced by activities, workshops, seminars and tools. The environment my "design" was landing in was also changing. I was no longer concerned with the technology environment. My "design" was beginning to exist in a human environment that concerned incentives, culture, management, knowledge and soft skills.

Naturally my reading changed during this time. The usual design sources just weren't equipping me for what I needed to contend with. I began reading business journals and scouring academic articles on management and group theory. Hence this blog to house and share the links I have come across that I hope will benefit others in the Service Design community.