Service Design Community Progress

A wonderful note from Stefan Holmlid on Service Design…

A lot of energy, time and soul has been put into developing and performing research in the service design community the last academic year; it’s a great achievement you have all been driving and contributing to (and other with you that I forgot to add to the email list). This is an attempt to share with you some of the developments within the community. It will be a summary with some examples, there are more examples for each category (just send them over if you have more!).

Conferences:
– during the SDNC in SF the PhDs had a workshop
– There is a special track at the EAD conference in 2013 dedicated to the craft of service design
– The ISIDC conference is running in 2012 in Taiwan
– The ServDes conference was held in Finland in 2012, and will be held in Lancaster in 2014, marking its development into an international academic conference
– The AHFE conference had a set of service design papers
– Papers and workshops on service design has been accepted to a set of other conferences, such as PDC, CHI, and others
– The Korea SDN chapter conference had a research track.
– There will be a Service Design and tourism conference in august
– Proceedings from these conferences are increasingly being published by publishers that are well indexed
– speakers from the community and SDN has been invited for example at the Korea SDN chapter

Books:
– Daniela Sangiorgi and Anna Meroni published their book at Gower
– Marc Stickdorns book This is Service Design Thinking is now translated for parts of the asian market
– Satu Miettinen edited a new book that will be published later this year
– There will be a report book published from the Service Design in Tourism project
– there are at least 2-3 in the pipeline, not counting possible chapter contributions in edited volumes

Journal special issues
– Behaviour and Information Technology hosted a special issue
– Int Journal of Design hosted a special issue
– Design Research Journal hosted a special issue
– Several service design related papers have been published in service as well as design journals

Research centres/projects:
– At AHO in Norway a Service Innovation Center has been started
– The Service Design in Tourism EU-project is running to its end

Joint proposals:
– There is a EU proposal (Initial Training Network) underway
– A joint proposal on the Nordic level is under judgment

Subnetworks:
– There has been developed one with a focus on the Tourism sector
– The PhDs formed a chapter
– There has been formed a student chapter

PhD students:
– at least one PhD student finished during the period (Tan)
– one PhD student will finish up in end of august (Vaajakallio), more coming up in the next few years

Exchanges:
– The amount of exchanges (formal and informal) have increased; E.g. Brazil-Germany, Sweden-US, Finland-Italy, etc

Education:
– new/renewed service design oriented programs/specialisations have started e.g. in Oslo, Milan and Aalborg

National Innovation Policies:
– Researchers of the community have been involved and influential in the development of National Innovation Policies in Finland, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden.

It’s clear that the academic community is doing work that holds “journal quality”, and that the work we do fit into existing journals. The community also have “conference impact” and volume, where we share and test thoughts, results and ideas within the community as well as with other disciplines.
My 5 cents: We are still in a growth/development phase where we need to support and promote the work we all do, be inclusive as well as critical peers.

All the best
Stefan Holmlid

————–
Stefan Holmlid, associate prof Interaction & Service Design
E: stefan.holmlid@liu.se | P: +46 13 285633
W: http://www.ida.liu.se/~ixs/ | T: @shlmld
A: IDA, Linköping University, 581 83 LINKÖPING