Katarina Wetter Edman

Keyword: Service design, Industrial design, user involvement, design methods, boundary objects.

Design methods for improved service innovation The intention of this project is to study how methods and tools used in the field of industrial design can be used to increase the efficiency of user involvement in early phases of service development processes. The project considers methods to be platforms for communication for the actors involved in the development process. Design methods build on a frequent and well thought-out customer interaction and use different tools of visualisation (British English) and boundary objects in the communication between the designer and the user. The aim of these studies is two-folded: firstly, a theoretical reflection regarding the possibility to use industrial design methods within service innovation, and secondly to more specifically adapt the design methods to suit the specific needs of service design. The project plan comprises participatory observations of user involvement situations; these will be used to describe and reflect on the attitudes of different competencies in regard to the customer/user. The results will be the basis for a number of experiments, in which we further develop and implement design methods in different field experiments where the participating partners' users and customers are involved. Our objective is to develop methods with a high level of user involvement where the user experience is the driving force for new service innovation.

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