EPDE2023/1168
25
TH
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING AND PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION
7-8 SEPTEMBER 2023, ELISAVA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF DESIGN AND ENGINEERING, BARCELONA,
SPAIN
PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF SERVICE DESIGN
FOR INDUSTRIAL DESIGN EDUCATION: CURRENT
CLAIMS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Isil OYGUR ILHAN, Ali ILHAN, Braden TRAUTH and Craig VOGEL
University of Cincinnati, United States of America
ABSTRACT
With the service sector’s dominance in the world economy, we have witnessed the development of
service design as an emerging field. Not only do design programmes offer courses on service design,
but there are universities offering undergraduate and graduate programmes specific to this field.
However, the professional development of service design and its alignment with other design disciplines
is still in progress. With this perspective, we aim to take a snapshot of current service design offerings
at the university level to discuss their impact on the future of industrial design education. We
systematically analysed the courses and programmes of the first 50 design universities with design
schools listed on QS World University Rankings by Subject 2022: Art & Design. There are 19
universities offering a total of 82 courses and 12 programmes related to service design. Service design
courses and programmes are more common at the graduate level. The analysis of service design course
descriptions shows that the skillset and knowledgebase identified by these programmes are not highly
unique. Their pedagogical goals are aligned with delivering human-centred design, design research,
design thinking, and design strategy content central to industrial design education. Further integration
of service design in industrial design programmes might mean a decrease in the high-fidelity model-
making capabilities of industrial design graduates and an increase in visualisation skills for the
communication of systems. Every industrial design programme must assess and align service design
based on existing course offerings with averting redundancies in a competitive resource environment.
Keywords: Service design, industrial design, design pedagogy, curriculum
1 INTRODUCTION
Today’s economy has been increasingly defined by services rather than the other two economic sectors,
industry and agriculture. In 2021, the service sector contributed 76.74% to the US's gross domestic
product (GDP) and 65% to the EU’s [9]. While the service sector is not new, its expansion to e-services
increased its significance compared to other sectors in the digital era. This reality and the competition
around better service offerings have impacted organisations' service approaches. For-profit and non-
profit enterprises have been investing in the design of services to better serve the user/customer,
business, and society [2]. This sectoral need led to the development of service design as a field and
increased the number of jobs requiring service design expertise [8]. These positions are filled by
designers from diverse backgrounds, including industrial designers [2].
The increasing service design job market for industrial designers has also initiated a transformation in
industrial design education. Some design schools have restructured existing design programmes to offer
service design courses, while others have launched programmes specific to service design. The
professional development of service design and its educational alignment with other design disciplines
have been discussed for some time. Sleeswijk Visser and Stappers [5] discussed how the similarities
between the “mindset, methods, and tools” of industrial design and service design helped the Delft
University of Technology to incorporate service design courses into the industrial design engineering
curriculum rather than offering service design as a separate area of study. On the contrary, two
universities, one in Europe (Laurea University of Applied Sciences) and one in the US (Savannah
College of Art and Design), started master's programmes in service design as early in 2009 [2] as an
expression of the unique expertise requirements for service designers.
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Regardless of being integrated into existing design programmes or being offered as stand-alone
programmes, the pedagogical developments in service design can be interpreted as the need to deliver a
unique knowledgebase and skillset for service design to prepare graduates for sectoral needs better. In
the service-dominant logic, services are co-produced between users (customers) and service providers
[7]. Designers need to consider how an experience around a service evolves over time and space to fully
capture the interactions around multiple stakeholders and various digital and physical touchpoints [3].
At the same time, they need to consider the societal and environmental impact of their service design
decisions for the global wellbeing [1,4]. Such plurality and complexity warrant a system-level approach.
This brings the efficient and effective communication of systems, especially in cross-disciplinary teams,
as a major concern in service design. In contemporary service design practice, communication tools
such as visualisation techniques and prototyping are central to the service design process [6].
The systems mindset, methods, and tools in service design practice are familiar to the ones applied in
the industrial design discipline [5]. This brings a question about integrating service design content into
the industrial design curriculum. For service design to flourish sustainably within the higher education
ecosystem, it is essential to understand the current state of the pedagogical offerings. Our paper provides
an important first step to filling this knowledge gap by providing a snapshot of the service design
offerings in higher education.
2 METHOD
To sketch the current state of service design education, we systematically analysed existing courses and
programmes specific to service design offered by design schools worldwide. To do so, we consulted QS
World University Rankings [10], a highly reliable international university ranking. We explored the
service design courses and programmes offered by the first 50 universities’ design programmes listed
on QS World University Rankings by “Subject 2022: Art & Design.”
We followed two strategies to extract the service design courses and programmes. First, we conducted
a keyword search with the term service design (without quotation marks) on the official website of each
university. We searched for information on courses or programmes in the results. We also explored the
websites specific to each university's design schools and analysed the curriculums of the programmes
offered in these schools to define courses. Second, we conducted keyword searches on google with the
university name in quotation marks followed by service + design as well as the university name in
quotation marks followed by the following terms: modules, curriculum, schedule, “course catalogue,”
“courses offered,” “course offerings,” “course list,” “classes offered,” and “class offerings.” This second
search strategy allowed us to access course catalogues for the universities that share them publicly. In
these course catalogues, we searched for the courses with the term service in the course title. We
specifically did not search with “service design” as our initial trials showed that there are service design
courses that do not use this term in their title but use service alone.
We limited our search to schools of design and undergraduate and graduate programmes, but not
masterclasses, online short courses, MOOC courses, or certificates. We only searched for the most
current course catalogues available; we did not do a retrospective search (which was also not a feasible
approach). We did not include the courses and programmes from other schools, such as business (e.g.,
Aalto University Master of Business Administration in Service Design) and architecture (e.g., Building
Services course offered by Pratt Institute), as our primary focus is the implications of service design on
industrial design curriculum. On the other hand, we included all courses in design schools where
industrial design programmes are a part, as industrial design students have a higher chance of taking
these courses as electives.
We collected data on the university name, school/college, department/programme, course name,
instruction level (undergraduate, graduate), course description, and country information for the courses
along with data on the university name, school/college, programme name, overview/description,
programme type (undergraduate, graduate), degree granted, total credits, and country information for
the programmes. Course descriptions and programme overviews/descriptions were analysed using the
R statistical computing language. We implemented topic models using LDA (Latent Dirichlet
Allocation) algorithm to cluster the courses according to topics and cosine similarity measures to
examine the extent of similarity between course descriptions. We only report quantitative results for
course descriptions because of space limitations, noting that programme descriptions show a similar
trend.
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We do not claim that our dataset is comprehensive enough to depict the whole reality around service
design education. For example, we are aware of other programmes (e.g., the Service Design Strategies
and Innovations (SDSI) programme that is a joint effort of the University of Lapland, Art Academy of
Latvia, and Estonian Academy of Arts) that did not make it into our dataset because of the universities
not being in the first 50 of QS ranking. We limited our analysis to the first 50 universities on QS ranking
as we aimed to get a snapshot of the phenomenon to have an informed discussion on the impact of
service design on industrial design education.
3 FINDINGS
Out of 50 universities, 28 were not offering any courses or programmes specific to service design during
our study. We also had three other universities (Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and Tongji University) for which either the official website
was not working, or there was no English course and programme descriptions available.
3.1 Dataset overview
In our dataset, there are 19 universities offering a total of 82 courses and 12 programmes related to
service design. Savannah College of Art and Design is the university with the highest number of courses
(N=18) related to service design. This can be expected as it is also the university with the highest number
of programmes in service design (one undergraduate and two graduate programmes).
There are seven universities offering programmes in service design. Service design programmes are
more common at the graduate level (Table 1) than undergraduate level, and the UK is the country with
the most service design graduate programmes in our dataset.
Table 1. Distribution of programmes across education levels and countries
Level
Country
# of
Programmes
Total
Undergraduate
Hong Kong
1
3
UK
1
USA
1
Graduate
Hong Kong
1
9
Italy
1
UK
5
USA
2
On course level (Table 2), 52 courses are graduate courses, whereas there are 20 undergraduate courses.
Ten courses are listed both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The USA has the largest
representation in the dataset, as 34 courses are from this country.
Table 2. Distribution of courses across education levels and countries
Level
Country
# of Courses
Undergraduate
Australia
1
Finland
4
Hong Kong
1
Netherlands
2
Switzerland
1
UK
1
USA
10
Undergraduate and Graduate
USA
10
Graduate
Australia
9
Finland
4
Hong Kong
6
Italy
6
Japan
2
Netherlands
2
Sweden
1
UK
8
USA
14
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Within our dataset, while 34 of the courses are offered by programmes specific to service design, 49 are
offered by existing programmes (e.g., industrial design, interaction design, design strategy) at schools
of design. This indicates the trend towards integrating service design into existing design curriculums.
3.2 Analysis of course descriptions
Of 82 courses in our dataset, 12 did not have course descriptions. For the remaining 70 course
descriptions, Table 3 shows the frequency of tokenized words (features) used 15 times or more.
Table 3. Frequency of words that appear 15 times or more in course descriptions
Word
N
Word
N
Word
N
method
36
social
26
explore
20
develop
34
understand
26
context
19
system
33
research
25
complex
18
product
33
concept
24
solutions
17
experience
32
model
24
use
17
process
32
people
24
value
17
interaction
32
innovation
23
designers
17
tools
30
approach
23
innovative
16
business
29
sustainable
23
create
16
practice
28
user
21
technology
15
In course descriptions, the communication and analysis of services as “systems” and the complexity of
the systems thinking approach are highlighted more frequently than other aspects of service design. This
systems approach comes from the “sense making of complexity and organisational and networked
relationships” (Aalto University, Designing for Services course). The emphasis on the systems is also
followed by a reference to “interaction” to indicate a difference between service and system. Services
are theorised as systems that involve user interaction. Therefore, it is not surprising to see a focus on
human-centeredness in service design course descriptions with references to “experience,” “user,” and
“people.” However, the service design course descriptions also emphasise how they differ from any
other design field, for which human-centeredness is paramount, by combining human-centeredness with
other aspects, most importantly, with “business” and “social.” The significance of “social” in service
design is also represented by the words “public” (N=13) and “society” (N=8) in course descriptions.
The analysis of word frequencies also conveys the attention given to service design practice by the
introduction of “methods” and “tools” in courses. Another important aspect to highlight is that the course
descriptions do not only name specific methods (e.g., visualisation, co-creation) and tools (e.g.,
blueprint) to utilise in the process, but some also describe “design,” “design thinking,” and “design
process” as tools to handle the complexity of services. The programme description of the Glasgow
School of Art’s Design Innovation and Service Design is an example of this: “At The Innovation School,
Service Design is taught as a means of applying design processes to complex problems, combining
artifacts and interactions to produce services that exist, unfold and evolve in both space and time.”
The qualitative analysis of course descriptions also indicates that the courses aim to differentiate
between being digital or physical oriented. Some courses try to combine both. These differences are
partly because of the programmes that are offering the courses. While courses in communication design
address the significance of digital interactions for services as touchpoints, course descriptions from
industrial design programmes also add products as the main point of interaction.
One last point to highlight is the focus on the collaborative nature of service design. Course descriptions
specifically address two types of collaborations. One is the value of cross-disciplinary collaboration and
teamwork. The other is the utilisation of co-creation and co-design with service providers and users in
the service design process.
The topic models in Table 4 show the patterns and relationships in course descriptions. Topic 1 is about
the value of service design and what it brings to the table by emphasising how it differentiates from
business-oriented service development. Topic 2 illustrates the content of the courses and what they
deliver. Topic 3 is mostly about what is designed, especially with a human-centred approach to services.
Lastly, topic 4 exemplifies the focus of service design and how this focus is different from other design
practices.
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Table 4. LDA topic models of course descriptions
Topic 1
Topic 2
Topic 3
Topic 4
people
methods
interaction
business
system
develop
product
model
opportunities
experience
user
sustainable
practice
process
different
system
use
social
technology
product
create
research
making
value
communicate
concept
creation
explore
explore
tools
people
challenges
interaction
understand
digital
stakeholders
ideas
innovation
first
strategic
As a last step, we also analysed how the courses are clustered. Figure 1 shows that the courses are
grouped into four based on their descriptions. Two course descriptions from Chiba University (only the
same, one sentence in both courses), one from the University of Technology Sydney, one from the
University of the Arts London and one from Loughborough University were outliers and were taken
out. The course descriptions with pink mainly address the relationships (e.g., among people, things) and
inclusiveness (e.g., all stakeholders) that must be considered in service design. In this sense, these
courses emphasise how the designers’ focus should shift from singular (e.g., product, end-user) to plural
(e.g., interactions, systems) during design. The common aspects of the course descriptions in orange
have the objective of communicating and teaching human-centred methods and tools that are important
for service design practice. The courses in purple highlight the service design process and
communication with visualisation and storytelling. The last cluster in blue groups courses that describe
services’ complexity and system attributes. They bring the business and management aspects; assess
and measure future service solutions. It is also important to note that the courses on product-service
systems do not cluster in a different group. This might be interpreted as an overlap between service
design and product-service systems course contents.
Figure 1. Course clusters based on their descriptions
4 IMPLICATIONS OF SERVICE DESIGN FOR INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
EDUCATION
Given the significance of the service sector in today’s economy, we expected to see a more
comprehensive implementation of service design in higher education. Out of 50 universities, there were
only 19 universities offering service design courses and/or programmes. This can be interpreted as a
lack of understanding of the importance of service design in many universities and design programmes.
Design schools are slow in addressing sectoral needs.
Service design courses and programmes are more common at the graduate than undergraduate level.
However, more undergraduates have also been hired as service designers [2]. This can also be
interpreted as a need to further implement service design competencies and skillsets at the undergraduate
level.
The analysis of service design course descriptions demonstrates two main issues. First, some core
offerings highlighted in service design course descriptions, such as human-centeredness, co-creation,
and systems thinking, are not new to industrial design. These core offerings mostly overlap with the
pedagogical goals of delivering human-centred design, design research, design thinking, and design
strategy content in industrial design education. On the other hand, courses on service design also indicate
a transformation in design education in general and industrial design education in specific. The sheer
number of service design courses offered by existing design programmes is a good proxy for the
integration of service design. At the same time, we do not observe a change in total course numbers or
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credits of industrial design programmes. This can be interpreted as the changing nature of industrial
design education.
Based on our data, one of the core changes is the increasing importance given to system visualisation.
However, the same cannot be said for the making aspect of design. While service prototyping is
introduced as a tool in courses, this differs from the high-fidelity model-making common in industrial
design education. Thus, further integration of service design in industrial design programmes might
mean a decrease in the high-fidelity model-making capabilities of industrial design graduates.
In addition to a pronounced emphasis on business and user needs, one of the core aspects of service
design is its focus on society and the public good. This focus expands the practice of industrial design
beyond the commercial sector. This might be interpreted as a need to further include theoretical courses
on social issues. There has always been an interest in social issues in industrial design. While this might
be true, there has never been a coherent framework to address these problems.
Integrating service design into industrial design education further highlights design as a medium for
multiple stakeholders to communicate and interact. Some service design course descriptions exemplify
how visualisation techniques can become tools for co-creation. Hence, it is important to define and
effectively communicate the designer’s role in the ever-changing design landscapes to students through
clear learning objectives.
Our study communicates the significance of service design in the industrial design curriculum. Our
findings also illustrate possible redundancies in industrial design curriculum (especially on design
research, human-centred design process, and design thinking) if the service design is hastily integrated
into industrial design education without in-depth analysis. Every industrial design programme must
assess and align service design based on existing course offerings with averting redundancies in a
competitive resource environment. It is also important to reflect on students’ experiences regarding
service design course offerings, which our study comes short of addressing given our data.
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