Service Design

• Date Fall 2018
• School Emily Carr University of Art + Design

“A service is something that I use but do not own,” explains Mat Hunter, Chief Design Officer at the Design Council. “Service Design is therefore the shaping of service experiences so that they really work for people. Removing the lumps and bumps that make them frustrating, and then adding some magic to make them compelling.” (Design Council)

This 6-credit core studio allows for an intensive project-based learning experience in interaction design. Students will be exposed to skills and theories that build on the knowledge from second year, expand their design capacities, and prepare them to work independently in fourth year.

Service design is about ensuring the thing you build reflects the complexity of the problems you are trying to solve. Service design isn’t just about building digital things, but also about ensuring that a digital product, like an online service, is positioned in a way that looks at a human’s entire experience of that product, from start to finish. Service designers are often called upon to tackle massive social issues, where they look at face-to-face and digital touch points, and redesign the entire journey from end-to-end.

This class will draw upon the global movement for service design within the public sector (e.g. Canada, Estonia, Singapore), as well as social justice oriented examples to help student cultivate their ability to parlay interaction design expertise into service design thinking.