Lab8

// According to the slideshow by Sylvain Cottong, who is an employee at [|http://www.integratedplace.com], describe the tools and methods of 'service design' (2 paragraphs). //

// From your personal experience, what would be a scenario in which these methods would be useful? (2 paragraphs) //

Sylvain Cottong identifies the idea of service design as an integration of product design and interaction design. Service design is a human-centered approach used to make the overall experience more useful, usable, efficient, effective and valuable for customers. Within the Service Design framework there are tools and methods used to adopt to individual situations and projects.Some tools and methods Cottong discusses are the customer journey map, service blueprinting, ideation, context mapping participatory design, and service prototyping.

Customer journey map refers to the timeline of events the user will experience as he or she interfaces with the service. Service blueprinting refers to the procedure users will take. It is the chronological order in which the user experiences a certain point in the service. The ideation, context mapping, and participatory design tool shows that users are active contributors to the problem solving process. Most of the time this method is handled by an expert. Lastly, service prototyping is about creating certain situations that might occur to help in the solving the problem.

In my personal experience, i have roughly used Cottong's tools for service design in another of my classes: MGD421 - Technological Entrepreneurship. The major project of the class was to come up with a business idea and develop a business plan and presentation that we presented infront of a panel of judges, business consultants and entrepreneurs. Our groups' idea was to develop a smartphone app, along with small RFID sticker tags. The user would attach these RFID tags to their important personal belongings such as keys, wallet or briefcase. They would activate the app and the specific belonging they want activated. The app then keeps track of these belonging and incase you forget one or go far from range, your phone would alarm. Our solution was to prevent people from misplacing their items or having them stolen. The panel loved our idea that we won first place and a prize of $600.

In designing this idea, we had to think of the problem before the solution and integrate the customer's wants and thoughts. We had to think of who our target customer is, the timeline of which users would adopt a new idea and when, such as innovators, early majorities, lat majority and sceptics. We created scenarios, outlines, flow charts and diagrams that show how our product would be used. We developed a rough plan on who would help us with developing such a project, including other student innovators and alpha customers.