Abstract

This paper presents the result of a pilot survey study about challenges faced by practicing service designers. Challenges include: 1) low awareness of what service design is and how to use service design in organisations; 2) issues with involving people in the design process; such as getting the right stakeholders on board and doing user research; 3) assessing the business and organisational value of service design and the extent to which it is able to actually change roles within organisations; 4) design in the organisation where silos, culture, maturity, willingness to change and acceptance of design can all limit the usefulness of service design, 5) obstacles to implementation and 6) designer identity and how it can impact expectations. While some of these challenges are inherent to design approaches, others keep recurring in studies of (service) design practice and should be given more attention and taken seriously by academia.

Keywords

challenges, design practice, survey

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Challenges facing service design practitioners: a pilot study

This paper presents the result of a pilot survey study about challenges faced by practicing service designers. Challenges include: 1) low awareness of what service design is and how to use service design in organisations; 2) issues with involving people in the design process; such as getting the right stakeholders on board and doing user research; 3) assessing the business and organisational value of service design and the extent to which it is able to actually change roles within organisations; 4) design in the organisation where silos, culture, maturity, willingness to change and acceptance of design can all limit the usefulness of service design, 5) obstacles to implementation and 6) designer identity and how it can impact expectations. While some of these challenges are inherent to design approaches, others keep recurring in studies of (service) design practice and should be given more attention and taken seriously by academia.