Abstract
Do professional design services offer a service or design a product? A traditional definition rooted in the service economy might point to the former, but the theory of Service-Dominant Logic from marketing might suggest the latter. While this may appear purely as a semantic difference, it has severe implications on 1) how designers articulate the value of their services, and 2) how clients perceive the value of a designer's service. This paper provides four industry examples to show how professional design services may change how they deliver a service to address the evolving expectations of a design service. It ends by offering two ways service designers can help professional design services innovate how they render services to their clients.
Keywords
professional design service, service-dominant logic, architecture services
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2020.72
Citation
Tan, L.(2021) The paradox of delivering professional design services: The plurality of value, in Akama, Y., Fennessy, L., Harrington, S., & Farago, A. (eds.), ServDes 2020: Tensions, Paradoxes and Plurality, 2–5 February 2021, Melbourne, Australia. https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2020.72
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Papers
The paradox of delivering professional design services: The plurality of value
Do professional design services offer a service or design a product? A traditional definition rooted in the service economy might point to the former, but the theory of Service-Dominant Logic from marketing might suggest the latter. While this may appear purely as a semantic difference, it has severe implications on 1) how designers articulate the value of their services, and 2) how clients perceive the value of a designer's service. This paper provides four industry examples to show how professional design services may change how they deliver a service to address the evolving expectations of a design service. It ends by offering two ways service designers can help professional design services innovate how they render services to their clients.