Designing services in science and technology-based enterprises

The project responds to two developments. Firstly, the growing importance of services, economically, socially and culturally, and the emerging discipline of service design, which has few direct links with management research. Secondly, efforts by university based researchers to exploit their research through setting uop commercial enterprises, especially in science and technology, sometimes offering services.

This project has two intertwined elements:

(a) An interdisciplinary conversation taking place over 12 months about service design, and in particular the design of services within science and technology based enterprises.
Participants include social scientists working within a business school; service and
interaction designers; entrepreneurs from science and technology based enterprises;
researchers working within computing and environmental sciences; practitioners from
large IT services companies; and MBA students. The task of this varied group of approximately 25 people is to share knowledge, skills and experience about service
design; and to create a shared vocabulary about designing services in science and
technology based enterprises.

(b) Four design-led research projects taking place over three months, in which a science or technology based enterprise offering, or planning to offer services, is paired with a
design company. Designers qill use design approaches and design tools such as
creating scenarios, modelling, and paper prototyping, to help develop services, or test
assumptions within existing services. The findings from these projects are the 'data'
feeding the wider conversation.

Both parts of the project will be documented with photography, video and interviews, and made public via the web. Other outputs include an illustrated document sharing the vocabulary for discussing service design generated within the project; and academic papers for the design research community and others.

The project is hosted by a business school, with research strengths in innovation, strategy and the social sciences of organisations, within a university with a strong science and technology research culture and a track record in commercialising research. We anticipate it will have effects within the three main groups of participants: academics within business schools who study services; service designers; and science and technology entrepreneurs.