The Good of Service Design

"Tourism is the temporary, short-term movement of people to destination outside the places where they normally live and work and their activities during the stay at each destination. It includes movements for all purposes."
Beaver, Allan (2002). A Dictionary of Travel and Tourism Terminology. Wallingford: CAB International. p. 313

Tourist have in fact plenty of pain-points (struggles and needs), however because of the fact that tourism is considered a short-term activity in relation to their daily life, often these pain-points are forsaken as tourists would unlikely be encountering the same pain-points again.

On the other hand, because the user's experience is seen and evaluated from the overall experience, the good parts tend to shadow the bad parts, thus little noise is made to tackle these problems. Hence it is difficult to pay attention to tourists and soothe their needs, unless much attention is paid towards pursuing an overall experience.

So with a service design approach, its bottom up method of looking at the landscape enables me to cast an overview on the subject I am focusing on. Through field observations and applying various tools to present and evaluate my data, I can uncover valuable insights that can lead to design solutions that will serve to solve the pain-points noted during the research.

Another main feature of adopting Service Design thinking is that the approach is not about avoiding mistakes, but rather to explore as many possible mistakes as possible.

Design Thinking For Service Design

Quoting Thomas Lockwood, he states that Service design begins with discovering what processes need improvement and how to best serve people's needs. To me that is by far the best definition I have came across that summarizes the meaning of this new learned design field.

Earlier on in his book, he also talks about co-creation as a key element to innovation. And to share, this is the formula:

Engineer + Designer + a business analyst on the side + a whole lot of Willingness to work together to experiment, develop and test = innovation success

With that said, besides the differences in each field, personally I feel that there must be a certain similarity for it to all work. I would believe the success would be easier reach if the team would have a similar interest i.e. EURO 2012. Aside from that, every stakeholder involve MUST have a passion for the field/client they are working on, otherwise the result will surely be compromised. Like in a footballing sense, it's the combination of having the passion for the game, skills/talents, and gelling with the teammates to make a success team that can deliver results.

This is my added definition of Design Thinking.