Ways of seeing service: Surrogates for a design material

Abstract

One ongoing debate in service design concerns what can and/or should be designed when working with services. I argue that, as service design grows both academically and in practice, the material of service design is collectively created by individual contributions to service development and design research. This paper looks at such contributions by examining representations, or surrogates, that designers make and use to visualise and prototype services. These representations inform us about what is considered part of service as a design material, including service concepts, processes and systems.