Realizing Design Thinking through a Service Design Process and an Innovative Prototyping Laboratory: Introducing service innovation corner (SINCO)

Abstract

Although service design has been widely recognized as a holistic approach, the methods of service prototyping tend to focus on specific parts of services instead of the entire serviceexperience. The SINCO (Service Innovation Corner) project, started at the University of Lapland in 2009, recognized this problem and began to develop an environment for holisticservice prototyping where building a prototype in a “rough and ready” manner, bututilizing quick and agile methods, would be easy and collaborative. In this paper we outline the benefits of the service design process, especially from theservice prototyping point of view. We also introduce the SINCO prototyping laboratoryconcept, and present the related service prototyping elements, methods and tools. Duringthe development of SINCO, several cases were performed for clients and in this paper we present three of them in order to uncover how service prototyping methods and the SINCOlaboratory were used in different phases of the service design process and how this also facilitated design thinking.