Investigation into how each stakeholder plays a role at different levels of granularity to realise a long-term service design project

Abstract

A 5-year service design project, ‘Digital Detox’, aims to develop a service business model and build a platform for service content that helps to prevent young teenage students become addicted to using smartphones. This paper aims to explore 1) how tasks are undertaken in each year’s process and 2) depending on each year’s process’ phase, what roles stakeholders and designers play to realise the service and its system in the market. Through investigating each year’s phase, we found that the service agency’s authority as project manager was shared with diverse partnerships to embody the service design concept and commercialise the service. The partners’ roles can be divided into four types: 1) an informative role to evaluate the suggested prototype, 2) consultative and 3) participative roles to engage with users and embody an elaborate plan, and 4) a masterful role to lead a certain activity which requires partners’ professional knowledge or capabilities.