This week’s reading for our Service Design class comes to us from Stefan Holmlid and is entitled “Interaction Design and Service Design: Expanding a Comparison of Design Disciplines.” In this paper Holmlid seeks to find commonalities and differences between interaction design and service design in order to “create supportive structures” between the two. To do this he relies on two different frameworks, one provided by Richard Buchanan on the four orders of design, and one provided by Edeholt and Lowgren as a comparison of design disciplines.
For starters, to clarify some terms, Holmlid defines Service Design as “a human-centered approach and an outside-in perspective” that “is concerned with systematically applying design methodology and principles to the design of services;” He uses the term industrial design to refer to the design of goods; and his definition of Interaction Design is a little more involved… Holmlid makes mention of Richard Buchanan’s definition of Interaction Design as “more than interaction design with digital material” where “service design and IxD both are within the Interaction Design order.” He is saying that Buchanan believes that Interaction Design contains both digital design and service design. Because the design of digital materials is often called Interaction Design, Holmlid, in an attempt to clarify, refers to the design of purely digital material as “IxD”, and Buchanan’s definition of interaction design as “Interaction Design.” This gets even more confusing as he starts quoting other authors who clearly do not share his same definitions… but for the purpose of this blog post: “IxD” = the design of digital products and “Interaction Design” = a broader term that includes service design & IxD.
Holmlid then proceeds to apply the frameworks of Buchanan, Edeholt and Lowgren to Service Design — and also adds new criteria to the framework, which are in bold below the x-axis in the graph of the data I have provided below:
The major takeaway from this data, other than how tedious and confusing it is, is the amount of pink (Service Design). This means that Service Design is necessarily interested in almost all areas of design, which the author has broken down into three main categories: process, material and deliverable… and then subdivided twice more– I don’t wish to take the time to look at or define here.
What I want to do is take a look at his decision to choose a narrow definition of Interaction Design (that he is calling IxD) for making his comparisons and see what effect his has on his conclusions.
For his conclusion he looks at Richard Buchanan’s four orders of design & their design objects listed below.
His conclusion, based on the convoluted data graphed above, is that “Interaction design… positions itself as a discipline integrating, to varying degrees, design objects of symbols, things and actions. Service design on the other hand integrates actions and the thought governing the environment in which these actions are performed… and… together they could function as integrating disciplines.” This confused me as a conclusion, because if you look closely at the graphs, the only aspect of IxD that outranks Service Design is how “experiential” the material aesthetics are. That is to say, of the 25 different criteria he uses to compare these three fields of design, the field of Service Design encompasses 24/25 of the ones that IxD does. Below I have illustrated the conclusion he presents next to the conclusion I inferred from the reading.
As you can see, the conclusion–as he states it–is a nice, even venn diagram. In reality the pink Service Design bubble should be covering almost the entirety of the blue IxD bubble. I have also applied the broader definition of Interaction Design as the green bubble, which encompasses both IxD and Service Design.
So why did Holmlid choose the narrow definition of Interaction Design (IxD)?
I have a few ideas. First, the broad view of interaction design is eerily similar and slightly more encompassing than what he presents as the field of Service Design. If he presented them both in concert, the reader might be more attracted to the field of Interaction Design than they would to the field he is trying to elevate. Second, he might be trying to narrow the definition of Interaction Design to IxD so that the corporate world will segment out design work: Digital work for Interaction Designers, and user-based service design for Service Designers. Last, to give him the benefit of the doubt… from a practical standpoint, Edeholt and Lowgren had already done a comparison between IxD and Industrial design and he may have simply wanted to incorporate Service Design into that framework as a means of adding Service Design to the conversation. While I understand that, I think it would be more accurate to bring Service Design into the conversation as an area where Interaction Design is well-equipped to use its established methods.