Conceptualisations of Service Prototyping : Service Sketches, Walkthroughs and Live Service Prototypes

This chapter addresses the area of serviceprototyping, which is considered by service designersto be one of the most important aspects oftheir work (Blomkvist & Holmlid, 2010). However, littleis known about what a service specific prototypingapproach is and how to best represent services in sucha way that makes it possible to understand whole serviceexperiences. Consequently, one way of conceptualisingservice prototypes is suggested here.By prototyping, an activity surrounding a prototypeis implied. It can be the activity of creating prototypes, oractivities made possible by or with the prototype. Theseactivities are ways to suggest changes to, and gain understandingabout how an existing situation can betransformed into a new one. Here, any representationof such a future state is referred to as a prototype. Differentprototyping approaches have been used withinvarious design disciplines for a long time. This chaptersuggests that service prototyping is a specific activitywith similarities to other prototyping approaches.Service prototyping is described as an activity that involvesthe representation of multiple service momentswhere customers interact with service providers.How such a service specific prototyping approachmight be utilised, to assist service development atvarious stages of the development process, will beaddressed. Representations that can be used at threedifferent stages of the design process will be used asexamples. These are: service sketches, service walkthroughs,and live service prototypes. The examplesillustrate how services can be understood as wholecoherent compositions, and how an embodied andsituated understanding of services can be achieved