From User-Centred to Stakeholder-Oriented Service Design: Implications for the Role of Service Designers and Their Education Based on an Example from the Public Sector

This working paper reflects on an inquiry into a current service design practice, by describing resulting insights into the changing role of service designers and outlines implications for service design education. It is a working paper that results from an ethnographic research engagement in which a researcher from the Glasgow School of Art inquired into the practice of a public-sector service design agency – FutureGov. During a three-week ethnographic immersion, a researcher observed and shadowed FutureGov practice, its engagement with clients and stakeholders and conducted one-to-one interviews. Resulting observations suggest an extension and partial replacement of the user- and human-centred design focus with an emphasis on the organizational and wider stakeholders involved in a service, its design, its strategic and policy underpinnings and its implementation and delivery. The specific characteristic of this development towards a stakeholder-centric design focus, which is not exclusive of user-centred and co-design attitudes, are further described in the paper and are discussed in relation to scholarly debates that promote varying relationships between design and organisations. Further, requirements for designers when practicing in these stakeholder-centric design contexts are articulated here as part of work in progress, as a suggestion for further discussion and articulation. Observations suggest that as service design has matured, user-centred design has become an established approach to service redesign and innovation that a growing number of organisations now understand and adopt. Although there is still convincing and explaining required to communicate the value of user-centred design to some organisations, others have become increasingly interested in how their organization has to change in order to enable and support the delivery of service innovations effectively. With this comes an interest in questions of deep organizational implementation and transformation, and parameters for successful and effective delivery of services, requiring designers to organize around and for service delivery together with service providers. This development is reflected in the briefs that service design projects are based on and the dynamics that designers face in their daily work environment. As mentioned in the call for this track, agencies from the digital sector and from the management consulting sector have turned to and adopted service design methodologies as well as design thinking and FutureGov can be considered one of them. By observing a digital agency that has profoundly incorporated service design into its business, this research outlines challenges for service designers when operating in a context of organisational transformation around digital service innovation, but also the opportunities that the involved relationships and conversations provide. As service designers become increasingly concerned with and integrated into the organizational context that they try to change, the conversations they have and the relationships they form, as well as the decision-making paradigms they are exposed to, change. Anticipated implications for education respond to the resulting modified understanding of the role of service designers and the relationships they create, are exposed to and might feel ill-prepared to manage. This paper then firstly gives a real-world example of the deep integration of service designers in a client organization, a council, it continues by describing the interactions and relationships that service designers have with this organization and then identifies potential for research and education by discussing these findings in relation to service design education using the example of product and service design courses at the Glasgow School of Art and discourses from literature