Actionable service design deliverables supporting service designers in empowering their business clients

Service design is a human-centered, design-led practice of improving and developingnew customer services through the engagement of various stakeholders. As a designdiscipline, it emerged from the need for a holistic approach to designing complexsystems, including the ecosystem of products, their users, other related stakeholders,and technologies.The development and advancement of service design poses a new set of challengesfor design practice, e.g., regarding tools and methods for the creation of services,models for new service development (NSD), or even the need to go beyond newservice development. The research presented in this analytical overview aims to findout how to support service designers in empowering business stakeholders from largeservice providers, e.g., telecoms, through service design deliverables for the laterphases of the service development process.This research project is based on six qualitative, practice-led, and design-driven casestudies and applies the two core characteristics of service design, namely, that it is avisual and stakeholder-oriented discipline. The first three studies explore various rolesof external representations, such as a custom set of cards, and investigate interactionsbetween stakeholders. The introductory exploration brought the transformativeaspects of service design on organizational capabilities into focus. Therefore, anotherthree studies investigate the attributes of service deliverables that empower businessstakeholders to act on the outcomes of service design within the later phases of servicedevelopment. These attributes are investigated in collaborations between designersand business stakeholders from large service providers that have little been studied.The research shows that design tools have the potential to support service designersin managing complex relationships with their clients. The research project wasconducted in Poland. The choice of the country results from the origin of the authorof the overview and the fact that service design in this country is still rather immature.Furthermore, the design is recognized in the categories of aesthetics. Therefore, it is ademanding context for investigating the actionable attributes of service deliverables.The main contributions of this research project include the introduction of the conceptof actionability in service design, the proposed set of actionable attributes of materialsresulting from service design practice and a theoretical concept of self-explanatoryservice deliverables. Actionability embraces the actions and skills of service designersthat empower business stakeholders to continue developing and delivering serviceswithout the support of designers. The contribution to service design practice includesActionability template-based toolkit and guidelines for service design practitioners.Such guidelines are meant to inform designers about how to implement actionableattributes of service deliverables into their practice and use Actionability toolkit.Future research can be devoted to the further development of actionable practices ofservice designers and business stakeholders in development phases of services.