Is the goal of service design communication and education to make service design a part of the working culture of all organisations and decision-making and to incorporate it as a part of all competences acquired through education? Should we understand that service design is adequately circulated only once it has made itself obsolete? Or should service design be considered an umbrella that overshadows all marketing communication, other fields of design, planning of business operations, and serv..

Think of a marketing slogan in a wall "Bank service touchpoint. Design Reima Rönnholm." Sounds rather ridiculous, does it not? Objects are marketed in this fashion; consider "Diningroom table. Design Harri Koskinen" or "Vase. Design Stefan Lindfors" No-one seems to make fun of those. Where is the difference?

The difference lies, of course between the tangible object and the immaterial service. Only a designed physical object is linked to a "real thing" that becomes a designer product or an obj..

The smaller a company, the more probably it does service design. Let's think of an example of a cafe. The entrepreneur surely thinking about offered services during his or her daily activities, monitors customers and their needs, and ponders on how to create more value to customers than the competition. As service designer Reima Rönnholm noted as I interviewed him, the smaller a company, the more probable it is for the company and its employees to be involved in service design or similar activ..

I did a research interview of concept designer, copywriter and author Markku Rönkkö for the ServiceD project. He discussed an interesting phenomenon, which is of great importance for the analysis of the changes in competence needs. He draws a picture of what’s happening by noting that “instead of paying for large organisations, clients are better off if they only pay for competent individuals. For example, the world of advertisement movies is moving towards an increasingly networked culture of ..

Times are changing ... and social change continues. We all recognize unique moments when we encounter them. Today when young people are entering the labor market for the first time, they have experienced many things I did not know well when I was a teenager in the 1970s. They have had two televisions, three laptops, i-Pod, the very latest mobile telephone, 2-3 boy/girlfriends, many computer games and a wardrobe full of fashion clothes.

This kind of change has been a real change in post-industri..

In the last couple of weeks or so, two seemingly insignificant news stories have reached my ears. First, Starbucks announced they enter the Finnish market - yes, there are still markets where the brand isn’t active yet - and second, the main Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (HS), revealed plans to move from broadsheet to tabloid format.

My somewhat antihipsteresque circle of acquaintances, all but a few easily described as knowledge workers or belonging to the creative class, seems to gre..

As curious persons, we are passionate about new ideas and inventions that promise to transform our lives and create new opportunities. We like to rapidly replace old technologies with new ones. There are two philosophies to change our service architectures. First is based on the idea “build to last”. Another is the idea “built to be changed”.

These alternative philosophies lead us two alternative service architecture planning models. In the first one you plan such service architectures which ..

Research shows that perhaps the most essential phenomenon related to consuming and consumption is the increase in customers’ willingness to tune and customize products and services to suit their own needs. This is clearly visible, for example, in real estate development and housing.

This development is currently taking a step forward: we now discuss prosumers who take part in the production of their own services in cooperation with service providers. This theme includes the idea of customer-dri..

Visionary Bruno Munari wrote already 1960^th:  “Today it has become necessary to demolish the myth of the ‘star’ artist who only produces masterpieces for a small group of ultra-intelligent people. It must be understood that as long as art stands aside from problems of life it will only interest a very few people.” [1]

It seems to us that ‘star’ designer is living well in 2010^th. Wow architecture gathers attention and many designers still act (and are treated) like stars. The spirit of public ..