At the end of the course you will have developed in four different areas: knowledge and insights, academic attitude, global citizenship, and interpersonal competences. After successfully finishing the course you will be able to:
* Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the role service design, principles, processes and methods play in developing smart services
* Leverage / use service design as a practical approach to generate stakeholder insights needed for smart services
* Integrate academic knowledge on service, interaction and business design to develop new ideas and innovative services
* Demonstrate academic reasoning and critical thinking based on evidence and theory
* Communicate in a clear and effective manner
* Successfully work together and manage tasks in interdisciplinary innovation teams

The course on Service Design explores the role of innovation in services on the nexus of people, technology, organisations and information. What is design thinking about services? It is a method for successfully developing innovation from a perspective of clients. It aims to ensure that the service is useful, usable and desirable from the client’s point of view and effective, efficient and distinctive from the supplier’s point of view (Mager 2008). The approach helps build innovations by going beyond the consideration of technological and economical perspectives.
From the very beginning, (Service) Design Thinking takes a user-centric perspective enabling people to develop radically new products, smart services or entire business models. So service design focuses on people (customers, users, employees and other stakeholders). The design thinking methods will encourage you to think in diverse ways to develop a broad range of new ideas (diverging). Subsequently, it also helps to identify the best ideas and focuses on developing their unique elements (converging). Therefore, service design can be seen as an agile and iterative process to visualise, formulate, and choreograph solutions to problems that do not necessarily exist today; the course helps you to observe and interpret requirements and behavioural patterns and transform them into future smart services, that is, product and service innovations that directly capitalise on digital data and technology, offering added value to customers.
New business models centred on the development of smart services are being introduced to meet this demand. This is yielding improved products and services for customers, businesses and broader society, and represents an important source of growth, cost savings and improved risk management. Successful businesses like Amazon, and Netflix, have emerged that largely base their smart services (e.g. recommendation systems) on business intelligence systems and their internal decision-making processes on data analytics.
Given the large variety of digital services, there is a growing need for professionals who can design these experiences and performances. This course will provide you with the required background and experience to design smart services.

* Brown, T. (2008). "Design thinking", Harvard business review, Vol. 86 No. 6, pp. 84-92.
* Dalia, D. (2017). Service Design at a speed and scale, Design at IBM.
* Jaakkola, E.,Helkkula, A., and Aarikka-Stenroos, L. (2015). "Service experience co-creation: conceptualization, implications, and future research directions", Journal of Service Management, Vol. 26 No. 2, pp.182-205.
* Mahr, D., N. Kalogeras, G. Odekerken‐Schröder, (2013). "A service science approach for improving healthy food experiences", Journal of Service Management, Vol. 24 No.4, pp. 435-471.
* Teixeira, J. G., Patrício, L., Huang, K.H., and Constantine, L. (2017). "The MINDS Method: Integrating Management and Interaction Design Perspectives for Service Design," Journal of Service Research, Vol. 20 No. 3, pp. 240-258.
* The Service Designshow (on youtube) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYpyoyI0DiujtiRuN-VgxWg
* Yu, E., & Sangiorgi, D. (2018). Service design as an approach to implement the value cocreation perspective in new service development. Journal of Service Research, 21(1), 40-58.

No predefined prerequisites.