Archives of Design Research

NSD literature widely adopts the cyclic model of Johnson et al. (2000), which prescribes four main process stages (design, analysis, development and full launch) and associated activities. In contrast, SD processes in design literature build on the double diamond process model defined by the Design Council, comprising of four phases: discover, define, develop and deliver (Technology Strategy Board & Design Council, 2015). Whereas the NSD processes indicate phase-dependent activities and actions (Froehle & Roth, 2007), the SD processes represent the alternating shift of modes of thinking, perspectives, and approaches alongside the overall development process. Therefore, the four phases of SD processes seem to serve as a conceptual construct to guide design actions and activities. Under the constructs, design actions and activities were assigned in a flexible and iterative manner (Stickdorn & Schneider, 2010; Zomerdijk & Voss, 2011), not in a prescriptive manner as in NSD.

According to the literature, NSD processes are dedicated to planning and executing service offerings, which correspond to designing service concepts and developing service delivery systems respectively (Johnson et al., 2000). To gain a competitive advantage in the market, a service concept is configured strategically in terms of value, form/function, experience, and outcomes (Clark et al., 2000). On the other hand, developing a service delivery system is focused on preparing service system elements related to structures, infrastructures, and processes that fit the defined service concept (Ponsignon et al., 2011). Thus, designing service concepts and developing service delivery systems depends on the provider’s resources and capabilities, and industry contexts (Froehle & Roth, 2007). In contrast, although SD activities involve designing service concepts, their ultimate goal is highly geared toward desirable service interfaces (Secomandi & Snelders, 2011), service experiences (Meroni & Sangiorgi, 2011), and relational experiences (Cipolla, 2007). SD activities greatly build on an empathic and rich understanding of users’ needs and contexts rather than providers’ contexts and resources. Service systems are designed in consideration of social, material, and technical aspects (Kimbell, 2011; Morelli, 2002), and service system design is strongly informed by people-centered insights derived from delving into actors’ needs in the value network (Wetter Edman et al., 2014).

Enablers and facilitators refer to any types of knowledge, practices, or methods/tools to support service development processes. Facilitators for NSD and SD seem to differ in their focuses. Whereas NSD methods and tools as a facilitator help to capture users’ spoken needs (Edvardsson et al., 2000), SD ones as a facilitator are geared to capturing users’ contextual and ordinary life experiences and emotions through empathic and ethnographic design research skills (Mattelmäki et al., 2014; Segelström et al., 2009). In NSD literature, the nature of participation of customers and staff in development processes is described as passive (Alam, 2002) except for a few recent studies considering users’ latent needs (Matthing et al., 2004). In SD literature, users and stakeholders were involved in development processes as co-designers rather than informants (Godfroija et al., 2013). Also, whereas NSD considered more direct organizational issues (e.g., structures, internal communications and cultures) and industry contexts (Biemans et al., 2015) as a facilitator for successful service development, SD regarded organizational change by engaging with staff and embedding user-centred practices as a facilitator for service innovation (Junginger & Sangiorgi, 2009).

The confrontation of the NSD literature with the SD one led to Figure 1, which shows similarities and differences between them. Part of the similarities comes from apparent processes and activities, but differences occur in orientations and propensities. Whereas NSD indicates the process and methodology, optimized for organization-based service innovation, SD uses a process and methodology to develop valuable service experiences and services from the user’s perspective. Overall, NSD seems to resonate with the manufacturing paradigm, reflecting goods-dominant logic, whereas SD is more related to service-dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004), which emphasizes customers’ experiences and value creation. While this theoretical comparison between NSD and SD provides an in-depth understanding of both concepts, how their similarities and differences could be used to link them is not clear. The following expert interviews were used to address this gap.

Figure 1 A theoretical comparison between NSD and SD

The interviews with twelve NSD and SD experts were conducted to investigate the SD concept and its characteristics, the validity of NSD theories for modern service research, and the relationship between NSD and SD. As NSD and SD are concerned with the marketing, management or business disciplines, and the design discipline respectively, interviewees were selected from these areas. We selected four NSD academics, four SD academics, and four SD practitioners for this study. This selection of three interviewee groups was driven by our need for accessing the primary source for professional first-hand knowledge of NSD and SD, rather than by a pre-defined perfunctory distinction between the groups. Originally, four NSD academics and four SD academics were selected, since their theory-based insights satisfied our need to develop a conceptual relationship between NSD and SD based on an in-depth understanding of the two domains. The interviews with the NSD academics revealed that NSD has been largely developed as conceptual theory rather than formed by practical cases undertaken by organizations. It is also evidenced in NSD literature (Biemans et al., 2015). Therefore, it is recognized that NSD knowledge is more likely to be accessible in academia rather than in practice, and this recognition influenced our exclusion of NSD practitioners in this study. In contrast, since SD as a relatively young domain has developed its perspective, approach, methods, and tools both through academic research and through practical projects (Meroni & Sangiorgi, 2011; Polaine et al., 2013; Reason et al., 2015), there was a strong rationale for including SD practitioners in the interview study. The criteria for selecting the members for each group are as follows:

• The NSD academics have published many papers widely cited in publications, and have an understanding of SD as part of their research track.
• The SD academics have published many papers widely cited in publications, represent diverse research areas within design, and can provide insights into SD in the context of NSD processes and practices.
• The SD practitioners have been working on SD projects for at least 2 years, represent a wide spectrum of job roles within companies, and can provide insights into SD in the context of NSD processes and practices.

Table 1 shows the final list of interviewees.

We collected data from qualitative semi-structured interviews, and the interviews lasted between 20 minutes and 95 minutes. Four interviews were conducted face to face, and eight interviews were done via a video call. While the interviews were conducted based on the questions structured for addressing three agendas (Table 2), respondents also gave their expanded responses to our spontaneous follow-up questions (Gray, 2009). For example, when discussing SD in the context of NSD with the interviewees, we expanded the question about the relationship between NSD and SD, by asking for their opinions about SD contributions to and limitations for NSD.

All the interviews were transcribed and analyzed using qualitative content analysis (Zhang & Wildemuth, 2009), which refers to a research method for interpreting the content of text data through coding and classifying data and identifying emerging themes (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). Since our expert interviews aimed to address the three agendas (i.e., conceptualizations and characteristics of SD, the validity of NSD for modern service research, and the relationship between NSD and SD), coding started with identifying all the data segments related to the defined agendas. While reading over the data, we clustered similar codes into categories, and the categories were again grouped into themes (Figure 2). We identified 221 data segments, 194 codes, 79 categories, and 16 themes.

Figure2 Analyzing interview data

The findings of the interviews are summarized in Table 3, which is followed by the detailed descriptions.

The synthesis of the literature study and interview study led to an interdisciplinary service research framework to link NSD and SD. The framework is visualized as in Figure 3. The framework generates two possible directions for future inter-disciplinary service research.

Figure 3 An interdisciplinary service research framework to link NSD and SD

The first direction is about how SD could support NSD by its practices. While NSD is theory-centered, it lacks practical applications. Also, as NSD focuses on designing service concepts and configuring service delivery systems as properties of service products, it is more related to goods-dominant logic. It seems to neglect the service-dominant perspective, which is centered on value co-creation, service systems, and customers’ contextual experiences. Therefore, NSD may improve by paying attention towards developing service systems for value co-creation and their outcomes from the customer’s perspective. According to our research, this improvement may be enabled by SD, which has the characteristics resonating with service-dominant logic. For example, better engaging with users and fully understanding their individualistic contextual experiences support the key idea of service-dominant logic about customer-driven value creation (e.g., value-in-use). Also, understanding actors’ experiences and use contexts, co-design/co-development, and systemic perspectives reflect another key idea of the logic, which is value co-creation (you can see the key tenets of service-dominant logic in Vargo & Lusch (2008)). Therefore, SD could support the NSD process to infuse it with the service-dominant logic perspective.

The second direction is concerned with how NSD can improve SD by providing theories. Since SD lacks theories, its contribution to academia is minimal. This may be related to the fact that much of SD consultancies’ knowledge and their skills remain tacit, not being translated into systematized disciplinary knowledge (Kimbell, 2009b). NSD could complement SD practices with its inside-out perspective and organizational knowledge. Considering that service designers are strong in user engagement, yet weak in organizational issues (Mulgan, 2014; Overkamp, 2016), NSD may help service designers’ outside-in perspective and user-centered practices to be better integrated into organizational innovation processes. To better engage with organizations, SD may learn from NSD studies about organizational people and structure as two main components that could generate specific organizational issues. These issues may include internal communications, organizational cultures, or service-customer cultures (De Jong & Vermeulen, 2003). Applying the understanding of these organizational issues to designers’ SD projects would make SD contributions stronger and its impact greater, since that organizational understanding could serve as a solid ground for involving and collaborating with organizational people.