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立 政 治 大 學
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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
In this post-digital age, not only startups but also large enterprises make their greatest effort to innovate their products and services to gain more revenues. Only the unceasing innovations can help enterprises to catch the market trends, or even more, create new trends.
Service design is as a means to service innovation and is a process aiming to create new or improve existing services to make them more usable, useful, and desirable for clients and efficient/effective for organizations.
Discovering insights from customers and defining the design challenges are very conclusive in service design. At the end of the insight defining stage, there will be a clear definition of the fundamental challenge or problem to be solved in the following stages (Design Council, 2005). Hence, if the design challenge is not defined well, no matter how good the service is developed and delivered, customers won’t accept it. For enterprises, if the value propositions of their services are not exactly what customers want, they may lose a huge amount of customers. Almost every firm knows that designing a service which customers need is very important to survive in the intense competitive environment; however, there are actually only a few doing this well. Large enterprises have their existing business model to gain revenue and most of them believe that they can continuously benefit from it.
Hence, most of them would rather keep things as they always do than give a try to something new and risky. In addition, large bureaucracies that make the big companies slow to make decisions are also barriers for new service development. In contrast, SMEs have a faster decision-making time and usually are also more adventurous. They are much more willing to do service innovation but have less resources, both manpower and capital, to put in innovations (Lindegaard, 2011). To sum up, both large enterprises and SMEs need a more efficient way to do the new service development.
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國立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
knowing the importance of service design and doing it well. First, for the aspect of management, enterprises should shift their mindset from Good Dominant Logic (G-D logic) to Service Dominant Logic (S-D logic) and consider of the situations from all of the possible stakeholders’ point of views. However, enterprises are usually accustomed to selling what they think customers need, instead of discovering what they need. Second, it is about the aspect of the process of insight discovery. Service design is multi-disciplinary; therefore, service designers may come from many different fields including industrial design, business, social science, engineering, etc. Although all of them are doing service design with S-D logic mindsets, the qualities of their discovered insights may be uneven since their diverse expertise. How to combine their expertise to achieve synergies is also a question. The last is the aspect of tools. Although some studies have been devoted to the expertise of designers (Cross, 2004; Paton and Dorst, 2011), little information is available on how information technology can facilitate the service design process. We argue that there should be an IT system to facilitate the process of discovering the design challenge for every designer, no matter experienced ones or novice ones.
In view of these gaps, we specify three research questions in this paper which are listed below:
(a) How to facilitate service designers to do insight discovery with S-D logic mindsets?
For the purpose of designing good services, having empathy is very crucial. We want to design a mechanism that can facilitate service designers to look upon the design context from all of the stakeholders’ point of views so that they are able to discover insights for developing satisfying services.
(b) How the services designers process their cognitions to discover insights?
As mentioned above, service designers have diversified expertise so that their accustomed
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國立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
way to discover insights as well as the qualities of derived insights might be different. We want to examine the cognition factors of service designers when they are doing design synthesis and then we can design a mechanism to facilitate the process.
(c) How can we use information technology to facilitate the insight discovery process in service design?
For now, service design is mainly rely on human effort. Therefore, we want to adopt information technologies to facilitate the process.
To summarize, in order to solve these research questions, in this research, we propose an interactive system to facilitate insight discovery in service design. The knowledge used in the system comes from ConceptNet, a famous commonsense knowledge base developed by Liu and Singh (2004) in MIT. With our system, designers can easily find themes from the data obtained through interviews and observations. The system also helps designers reframe the situation to find more prospective new users, new operating environments, and new embodiments. Furthermore, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the system as well as respond our research questions.
The organization of this thesis proposal is as follows. Chapter 2 gives related literature reviews. Chapter 3 describes the motivating application – Prosperity Taiwan, which this thesis is involved. Chapter 4 provides the basic concepts and the architecture of our system and an application scenario is provided in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the system and some findings are provided. At last, we conclude this research in Chapter 7 including contributions, implications and future works.
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國立 政 治 大 學