Content, progress and pedagogy of the module

This module will introduce design thinking and service design and provide knowledge and methodological tools to analyse existing services and to develop new services. The course will provide an overview of analytical methods to understand and integrate user’s needs, design methods to control and organise time and interaction-based elements of a services and representation techniques that can be used to communicate with the various actors involved in a service system.

Learning objectives

Knowledge

Students who complete the module will obtain the following qualifications:

• Understand the foundations of design thinking as a learning approach
• Understand the nature and characteristics of services
• Understand and be able to explain differences and analogies between products and services in relation to the design process
• Understand the structure of a service in relation to its time, experience and interaction factors
• Understand the nature and characteristics of the interaction between service providers, technologies and users in a service encounter

Skills

Students who complete the module will obtain the following qualifications:

• Capability to apply the design thinking approach to real problems
• Capability to apply adequate analytical and interpretation tools to integrate users’ needs and support users’ participation in the design process
• Ability to design a service, its structure, components and actors (synthesis)
• Ability to organise sets of operations, sequence of events, interactions and material evidences in a service (synthesis)
• Capability to apply adequate representation techniques to communicate the structure of the service to people with different knowledge and technical/cultural background

Competences

Students who complete the module will obtain the following qualifications:
 

• Ability to select and apply an appropriate approach to the analysis and the design of a service.

Type of instruction

See general description of the types of instruction described in the introduction to Chapter 3.

Exam

Exams