Democratization of education is imperative for social progress, promising inclusive access to high-quality education otherwise constrained by several barriers. With several causes for dissatisfaction with traditional schooling, homeschooling is seeing a global rise in adoption, bolstered by the digital age with access to technology and content. Still, homeschooling is perceived to limit socialization, emotional development, team skills, and physical activities. We see service design’s potential to design the homeschooling journey from an ecosystem perspective, enabling an environment for holistic development of children and supportive systems for parents. In this study, we conducted a survey with participants across India, with and without exposure to homeschooling. We utilized Service Design principles and CraftChange Behavior Change Progression Model as frameworks, along with the responses, to arrive at service ecosystem needs for homeschooling. The paper provides perspectives of parents in India around homeschooling and proposes service design-oriented directions to empower parents and the community to address concerns around homeschooling.

In many aspects of our lives, we often enjoy activities in the company of others, whether it’s going to amusement parks, dining out, or traveling. When designing services meant for group participation, it’s essential to understand how groups interact and experience these services together. While personas are a powerful tool in design, typically focusing on individual needs, behaviors, goals, and context, we set out to explore the concept of “Group Persona.“ This concept aims to represent the needs, context, behaviors, and goals of a group of people and how their service journeys can be curated to be impactful. Traditionally, developing personas requires extensive user research, which consumes considerable time and resources. However, with recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), personas can now be created swiftly and accurately, even with minimal data inputs. This paper elaborates our exploration of utilizing LLMs for group persona generation with the intent of generating the most representative group personas that can be used in the design process. An innovative approach that harnesses AI to enhance the process of group persona generation is proposed. The methodology typically involved generating diverse samples of user participants, using role-plays with AI for interviewing the user participants and deriving group personas from the generated data, based on identified parameters essential for the group personas. The methodology was applied in the context of Air Travel service and the generated group personas were validated. The initial findings and observations from this are discussed in the paper.

In India, a significant portion of children and adolescents living with HIV (ALHIV) face formidable challenges due to lack of support and pervasive societal stigma in their daily lives. With the goal of empowering ALHIV to achieve their fullest potential, we devised a comprehensive service ecosystem using a Service Design approach. Given the sensitivity of the topic, conducting comprehensive primary user research was difficult. However, through surrogate user research and AI capabilities, we present an analysis of current scenarios and envision five distinct future scenarios tailored to the needs of ALHIV. These scenarios illuminate the transformative potential of AI and design in reshaping the lived experiences of ALHIV. This paper proposes a service design approach with integrated surrogate user research, speculative design methods and AI capabilities, aimed at envisioning future service experiences. It showcases a successful collaboration between a business organization and a prominent Non-Governmental Organization in Maharashtra, India, committed to enhancing the well-being of HIV patients.

Storytelling is a well-known technique to emphasize emotions. This paper explores the integration of storytelling techniques into service design to cultivate empathetic service experiences. Emphasizing the significance of emotional connection in social service contexts, we designed services for Adolescents Living with HIV (ALHIV) in India. Due to a lack of awareness and social stigma, ALHIV are unable to make timely and responsible life decisions around intimacy and HIV status disclosure. We designed services that disseminate essential information and enable ALHIV to make informed life decisions. The solution is an interactive story media where users make decisions around in-design encounters that parallel with possible real-life encounters. As a result, they get to explore multiple possibilities in a safe space, leading to improved real-life decision-making. This paper demonstrates the replicable framework of orchestration of human and technology touchpoints through multiple dynamic and choice-based scenarios. The study examines the synergy between service design and narrative frameworks. Through a detailed case study, the research underscores the pivotal role of storytelling in fostering genuine user engagement by infusing empathy-driven narratives into service encounters. Overall, this research contributes a novel perspective on designing empathetic services, demonstrating the role of storytelling in crafting meaningful service experiences.

Disruption is not new for humankind, and the education sector is recently experiencing it. Now short courses as part of lifelong learning are becoming the new norm. It is being offered by hundreds of educational institutes for learners to intellectually stay engaged and remain relevant in the current world. These short courses get credibility through micro-credential. This non-formal learning is evolving as a solution to democratizing education. It has the potential to scale and increase, the reach of education by dismantling the barriers of location, religion, gender, and socio-economic conditions. Developing countries like India are facing a disparity between the number of aspirants for quality education and the number of admissions to desired academic institutes. In the industry also, rapid upskilling is required, and it has emerged that the formal education system is unlikely to cope with multifold demands. Ever-increasing cost is also one of the barriers to democratizing education. The evaluation of the current micro-credential system and the demand helped to understand the research gap. The various aspects such as credibility, security, ecosystem, and the need for standards emerged through this research. We triangulated our findings with the inputs from key stakeholders in universities: faculty and students. This paper elaborates on the various aspects required for micro-credentials, what are the current barriers to proliferating and how the Indian current education ecosystem can leverage this opportunity to ‘go digital’ and ‘go global.’

In India, a significant number of children live with HIV. Due to a lack of awareness and social stigma, they do not make timely and responsible life decisions around intimacy and HIV status disclosure. In this paper, we share our experience of collaborating with Prayas Health Group (PHG), a prominent Non-Government Organization in Maharashtra (India) that is dedicated to enriching the lives of HIV patients. We used Service Design methods to create a solution that disseminates essential information and enables Adolescents Living with HIV (ALHIV) to make informed life decisions. The solution is an interactive story media where adolescents make decisions around in-design encounters that parallel with possible real-life encounters. As a result, they learn more about the subject and its implications, leading to improved real-life decision-making. This paper demonstrates the orchestration of human and technology touchpoints through multiple dynamic and choice-based scenarios.

Businesses constantly need novel ideas to sustain and grow. Ideation techniques often rely on human skills. It is difficult for untrained participants to be creative and arrive at high-quality ideas in quantity. Service design aids businesses to enhance their product and service offerings. Ideation processes in service design and business context need special attention considering the variety of stakeholders involved and their limited familiarity with creative techniques. We aim to make ideation more democratic and accessible to business stakeholders with a focus on quantity as well as quality. Using action research and research-through-design methods, we explored several approaches to enable collaborative ideation. We did this by leveraging creative techniques to enhance participants’ abilities to ideate effectively across design workshops. We discuss key takeaways and challenges from our experience, pointing towards looking at ideation as a lifecycle and the need to integrate service design sensitivity to ideation.

It is essential to develop a user research protocol before conducting studies to discover user needs. A user research protocol acts as a detailed plan of execution steps, guidelines, interview questions, and prompts, to enable consistency, effectiveness, and efficiency in the user research execution. Formulating relevant questions for a study is challenging and is human-skill dependent, prone to biases, and limited coverage of user research objectives. Our research aims at process and technology assistance to develop user research protocols, with a focus on aiding designers and business stakeholders to formulate the right questions to ask users. We define a two-stage process: Stage 1 is to transform the user research study objective into candidate questions and prompts. This step also leverages principles and approaches from service design to enrich the question formulation. Stage 2 is to generate a dynamic user research protocol, including the formulated questions. The protocol is updated through iterations of execution to sharpen the focus on developing areas of interest. The paper introduces this approach, illustrated with a walkthrough. This method has implications on democratizing user research and enabling large-scale user research.

Services are getting increasingly complex and extensive. Rapid growth in digitization, increased focus on customer satisfaction, continuous demand for innovation, and diverse views coming from multidisciplinary stakeholders are making service design a challenging endeavor. With its focus on human-centric and holistic approaches, service design is largely adopted by organizations for designing desirable and useful service concepts. A major final step in the service design process is service prototyping which helps to communicate the proposed service concepts. Each prototype has a specific intention with which it is created. The way service prototype is effectively and efficiently communicating the intents and meeting the stakeholder’s expectations is a crucial phase in the service design life cycle. The process of service prototyping becomes even more challenging considering the required time, effort, and resources. Generally, these multi-user activities within a service span across multiple encounters which adds to the complexity of prototyping. To address these concerns, various characteristics of a service prototype were identified, while exploring their relevance based on the service intent, context, and audience to develop the service prototyping framework. In this paper, we reflect on the challenges faced in two aspects of communication in service prototyping—challenges related to communication within the organization during the creation of the service prototype and challenges faced in communicating the prototype to stakeholders. We followed the methodology of “plan (research activities)–act (as planned)–observe (during activities)–reflect (on the observations)–refine and repeat” during several corporate projects we undertook in the past to arrive at service prototyping framework.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted employees’ lifestyles as well as organizational service experiences. Disrupted service experiences have led to changes in employee well-being, behavior, and responses, disrupting existing organizational structures and leading to diminished effectiveness of workplace and workforce management. Employee satisfaction at work has become more crucial post-pandemic for retaining employees in the organization. To thrive in the postpandemic situation, offering improved flexibility and adaptability in the employee lifecycle will enable employees to respond and recover faster and better. In this paper, we analyse the employee service experience problems and disruptive scenarios that have occurred due to the pandemic. We propose a Rapid Service Design (RSD) approach to mitigate gradually unfolding challenges, accelerate the service design process cycle time, and creatively and iteratively respond to service continuity in pandemic-like disruptions.

Enterprises are increasingly facing the need to be resilient in the face of uncertainty and dynamism. Simulatable digital twins have become critical aids for analyzing and adapting complex systems. Design thinking and service design methodologies, in contrast, are gaining momentum for ideation, subjective evaluation, and innovation. A systematic application of these methodologies to explore innovative ideas and a faithful virtual environment to test and fine-tune those ideas without impacting real systems could be transformational. This paper presents an approach that establishes a symbiotic relationship between these two approaches to introduce precision and innovativeness to make enterprises resilient. We describe the key characteristics of resilient enterprises, present our approach, and illustrate its effectiveness with a case study focusing on a transformation toward a new normal to address the Covid-19 pandemic induced disruptions in the IT industry.

Organizations are transitioning from a product mindset to services as their primary customer offering. Service organizations today have complex processes spread across physical and digital spaces involving several stakeholders. IT organizations help these organizations by building products and services and providing advisory to achieve their strategic objectives. IT organizations are hence well‐positioned to introduce this shift towards a service mindset and encourage the adoption of service design. IT organizations need to first decide whether they want to proliferate service design. However, there is a predicament about how to approach this ‐ should they start by designing the services for their customers first, or focus on their own organizational internal services? Once they decide it then next dilemma is about whether to follow top‐down or bottom‐up approach. We have utilized an ‘Inside‐out’ approach for proliferating service design to address these dilemmas. The approach of ‘inside‐out’, in essence, is about gradually proliferating a new process by experiencing its benefits within the organization first and then subsequently applying it to their customers outside the organization. In this paper we advocate the mix of top‐down or bottom‐up approach for the proliferation of service design.

Services must scale up to meet the varying contexts and demands of diverse consumer groups, especially for global consumers, citizen services and organisational services. To enable services for scale, the activity of service design must scale up concerned processes, tools, techniques and people. Beyond traditional design approaches, rather than depending on a handful of designers and stakeholders, we can reap benefits of a more significant number of people and designers, across regions, and considering a wide variety of issues, users and methods to inform the design of the services. In this paper, we deliberate on this conversation of scaling service design by primarily considering the phase of primary research, specifically qualitative user research. Although qualitative user research is accepted as an academic approach, it is often questioned on the grounds of validity and practicality of logistics. When considering service design for scale across very diverse user groups, data saturation may be challenging to achieve with a small number of samples. We argue that it is necessary to tackle more extensive qualitative studies if we want to scale up designing for services, with technology as an enabler. We highlight this need for conducting large-scale qualitative studies while covering theory and critique in literature and propose some of the approaches we have attempted in our service design practice.

Well implemented services can have a transformative impact on any organisation. The implementing team receives service design specifications once the design phase is complete. These specifications include blueprints, storyboards, touchpoint guidelines, among many other custom artefacts. Implementation of technical touchpoints, as envisaged by the designer, will bring the experience alive not only for service users but also for all stakeholders, including those from the service provider. However, after the handover, inconsistencies may often be introduced during the development of touchpoints. The touchpoints may differ from the designers’ original vision and affect the stakeholders’ unified experience. The place where touchpoints’ implementation went wrong is hard to trace. Hence, the long-term involvement of the designers with the development effort is recommended but may not always be feasible. The handover process, and the form and content of the service specifications are critical to reducing the strong dependency on the designers post-handover. In this paper, we propose a framework to map service specification to technical specifications, focusing on traceability and completeness. After scrutinising various technical specification templates to find the essential components, these components were mapped directly or indirectly, by diving deep into multiple artefacts of service specifications. Mapping this extensive technical specification with design specifications early in implementation makes it comprehensive and complete. They are hence reducing the dependency later in the implementation cycle. Such a technical specification document leads to seamless implementation.

Service design has proved its potential in creating effective and innovative solutions, desirable by users as well as service provider organizations. Service design, which follows holistic and human-centred approach, exhibits an enormous scope to address complex, large-scale problems like designing citizen services that are experiential, efficient and effective. Citizen services involve complexity due to the diverse user base and their varying needs; rapid technological advancements and increasing demands of users. The involvement of multiple stakeholders, socio-political and environmental changes across the globe makes it more complicated. In order to explore the effectiveness of the service design approach, methods and tools for citizen services, we undertook a speculative case study of Indian Postal Services. The study was broadly divided into research, analysis, ideation and conceptualization stages. A mix of quantitative and qualitative methods was used for user research, and derived insights were taken forward through ideation workshops using tools provided by CraftChange—service design for behaviour change framework. Ideas were clustered to create a service ecosystem comprising of peripheral as well as core services for India Post. This study emphasizes on adopting differentiating practices, tools and methods while designing citizen services, to achieve greater adoption and sustained usage of the services. Service design for behaviour change approach towards citizen services seems to be promising to have more holistic, valuable and sustainable services for the users, service providers, associated organizations and the society and environment.