Master’s in Service & Experience Design
Director: Elena Pacenti
The MA in Service and Experience Design is offered during the following term/s:
September 2012 – August 2013
The Master in Service and Experience Design is not yet validated by the University of Wales. Students will receive a Master’s Diploma at the completion of the program.
| PROGRAM DESCRIPTION |
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Due to the utmost importance of the service sector in our contemporary world economy, high customer expectations for a quality level of service standard is rapidly expanding. Thus, service companies will be looking for greater differentiation and competitiveness through innovative ideas and outstanding experiences, hence, requiring more qualified professional profiles.
Service design is a relatively recent interdisciplinary practice that emphasizes the centrality of users and the user experience into service management and innovation, promoted by a growing community of academic and professional practitioners, in Europe and abroad.
The Master program focuses on consumer services (B2C): from banks and insurance, hospitality and tourism, mobility and transportation, entertainment and culture, retail and commercial, to healthcare and public services.
Lessons will offer fundamentals on services, such as basic concepts and definitions, sectors and taxonomies, typologies and delivery modes, the historical and evolutionary phenomena; socio- economical issues affecting the service industry, such as environmental sustainability, social innovation and the experience economy; main principles and tools of service management and organizational issues, such as business planning and service operations mgmt; design culture language and approaches; service design methods and tools, such as customer journeys, touch-point maps, service interaction guidelines, and visualization tools. The lessons will be divided into 5 courses:
- Service Fundamentals: The course offers basic concepts and definitions, fields, sectors, taxonomies, typologies and delivery modes; historical and evolutionary perspectives of different fields; automation and de-localization phenomena; industrialization and “McDonaldization;” e-services and new media.
- Service Economies: Services are considered with respect to social and economic innovation, and within specific socio-economical contexts and themes such as: environmental sustainability, social services and welfare, experience economy and industry.
- Service Management: The fundamentals of service management are provided as a knowledge basis for the complementary service design approach: from strategic management and organizational issues, business planning, logistics and service operations management.
- Service Design: The service design approaches, principles, concepts and tools following the recent discipline to manage the quality of the interaction and the experience of users: customer journeys, touch-point maps, service interaction guidelines, offering maps and simulations, story boarding, mapping and all visualization tools and prototyping methods.
- Design Thinking: The course briefly presents the specific language and approach of the design culture and how such a culture has become a strategic level of innovation for companies, More specifically, principles and methods of the interaction design culture are explained for their affinity to service design development.
- Customer experience: The first workshop will be focused on the analysis and assessment of the customer experience within an existing service context. The assessment will be performed through the application of specific methods and tools: customer journey, touch-points analysis, ethnographic observation and interaction guidelines. The objective of the workshop will be to design improvements to the present case.
- Service innovation: The focus of the second workshop will be to identify business opportunities for innovative service ideas in a specific sector. After the competitive analysis of the existing players, the participants will define a new concept to be positioned on the market. Its feasibility will be acquired through service management tools. The envisioning phase will be supported by advanced concept generation methods and tools.
- Branding services: Through steps related to the brand value analysis, visibility and accessibility issues, touch-points analysis, the workshop aims at defining a coherent brand strategy for service companies. The outcome of the workshop is the creation of a brief for identity and advertisement, together with the consistent briefing for all the aspects of the service interface (personnel scripts, media and communication, signs, information, corporate identity).
- Thematic workshops (hospitality, health care, well-being, retailing…): The thematic workshops address specific service design cases. They are developed together with the partnership of a service company, and have the goal of pursuing concrete improvements and innovations to be tested in a real service environment. The briefing of the workshop, to be developed by the directors, project leaders, and company management, must identify meaningful challenges both for design and business objectives.
Thesis: Each student individually develops a Master thesis project on themes related to innovation in the service industry, with a project leader and cooperation of a company.
| AUDIENCE |
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The Master in Service and Experience Design addresses professionals and graduates in humanistic studies, social sciences and communication, business and design-related disciplines.
| PROGRAM OBJECTIVE |
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The aim of the Master Program is to develop professional skills for Service Design and Management, with a focus on the quality of the overall customer experience and on the design of innovative service ideas. The educational objective is to impart upon participants all the conceptual and operational tools for designing and managing service innovations, such as, customer experience assessment and improvement; design of service organizational procedures; service interface design; as well as envisioning the feasibility and implementation of new service ideas.
During the master program, participants will learn and practice conceptual and operational tools for:
- understanding the service sector peculiarities and evolutionary patterns, with respect to B2C contexts, use critical and reflective thinking to conceive innovative business opportunities
- design-driven methods and practices for customer experience assessment and improvement
- apply recent theories and methods for service operations management through specific case-studies
- designing and modeling incremental and disruptive innovation for the service industry through viable and competitive service ideas
| THE FUTURE |
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Participants of the Master program can aspire to a wide range of career opportunities:
- Banks, finance, insurance
- Commercial services: GDO (Carrefour, Auchan, Coop, Esselunga), Retail (fashion, design, food, consumer electronics, books and music…), Real Estate
- Hospitality & tourism: low cost companies, luxury hotel, territorial agencies, tourism offices, agencies, tour operators, travel agencies, cultural travel agencies
- Healthcare & Wellness: hospitals, clinics, care centers, prevention centers, wellbeing centers/spas
- Mobility & transportation: urban mobility, bike and car sharing, railway, airline companies, highways companies
- Entertainment & Culture: museums, cultural public and private operators
- ITC services: telecom companies (Vodafone Telecom, etc.), e-commerce and communication companies
| COMPETITION: “SERVICE DREAMS” |
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The Master in Service and Experience Design prepares professionals to promote innovation for service industries, both within the private and the public sector. Service design can be applied in very diverse contexts at the urban scale: mobility and public transports, tourism, cultural and social services, retail and distribution, finance, housing, object maintenance and repair, food delivery and restaurants, hospitality, health care and wellness… Service design seeks to promote human-driven innovation, design better environments and relationships, and create new platforms enabling service improvement and innovation. The competition “Service Dreams” invites you to think about the next generation of services in the perspective to improve the services that permeate our daily lives. Dream Service are service ideas that can contribute to make the world you live in a better place.
The Competition: Your design challenge is to submit a proposal for an ideal service – your Service Dreams – to improve the quality of daily living in your city/country (you can focus on mobility, social aspects, financial services, public support, travel, housing, etc.). The idea should clearly represent a benefit for the users, promote social exchange, and encourage sustainable behaviors. Your dream service can rise from an existing context, you would really like to improve, or from an existing problem or users’ need that has not yet been answered. As a starting point and source of inspiration, you should think about one or more possible user profiles, their preferences and their habits when living and moving around the city. The service idea can live in a short, medium, or long-term perspective with respect to its feasibility and complexity.
- 01_the service context: clearly describe the specific context, the current situation, and the reason for your service idea (why)
- 02_the provider and the users: choose the user profile to whom your service idea is addressed (who will use your service) and understand who can be the provider (who)
- 03_ the service idea: try to explain your service idea briefly. What is it? How does it work? Please use any representation tools to help better understand the service (what)
- 04_describe the benefits for the environment and the behavioral changes it triggers
- 05_poster: create a poster (and treat it as an adv for the new service) that promotes your idea and presents it to the public.
Materials Required:
- Project description: maximum 5 A4 illustrated boards (including a written description);
- Curriculum vitae of the participant: maximum 1 A4;
- Statement of purpose: maximum 5 lines on an A4 page.
The candidates are asked to send their materials in one sole file in .PDF format Any further attached material will be considered a plus and will be evaluated by the jury.
Prizes:
- One scholarship covering 70% of the total tuition fee of the Master Program.
- One scholarship covering 50% of the total tuition fee of the Master Program.
- One scholarship covering 30% of the total tuition fee of the Master Program.
Deadline: Electronic entries must be sent to: micaela@saiprograms no later than May 4, 2012. Candidates will be informed about the results of the competition by e-mail on May 18th, 2012.