The Influences of Designing for Services in Product Design Oriented Organisations

As the service sector has become a crucial part of the economy, addressing service design by investigating the role of designers, design process, and tools and methods has a powerful potential to contribute to the professional needs, the industry, and also academic research. The increase of service sector in industrialized economies, the shift from manufacturing industries to service industries and the penetration of information and communication technologies especially in daily life have taken attraction to service design and product design oriented organisations cannot stay away from this powerful change. From this perspective, this paper aims to show how designing for services has (potential) influence in product design oriented organisations. The empirical part of this research, 12 in-depth face-to-face interviews were conducted with design practitioners who have several years of experience working in design consultancies and companies in Sweden and Denmark. Based on the framework of this paper, there are 3 levels of influences as powerful indications for change in product design oriented organisations: re-structuring the approach to design problems, re-structuring the way design organisations work internally and collaborate with their clients and re-structuring/re-organising the design organisation itself. The three levels of influence depend on industry needs, demands from client companies, users and how those needs and demands affect product design oriented organisations in addition to how much the mentioned organisations would be ready to go through the three levels of organisational change.