Teaching Service Design in an Interdisciplinary Educational Context

Designing services include participation of users and stakeholders at different levels varying from minimum participation to co-creating with these actors to form a holistic perspective. Values are created collaboratively with people, but the intensity, the extent, the timing of involving people and their roles vary widely. Since such a context has a diverse nature in terms of including people with different backgrounds, mind-sets, and communication approaches, it is important to find a common platform for communicating with the design ideas and visualizing those design ideas in a group of students from different disciplines. Opening up the design process for others and finding a common platform for teams to communicate and prototype services especially in the early design process and might contribute to creating better services with higher qualities. Co-creation is in the focus of this paper as an approach in education because it allows people to communicate and cooperate among each other regardless of their backgrounds. Based on this perspective, the aim of this paper is to explore how to create initial design ideas in a group of students from different disciplines by getting all the students participate actively in the early design process. This exploration was made by conducting a series of workshops with students from industrial design undergraduate program as well as with students at different levels from entrepreneurship, business, psychology and engineering undergraduate programs. Depending on this exploration, enactment and mock-ups are found to be most effective tools during the early design process to fuel participation and creativity. Applying co-creation as an approach have benefits in terms of playing a role as a background for improving and increasing the creativity, thinking out-of-the-box and developing innovative solutions in the future.