Toward a Participatory Design Approach to Service Design

Abstract

This paper introduces service design as a potential Participatory Design (PD) theme. It proposes that the success of designing good services can be increased by including the perspectives and practices of the future service participants into the design process. Through the description of an action-research project, the paper explores the potentials and limitations of using an ethnographic approach and Activity Theory to frame the service design process and interpret the complexity of services.