Lucy Kimbell and Design 4 Services

Designing for Services essays

I first met Lucy Kimbell at the Royal College of Art in 2003 where she was teaching interaction design. Now she has an interesting role at Saïd Business School in Oxford. She is teaching design approaches and processes to MBA students next to doing her own research. It may seem unusual for a business school to have a designer enrolled, but more and more B-schools do, for instance the D-school at Stanford University, and Tanaka Business School at Imperial College collaborates with the Royal College of Art in Design London. A panel I attended back in 2007 even wondered “Are D-schools the new B-schools?” [link] Generally the idea is that business strategy can benefit from approaches designers take, ranging from co-creation to experience prototyping, from visualising customer journeys to service blueprinting. In 2007 she set up Designing for Services (D4S) at Saïd, with Victor Seidel.  They connected service design companies to technical start-ups in Cambridge, to see if this would lead to new application areas of the inventions of these start-ups. The whole project is well documented and reflected upon, as you would expect from an academic project. You can download the final collection of D4S essays. Our next Service Design reading circle in Amsterdam has taken this publication as its topic. If you want to join, become a member via the Facebook group of Service Design Netwerk Nederland. We have several copies of the D4S essays available if you want one. You will even find a reference to my beloved design documentaries, which served as inspiration for some of the filming that happened in D4S.