Codesign in Services

This elective course provides an understanding of the service design process with an emphasis on codesign. Different types of organisations, whether in private, public or third sectors, are looking to codesign approaches as a way to design better services that can meet human needs, while distributing benefits and burdens across society in equitable ways.

Codesigning services calls for a different way of doing things. Instead of designing 'for' people, it's about designing 'with' people. Also, designers must acknowledge that people's experiences of services can be cocreated by multiple stakeholders interacting through various types of service interfaces, such as rented products, environments and interpersonal encounters.

In this course you will study the fundamental concepts and theories about service codesign, learn to identify opportunities to use service codesign in tackling organisational challenges, and apply codesign methods for the creation of new services experiences.

You will put knowledge into practice, working in teams to conduct codesign sessions with invited groups of participants. And you understand the empowering role that professional designers can have in service codesign and learn to be more democratic in the making of design decisions.

The three learning objectives of this course will be assessed twice during the course:

Assignment 1: Students will be divided into groups, and each group will (1) conduct research on a given domain (e.g., healthcare, mobility, sustainability, etc.), (2) identify one or more opportunities to apply service codesign methods to create new services, and (3) carry out pilot codesign sessions with their peers to address one or more of the previously identified challenges. The deliverable is a presentation to the rest of the class. Groups will receive formative feedback, which does not count toward the final course grade.

Assignment 2: The same groups will plan and execute codesign sessions to further explore one of the challenges identified in Assignment 1. This assignment must involve external participants representing the target group, who are to be actively engaged and empowered throughout the design process. The deliverable is a group report following a predefined template, including an individual self-reflection on the learning experience from each student. This assessment is summative. The group report is graded on a scale from 0 to 10 to establish a baseline. Based on the quality of the individual self-reflection, up to 1.0 point may be added to or subtracted from this baseline to determine each student's final grade for the course.