Defining Services for Designers
Christo Sims,
Defining Services for Designers,
School of Information, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California, UCB iSchool Report 2007-002, March 2007
This paper is part of a larger effort to improve methodologies for service design. It focuses on one small, but fundamental,
component of this endeavor: defining services in a manner useful for designers. Doing so provides common vocabulary and conceptual
groundwork for differentiating services from products and distinguishing between different types of services. This paper begins
by aggregating and refining existing definitions of services. As will be shown, services differ from products in that they
are not entities; rather, they are social, technical or socio-technical relationships that transform something of value for
the service recipient. The paper then offers conceptual strategies for characterizing similarities and differences between
various service relationships. It proposes a multidimensional approach for mapping the service landscape. Such an approach
differs significantly from existing classification approaches and represents an exciting area for future research.
