Service Design and Urban Needs

Service design covers the visible and invisible actions that make up everyday life. In a city, the interactions between people and places, through transactions, actions, and rituals, are how we get our days, weeks, and years to work. Service design is a way to understand those experiences and a practical tool for changing them.

The first half of the term builds the core skills through cases, methods workshops, and field observation, including a day at Detroit Metro Airport, where students read an entire airport as a service. The second half puts those skills on a live project with Michigan’s state courts, where the class works as a civic design studio to reimagine the legal experience for the people who move through it.

By the end of the term, students will be able to:

• Run mixed methods research, ethnographic and desk, to understand a service context in depth.
• Map a service in full, reading the frontstage a person meets and the backstage that staff operate, and locate the pain points and opportunities in the journey.
• Build presentations that tie every claim to a research insight, and pitch them to the people in the room.
• Hold user experience and operational reality together in the design artifacts you make.
• Turn insights into a working digital prototype that shows an improved service experience.

Every week runs on two tracks. Tuesdays build the operating rhythm a team uses to ship work. Thursdays build the service design methods that turn observation into a redesign.

• 01IntroductionTue Course orientation and expectationsThu Service design fundamentals
• 02Seeing the SystemTue Observation practices and signal detectionThu Journey mapping and fieldwork methods
• 03Structure and FlowTue Ecosystem mappingThu Friction analysis and insight generation
• 04Language and MeaningTue Operating rhythm introductionThu Plain language and content strategy
• 05Decision MakingTue Team standupsThu Decision trees and information structure
• 06Power and StakeholdersTue Backlog groomingThu Stakeholder mapping and constraints
• 07Midterm SynthesisTue Sprint retrospective and preparationThu Midterm presentations
• 08From Insight to InterventionTue Operating sessionsThu Concept development and system scenarios
• 09Designing for ScaleTue Standups and prioritizationThu Prototyping digital services
• 10Testing and LearningTue Operating sessionsThu Testing assumptions and failure modes
• 11Refinement and FocusTue Backlog refinementThu Iteration and design critique
• 12Delivery MechanicsTue Standups and check insThu Preparing digital artifacts
• 13IntegrationTue Final sprint sessionsThu System coherence and handoff thinking
• 14Polish and NarrativeTue Operating sessionsThu Storytelling and presentation design
• 15Final PreparationTue Dry runs and final adjustmentsThu Final review and critique
• 16Final ReviewTue Final presentationsThu Course reflection and close

For most people, access to justice looks like a PDF. A confusingly worded checkbox, a cramped text field, a sheet of instructions that expects a law degree. In the second half of the term, the class works with Michigan’s state courts on the forms that decide whether a person can halt an eviction, reclaim a security deposit, or file a claim without a lawyer.

A shelf that tracks the term, from the research at the start to the forms in the courts project.

• Just Enough Research, Erika Hall. Read against the mixed methods research that opens the term.
• This Is Service Design Doing, Marc Stickdorn and colleagues. Read against journey mapping and the frontstage and backstage.
• Letting Go of the Words, Janice Redish. Read against plain language and the court forms.
• Ends, Joe Macleod. Read against testing, failure modes, and how a service ends.

• Taubman College students create innovative concepts to welcome new residents in collaboration with the State of Michigan’s population growth effort. Taubman College, April 2024.