Skip to main content

Cornell University

Service Design Methodology

An Intervention for Engineering Design

4. People

Page Contents

Learning Objectives

  1. Identify reelevant people and roles relevant to a service design project.

  2. Map and differentiate roles of users, staff, and stakeholders.

  3. Lay groundwork for collaboration across diverse roles and perspectives.

  4. Engage participants through co-creation methods like interviews, workshops, and prototyping.

  5. Gather and interpret user feedback throughout the design process.

  6. Adapt service designs based on evolving insights and lived experiences.

  7. Reflect on shared ownership and the ethics of designing with people, not just for the

Examples

Collaboration is a fundamental pillar of any design process. Creating a well-rounded, user-centered design requires diverse perspectives and input from multiple stakeholders. In the image above, Julia (left) and Tej (right) work together to prototype their fog harvester, which uses a charged wire to extract water from the air.

Two people collaborating in a modern kitchen setting. A woman with long brown hair wearing an orange sweater holds a black handheld device with green accents, while a man in a gray hoodie extends his hands toward the device, appearing to interact with or test it. The kitchen features light wood cabinets, windows, and modern appliances in the background. The scene suggests a demonstration or testing of the handheld technology

People Video

Gathering Insights Slides

Interview Protocol

Levels of Insights and Insights-Gathering Methods

In Chapter 4 of Service Design, you learned that there are three levels of insights: low, middle, and high. Gathering insights mostly from secondary sources, as in published scholarly literature, is a great way to begin situating your design project. Journal articles, patents, technical standards and reports, and regulatory agencies can offer background information to help you specifically define a problem as well as explore how others have attempted to solve it.  

This semester, you will conduct a site visit, which would be considered a middle-level insight. As a we move forward, the goal is form teams and begin to formulate a design idea with high-level insights.

At this time, you should start to formulate questions that will guide you toward a design opportunity. Determine what questions to ask a relevant person–perhaps an end user or field expert–in a depth interview, which is defined as “long, in-context interviews that tend to be fairly open in their structure” (Polaine, Løvlie, & Reason, 2013). The authors of Service Design recommend, “Meet participants in their own homes or places of work to bring ethnographic context into the interview” (Polaine, Løvlie, & Reason, 2013). 

We will review the Gathering Insights Slides during class and discuss levels of insights.

Interview Opportunities

  • Visiting the Ithaca Farmers Market will provide an opportunity to talk to many agricultural experts and farmers in the area.
  • Ask your instructor if there are other topics you are interested in because they may be able to connect you with experts in the area

Resource: Service Design (course textbook)

Refer to the reading you did in Week 3 in Service Design, particularly Chapter 4, “Turning Research into Insight and Action.”

Submitting Instructions

Submit the commenting link to the Google Doc. The brief video below shows how to obtain the commenting link.

Reference

Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, & Ben Reason. (2013). Service Design : From Insight to Implementation. Rosenfeld Media. https://catalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/16410339 

Developing & Researching User Personas Slides

User Persona

To situate your team’s proposed design for actual users, extend the sketch you discussed in class into a full user persona. Research your persona using the resources provided by the Cornell Engineering librarian to get a sense of their needs. Remember the service design adage of designing with people, not for them. This means we need to both imagine and involve users throughout the design process and iterate to better serve their needs.

Content Areas

Include all of the following in the user persona:

  • Image/Photo
  • Demographics (age, income, location/resources, experience, type of business)
  • Goals
  • Motivations
  • Frustrations
  • Technical skill set
  • Available props

User Persona Templates

Create a persona with either:

  • Edit.orgLinks to an external site.
  • USDA.govLinks to an external site.

Submission

Download a template, tailor it to fit your user persona, and upload a PDF or image file. You may also upload an image into a Google Slide if desired.