Thaindian News

New Delhi, Dec 11 (IANS) With increasing commodisation, it has become necessary for businesses to think of an entire product eco-system instead of a product alone, says an expert.

This is where service design comes in. On the other side, the service sector constitutes about 70 percent of the economy. The companies in this domain also need “service design”.

These were some of the themes discussed at the just ended 11th CII-NID Design Summit here.

“We need to have ‘responsible design’ to be able to get our focus right,” Prasad Boradkar, Director, Innovation Space, Arizona State University, US, said. “Let us have foresight not forecast in service design.

“We need to envision products not in isolation but as components of larger networks; we need to imagine services not in individual terms but as systems; and we need to think of design not as being human-centered but as being life-centered,” he said.

The things we design are not merely expressions of form and function; they are critical components of everyday culture, and have intricate lives and deaths of their own,” Boradkar added.

“Design innovations are oxymorons,” said Mark Watson of Design Providence, Australia.

“Service design has emerged as a strong tool in change management across the ‘for profit’ as well as the ‘not for profit’ sectors in providing creative solutions to ‘wicked’ and ‘not so wicked’ problems in organisational operations internationally,” Watson said.

Jitendra Singh of Bangalore-based MindTree Ltd referred to his experiences with Aadhaar, the unique identification project of the government of India.

“Aadhar as a first-of-its-kind system in the country faced technological, social and political challenges. For instance, in some parts of southern India we had a peculiar issue with fingerprints. Some people didn’t have fingerprints! They had lost it with constant use of acids at work,” Singh said.