Abstract:

Design approach is widely utilized in different areas of society and as a contemporary approach to focus on citizen participation and engagement in urban ecosystems and cities, and co-development of public and private services. Service design is used to improve customer- and user-centricity in services. Several actors are engaged in process to solve challenging, multidisciplinary problems. Thus, service design is a multi-professional and multi-disciplinary approach, requiring a variety of decisions and choices during the process. Yet, literature on design is largely neglecting the potential of behavioral insights in informing and improving the quality of service design process and its outputs. Moreover, there is barely any discussion on how behavioral insight principles are educated in service design programmes. Hence, it is useful to examine the service design process to eliminate the effects of biases and heuristics in service development.

Behavioral insights may help service designers to view the participants in the service design process as decision-makers and to recognize the limitations of people in rational judgment and action. Behavioral insights rely on an understanding of behavioral economics and other related behavioral sciences regarding choice behavior. A key application of behavioral insights is the promotion of behavioral change through the design of the choice environment (i.e. choice architecture). In this paper, we question whether the behavioral insights are adequately considered in service design and its education. In business, one key approach, though untenable, is to rely on customers, users, and staff to act rationally. In service design, the team (and others involved in the process) face various selection situations, ones in which their own actions are affected by biases and heuristics on both individual and social context.

The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship between service design and behavioral insights for improved service innovation. Our exploratory study, which has just started, investigates how the biases and heuristics apparent in choice behavior manifest themselves in service design process. As an example, heuristic choice behavior can lead to the search for easy and obvious solutions that support the beliefs and perceptions of those involved in the process. In this paper, we identify development needs that would enable practitioners to achieve a more comprehensive and innovation-friendly service design. The research design deals with analysis of the main concepts, and definition of the relationships of the concepts. Our method includes literature review and focuses on analyzing service design process to identify areas in which behavioral insights can be useful. The conceptual development focuses the areas in the service design processes, which could help eliminate the effects of biases and heuristics in service innovation. As a result, we propose new relationships among constructs, and identify development needs for education of service design that would enable practitioners to achieve a more comprehensive and innovation-friendly service design.

Adopting the principles of behavioral insights may support the realization of the ideal of service design, and thus help people with multidisciplinary, multi-professional, and multi-expertise backgrounds to create genuinely new and innovative initiatives together.

Keywords:

Design, service design, behavioral insights, decision-making, biases.