Design Fiction as a service design approach

Abstract

Many of the techniques service designers currently use to represent their ideas in the conceptual phase of their design process, such as service blueprints or customer journey
maps, are rather abstract, static and schematic. While this might be valuable from an analytical, high-level perspective, such representations do not address the full contextual,
emotional and spatial-temporal richness of real-life services. This paper argues that design fiction, because of its focus on telling stories about possible implications of new and
emerging technologies, could have the potential to address this particular issue early on. While design fiction is currently mostly associated with more ‘underground’ design domains, such as speculative design and critical design, its principles might also be applied to service design, to visualize, explore and probe potential service scenarios already in the beginning of a design process.