Service Design

Overview

Service design is a human-centred discipline which focuses on:

• designing services in the public or private sector
• working in a participative, iterative and qualitative manner with all stakeholders
• considering wider systems at play.

By developing and applying service design to a range of societal and business challenges, this course will enable you to work on live projects, collaborate with stakeholders, partners and experts across multiple disciplines, and use design at a strategic level.

This Service Design course at University of the Arts London (UAL) is structured to guide you through the understanding and practice of service design, starting from current challenges at the local and user scale before progressing through to futures and systems levels.

What can you expect?

• We value making and design-based methods throughout the course. From the very beginning, you’ll work collaboratively on projects using research and co-design strategies, evolving from team work in the first terms to developing more individual work towards the end.
• You’ll undertake projects that tackle many of the social, corporate and environmental challenges facing the 21st century. You’ll develop the confidence to engage with stakeholders, and learn to analyse and apply the results through meaningful interventions.
• You’ll end the course by completing a Major Project. Previously, these have ranged widely in terms of subject and geographical location – past examples include redesigning educational systems in India, creating games to facilitate conversations between relatives of transgender people, designing post-acceleration support programmes for technology start-ups, and designing digital services for refugee camp volunteers in Greece.
• Practice and theory are embedded into everything that you’ll do: each practice-based project is underpinned by theory, and each theory-based assignment has an element of practice or research-through-design.
• Your lessons will take the form of lectures, practical workshops, tutorial sessions, feedback sessions with experts, presentations and pitches, industry talks, museum visits and technical sessions.
• MA Service Design is aimed at applicants from design disciplines who wish to broaden their understanding of innovation and design as a collaborative, interdisciplinary process. The course is also open to students with backgrounds in social sciences, business and innovation, and other related fields.