Service design is a relatively new discipline which seeks to apply some of the rationale behind other kinds of design to the service sector. Given its relative novelty, it is not surprising that there are any number of ways of describing service design. Below are some examples from this family of definitions:
When you have two coffee shops right next to each other, that each sell the exact same coffee at the exact same price, Service Design is what makes you walk into the one and not the other.- Marc Fontejin, 31 volts
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| - Paul Thurston, thinkpublic |
Service design addresses the functionality and form of services from the perspective of clients. It aims to ensure that service interfaces are useful, usable, and desirable from the client's point of view, and effective, efficient, and distinctive from the supplier's point of view.
- Birgit Mager, Köln International School of Design
What has service design got to do with Business English?
At a basic level, Business English is a service - the training, coaching, and teaching of linguistic and paralinguistic sets to clients who have specific needs. As a service, Business English is open to design in the same way that a night at the opera is, or passport control.
One of the defining features of Business English is its diversity. There are any number of Business Englishes which are delivered across a range of media, to a variety of clients, using dozens of methodologies, for scores of reasons, across numerous time frames.
Given the diversity of the Business English service, it is likely that there will be many areas in which Business English can be redesigned and enhanced to improve the usefulness, usability and desirability of the learning experience for students, and the effectiveness, efficiency, and distinctiveness for teachers and schools. This blog will, in part at least, explore some of these areas.
