In a twelve-week Service Design course, students are developing ideas that involve multiple touch points, channels, platforms and interactions. To enable students to grasp, articulate and comprehend this inherent complexity, they are instructed in creating a service diagram.
This is challenging because to this date, these students have only been trained to draw singular products/interactions for only one type of end user. To help them to adopt a more systemic, birds eye point of view, the teacher demonstrates how to create such a diagram.
The students are asked to tell a story of how they envision one or two stakeholders interact within the service concept, while the teacher starts to take visual notes that throughout the duration of the student’s story telling evolves into a diagram. The visual translation from storytelling diagram helps students to ’bridge’ between text, language to the visual representation of complexity.
The students are told that it will take time to develop this kind of visualization, and that practice will help them to develop a visual vocabulary from which over time it will become easier to source from.
Describe how this learning experience enables students to develop their design competencies.
Being instructed in creating these diagrams, students are taught to develop a visual thinking vocabulary, which they can use to articulate different design elements, upon which they can start to synthesize the systemic connections that are necessarily to enable a service concept to be realized.
