Designing Service Machines: Translating Principles of System Science to Service Design

The concept of service system and service science has evolved over last two decades to counter the Baumol’s disease. Productivity increase in service is possible in some cases, but it does not necessarily follow the manufacturing model. Services have been subject to scientific inquiry for generating new knowledge about services, how they can be measured and evaluated, and understanding how they work. Traditional service science literature from marketing perspective assumes that if it could be found out what customers want and are willing to pay for, produc-ers’ will scramble to deliver. However, as services grow in complexity, it can’t be assumed that merely knowing what should be done would get it done. A systematic exploitation of knowledge is required to design the service production systems. This chapter outlines the need for a new metaphor called Service Machine, intended to work as a quick-and-dirty shorthand tool for aiding production engineering effort towards design of service production systems.