How HCI Interprets Service Design: A Systematic Literature Review

The scope of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research is expanding with regard to the studied systems and stakeholders, and its impact areas. Service design has recently gained tractions in HCI as an approach to deal with these expansions. However, there has been confusion around the definitions and roles of service design in HCI, especially with its overlaps and differences with interaction design. To examine how HCI has adopted service design, this paper presents results from a systematic literature review on 52 papers from the most cited HCI publication venues. Our findings show that the adoption of service design concepts and methods in HCI has been sporadic over the past decade. The term service design has been interpreted as a variety of meanings. The most predominantly observed understandings include service design as a term for designing digital services instead of products, and as an approach providing a journey and system perspective to the design of social computing, Internet of Things, or other complex systems. Only a few studies adopted the fundamental logic of new value exchange or co-creation of systems from service design. We discuss the reasons behind the differing interpretations of service design by HCI and future opportunities for HCI to better benefit from service design.