Towards a New Agenda for Service Design Research

This paper presents the findings from a systemic enquiry into the current research on Service Design (SD). It examines academic publications on SD over the last two decades using a summative content analysis of 305 articles that use SD as one of its 'author provided subjects'. The analysis revealed: (1) three distinct groups of publications that use SD differently, with research rooted in Design (142 articles) seen as the driver for development of SD as a discipline; (2) a typological overview of SD research including nine categories differentiated by 'knowledge' and 'methods'. The findings suggest that SD research is largely comprised of practice-oriented and phenomenological studies based on interpretative approaches. Research underpinned by objectivism is noticeably rarer. Future research needs to go beyond practice-based research, to embrace more objective and systemic approaches.