Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services
Author
Kim Goodwin
Publication Date
March 2009
Publisher
Wiley
Kim Goodwin's book is a pretty massive tome. She is the VP Design at Cooper and also runs their Cooper U curriculum, which aims to pass on their company knowledge to other employees.

The book's mandate is pretty broad, as the back of the cover blurb explains:

"Designing successful products and services in the digital age requires a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in interaction design, visual design, industrial design, and other disciplines. It also takes the ability to come up with the big ideas that make a desirable product or service, as well as the skill and perseverance to execute on the thousand small ideas that get your design into the hands of users. It requires expertise in project management, user research, and consensus-building."

What is good about it is that it covers a lot of approaches and methods from dealing with client briefs and research right the way through to managing teams and implementations and testing. As a kind of Bible of design in the modern age, it's really useful (and very useful to teach from too).

There is a small bit about service design specifically in there, but a lot of crossover due to her taking the time to explore different disciplines, touchpoint designs and approaches that service designers use.

The only danger with a book like this is that the methods and processes can become dogmatic. These kinds of books are best treated as great toolkits that you can use where appropriate, not as scripture that must be followed to the letter.

Designing for the Digital Age Filed under: digital, design, services, methods, techniques, cooper.
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One Comment
Lee McIvor on June 23, 2010 8:01am
This book is more a reference guide to goal-centred design than service design per se, but the fact that it provides an overview of the entire project lifecycle makes it still useful for service designers.

It also has a large section devoted to qualitative customer research and using it to generate customer archetypes / personas for use in then designing for them.

Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services
By Kim Goodwin
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  1. Goal-Directed Product and Service Design
  2. Assembling the Team
  3. Project Planning
  4. Research Fundamentals
  5. Understanding the Business
  6. Planning User Research
  7. Understanding Potential Users and Customers
  8. Example Interview
  9. Other Sources of Information and Inspiration
  10. Making Sense of Your Data: Modeling
  11. Personas
  12. Defining Requirements
  13. Putting It All Together: The User and Domain Analysis
  14. Framework Definition: Visualizing Solutions
  15. Principles and Patterns for Framework Design
  16. Designing the Form Factor and Interaction Framework
  17. Principles and Patterns in Design Language
  18. Developing the Design Language
  19. Communicating the Framework and Design Language
  20. Detailed Design: Making Your Ideas Real
  21. Detailed Design Principles and Patterns
  22. Detailed Design Process and Practices
  23. Evaluating Your Design
  24. Communicating Detailed Design Ensuring Success
  25. Supporting Implementation and Launch
  26. Improving Design Capabilities in Individuals and Organizations