Over the past four years, a number of benefits have been observed from teaching design for services to undergraduate BDes product design and BEng/MEng product design engineering students resulting in design students that are more aware of the need to, and how to consider users when designing products, and of considering the context of the user experience within which these products exist. The teaching is delivered in a project-based, studio culture as problem-based learning through projects addressing real user issues. Working on real world problems with external clients has provided a focus for developing these skills and a touchstone for assessing project outcomes.

Designing for services in the form of service design thinking, methods and tools brings an added perspective to a product design problem and this paper aims to create a debate around introducing service design methods and processes into a product design / engineering curriculum and discusses the benefits to the students’ design learning experience.