Developing service design within the product design programme at Glasgow School of Art, involved exploring areas of commonality between product and service design and the parallel skills that can be applied to both. During this process, we had the opportunity to consider how we teach design in a service context and to begin the process of developing a common framework for a service design language within the department.

To help develop this knowledge and expertise and to complement design and social science skills within the department, service design professionals were brought in to share their professional practice and knowledge through workshops with the students. Projects were run with the year 3 product design students in collaboration with an external client to provide a real-world context, user-groups and stakeholders for the project.

There were also interesting spin-off benefits to the projects. As well as the students, and staff, benefiting from input professional service designers, we also noted the value of delivering design tools and prototypes to the client organisation. These tools and prototypes were used to disseminate the service propositions internally, but had the added benefit of raising awareness to service design thinking and processes within the organisation. Over the last two summer breaks, two students per year have been employed on internships to develop ideas generated during the projects. Also, some of the project outputs were used to help develop briefs for service design consultancies.

The benefits for the students and staff within the product design department and the client organisation, as well as spin-off work for graduates and consultancies have been numerous. Some of these benefits could have been predicted, but many were not, and it is with reflection that these benefits were identified.