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Introduction
Co-design is increasingly popular in many businesses and organizations (Binder, Brandt, & Gregory, 2008). However, co-design is sometimes used as a buzz word and it is not always entirely clear how co-design contributes to a service design project. The goal of this paper is to help the people who are involved in co-design to articulate more precisely and realistically which benefits to aim for, and to match these benefits to the goals of a service design project. We do that by identifying and discussing a range of possible benefits of co-design in service design projects.
Sanders and Stappers (2008) used the term co-creation to refer to "any act of collective creativity, i.e. creativity that is shared by two or more people", and used the term co-design in a more narrow sense to refer to the "collective creativity as it is applied across the whole span of a design process". In line with this use of these terms, we will focus on co-design in this narrower sense, that is, on creative cooperation during design processes--rather than on the co-creation, which also refers to creative cooperation during service delivery and usage, for example, to interactions between customers and service provider at service touch points. In co-design, diverse experts come together, such as researchers, designers or developers, and (potential) customers and users--who are also experts, that is, "experts of their experiences" (Sleeswijk Visser, Stappers, Van der Lugt, & Sanders, 2005)--to cooperate creatively. We will pay special attention to involving users and customers in the design process and putting their experiences central (Alam, 2002; Edvardsson, Gustafsson, Kristensson, Magnusson, & Matthing, 2006; Kujala, 2003; Muller, 2002; Sanders, 2000). Furthermore, we use the term service design to refer to the process of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service, with the goal of improving the service's quality, the interactions between a provider and its customers, and the customers' experiences (Mager, 2008).
This paper is based on the assumption that co-design is critical to service design because different perspectives, and a productive combination of different perspectives, are needed in order to understand both a service's demand side, i.e. users' and customers' needs, and its supply side, i.e. technologies and processes, in order to develop successful...