Service Designers’ Information Seeking: Consulting Peers Versus Documenting Designs

Abstract

Service design is an information intensive activity. This study aims to investigate service designers’ information behavior and understand the roles people and documents play as information sources for service designers. Ten designers were interviewed about their information seeking behavior in one service design project from its start to its completion. The interviewees were asked to describe and reflect upon their choice of information sources and their use of project documentation. Each interview lasted about 1.5 h. The interviews were transcribed in full and the transcripts were coded with respect to design activities, information sources used, and reflections on information behavior. People served five different roles as information sources and documents served four. Documents became increasingly important sources of information as projects progressed because still more information was recorded in writing. Consistent with previous research, people play an important role because of their easy accessibility and the good quality of the information they provide. In contrast, the forward-looking role of document creation restricts the backward-looking roles of the resulting documentation. We speculate that the consultancies suffer from poor integration across documents.