Branded Healthcare Innovations, Experiences from a Service Design Workshop

Now that there is an expanding market for design skills into the field of service design and at the same time ‘products’ become ever more intangible, it becomes relevant to teach and explore this part of the discipline. At the same time, one can ask the question whether the principles of design are so fundamentally different when applied to intangible services instead of tangible products. For this paper we explored these topics with a group of eighteen third-year students of Industrial Design in a one week workshop setting. Divided in five groups the students developed branded healthcare services, supported by a range of both intuitive and more structured design techniques that were meant for developing innovative product concepts and tangible brand extensions. Based on the design results and the written student reflections we can conclude that the proposed design techniques were largely as effective in supporting the development of the branded healthcare services as they were in our previous experiences with more traditional products.