Toward Sustainability: Design Techniques in Service Sector

Dear Colleagues,

The service economy is now the driving force behind the production of wealth in the world. However, the service, also called intangible production, creates pollution and contributes significantly to global warming. Indeed, the digital revolution does not make the service sector immune to energy consumption and, surprisingly, in a logic of globalization, social ties are very vulnerable to major incidents such as pandemics, migration, etc. A service experience corresponds to a social process whose "production" involves both service providers and a customer. This production process that leads to the resolution of a problem does not follow a linear sequence, as in the case of industrialized organizations. To improve these myriad service experiences and orchestrate them coherently towards greater sustainability, there are design techniques that can be used. Although these design techniques specific to the service sector have very different names (service design, design thinking, living lab, servicescape, ethnographic and semiotic design, etc.), they share the common feature of placing people and their environment at the center of the innovation process and are based on a multidisciplinary approach. In particular, there are essentially two co-production configurations: enabling service (active co-production) generating a high perception of value; and supporting service (passive co-production) generating a low perception of value. This is the great paradox of productions intangible. We firmly believe that in the future of services, the user strongly involved in co-production and co-creation will not only allow a real awareness on the part of all but will really have an impact on sustainability, even if some claim that only technology will solve all problems. Within the framework of this Special Issue, we are interested in receiving papers on the theme of design techniques applied to the service sector and which will allow the creation of new services to contribute to more sustainability on our planet. These papers can be based on micro as well as macro-approaches and can be both theoretical and practical.

Prof. Dr. Emmanuel Fragnière
Guest Editor

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• Design of services and experiences
• Sustainable developments
• Network, sharing and circular economies
• Sustainable enabling services
• Service orchestration, staging, scenography, and choreography