Families and services: understanding opportunities for co-production of value in service design

• Authors: Jodi Forlizzi;John Zimmerman;Steven Dow
• Venue: DPPI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces
• Year: 2011

Services comprise the backbone of most economies. As the design community increasingly conceives of and communicates about service relationships, we need a theoretical understanding of how such relationships originate, evolve, and co-create value over time. The home provides a resource for studying service dynamics. How are services purchased and perceived within the home? What do people value about domestic services, and how is value collectively produced between service providers and consumers? How do examples of service co-production in domestic settings extend to other service domains? To answer these questions, we undertook a nationwide survey of US households, followed by a number of in-depth interviews, in order to understand opportunities for service co-creation. Our findings reveal how customers and providers co-create services in the home. Domestic services rarely are performed autonomously; instead, there is an active, adaptive dialogue between customer and service provider. This intensely personalized interaction provides a basis for studying successful service co-production between customers, domestic service providers, and other organizations. We found service consumers and providers perceive the service experience with different cultural framings. Moreover, customers report more satisfying experiences when stakeholders co-produce the service through open dialogue and identifying mutual value. We describe the opportunities and breakdowns of service co-production, and discuss the design implications that follow.