Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University and The School of Design

Founded in 1900 and home to more than 90 centers and institutes, Carnegie Mellon University is recognized for its unique interdisciplinary environment encouraging and supporting work across departmental lines from computing to the arts to the environment and biotechnology.

Housed in the College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design believes design to be a humanistic discipline that focuses on answering real human needs in the context of everyday living. Our design education supports learning by doing, balancing theory and practice, and developing a student’s individual voice when approaching human-centered design. The use of a human-centered model, with a concern for psychological, social, and cultural factors on the one hand, and technical and economic factors on the other, was pioneered at Carnegie Mellon and is now widely embraced as a design standard around the world.

Carnegie Mellon recognizes that design shapes the experiences of people as they interact with products and situations enabling them to achieve their goals and objectives. In this way, designers define product behavior, mediating relationships between people and people, people and products, people and environments, and people and services across a variety of contexts.

Service Design

Service design at Carnegie Mellon began in 2004 with the course “Designing for Service”. Today plans are underway to develop a professional Masters program in Integrated Service Design and Innovation. It is our view that services have been consciously designed, but rarely with the participation of designers or transdisciplinary teams. When they have, they’ve looked back toward product design for inspiration. Carnegie Mellon’s work in service design looks forward toward designing in ways that stimulate senses, connect deeply with people’s lifestyles, emphasize the broader social and cultural context of people’s actions and provide support through a networked service ecology or system of systems.

We create resources that choreograph interactions and design the service interface that enables participants to co-produce value utility, satisfaction and delight. This is done by creating a service system framework composed of multiple interfaces and touch points. They are consciously inter-connected, so that they can sense, respond, and reinforce one another. In order to do this effectively, designers need to understand the interactions, cycles of experience/journey, and the context or delivery channel.

They do this in a number of ways including: developing a rich portrait of the stakeholders; focusing on the total customer journey; understanding the core competencies of the service provider; and over-all, embracing an ethnographic approach for the process of exploration and discovery. Ultimately a system is created that is dynamic enough to efficiently reflect the expectations people bring to the experience at any given moment.

More information about Carnegie Mellon: www.design.cmu.edu