By 2020, we would like to become the hotspot in service design academic activities and projects. We also strive to formalize the service design knowledge, by giving it a scientific approach and legitimacy in Colombia. Finally, we would like to use all that knowledge and apply it in the country aligning the companies (public and private sector), academics and the government.

Service Design in Colombia:

Service design in Colombia began with an academic vision at universities like Los Andes, EAFIT and Javeriana.

According to María Cristina Hernández Director of the Design Management Máster at EAFIT University. It begins with Product Design Undergraduate program whose graduates started to work at service companies like Bancolombia, Sura (Insurances) and also started to offer their knowledge and skills as a service itself. Another source of awareness was their academic trips to china, north europe, and England where they saw how service design was being adopted at many corporations and Universities .

After all of this, they acknowledge the need to develop service design in their courses and in 2006 and 2007 they started to formalize their knowledge with universities like TuDelft. It lead to the inclusion of SD in the curriculum of Product Design Program (and Design Management Máster)

At los Andes University, Natalia Agudelo and Silvia Lleras were pioneers publishing with the los Andes University two documents where several classroom projects were documented from 2008 to 2012. Moreover, the University has participated in events with speeches on service design since 2010. In addition to, the university organized the first Bogotá Service Jam edition in 2013. They currently offers a Design Master program and seminars about experience design. 

At Business Schools, the marketing departments started to discuss the implications of the rise of services economy and how to develop and implement marketing strategies. There was an special influence of lusch and vargo with their seminal paper about Service Dominant Logic vs Product Dominant Logic (2004), and Christian Grönroos who wrote: “Marketing as a Promise Management: regaining customer management for marketing” (2009)

EAFIT started to attend to different scenarios like (DMI -design management institute- SDN -Service Design Network- AACSB- Accreditation Institute who help Business Schools to improve curriculum- AdaptivePath Intensive Workshops) to identify how marketing were adapting to this new approach to services.

This new service design approach was included in the services management courses (2008) new Marketing undergraduate Program (2012) and Marketing Master Program (2012). It also was implemented in Seminars, and events like Service Jam EAFIT 2016 

Other institutions that work on strategic and service design at an undergraduate and postgraduate level are: as we mentioned Universidad EAFIT, Universidad ICESI, Universidad EAN, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá and Cali), Universidad de la Sabana and Universidad Externado. Furthermore, some Colombians have received a training on service design in foreign countries; Emilio Jiménez at Politecnico de Valencia in Spain, Juliana Jaramillo at Politecnico di Milano in Italy and Juan David Martin studied Strategic design in TUDELFT in the Netherlands. 

Moreover, there are some Colombian agencies that work around at an organizational level. Háptica S.A.S, an strategic and service design consultancy agency with three years in the market, in addition to, Conecta (EAFIT Spin-Off), SIPMAN, ImasD, Xperience, and others with personnel consultancy services. Some other foreign companies have entered to the market with their design service practices, InSitum, “Rebrand, Design it and Innovare” either autonomously or with marketing agencies, market research and consultants’ support, entered the country with specialized personnel in the subject (Fino, Vargas & Buitrago, 2017).[1]  

Chapter’s Objectives:

  • Build a community around service design articulated by universities, public entities, private, agencies, consultants and the community.
  • Provide upgraded valuable information and content to the actors involved in the network.
  • Lead conversation and environments to exchange information, opinions, best practices and experiences around challenges and solutions in service design that impact the needs or problems of stakeholders (National and International).
  • Foster the formalization of academic programs in service design (Courses, Diploma, advanced courses in business and engineering faculties).
  • Facilitate the development of projects, through tools that allow the application of knowledge in the search for stunning solutions to involved actors and the community in general.
 
bio
bio - Academic Coordinator at EAFIT University

As a Marketing professor in one of the leading business schools in Colombia, I've been working as an academic coordinator, researcher and consultant on service topics. I´ve worked in many projects with product designers from whom I’ve learned their methods and simultaneously I’ve received training from companies like Adaptative Path, Usaria and Universities like Tulane Business School and my own Institution EAFIT University. Now I’m teaching at a Marketing Master program, researching and publishing and giving consultancy on Service Design. Last year I became a member of the Service Design Network. I’m interested in creating a space were academics and practitioners may share and create new knowledge and techniques in order to develop and enrich service design practice. By having our roots in the educational field, sharing and contributing knowledge to everyone will be easier and will allow a lot to co-create around Service Design, following Universidad EAFIT motto that says: Inspire, Create and Transform society.

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medium_id - Inpendent Consultant

I am responsible to develop and manage the consulting and training portfolio services in the agency, those services are related to strategy and business model design, innovation management, service design, project and portfolio management. As a professional in my 15 years of experience, I’ve developed to develop different innovation projects in some service industry companies and I’ve had the opportunity to formally train my skills around design, innovation and entrepreneurship from experienced and recognized companies like Business Model Alchemist, Stage - Gate international, Acumen - Ideo.org, More Than Metrics and Design Thinking Academy and also from the academic side at Cambridge University - Judge Business School. Motivation: Create Colombia´s SDN Local Chapter to consolidate service design knowledge and practices in main cities of the country; and also in middle term, explore the opportunity to introduce the network in the Andean Region and Central America for Spanish spoken people. Learn, Share and Collaborate around service design.

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medium_id - General Manager at Háptica S.A.S.

Service design is my professional engine, is what I do every single day of my life in Háptica, the enterprise that I’ve founded three years ago. I’ve worked with different industries: financial, health, tourism, massive consumption among others, designing their services in order to improve their users experiences. I also teach a class in Universidad de los Andes related to the subject that is called creativity, class in which I focus in the service design process that I usually develop in my enterprise. As Colombia is a service oriented country I consider service design of being an important tool for companies to improve the experience of all the final users. That’s why, I would like that all the Colombian enterprises consider and adopt service design in their day to day work. SDN is a community of people interested in service design, bringing and been part of this community. It will make service design official in the country and it will be a for us that will open opportunities to involve new actors. In Háptica, a team of 22 persons, we are interested in sharing our knowledge and tools to improve the service design concept in the country.

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medium_id - Co-founder at 8Ideas

Librarian with more than 8 years of experience in customer service. Researcher and speaker about future innovation and technological trends in library science. Lecturer at Javeriana University (5 years ago) where I teach “Service Design for Libraries“ and “Qualitative Research“ for Industrial Designer among others courses. I’m Alliance Coordinator at e-Tech Solutions (Business) where we’ve introduced service design methodologies for strategic planning. To be part of a Service Design community of practice focused on sharing information and building a network around the subject to analyze critically the challenges and opportunities of it and to explore its possible applications to solve local problems of our communities. Also at 8IDEAS we are interested in promoting service design in Colombia and the region to encourage interdisciplinary research and produce local knowledge to publish both in spanish and english.