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Ted Matthews is a service designer and researcher at the center for design research.
He is the chair of service design at AHO. His professional and research areas of interest could be broadly framed by the design of experience-centric services. Experience-centric services refer to services that lift the experiential with a designed intentionality as a crafted, differentiating element of the service offering. However his research has honed in on the study of the sacred as a possible area to glean fruitful practices and concepts for the development of new approaches for the design of experience-centric services. In doing so his research draws from approaches, concepts and practice from socio-cultural domains to weave this together with service design practice.
Through a transdisciplinary, practice based, Research through Design approach, Ted has worked with professional projects from as diverse as professional football and tourism to financial services and telecommunications.
His PhD entitled ‘Exploring Sacred Service Design’ was recently submitted for final consideration.
Additive Designing|CSI (Centre for Service Innovation)|DOT|Sacred Services
Just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to fade, the Russia–Ukraine conflict erupted into a large-scale war. This caused a new influx of refugees to many European countries. In this case study, through an autoethnographic service journey, we investigate the process of applying for asylum in Norway... Read »
Service Design Working Group is aiming to share information about service design teaching [introductory courses and briefs to students, both defining and sharing tools/online resources] and how the information is shared about specific areas of service design such as architecture, housing, and healthcare. .. Read »
This study focuses on the development of new service design approaches for the design of experience-centric services through the integration and utilization of concepts and practices relating to the study of the sacred... Read »
This guest chapter by Ted Matthews explains how meaningful experiences are made and why such, often shared experiences, are especially memorable and powerful. It describes how we, as a society, have developed behavioural and experiential patterns such as rituals and myths... Read »
This paper is about exploring how interaction- and service-design approaches can be used in imagining and proposing urban futures. The paper presents an ongoing project on investigating how experiential, prototype-driven design methods from service- and interaction-design can offer new ways of exploring possible futures in today’s increasingly digital, service-driven cities... Read »
Whilst attention has been given to the sacred in consumer behaviour, often high- lighting its potential for meaningful experiences and customer loyalty, little research has been undertaken which investigates how such experiences might be designed for... Read »
Great football experiences depend not only on the play on field but also on a contextual understanding of the moment, the sense of self in place and of belonging that can lead to highly emotional and meaningful moments. This paper presents the outcomes of the research project between the Norwegian Football Association and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design during 2015... Read »
With an increasing focus on experience-centric services, where deeper customer connection is to be achieved by heightened dramaturgy and emotional engagement, service design must ensure it has tools that can model and communicate these experiences during service development... Read »
Change by Design: Transforming organisational mindsets through Service Design thinking “Everything I have learnt during the last 20 years has been thrown up in the air, and landed up-side down – in a good way”. This quote is from a manager who participated in Service Design Academy, a transformation programme in Telenor; one of the world’s largest mobile operators... Read »
Service design must negotiate the challenges of intangibility, co-production and temporality in the design for experience. The field currently uses tools and concepts such as customer journeys and touch points to assist in this task. However, other fields have the potential inform the service design process as it seeks to focus more and more upon the customer experience... Read »
Service design must push its current boundaries of reference to incorporate wider impulses from the social sciences and humanities to allow for higher engagement at a socio-cultural level with service customers. Services are primarily defined by their intangibility and temporal nature where value is co-created during service delivery between customer and service provider... Read »
Rituals give structure to time, offering passageways to special experiences through contact with artifacts, shared performance and the narratives of myth. This description has resonance with definitions of Service Design, which is often referred to as the design of experiences that happen over time and across different touchpoints... Read »
As we move deeper and into a service economy, differentiation of service offerings occurring through the customer experience is becoming central to the success of service providers. The emerging discipline of service design must find new ways to orchestrate settings for customers that will result in favourable and memorable service experiences allowing for differentiation to take place... Read »
Service design must push its current boundaries of reference to incorporate wider impulses from the social sciences and humanities to allow for higher engagement at a socio-cultural level with service customers. Services are primarily defined by their intangibility and temporal nature where value is co-created during service delivery between customer and service provider... Read »