Participatory Teaching Service Design and Innovation

This paper is about service design: the focus is on touch-points of services view as interactive events involving users and a service supplier; we mainly refer to traditional and innovative services provided by teacher and university, such as learning communication centers and cross disciplinary teaching platform services. In this paper the authors present a conceptual representation of participatory teaching shared by all services, some of that has been employed as theoretical framework in projects and didactical activities during the last few years; the proposed model supports the design of services both from the functional and formal points of view, outlining the complex correlation between students, teacher and university factors in services, highlighting some significant elements that influence the emotional experience of users, and investigating the role of the different contribution provided by the different discipline that concur in service design processes. User experience is mainly analyzed in terms of emotional and cognitive processes and it is related to perception studies. Furthermore, the paper presents a teaching model to the project of touch-points of services and some results obtained applying the presented theoretical principles to practical contexts, significantly in the field of undergraduate education of art and design; the project activities were mainly performed in art and design department of Beijing City University. Following the authors, the core element of user experience relies in the perspective adopted by a student toward himself and toward the professional study challenges posed by the course of career and the corresponding service fruition; to this purpose, service design interventions should be designed to support student in the adoption of a positive and adventurous attitude toward their state of study, reducing feeling of discouragement, boring and uncertainty often associated to frustration in learning and the unknown.