Benefits of External Representations in Service Design: A Distributed Cognition Perspective

A defining characteristic of service design is the use of external representations, which support designers in making intangible aspects of services accessible and shareable. Both current and future states are externally represented, using different service design techniques, for the purposes of articulating insights, learning, communicating, collaborating, and maintaining empathy for customers. The purposes of, and techniques for, making external representations were compared with benefits of using external representations to think, suggested by the theory of distributed cognition. The analysis indicated that the service design techniques could be divided into two groups: definite and ongoing. The analysis also revealed that none of the included techniques explicitly supported designers in making multiple simultaneous representations of services. The research contributes knowledge about how the externalizations relate to benefits of making external representations, and about how to choose and use different service design techniques based on theories of distributed and situated cognition.