Making sense of data in a service design education

Abstract

Digital data has a considerable role in our everyday lives: we use publicly available data to find out about weather, traffic or pollution, we track ourselves and we release our private data to monitor our health and to get advices from our favourite apps, we relate on services that digest big amount of data to predict what will happen next. In this era of “living services”, what kind of data literacy is needed to equip a service designer? Is there a need to rethink of service design tools so that data will be explicitly taken into account in the design process? Is there a need to update service design curricula to embrace these challenges? All of these questions will be discussed through a specific case: a workshop on data exploration held at the Service Systems Design Master at Aalborg University in Copenhagen to investigate the role of data literacy in a service design university program.