Alter users’ experience through service design : enabling self-awareness and responsibilities

Abstract

User experience is widely used in the field of service design. The definition of ‘user’ and the scope of experience varies from person to person depending on the context in which the word is used. In real-life situations, people are most of the time unconscious about their daily experiences. When people are unconscious about their behaviors, they may harm themselves as well as to the environment. Therefore, it is important for people to understand their experiences, and be more conscious and responsible in their daily lives. In order to explore the essence of experiences, this thesis focuses on individual users, trying to explore how service design can enable conscious and responsible user experience. Moreover, the thesis will discuss what the role of service design is in change making. Three participants were selected for the research. In-depth interviews and experiments were conducted for the collection of qualitative data. This thesis argues that it is possible to alter people’s experience with the intervention of design, and service design could enable users to be more conscious and responsible. However, the change of experiences is profoundly related to the understanding of previous experiences. Thus, design interventions need to be implemented at the core layer of the previous experiences. Future studies can explore the topic on larger scale with an increased number of participants over an expanded period of time.