Identification of a need for data representations in Service Design

Organisations are looking for new service offers through innovative use of data, often through a Service Design approach. However, current Service Design tools conceal technological aspects of service development like data and datasets. Data can support the design of future services but is often not represented or rendered as a readily workable design material. This paper reports on an early qualitative study of the tools used to work with data and analytics in a medium-sized organisation. The findings identify the current representations of data and data analytics used in the case organisation. We discuss to which extend the available representations of data and data analytics support data-driven service innovation. A comparison of our findings and current Service Design representations show that Service Design lack to represent data as design material. We propose the notion of expansiveness as a criterion to evaluate future data representations for data-driven Service Design.