Türkiye'de Endüstriyel Tasarımcıların Hizmet Tasarımı Alanındaki Konumu Üzerine Bir Araştırma

Abstract

Hizmet tasarımı kavramı giderek maddi üretim sınırlarından kurtularak, soyutlaşan ekonomik ve sosyal düzende; tasarımcıların varlıklarını sorgulayarak, pazarlamacıların ise hizmet firmalarının rekabet için farklılaşmalarına bir çözüm olarak ulaştığı yeni bir disiplin olarak tanımlanabilir. Bu çalışmada hizmet tasarımı konusu, tasarım odaklı bakış açısı, endüstriyel tasarım, hizmet için tasarım konuları ile birlikte incelenmiştir. Türkiye'de hizmet tasarımı sektörü özet bir şekilde betimlenmiş, Türkiye ölçeğinde endüstriyel tasarım meslek pratiğinin bu sektördeki etkileri ve etkilenmeleri incelenmeye çalışılmıştır. Tezin ilk bölümünde araştırmacı hizmet kavramını incelemiştir. Hizmet sektörünün Türkiye'deki durumu ekonomik ve kültürel bakış açıları ile tartışılmıştır. Türkiye'de hizmet sektörünün ekonomik açıdan güçlü yönleri tanımlanmaya çalışılmıştır. Oldukça soyut bir değer olan hizmetin tasarımının da soyut değerlerden etkileneceği öngörülerek hizmet tasarımını besleyebilecek Türkiye'deki kültürel değerlerden bahsedilmiştir. İkinci kısımda ise hizmet tasarımı, hizmet için tasarım konularına değinilmiştir. Hizmet tasarımının tanımı yapılmış, özelliklerine değinilmiş, tarihçesi anlatılmış, hizmet tasarımına dünyadan ve Türkiye'den örnekler verilmiştir. Son olarak ise bu bölümde hizmet ve tasarım ilişkisine farklı bir bakış olan hizmetler için tasarım konusu tartışılmıştır. Tezin üçüncü kısmında ise hizmet tasarımı ile endüstriyel tasarım arasındaki ilişkiler anlamlandırılmaya çalışılmıştır. Endüstriyel tasarımın zaman içindeki değişimleri anlatılmaya çalışılmış, tasarım odaklı bakış açısı kavramı ile birlikte iki disiplinin ortak yönleri ve farklılıkları incelemiştir. Ürün hizmet sistemlerine kısaca değinilmiştir. Tezin araştırma kısmında ilk olarak hizmet tasarımı firmalarından temsilcilerle yapılan görüşmeler analiz edilmiştir. Hizmet tasarımının bir aktörü olan hizmet tasarımı firmaları gözünden Türkiye'de hizmet sektörünün durumu incelenmiş,oldukça yeni bir disiplin olduğu ve sadece küçük bir kitle tarafından bilindiği tespit edilmiştir. Bu konuyla bağlantılı firmaların en çok finans ve telekomünikasyon firmaları ile çalıştığı görülmüştür. Bunun nedeni olarak ise bu sektörlerin ekonomik avantajları ve teknolojinin gelişmesi ile verdikleri hizmetlerin tasarıma daha çok ihtiyaç duyması olarak belirtilmiştir.Tasarım firmalarının vizyoner olarak adlandırdığı bu sektördeki öncü firmaların hizmet tasarımını talep etmeleri de hizmet tasarımı projelerinin bu sektörlerde yoğunlaşmasının bir nedeni olarak değerlendirilmiştir. Ayrıca bu sektörde endüstriyel tasarım disiplininin katkıları da dikkat çekmiştir. Tezin ikinci araştırma konusu olan hizmet sektöründe çalışan endüstriyel tasarımcıların da incelenmesi fikrini bu bulgu daha da desteklemiştir. Vizyoner bakış açısına sahip, tasarım konusunda bilgi sahibi yöneticiler tarafından şirketlerin bünyesine katılan bu tasarımcıların şirketlerin daha insan odaklı olması konusunda çaba gösterdikleri gözlenmiştir. Bu tasarımcılar ayrıca çalıştıkları firmalarda problem çözmeye yönelik yaklaşımları ve durumlara geniş bir bakış açısından bakabilme yetenekleri ile dikkat çektiklerini belirtmişlerdir. Şirket çalışanları ilk zamanlarda tasarım kavramına ne kadar uzak olsalar da, konuşulan tasarımcılar iyi projeler ürettikçe bu kişilerle daha çok çalışmak istediklerini belirttiklerini iddia etmektedir. Ulaşılan bu veriler doğrultusunda Türkiye'de hizmet tasarımına katkısı yadsınamayacak derecede olan endüstriyel tasarımı disiplininden bu konu hakkında daha fazla araştırmanın yapılması gerektiği; okullardaki eğitimin biraz daha hizmet odaklı detaylar içerebileceği tespit edilmiştir. Bunun yanında hizmet firmalarının da bu konuda daha fazla eğitilmesi önerilmiştir.

Since its first emergence in Turkey, the issue of design and its role in industry has always been a hot topic for designers. Even though Turkey is a country where industrial production is limited as economic data suggest, there are many good design schools. Designers graduated from universities' related departments face problems like lack of demand to their design services and low salaries in return to their works, etc.. Several researchers engaging in design related fields claim that there are several special features of designers in periphery countries like Turkey such as being problem solvers for further social and economic development, providing new perspectives to design thinking which is distant from industrial production. Parallel to these thoughts, in this research writer suggests that graduates of design related departments with a perspective of broadened design thinking and cultural sensitivity can have a more active role in Turkey where the service sector has an important role in its economy. The main purpose of this study is to understand the relation between industrial design and service design in Turkey. Aiming this, the writer of this study tried to define the term of 'service design' and 'design for services'. She tried to position these terms in the Turkish Service Sector. She tried to find answers to some questions like what are the potentials of service sector in Turkey and what are its strengths. The relation between industrial design and service design was also investigated in this study. In the introduction part, the aim and the structure of the thesis are described. While this research was being conducted, she attended several workshops and seminars about service design. She aimed to understand service design and related issues. Three of these events are "USERSPOTS Usability and User Experience Design Certification Program", "Service Design Through Social Innovation by Nicola Morelli", and "IDEO Human-centered Design Online Workshop". By these activities, researcher found the opportunity to have more information on service design and to experience the several service design methods. These experiences were very fruitful for this research. After a brief introduction, the researcher continues with service sector part. Firstly, she tries to summarize the economic developments and trends in the world. She emphasizes that economies improve with the help of the sectors which they heavily depend. In this regard, 3 phases are mentioned in economics literature. In the first phase, the economy is based on the production of primitive outputs such as, agricultural and mining products. In the second phase, the economy is driven by the industrial production and construction industry. Lastly, the third phase is in which the economy depends more on services like transportation, communication, trade, public and personal services. These phases are used to define a country's economic position in the world. For example, if a country's economy mostly depends on services, this country is called as service economy. It means that they create more value by producing services than by producing other items. If we talk about the characteristics of this kind of economy, we must talk about information, brain power, computer networking and virtual money, weakened states, increased amount of NGOs, successes on electronics, computer and genetic sciences, robotized and mechanized production processes, commercialized services and different forms of trades. In developed countries, the increasing share of the service sector and the decreasing share of industry in economic activity are characteristic according to several research. It is also claimed that service design and service innovation have an important impact on competitiveness of companies in the new economic conjuncture. Services are processes and activities which have intangible outputs. These outputs also constitute a value like every other product but they are produced in a different way compared to other production methods. Since they are intangible, they include some abstract inputs. There are many other characteristics of services. The most known and accepted ones of all are intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity and perishability. Consultancy, communication, distribution services, education, environmental services, health services, tourism, entertainment, transportation are defined as service sectors. In this research, service marketing is also handled. As are in product design and service design, there are several differences between product marketing and service marketing as well. The experts say that you should know the product completely in the product marketing before you promote it. However, in the services sector, there are too many parameters you need to know. For instance, in the product marketing mix, there are four parameters which are acknowledged; product, place, price and promotion. Yet, when it comes to service marketing, there are three more parameters, namely people, physical facilities, and process management. In Turkey, unlike developed countries, the share of industrial sector in economy has never been higher than the share of services sector. Hence, services sector has always been the driver force of the Turkish economy. Several services related businesses have followed a very successful path in Turkey. For example, the knowledge based services, such as architecture, engineering, technical consultancy, information technologies and construction, have become the main engines of the Turkish economy for years. Other than knowledge based services, the traditional services, such as transporting and tourism, have also contributed to economic growth in Turkey. Since “service” is a qualitative issue, it is closely connected to cultural values. In Turkey, service sector has a great potential in business as exemplified above. The writer of this study tried to analyze the roots of these potentials in Turkish culture and elaborate the future of services sector under the light of this analysis. Service design is defined as the act of setting out plans for organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material elements of a service to enhance its quality and to build a convenient and useful link between the two group of agencies which are service providers and customers. The objective of service design methodologies is to supply a design meeting the needs of both customers and service providers by creating a user-friendly, competitive and relevant product. There are mainly two perspectives to service design discipline; namely service marketing perspective and designer perspective. In this study, the researcher approached to the service design as a designer. Like service itself, service design has also several particularities. Service design provides customers with different points of view, lay out the special properties of services in question and incorporates knowledge on diverse areas into the product at hand. It is a process which includes many interactive, dynamic, and comprehensive stages. For this research, the term of "design for services" is also very important. This term targets framing the relationship between design and services in a wider perspective. The researcher used this term in this research to explain how deeply design affects service businesses in Turkey. There are four fields under the design for services term. They are "designing interactions, relations and experiences", "designing interactions to shape systems and organizations", "exploring new collaborative service models" and "imagining future directions for service systems". The researcher created a shape of pyramid with these four fields and used it in her interviews which are conducted with some designers working for different services firms. She asked them their roles as a designer at their workplaces in order to detect the degree of effectiveness of design in the decision-making mechanisms of the firm in question. When it comes to history of service design, the researcher started with the first service design definition which entered the stage in 1984 with Shostack. She was a member of service marketing discipline. The first time that designers began to talk about design in services, on the other hand, was in 1991 by Hollins. After Hollins' book, service design discipline started to grow and attract strong attention in academic world. It was also spread as a professional design discipline. Nowadays, we can talk about a lot of design schools which provides education on service design. Also, there are many service design studios all around the world. Analyzing the relationship between service design and industrial design, the main argument of this study is that service design is similar in its methods and principles to industrial design. Yet, industrial design has gone through several changes by years whereas service design has remained mostly the same until the early 1990s. There are so many different approaches to understand this transformation processes. However, these approaches are similar in some ways, because all transformations took place parallel to economic, social and technological developments in the world. As mentioned before, the economy is getting more intangible in time. Thus, the problems that industrial designers have to cope with are getting also intangible. Other than designing industrial products, they started to deal with managerial issues using their design thinking abilities. In this study, design thinking is tried to be explained in order to make this development more understandable. When the researcher asked the designers, with which she made the interviews, what differentiates them from other workers while working for a field other than product design, the designers answered that they benefited from their capabilities linked to their designer identities (such as empathy, integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism and collaboration) which other workers in general are deprived of. Design thinking is also crucial in revealing the similarities between service design and industrial design, simply because both of them are fundamentally based on design thinking. The two practices are both effective in solving problems by taking risks if necessary and providing user-centered solutions. While doing these, they also collaborate with other disciplines time to time. Their methods are very similar in essence, even though they had different names. There are also some differences between service design and industrial design. For instance, service designers design intangible things whereas industrial designers design tangible things. While industrial designers focus on merely the user of the product, service designers need to oversee the needs of both the user and the service personnel. When it comes to details, industrial designers are required to think about the mechanism, material and the other technical details. However, service designers need to think about the all processes, employees etc. There is another subject of design that lies between service and product design; which is called product-service systems design. Product-Service System (PSS) is an integration of product and service in one output. It values experience more and emphasizes on the usefulness of the product or the service. Even though it is accepted that the PSS systems are the subject of management and marketing disciplines, designers' contributions are crucial for them due to the fact that usability, effectiveness, visibility are also important factors for PSS systems. This research is a qualitative research. In-depth interviews and narrative analyses are the key research methods for this study. The researcher has done in-depth interviews with several designers from Turkish Service Design Industry and some industrial designers who work for service firms. The data which are collected by interviews are analyzed by narrative analyses method. Firstly, the researcher talked with representatives from service design firms in Turkey. There are four service design firms in Turkey and all of them are located in Istanbul. The researcher reached the representatives from three of these firms. These firms are namely Fjord, I' am Associates Istanbul and Ethnogram. The representatives are Zeynep Falay von Flittner from Fjord; Erdem Demirci from I'am Associates Istanbul; Aydıncan Ataberk from Ethnogram. All of these candidates are working for managerial positions of their firms. Secondly, the interviews are done with nine industrial designers from various service firms. Two of them are working for a bank. Other three are working for a retail firm. Two of the rest are working for an airline company. The last two are working for a telecommunication firm. These different kinds of firms have one thing in common; they are all leading companies in their sectors. The designers are graduates of industrial design departments in METU, ITU and Dogus University. After the data from the interviews are analyzed, several conclusions are obtained. Firstly the economic position of Turkey and its cultural potential for service sector can be seen as a sign for the future successes of the Turkish service sector. It can be said that the service design sector is an emergent and quite small sector in Turkey. Banking and telecommunication sectors are the most significant clients of the service design firms. Service design companies design mostly interactions, relations and experiences for the companies. They build their teams with sociologists, psychologists, graphic designers, communication designers and (mostly and more importantly) industrial designers. As a reason for hiring mostly industrial designers in the service design firms, the representatives of service design companies, which are interviewed, pointed out the lack of qualified service designers in Turkey and the similarity between the service and industrial design disciplines. When it comes to industrial designers working for service firms, we can also arrive at several important conclusions. Firstly, thanks to their design thinking approach, they make a difference in their companies and they differentiate themselves from other employees working on the same tasks. The designers, who are interviewed, stated that they have holistic point of view and they are successful in problem solving. They also see themselves as user- centered and open to work together with others. Designers' positions in the decision making processes in the companies vary depending on companies' vision. For instance, while the designers in the telecommunication firm find the opportunity to work directly with the executives and make it possible that the design thinking is included to the strategic decisions of the firm; the designer who works for the airline company have only the chance to decide the shape of the soap dispenser in the restroom of airplane. Hence, it turns out that visionary management in a firm enhance the development of design discipline as a whole. When companies appreciate the importance of design and design thinking thoroughly, designers will have more active roles in decision making processes in businesses. Furthermore, this study paves the way for further research in the fields of design education, design thinking and design management for services with its assessments on service design.