Cultural Impacts on Service Design

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Design (Industry, Graphics, Fashion), grade: 1,3, Cologne University of Applied Sciences (Köln International School of Design), language: English, abstract: Nowadays companies are faced with the challenge to successfully place their services and service products in highly competitive local as well as global markets. Therefore this challenge also applies for service designers in established markets and for service design pioneers in emerging markets. With user experience and customer centered approaches becoming increasingly important business factors, proceeding globalization demands a better understanding of how cross-cultural differences shape the way services are used and how they are created.

New and emerging service markets like India and China rise the demand for internationally working service designers to incorporate cultural aspects in their process to stay competitive and to nurture and grow the service design sector in untouched markets. Examples from practice in Asia have shown that service providers as well as service users reject approaches which don¿t resonate with their culture.

Cross-cultural tools, such as the cultural dimensions, are used by International Management for decades in order to allow efficient management of multicultural teams and organizations. Their main fields of application certainly lies in business, but in recent years they are also used by design disciplines. Since service design connects design and businesses, it seems to be predestined for a possible application of cultural dimensions.

Therefore one the main question of this research paper is whether methods from international management, cultural dimensions to be more specific, can be applied to service design and how internationally active service design providers have to adapt their process of service design to specific cultures.