The Role Of Service Design In Public Services: Public Transportation
Public services serve a large number of people and are the largest employers in the world. The pace of change they are facing today is remarkable. Citizens' demands are changing rapidly. Speed, choice and customization will become the basis of expectations also for the provision of services in the public sector.
The challenges are many: how to provide more, better, faster for less? How to cope with the changing and growing demands and pressures of users considering also the economic aspect?
In the development of the efficiency of public services, effectiveness, legality and transparency are of the utmost importance. In many public services, the government is a partner and not necessarily the main supplier. The challenge thus becomes the opportunity to collaborate with commercial companies and organizations so that private profits and the public good are mutually reinforcing. We see a potential for cooperation between the government and the service design sector; work together, understand how people perceive services, how they use them and how they would like to use them. If this does not work, it causes major problems and dissatisfaction, not only for the user but also for the supplier. These two components must be taken into consideration and play a crucial role in the innovation design process.
To innovate the system of public services it is therefore necessary to evaluate the system from different perspectives, devise with the interested parties and develop prototypes that can be tested and perfected. Design offers a creative way of thinking and methods for solving problems at a systemic level, literally connecting external customers to external users and an organization. The role of design is in fact constantly evolving and today plays an important role in solving problems. Many organizations try to exploit its potential to go beyond the data and to instill in systems a different way of working and thinking. Trade organizations around the world increasingly take on design agencies, defined as 'design thinking' or 'service design', to change the internal dynamics. 'Design thinking in fact changes the work environment to foster a new way of thinking and working. Does this also apply to the public sector? Yes sure.
To improve the quality of the service and encourage more passengers to use public transport, the application of this methodology provides the authorities and operating companies with useful information to plan marketing policies specifically aimed at different categories of users and potential users of public transport. The relationship between public service and citizens has changed radically in recent decades. Services are co-created, in the sense that different stakeholders and citizens are involved in innovative services.
Waiting times, cleanliness and comfort are the variables that users value most, but the degree of evaluation varies according to the category of users, especially for the time spent traveling. Also the level of employment is a variable that has a great influence on the quality hoped for while the kindness of the driver, the occupation of the bus and the travel time generally have less weight.
Five key areas can be identified where service design is contributing to help innovation in the public sector, including: policy definition, cultural and organizational change, training and capacity building and citizen involvement. Finally, digitalization is one of the most important means for the public sector to be able to innovate its services: it becomes one of the main interfaces of communication between public service providers and citizens.
