Conference article

Over the last two decades, service design has steadily attracted adopters from both practitioner and academic realms. The diverse origins of these adopters pose challenges for the further advancement of the discipline. To address one of those challenges, this text investigates the use of an automated text analysis technique to explore the possibility to identify discursive elements of service design practitioners’ narrative to address organizational change. The author presents results of an automated text analysis of textual responses to a survey that reveal the main topics associated with 9 service design practitioners’ approaches to 5 different scenarios. These findings identify three basins of meaning in the discursive construction of the survey respondents: STORIES, TEAM, and IMPLEMENTING. It also shed light on a possible framework for apprehending the social reality of service design practices through discursive elements.

service design, discourse, research, automated text analysis