Although service design has been widely recognized as a holistic approach, the methods of
service prototyping tend to focus on specific parts of services instead of the entire service
experience. The SINCO (Service Innovation Corner) project, started at the University of
Lapland in 2009, recognized this problem and began to develop an environment for holistic
service prototyping where building a prototype in a “rough and ready” manner, but
utilizing quick and agile methods, would be easy and collaborative.
In this paper we outline the benefits of the service design process, especially from the
service prototyping point of view. We also introduce the SINCO prototyping laboratory
concept, and present the related service prototyping elements, methods and tools. During
the development of SINCO, several cases were performed for clients and in this paper we
present three of them in order to uncover how service prototyping methods and the SINCO
laboratory were used in different phases of the service design process and how this also
facilitated design thinking.
DRS 2012 Bangkok
