Temporal sketching as a method to balance service and experience design

This paper discusses the challenges of balancing service- and user experience design perspectives when engaging in the complexity of modern design processes. We argue this can be seen as a balance between different levels of socio-technical complexity – ranging from micro perspectives of a touchpoint’s interfaces, to a systemic perspective’s focus on actor maps and service blueprints. We propose video- and animation-based sketching as a way to use the temporal nature of both disciplines as a common language for zooming in and out of both micro, meso and macro levels of a service system design, and thus function as one approach to bridge the method gap between the two disciplines.