What is the DIEC?
The Design Innovation Education Centre will be the home of the discipline of Service Design. It will do two things: It will train the Service Designers of the future and it will carry out Service Design projects for private and public sector industries. The primary purpose of DIEC is to produce a pool of talent to help meet the growth and regeneration needs of the North East and the UK as a whole in a service environment and to seed the creation of a worldwide movement to create Service Designers across the globe. There are two dimensions to DIEC:
a commercial project consultancy, more on DIEC projects »
and a learning dimension, more on DIEC courses »
The DIEC Process: Service Design Tool Sets
Service design at DIEC combines nine sets of tools, used iteratively, to establish real needs of real end users, generate fresh ideas, identify those ideas with the best potential outcome (including performance metrics) and build a business case with the commercial and social logic to operate sustainably in demanding real-life conditions.
The sets of tools provide the means to decompose, analyse and recompose the issues underlying a complex service problem. They provide a way to step a new team systematically through interlocking and conflicting issues and imperatives and work out the inevitable trade-offs. The tools are practical and hands-on. They have been tried and tested with operating managers and teams in service delivery and other supply chains. In complex service-critical environments and particularly where more than one ideology (public/private) or structure exists and contestability is an important principle, then the tools prove their worth.
The four major sets of tools are:
Design Worldviews - D1 to D3 »
Marketing-Design Fusion Model »
Unique Assembly of Tried and Tested Components »
Business Plan and Blueprint Output »
These are supported by tools which create further distance between the way services have traditionally evolved and the way that they will work as design starts to shape its own future:
Performance Measurement Tools »
Visioning Tools »