COMPARING OF SERVICE DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS BETWEEN CHINA AND JAPAN

Abstract

Service design is considered to have originated in Italy and Germany in the 1990s. It then spread to the UK, northern Europe, the U.S., and even Japan from the late 1990s through the 2000s. Still, service design seems to vary from country to country, and it seems that service design in Japan differs content-wise from service design in China. We thought that clarifying the differences in service design in these two countries would give us a better understanding of their characteristics.
We therefore compared service design in Japan, which consists mainly of in-house design in the manufacturing industry, with service design in China, which uses design consultants, so that we could shed light on the differences in their targets, processes, and even methodologies. From activity reports and other materials from Japanese manufacturers' in-house design divisions, we found that the service design being practiced possessed three characteristics. Meanwhile, we found that service design in China, which uses design consultants, possesses three distinct areas of activity and four business characteristics. In conducting a comparative examination of the characteristics of a total of 10 service designs, we found five major distinctions. Our comparison of Japanese and Chinese service design thus found areas of similarity as well as areas of difference. We were therefore able to identify five characteristics of service design in Japan and China and the differences between them.