ABSTRACT
This case study, an investigation how service design professionals collaborate with science and technology-based service companies, illustrates how designers work across boundaries of knowledge domains reframing business models and service configurations. Drawing on empirical research, the case discusses the distinctive contributions that professional service designers can make to enterprises offering services originating in scientific research. The designers' practices and artefacts suggested they viewed the service from a perspective in which both humans and objects constituted the service. Taking an ethnographic approach, the designers sought to understand the practices of customers and stakeholders in constituting services. The designers all discussed existing business models and saw it as key to the success of their project that they understood the enterprise's activities and aims, while not claiming specialist knowledge about the underlying science or technology. Theories of design management and industrial design, which argue for modularity, offer opportunities for the design of services.
