51-785 Designing Service Experiences

12 units, Carnegie Mellon University

What does it take to get a service experience right? How can we integrate digital interactions and physical experiences? What is the role of design in the business of services? We will seek to answer these questions as we learn the fundamentals of service design in this project based course. This includes the tools and practices of the discipline, and using service design to both analyze and improve existing services, as well as develop new, compelling services. Our goals (and the objectives of this class) will be to understand service design by hypothesizing, experimenting, building, testing our assumptions, pivoting, tweaking, and improving. This course utilizes interdisciplinary and mixed-cohort teams to replicate the experience of working as a service designer, and ends with you pitching a new service that you believe has value to a particular audience.

Prerequisites: none listed

Offered: Spring 2027, Spring 2026

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