Since two decades ago, Service Design as a design-led approach to service development and
innovation has expanded its scope of interventions and contributions. It has been repositioning
itself from a rendering activity for supporting the development of service concepts and
structures to a human-centred and holistic approach to service development. However, this
expanding conceptualization of Service Design has not drawn much attention from wider
service research communities. It may be partly because Service Design has had weak
connections to other service disciplines while remaining as a design-centred description of
knowledge and practice within the boundary of Design. To address this issue, this thesis paid
attention to New Service Development (NSD) theory as a frame of reference for studying
Service Design. Relating Service Design to NSD theory may be helpful in enhancing the
legitimacy of Service Design by demonstrating how the ‘designerly’ approach could contribute
to organizational NSD practices and processes. Yet, Service Design has seldom been
investigated systematically in relation to NSD theory. This thesis aimed to understand how Service Design practice is involved alongside the NSD
process in terms of its interventions, characteristics, outcomes, and what are the contributions
and implications for NSD theory. The literature review and expert interviews were conducted to
build a theoretical relationship between Service Design and NSD theory as a foundation for
studying Service Design in the context of NSD theory. Also, 10 case studies were undertaken to
explore Service Design approaches and contributions to the service development process and
practices. As a result, four Service Design intervention areas: INFORMING; SPECIFYING;
ACTIVATING; and SUSTAINING were identified with associated key design activities. The
intervention areas and design activities were then positioned into the existing NSD process
literature to identify Service Design contributions to NSD theory, and they were interpreted
through the lens of the Service Logic. The Service Logic served as a useful framework through
which to articulate how Service Design practice can operationalize the user-centred perspective
and approach in NSD. Moreover, the case studies indicated that different designer-client relationships can influence the
quality of Service Design practices and can have different degrees of transformative impacts on
the client’s service development and operations. The design practices in the ‘Delivering’
relationship stayed at a peripheral level, just providing the client with user-centred reference
data. The designer’s activities in the ‘Assisting’ relationship motivated the client to design and
realize user-centred service experiences. In the ‘Facilitating’ relationship, the design practices
transformed the client to become a main agent for sustainable user-centred service innovation. This finding, on the one hand, can help organizations to recognize the potential contributions of
service designers while encouraging them to be more receptive to the Service Design approach
to reap the full benefits of it. On the other hand, the finding suggests that service designers need
to learn more about organizations to better implement the design outcomes and affect
organizational NSD practices and processes. Also, it implies the needs for developing more
specialized Service Design strategies and approaches geared toward different project purposes
and different organizational contexts.