The Object of Service Design🇺🇸 🇬🇧

ness of services, consumers cannot experience them directly, but only through their peripheral tangible clues, or evidence. She therefore defined service evidence as comprising everything “the consumer can comprehend with his five senses.” 8 In the airlines example in Figure 1, this evidence includes the aircraft, advertising, tickets, food and drinks, and other such items. Moreover, staff often stands as the main evidence of services because the way they dress and speak, their hairstyles, demeanor, etc., “can have a material impact on the consumer’s perception.”9 Because service evidence is so important, Shostack believed that it “must be [as] carefully designed and managed as the service itself.”10 Shostack distinguished between two types of service evidence: peripheral and essential. 11 Peripheral evidence refers to the tangible elements consumers can possess but that have little independent value, such as tickets for airline services. In contrast, essential evidence, such as an aircraft, has an important role in the evaluation of the services purchased but cannot be owned by consumers. Although essential evidence was paramount in Shostack’s conception of services, she considered such evidence to represent “quasi-product elements”12 that could not have the status of true tangible elements because, as such, they would have been evidence of goods rather than services. Figure 1 (above) Molecular models describing cars (left) and airlines (right). Circles represent intan- gible elements; squares represent tangible elements; dotted squares represent essential evidence; and peripheral evidence is scattered around the other elements. 8 Shostack, “Breaking Free from Product Marketing,” 77. 9 Shostack, “How to Design a Service,” 53. 10 Ibid., 52. 11 Ibid., 51–2. 12 Ibid.,...