International Herald Tribune talks about Service

This article is definitely worth reading. For those of us who are still a little hazy about service design and for those of us who are doing it and living it... "The traditional response would be to improve the physical design of the buildings, their contents, and the literature explaining what they're trying to do. Designers still do that, but they're also using design thinking to identify what needs to be done to improve the work of those institutions, and how they deliver it. Often they do so by working in collaboration with social scientists, economists, management consultants and anthropologists. Design thinking then helps to invent more efficient alternatives, many of which will be executed using conventional design techniques.

This area of design is so new that it doesn't have a recognizable name. It's variously called "social design," "service design" and "the new design."