Field-Oriented Service Design: A Multiagent Approach

Abstract

Service has been considered as value co-creation through the cooperation of service providers and customers. This paper, however, focuses on service design in problem fields where complex issues exist among various stakeholders, where identifying service providers and customers is not a simple process. In other words, we focus on a very early stage of service design with huge ambiguities; we call it field-oriented service design. A typical case is introducing new services in developing countries. The main issue here is to create new services compatible with existing services through action research that considers a wide variety of regional, national and global stakeholders. It is often difficult to identify the influence of/to the services to be designed due to the differences in culture, language and business customs. As a result, unexpected interdependencies among services together with stakeholders are often revealed during the process of action research. To resolve this ambiguity in the design process, we propose a multiagent approach that couples role playing games with participatory simulations; it is based on our experiences in agricultural support projects in Southeast Asia.