Emergent Scoring of the Temporal Experience, an Investigation into Service Mapping

Abstract

The design of services relies heavily on different mapping approaches to develop an overview of service architecture. Scholars largely agree that a key goal of service mapping should be the structuring of experience over time, yet the three most prevalent approaches to mapping service — customer journey maps, service blueprints, and system diagrams — fail to represent important aspects of the temporal experience. Current tools continue to center physical touchpoint attentions and struggle to depict more complex narratives of improvisatory customer/provider interactions. Notating the lived journey of temporally unfolding experience is not a simple task. Accomplishing this will require a recentering of kairotic time, a practice largely absent from our current discourse. In this paper, alternative approaches which represent time through the lens of the unfolding service experience are discussed, and early explorations in temporally aware service design mapping are presented.