Service Safari (Elephants Included)

A service safari is a method service designers use to evaluate service experiences in situ — going out to the location of the service and experiencing it themselves as a visitor, customer, user, etc. While many observational frameworks exist for use in ethnographic research, we wanted to develop one that emphasizes the most important aspects of service experiences. And what better location to test out a new framework for a service safari than at a zoo?

This experimental project is important and personal to me. I worked at the local zoo for over 10 years and later studied animal-computer interaction in graduate school. The zoo provided a familiar setting for me to test out our service safari framework, but the experience led to a more interesting design conundrum — addressing the role of non-human service actors.