Tools and Temples

Service design- seemed like an extremely confusing term when we first heard it. As students who are expecting to be doing graphics and product designs, it was not something we could relate to.

After a week of classes and discussions with class the term may have become a bit clearer, but its still a mystery to an extent.

We as a group have to design services for a temple. To design services for a temple is not an easy task, considering it is a religious place and is governed more by the people who visit them. Rather than being a structural experience, it is majorly an emotional and spiritual experience. So, in these past few weeks we have tried to figure out certain services we can render to temples. We are still however struggling with whether to work with temples as a concept or a specific temple.

In this whole journey we have used the 'service tools' to guide us. From the very beginning since we started visiting temples to see the problems posed to the service-takers, all the way to the point when we started thinking of the solutions that we could provide.

These are a list of the Tools we used so far,

*Role playing- which was a tool through which we took up the roles of different identities. the roles taken up were of the elderly, the tourists, the devotees, the youngsters and the priest. This helped us a lot to come up with new ideas. It helped us understand the different point of views of the different people.

*Stakeholder Map- this is a Flowchart of all the people involved in a temple, starting right from the government(as temples are government funded) upto the devotees.

*Cognitive Walkthrough- It is alot like the customer journey map only its done after the service is designed, to check if its a viable option.

*Interaction Table- This includes all the interaction that took place in the group while we discussed the services.

*Personas- We take on the identity of the user and think in his/her way.

*Rough Prototyping- Making iterations and prototypes of all the ideas we come up with.

*Mind Maps- We used mind maps to map out all our discussions and all our random ideas, some of which were very useful to us.

*Group Sketching- we used this tool to draw out all our ideas and solutions to all the problems we faced.

After six weeks of working, and discussion with our Facilitator, Deepta, we decided to "Build a Harley Davidson". All this while we were only looking at the physical experience in a temple and looking for problems to solve but this week we finally came to a decision that we are going to rebuild a temple completely. Our aim now, is for the visitors of a temple to have a completely different experience.