“There are two fundamental ways of looking at a service: from the perspective of the technology and from the user experience perspective. [...] From the technical perspective, a service is an atomic unit of functionality. [...] From the user experience perspective, a service is an atomic unit of activity. [...] Some of the confusion about the definition of “service” comes from the fact that end-user services may be composed of a number of software services, so service designers looks at them as unified experiences, whereas software architects look at them as combinations of things they consider to be different.”
“The core philosophy [is] that there isn’t a single path that ends with a product being purchased and consumed, but an ongoing relationship between users and organizations that is maintained through engagement with a range of designed experiences (which could be tangible products, media messages, environments or personal interactions). This top-down holistic design philosophy is comparable to that advocated by cybernetics and systems science in the mid-20th century, now updated for modern technologies and business contexts.”