About evaluation in service design: As it is and how it could evolve

This paper reports on the role of evaluation in the service design field, reflecting in particular on contributions presented at the ServDes Conference 2018 in Milan, where the topic is explicitly introduced for the first time as a promising research and practical argument, to push the boundaries of the discipline and reinforce its legitimacy as a driver of innovation. It starts with a brief overview of literature on the topic, which highlights an increasing attention on measuring the value of service design and its impact on organizations, and goes on to examine some preliminary contributions on the evaluation of services as service design outcomes. After this, some reflections are made on how the papers admitted to the conference currently address these issues. Although we are still not fully aware of the evaluation potential and a shared vision still needs to be built, some trends on how the topic is approached by scholars can already be detected, and future challenges are envisioned for bringing the discussion to the next level.