Multidisciplinary Team Dynamics in Service Design- The Facilitating Role of Pattern Language

Service design is an evolving discipline. Service value is co-created by service providers and their customer. The complex nature of services requires collaboration in a multidisciplinary team at the design stage itself to create service systems that lead to a delightful customer experience. While working in a multidisciplinary team for service design there is a need to effectively capture the knowledge of participants from different disciplines and integrate it in the design process. Team dynamics play an important role in this context as it is an unconscious, psychological force that influences the direction of a team's behavior and performance. Therefore, there needs to be a language that serves as lingua franca to improve the communication and a medium to ensure effective collaboration within a team. It this paper we share our study of the team dynamics in a multidisciplinary team while designing for services, and highlight the role of pattern language as an effective mediating entity.