Master in Service Systems Design, MSc

Master in Service Systems Design, MSc is one of 12 English-taught Industrial Design programmes at Master's Degree level in the register, offered by 5 institutions. 10 of them list an annual fee for students from outside the EU, EEA and Switzerland, from EUR 6,700 to EUR 9,000; this programme lists EUR 7,455 a year. 10 are recorded as free for EU, EEA and Swiss students.

Service Systems Design at Aalborg University is a two-year master's taught in English at the Copenhagen campus. It is built around one idea: services are complex systems, and you can only change them if you understand the people, technologies, business sides and environments they sit inside. The programme runs for four semesters, 120 ECTS in total.

What you study

Each semester has a project and three courses, except the fourth, which is your master's thesis. The courses are named and specific.

• User experience design for service interaction: research, analyse, prototype and conceptualise design with the social and cultural contexts of use in mind. It goes past usability lab testing into multi-modal methods and interaction design.
• Designing product service systems: analytical methods to understand users' needs, design methods for time and interaction based elements, and representation techniques for the actors in a service system.
• Visualizing and Prototyping for Service Design: workshops in visualisation and prototyping, both analog and live, and digital and online.
• Perspectives in Service Design: current aspects and future trends, and how distributed systems shape service design.
• User participation and social innovation: methods for co-design and participation, adapted to users' social and cultural context.
• Design futures: foresight and futures thinking, with speculative design, design fiction and experiential futures.
• Strategies and business in services: business models for service companies, entrepreneurship and product-service systems, applied to cases.

How the programme is organised

The first semester, Services as interaction, has you analyse a product or service and its interaction aspects: user and service, human and technology, machine to machine. The second, Services as systems, adds hands-on design of a complex service on a modular platform, with actors and competences identified and user participation planned.

The third semester is a company collaboration or a theoretical project. You can stay in Denmark or go abroad, and the programme helps you find a company or institution. You also take Strategies and business in services, and you may take an elective from another programme if the Study Board of Media Technology approves it. The fourth semester is the thesis, alone or in small groups.

Teaching leans on problem-based project work in groups. Bachelors who did not take their degree at Aalborg University also take a course on problem based learning as part of the first semester project.

Who it suits

You should be curious about how people, technology, business and environment fit together. The programme mixes theory and practice, so you need to be comfortable turning service design theory and methods into working solutions. Group project work is central, and so is working across disciplines, combining technical competences with creative skills.

Admission, language and next steps

The programme is taught in English and starts in September. The source page sets out admission requirements and how to apply on its own admission section, so check the exact entry requirements there before you apply. Master's applications go straight to the institution. Students from the EU/EEA and Switzerland study free of charge; other students pay a fee that the institution sets.

Master’s applications go straight to Aalborg University, not through optagelse.dk, and the institution sets its own deadline. Entry requirements and language tests are set by the institution, so start from the official programme page. Our guides cover tuition fees, residence permits and housing.