
70 Designing Service Excellence
Allocation of functions can vary from different users and designers. The
methodology was created during the 1960s by ergonomists in the UK and
the United States. Singleton (1974) made an elegant description of the use
of allocation of functions.
3
In his unpublished doctoral thesis Toni Iverga
˚
rd
(1972) described retailing from the development perspective of allocation of
functions and predicted the move from manually orientated retailing (shop
assistants serving behind counters) to highly automated retailing (bar code
scanning and automated readers of customers’ purchases). In his predictions
of the roles and pur ...