Watching final thesis presentations this week at Ivrea, I had a thought about the development of services. I see 2 approaches in the design of a service.
1. You can develop an idea/product/concept and then develop a service around it.
2. You develop a service idea and think about what the physical artifacts or touch points are in that system.
These are drastically different in the way they approach the design process and how an idea is developed for a service or with a service as an add-on. In a totally optimistic way i’d like to think that most processes that wish to intergrate services should start by thinking about them, or intergrate them in the design process as opposed to seeing it as part of the later stages…
Any thoughts?
One of our main goals are aiming at networking between likeminded people within design and innovation. I thought it would be great for a post where you could comment and introduce yourself and maybe get to know some of the other readers.
From our hostname tracking I have seen visitors come from Hewlett-Packard, Philips, GAP, Logiva, McKeanney-Flavell, Gerard Hilferty & Associates, Katzenbach Partners, Harrington College of Design, Harvard University, York University, Danish Ministry of Education and Technical University of Denmark. Who are you and where do you come from? 
Update: It seems there was a lot of interest in this and we have taken note of that. We appreciate all your replies, but I suppose a lot of people are still hiding in the bushes? Don’t be, there’s atleast 24 contacts to gain right now and the list is growing. So why not write a small comment, you’ve got a lot to win and nothing to lose. Besides the organizations named above, I have recently seen visitors coming from Kontrapunkt, The US Army (!), Rigshospitalet (Copenhagen University Hospital), Nazareth College, East Stroudsburg University and Pacific Market International - why don’t you introduce yourself? I know I’d love to get to know you.
Sometimes when you look for good new ideas your find yourself asking people what they need, what problems they are facing in using this or that tool.
A good marketer would make a quantitative analysis and from that point at a solution a or b.
Plato once wrote:
“If you know what you are looking for, then there is really no problem, but if you do not know what you are looking for, then how would you be able to identify it?”
So, asking a costumer what he/she needs today would be identifying a solution on today’s problems, not finding out what the solution should look like for the problems of tommorow. Right?
Any perspectives?
Don’t you get that sneeky feeling that what is missing between design and business to make them work togeher as opposed to in parallel to each other is a common language?
For example the expression touch points (which is being used now by the service design arena) mostly refers to either an “internet” or “channel” strategy (Martin Lindtrom), or yet again customer satisfaction in sales (The 6 most overlooked customer touch points) and then there’s service design with physical objects which are the link between a customer and an intangible service (Blast Radius). At the end of the day aren’t we using the same word for different concepts and maybe there should be a real dialog between these disciplines to start speaking the same language and truely collaborate and understand each other.
Can you think of any other examples?
As a consultant and hard selling salesperson I once in a while faces the challenge when the opposite site of the table questions the difference between what I’ve got in my bag and the methods provided by other streamlined consultants like Accenture, PA Consulting Group and other well esteemed consultant companies.
The first few times I’ve got confused but after a while I figured out a few differentiators between design thinking and “ordinary” business thinking.
Many consultants try to map companies challenges in a 2X2 matrix, showing that the specific company is located in the down left corner – of course knowing that the right position is in the upper right corner.
Traditional consultants – still – searches for solutions in a very metric world. Where can we cut costs? How to develop new markets? Can we ad new function to our existing products?
The new agenda is more about finding ways to improve:
- Meaning
- Identity
- Senses
It’s more about focusing on entity and concepts rather than optimisations on each element in the solution.
…..to be continued.
What do you think – is there a difference?
Over the last week I’ve been reading ”Innovation in the Making” by Lotte Darsoe.
A month ago I in fact had the possibility discussing the flux between design and innovation and she pointed me at the time to her own book.
She differs between 4 types of innovation:
- Incremental – innovations are improvements of processes, products and methods, often found by technicians or employees during their daily work.
- Radical – novel, surprising and different approach or composition.
- Social – spring from social needs, rather than from technology, and are related to new ways of interaction
- Quantum – refers to the emergence of qualitatively new system states brought by small incremental changes.
The last one I use to explain with the phrase – Micro-processes which causes Macro-consequenses.
Is the above types of innovation the only ones? Is there other explanations to those mentioned?
The way I see it this is the largest threat against our society, wealth, economy - everything. Forget about China and Black Tuesday. Worry about Kakorrhaphiophobia among designers. Kakorrhaphiophobia among (want-to-be-)entrepreneurs (!). Kakorrhaphiophobia among CEOs. Kakorrhaphiophobia everywhere.
So what is this? It’s simply morbid fear of failure. Quite simply also the greatest danger today. We are so afraid of making aesthically "wrong" designs (=failure), so we just stick with what everyone else is doing. We are so afraid of changing our life and starting up as entrepreneurs that we never end up doing it right, just because we are afraid of failure.
But frankly - what is there to lose? Your reputation? Your friends? I don’t think so, if you try to think about it, some of the most significant people in history failed big time before making it to the history books. Van Gogh cut off his ear.. Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and lost everything (you can say a lot of bad things about him, but he was definitely not afraid of failure).. Starck did some crazy things that designers saw as just "wrong" from an aesthic point of view and now he is one of the worlds most famous designers.. George Bush (Jr.) entered Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction but there was none.. I could go on, but I’ll let your imagination do that
Please provide me with the context I’m missing:
WHY ARE PEOPLE SO AFRAID OF FAILURE?
Few days ago there was a conference at Institute of Design. A strategy conference – I wished I had the possibility to go, but I couldn’t afford it.
Lucky me a few of the participants blogged about the event. Not that much, but better than nothing.
I’m sure that we next year will se a different coverage – maybe live-blogging? I hope so.
I volunteer as a transskription-blogging-assistant right away…..