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?
4 comments so far
Just as a comment, there was a great essay titled “Interactivity is the new pink” that was on the pixelache site a little while ago that talked about interaction design and interactive design. For some reason it’s not working right now — the URL was http://www.pixelache.ac/2005/archives/interactivity-is-the-new-pink/trackback/ — but you can access it via google’s cache.
Not only do different disciplines create culturally specific meanings around these sort of words, but so do individual organizations. In consulting, I find I have to learn a lot of local lingo, sometimes finding words that have the same meanings as words that I have used. Sometimes I don’t always find out in time 
(of course, decoding “native language” is an ethnographic “trick” if you will, so I’m always on the lookout).
Examples: in some parts of Hewlett-Packard, the word “design” refers to engineering, whereas “physical design” (or something like that) refers to what we would call design. Similarly, we presented to Nestle what we called some concepts, in other words, some broad, early ideas for products, based on preliminary analysis of some field studies. But when they heard “concept” they expected a “concept board” - a specific type of artifact that has a consistent set of information (brand, image, benefit statement, tagline, etc. etc.) so they were made very uncomfortable by what we showed.
The point being that maybe acknowledging the language breakdowns and doing some extra clarification whenever disciplines or organizational cultures come together would be prudent?
I agree with you Steve, and i think clarification sometimes comes from knowing how others work in their respective fields but for some newer ones such as service design, that borrow a lot from other areas, i wonder if a new language is necessarily the way to 1. express one’s ideas correctly and make sure that all are on the same page 2. gain respect from one’s audience.
This is in response to seeing some sites start up “glassaries” of terms that have to do with a specific field, eg nathan.com, live|work.co.uk, etc…