CPH127

There’s an interesting opposition of ideas when it comes to customer service in an era of web 2.0. On one hand we have a ton and a half of “user-generatable” content and companies are understanding more and more how to leverage that content to the advantge of their brand, but then we face large industries with little to no customer service. Worse is we do very little about it as this Emergence marketing post discusses. Why do we feel that it’s alright to use a companies APIs and customize it to no end, do cool things with the creative tools they give us, but then when we actually need something from them, the door is slammed in our face? I once heard that for every complaint that a person filed to a company, there are 1000 dissatisfied customers who have never complained.

If we have so much power as some would have us believe, how come we get so little in return?

After reading this World Changing article via Putting People first I started to realize how much stands in the way of a service economy. The article in itself did not reveal that much about the innovative ways in which we could be considering our possessions for one. I find it a bit depressing that we are still talking about basic and impersonal services like car sharing, tool sharing, lending and renting services, things that Ezio Manzini has been talking about for the past 10 years.

Yes people like to own things, they socially define themselves by what they own, so services that would challenge and question our worldly belongings and the way we interact with them (Rentathing comes to mind) would be more useful to the whole discourse i think… especially when you read the types of comments that accompanied the article. I think that people seriously need to start considering what their impact on the environment is but also for designers to start getting a lot more creative about the options that we offer people. If some services have changed the face of video rental, air travel, music sharing, surely there is a fabulous design space beyond sharing your lawnmower with the neighbor! Club cards aren’t the answer to everything.

This really good conference: International service design Northumbria in Newcastle took plòace last march and was on the subject of service design with a great collection of speakers and the podcasts to download:

Service Innovation through Design Thinking from Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Signposts for the Next Decade from Dr. Andrea Cooper, Head of Design Knowledge, Design Council

Live|Work - Pioneering Service Design from Chris Downs, Partner, Live|Work

Objects of Service - From Subjects to Objects and Back Again from Prof. Steven Kyffin, Global Head of Design Research, Philips Design

and much more…

via Design Council RED

Oh Oh Oh, can i go? The Carnegie Mellon University School of Design are organizing a Service Design conference on the 8th-10th of September in Pittsburgh called Emergence and are accepting proposals for presentations. Sign up for updates, i will.

A very good Times online article on the shift that we are living of seeing value in what we experience through services vs what we own and experience through objects.

A very interesting seminar on “creative communities and social innovation” is happening in Helsinki this friday. With such big names as Ezio Manzini, John Thackara, Francois Jégou this seminar is about:

“framing the welfare and care story as a series of design opportunities.”

Anyone going??? Anyone blogging???

via Doors of Perception

So the very awaited Cox Review of Creativity in Business just came out and the buzz has started already… the likes of John Thakara have already started blogging parts of it like:

“The model of the UK becoming an all-service economy, the world’s leading repository of professional skills, is enormously appealing - and totally unrealistic”

Written by Sir George Cox who is the Chairman of the Design Council and published this December 2nd it is sure to be a very interesting read that i will go through and report back in the coming week. But if anyone has read it, please share!

Found this core77 post on the Design Council’s new campaign Dott07 and its new program director John Thackara. I got to see the behind-the-scenes of this campaign a little ago while at the Design Council during an informal presentation and I think that it is quite clever for them to pick such a respected and media-friendly designer as thy tends to be very anonymous in their campaigns.

The role of the Design Council is also quite interesting as they do not come up with design solutions per se (apart from the RED team for which i worked but which represents a small percentage of the organisation) but rather promote design as a meaningful process that can benefit a number of industries. Promoting the design of public services has always been one of their poster definitions and i often think of how much does service design have to do with our understanding of what services are. It feels like talking about “stuff” and “things” for me sometimes, it sounds pregnant with possibilities and i like the sound of “less-stuff-more-things world” but what could this look like? How much are people willing to give up the “stuff”? Maybe it would be a good idea to start listing the good, and the bad of services we all know so we can discuss and identify areas which might have potential for all the service designers out there…

Although not a new topic the principles of design are often taken for granted as being largely aesthetic considerations. This is particularly so for people like myself who are from a 2D background.

It is important however to recognise how such principles extend beyond the visual organisation of design elements into the realm of experience design.

In 1997 NC State University, The Center for Universal Design, developed a set of Universal Design principles compiled by advocates of universal design, [listed in alphabetical
order: Bettye Rose Connell, Mike Jones, Ron Mace, Jim Mueller, Abir
Mullick, Elaine Ostroff, Jon Sanford, Ed Steinfeld, Molly Story, and
Gregg Vanderheiden.]

The seven principles are listed as:

principle one: equitable use
principle two: flexibilty in use
principle three: simple and intuitive
principle four: perceptible information
principle five: tolerance for error
principle six: low physical effort
principle seven: size and space for approach and use

A recent posting at the lovely site UIGarden provides more detail. It’s a great site and I think you will enjoy browsing this and other articles.