designswarm thoughts

There’s clearly something wrong with the delivery of a service if it makes me think “oh what a waste”. This reflects poorly on the company, it’s brand and it’s supposed values, especially when I’m already aware I’m being unsistainable by using the service.

1st example:
Last week during a doze on the Eurostar a member of staff woke me up (!!!) by pushing a leaflet on me that described what their specials were at the restaurant car. I always valued the Eurostar experience as one of the best, especially their ability to generally leave me alone to just enjoy the ride. This has definitely changed things as not only are they wasting a lot of paper for trivial advertising but they actually encourage rude behavior from their staff.
2nd example:
Today on the Gatwick express, I bought a bottle of water, only to have a napkin given to me with it. Did I look like I could spill it all over the place? I realised it was made in the Netherlands for Starbucks and had the clever and oh so ironic “less napkins, more plants, more planet” printed on it. As you’re being handed a napkin so uselessly, this tagline really is reduced to hypocritical corporate advertising.

Got tagged by Marc of 31volts so here goes. This is how I would characterise service design:

Getting a meal at MacDonald’s, getting a weekly vegetable delivery from Abel and Cole, ordering chinese takeout, going on your weekly supermarket run, getting your lunch from the office canteen, all the same thing, but not the same at all.

Let’s start with an anecdote:

I spent Friday on the go on a mad one-day trip to Amsterdam and then Eindhoven and back to London. Not as mad as you’d think, it was a totally self-indulgent decision I took at the last minute and ended up meeting old friends and new ones. Just lovely to be in the Netherlands as well. One my way back I didn’t have enough time to stop in town to had to settle for the sad choices at Schipol airport. I ended up getting a pannini at Per Tutti, some dodgy italian food chain. The waitress handed me a thick plastic-cased coaster and asked if I knew what this way for? I cleary looked like I didn’t so she went on to explain that when my sandwich will be ready, this coaster will ring and blink and I can come and get it at the counter. At first I thought: wow the future we’ve been talking about is getting nearer by the day, but wasn’t entirely thrilled either. The coaster reversed the role of the waitress and got clients off their backs, this also limited the reliance of the company on good and friendly staff as the interaction with the customer was limited, even more than usual. This felt like an efficient service definitely, but also one that made you feel even more like a number.

A few days later during the course of a conversation with Janne the larger implications dawned on me. The question for service design in the future isn’t only how will services be made more ubiquitous, engage people in different ways and get people to use things, but it’s also going to be: how are we going to be designing services that still involve people altogether?

Will our idea of progress eradicate the need for people to occupy a role in the service industry because we’ve designed them out?
In countries like China and India where population is a big issue, they are turning to solutions that see the problem in an opposite way. Each service must be broken down so as to involve (and pay) as many people as possible.

Does that mean that in the future, dealing with people in services will be seen as a less-productive method of obtaining something? Surely that’s not why so many of us complain about feeling unimportant and like a number when we interact with banking services. So it’s interesting to see that approach in the food industry which perhaps points the way to future changes.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting some of the great people behind a book on services in the tourism industry. Andres explained to me that they had written this book in Estonia (only has been translated to Finnish so far) and was working on setting up a BA in service design.

This was great news, as I often feel that how you teach people can influence the way an industry shapes itself. I quickly realised though that we were talking about services in really different ways. He was talking about the classic and slightly corporate view of the “service industries” like tourism, catering, etc and imagined the alumni of this program to work in middle managment in bridging ideas between people on an execution level and the upper management. Quite a different perspective than my own on the subject.
This makes me think that service design, in the way that I was taught and people talk about in the UK, can be interpreted in a really different way and a little like interaction design, might create a gap between the way a field is taught and the practice. Definitions are always useful and I get the feeling that in these pioneering years of service design, we’re gonna need one really quickly.

I’ve had the privilege to have experienced a rather luxurious service recently and it got me thinking about the way we design services for the elite vs the general public. Can one inspire the other? What are the differences and what’s the thinking behind it?

1. Planning for all possible scenarios:

I stayed in a very fancy hotel last month and found among other weird things a shelf next to the minibar including the following items:

- a promotional cup from the hotel
- an Alvar Aalto votive candle holder
- a bottle of liquor
- a box of condoms

Odd combination of items which in fact make total sense, but that I’ve never seen offered in more affordable hotels. What’s the scenario here? Have a cup of tea, light a candle, have a romantic drink and shag? Bring back the cup of tea as part of your collection, bring back the candle holder as you forgot your wife’s birthday, have a stiff drink and call a hooker?

In a way, this very fashionable hotel is almost acknowledging what it is more than hotels where you’ll find the Bible in the drawer of the bedside table. Culturally and otherwise these objects are far more useful to a guest because they can convey a sense of “we’ve thought about everything, just relax”.

It’s interesting to think about how this feeling could be replicated in services. How can you provide a service and give a sense of reassurance to it’s users? Are you honest-enough with your service provision?

2. Secret language:

We all know that the epitome of luxury is feeling like you’re part of the elite and have your own secret language. You can find this to be true of most internet memes (wtf is flume?) but it also applies to the services and objects you surround yourself with. The latest Core77 article on the latest Bang & Olufsen portable music player is an example of misunderstanding that language:

“Bang & Olufsen designs interesting-looking products that most of us will never own, either because they’re too expensive and/or we simply have no use for them.”

That’s besides the point really, because luxury was never about utility but about recognition. How can a service develop it’s own language, only understood by it’s users? I’m talking about more than a member card here. Can other users of the service recognize each other by that language, like those necklaces people who have been to New Zealand wear. Products and services can become part of a secret shared by few but who are the few? Your friends? Your family? Your colleagues?

3. Not for everyone:

Asmallworld has been enjoying a little press lately, and why shouldn’t it? When all the services out there these days have “free signup”, these guys are invite-only (perhaps also what makes feel so elitist still).

What would be the middle ground here? Partial service access depending on who you are to me as the prime user?

I think there’s a lot of potential here beyond thinking about luxury as guns, drugs and art deco :)

I just finished working with Dave on a proposal for the second edition of the Muji award, and being designers of course, we waited till the last minute to submit our proposal.

In this particular case, Dave is in Boston, I’m in London and the proposal had to be sent to Japan by Tuesday next week. We were done with everything by Friday afternoon, but that meant that traditional postal services were no longer an option (we also had to get 2 A3 printed etc…)

We turned to the most efficient option, in this case Fedex Kinkos. Trying to figure anything online with these services is a mess but we didn’t have a choice. We thought about it a little and then thought… hey wait a minute! What if we get their Japan-based office to print this out, and they can send the stuff through from there as well! This will not only mean that the proposal will be received on time, but will actually be much greener as it wont have to take a plane to get there!

With all the greenwashing going on, it was refreshing to find a nugget of sustainable opportunity in a clunky service. Only thing is that it seems that Fedex haven’t figured this out yet, because payment online, without a Fedex account, is not possible and transacting between Kinkos and Fedex seemed to involve someone from their office printing it out, calling Dave to arrange payment on the phone (!!) and then being able to send it…

This is when you realise that there are organisational and corporate roadblocks to a seamless and converged service that could otherwise make an experience much more enjoyable (and sustainable).

Spending time in New York is always a story of compromises. I planned to go to the MoMa but didn’t get a chance to. Nice people were in town but triangulating was a nightmare. I think it has something to do with the scale and the spread of urban life there. In some cities, you clearly have a “downtown” area where you’ll eventually bump into people (Milan is a good example) but in New York, you can go from one end to the other really quickly and there are interesting things to do and visit at pretty much at every corner. Making plans with other people becomes an odessey.

So the trip consisted of hanging out in the West Village, getting great coffee at Jack’s Stir Brew, eating at some nice vegetarian restaurants that Daverecommended, going to see Design Life Now at the Copper Hewitt Museum, breifly dropping by the venue for Postopolis and getting my new favorite ice-cream in America: Green tea Pinkberry topped with coconut flakes.

In any travel plans however there’s also a little bit of work involved and so Matt and I went to see Designing Audiences an AIGA talk at the beautiful Fashion Institute of Technology.

The panel was lead by the infamous Ze Frank with guests graphic designer Stefan Bucher, game designer Katie Salen, and head of Stamen design, Eric Rodenbeck.

They each made a short presentation of their work, Stefan with his daily monsters, Katie with her Ice Karaoke project and Eric with the work that Stamen does (presenting Trulia Hindsight for the first time).

Each spoke about their relationship to audiences both offline and online and I must say I was at first skeptical about this wide array of experiences in drawing a set of conclusions but 2 themes seemed to emerge from the conversation nonetheless:

1. Setting rules is key: Not unlike a school teacher, the designers, apart from Eric perhaps, all spoke of the need to set rules to grow a good community. If you left things too open, people would start wandering away from the “goal” of the community and produce what Ze referred to as “crapucopia”. This is a social phenomenon that teachers, babysitters and mothers all know too well. Makes me wonder if these designers haven’t all turned to become design teachers handing out briefs. The tighter the restrictions, the more creative you are forced to become in order to impress your peers and win the love of the teacher. Is this web2.0 all just an extension of school then? Strange notion worth exploring. In a way this has nothing to do per se with designing a community but more to do with maintaining one and maintaining the conditions that will make every participant feel special and look great by rewarding even their most meager attempts, and keep them interested in contributing. Seen under such a light, “web2.0″ seems almost a maternal activity, closer to real life than a truly unique “internet phenomenon”.

2. Platform makers: I asked them during the Q&A whether they thought that designers would become simply platform makers and their value would come from how great a platform they would create for people’s enjoyment. This is a question that I myself struggle with as a designer in an age that pushes us to think more and more about services and less about “stuff” more particularly in product design. The answers they provided pointed to a balance between these 2 roles for the future designers. Yes we will be building more platforms but the content creation will still be important to launch that community and gather people’s reactions around an initial body of work.

It seems almost impossible to think that most designers will not be following this trend even if it means more maternal maintenance work and less ego-driven creation.

The week is finally over and my student’s work was great! I invited them to post all of their service ideas online and will be updating this post with the links as time goes by. They also conducted a short interview, nothing none of you don’t already know. We didn’t really get to the core ideas about interaction design which some of the other professors talked about. Pity.

1. SNAILMAIL
Jan, Simon and Andy thought about how to bridge the digital divide and allow metaphors to converge. SnailMail is a service that allows you to send an email to an elderly person even if they don’t have an email address. That email would be printed out and sent via the postal service to that person. In return they could write a regular letter and send it through regular mail but with special envelopes provided by the service. In time, the elderly person would understand the concept of using email and eventually transition out of the service.

2. MR SHOP4U
Designed by Dries, Ellent and Maxime, this service is quite complex but holds a lot of potential in my opinion. Mr Shop4u is a service that aims to piggyback on local services to reduce the amount of packaging of frehs goods at the source. A convenient and online virtual shopping experience allows you to pick your goods and then get them delivered by local bikers that give you boxes you can then hand back to the service at your next delivery. Very smart.

Video on Youtube

3. Mod, this service by Carmen, Klaas, Wouter and Nils caters to people who want to discover new places to hang out in. Depending on their mood, calculated by a bracelet the service provides, you would be suggested a location to spend and evening. the bracelet also helps you locate that place by indicating which direction to walk in, since the last thing you want to do is pull out a map late at night. Then you can feedback to the system which takes that information into consideration when picking the next place or for other users in general, recording what the good nights are and the less interesting night are within a same location.

4. Braceme is a service idea from Bert, Tom and Eva Teresa that explores the different ways in which we can connect while in urban environments. You would go buy a Braceme bracelet and fill in a survey to highlight some caracter traits, likes and dislikes. This information would be implanted in this bracelet that would respond quite visually to whether anyone in your direct environment has more or less things in common with you. This bracelet is coupled to a mobile application that allows you to tweak the visual notifications you would get on your bracelet and also allow you to send your picture to the service who relays it to that person to establish a meeting.

You can find the details of the workshop i’m conducting on service design with industrial design students on the workshop blog.

My introduction presentation here (pdf)

Closing presentation here here.

Enjoy!

As soon as I started blogging, a little over a year ago now, I’ve always been interested in how my former life of industrial designer merged with the internet. I went to blogject workshops, read about the “internet of things”, went to “near field interactions” workshop, looked at Matt’s work on Second life, listen to the likes of Ezio Manzini and John Thackara talk about services and the lightness of systems, watched as buzz words like “rapid prototyping”, “user generated content”, “semantic web”,”web 2.0″,”netocracy” fly around and get tagged onto a whole bunch of different virtual businesses. Today was different though. Something weird is happening: the bottom-up approach is gaining industrial design, and this is completely changing the game… Let’s talk about clear examples then:

Article 1: USA today article on Amazon’s new plan to start looking at creating a platform for product development and distribution on a “user- generatable scale”. Their argument is that if we can create platforms for entrepreneurship on a virtual level, why shouldn’t we be able to do the same with products? Why shouldn’t GM be interested in niche markets and production?

Article 2: Teapotters,
a new online community of people who publish and share their 3D models. Not that this didn’t exist before of course, but i guess their web2.0 logo makes them more credible : P

Article 3: Crowdspirit which proposes to make electronic products that are less than 150 euros manufacturable by individuals.
“Our community will have the power for the first time in the history of manufacturing to be actively involved in the design, selection and the sales of highly innovative products. These products will no longer depend on big manufacturers having control over what is made and what isn’t.”

Well the PSS model just went straight out the window didn’t it?

One of a number of issues I see with a lot of this has to do with the discrepancy in perception. There is no such thing as a bad guy in manufacturing, there are large and small companies making products on large or small scale. The large old and dirty media and advertising companies who scew our view of the world aren’t the same. This is not the same battle as the rest of the web2.0 world, its not the same ballpark or the same sport.

The impact of an online services or business is worlds away from real manufacture. At this particular point in time, it costs very little to start an online business, a coffee maker, two to 3 clever people with a good idea, some VC funding, a server or 2, a couple of sleepless nights and voilà, your idea is accessible to all, has little material impact (if you exclude the shwag you’ll be producing to get groupies to promote you at geeky conferences).

Now when we’re talking about product design, architecture, engineering, this is definitely a different world. This is when some of the problems that industrial design always had in defining itself legally are coming back to bite it in the ass. If you’re an engineer or an architect, you are responsible under law for what you design. You have a responsibility and a duty to create and and maintain what you produce. Industrial designers never had that, because their field of work was way too vague and complex… what legal responsibility did you need if you were designing a salt and pepper shaker for Alessi? None. Even if you were designing window sills, you didn’t need to report or feel responsible to anyone. You didn’t even need to feel responsible for the material waste you created by choosing particular materials. Some of that has changed of course in the past 10 years… green became popular and industrial designers started to embrace “eco-design”, looking into reusing materials, offering environmentally-friendly products, etc… This was a small revolution that still takes place consistently in isolated areas of the field…

However, what happens when you put this power of creation in the hands of anyone? Well, that revolution ceases to have an impact on our thinking. As soon as you start putting the power of manufacturing creation on individuals, you stop asking yourselves the important questions, because then manufacturing happens on the basis of “i want one”, and the all important barrier to design: market and scale, ceases to have an impact. Why are these things important? Firstly, because you have to make sure as a business that your potential sales will be worth the tons of investment that you will make in providing the VERY expensive and pollution-heavy tooling. (Let’s also be clear here: making one or making a million is the same tooling if you want to get the quality right.) And then you need to think, where do your unsold item go? Where are the secondary markets?

These act as controls for products which might not stand the test of time. We also know how polluting manufacture is and this is why micro-systems like Etsy and Ebay act as great ways to give used objects a second life. But what happens when manufacture is necessary out of individual whims? It’s all good and well when it’s self directed and done through craft… but do you really want to put together, assemble, plan, spend energy and carbon on tooling for one object at a time?

And please don’t talk to me about rapid prototyping… the golden cow of glory that was supposed to save the world of designers since the mid nineties… it’s always been too costly to run and purchase and doesn’t apply to materials that last. It works as an intermediate step in the overall design process alone, or to make small sculptures of Second Life characters : ) not a cell phone!

There’s already so much that’s been done to encourage large companies to offer green services. We vote more and more with our dollars for the companies whose products we respect. When we wont have any company to identify who will be to blame, who will take responsability? Whose fault will it be when our landfills fill up twice as fast because now we have two models running at the same time: the industrial one, and the individual one?

Maybe I’m being too pessimistic, but I got shivers down my spine today…

I showed you the Fresh Start poster a few weeks ago when I first started designing it and now the final versionthat was finished by Dave is online as well. Enjoy and do comment!

I had a fairly shocking meeting with a man who was supposedly interested in redesigning Youth centres in the UK. This sounded great to me especially because the landscape of childhood now, with the addition of technology, is very different from my own. Growing up in the 80s I only had contact with technology later on in life through my first walkman at age 11 maybe, my first computer at the age of 15 and was introduced to it through school computers when i was young, and then DOS and Windows 3.1 classes in Saudi Arabia. Ok so maybe i didnt have a classic childhood to begin with, but that’s not the point… : )

Now children have access to cell phones at age 6, a computer present in the house from birth, and they probably try to suck on an iPod shuffle once or twice…Age compression they call it in large toy companies, or the changes that children have gone through that make their traditional toys irrelevant more quickly, is an example of this change.

As children grow up, their social dynamics are now shaped by the tools they have: cell phones, texting, emails, chat, online communities such as MySpace (or Bebo in the UK) etc…

With all this in mind you would think that anyone attempting to redesign Youth Centres would be interested , even a little, in the ways that “growing up” have changed. You would also think that as an adult designer, you would want to have a very user-centrered design approach to that problem. Why aren’t joung kids using these youth centres. What is their perception of them. What so they seek elsewhere that the centre doesn’t provide? What would they like out of an urban structure that is supposedly catering to them? Those would be just a few of a miriad of quesions that one could ask kids of all ages. Wouldn’t this be the perfect way to make sure you’re not perpetrating the “patriarchal designer” model… the “i know best” model which has proven to fail and has led to the web-2.0-user-generated- content generation of applications to emerge?

But no. I sat there in Greenwitch park listening to a man who thinks that when designing youth centres “people don’t know what they want”, “children are not my client, society is my client”, “i dont understand the web”, “we need to work with experts in child development”, ” a child doesnt know what it needs to grow up properly”. I’m not saying that i disagree with all of what he was suggesting… but this is such a dangerous approach to take. It was like talking to a product designer who doesn’t know that people use his product. It was like going back in time and as i spoke to him about Fresh Start and experience prototyping, iterative design, etc… I saw how far removed I am from the normal world. I think I need to dumb things down these days for anyone outside of my field to understand me. I’m not sure what this means for me as a professional, but what I do know is that as Ezio Manzini (who I admire greatly) said :

“[Start with the premise that] people are smart” and what you will design with ultimately be better.

Finally Fresh Start is online! Nearly 2 years after the initial (7 weeks) project we’ve been working hard to present this to the Emergence poster sessionin Pittsburgh and Dave went and also live-blogged the event. Loads of interesting thoughts.

I wont be attending Emergence but I had the pleasure on working on illustrating our design process for the poster session where Fresh Start will be presented and i suddenly found it a fascinating exercise. How do you represent what starts out by being boxes and arrows and make it compelling? I had to think about the flow of the process for one. We went through some design steps that influenced the way we analyzed prior assumptions (so the loop) and iterative processes around core design elements (around experience prototyping for example) that completely shaped the final product. So I tried to convey the dynamic essence of that process without losing sight of the visual flow i wanted to keep, i.e. some respect of a left to right, top to bottom way of reading.
So what i came up with eventually was reshaped because we had a lot of copy to include for each step as well as pictures, but i still really like the visual illustration of 7 weeks of hard work, that solely focuses on process and not on detailing the service. On an academic level it’s really interesting and worthwhile.

The final poster version will be present at the conference of course, but consider this the teaser ;)

More than a year ago, I worked, along with Dave Chiu and Haiyan Zhang on designing Fresh Start a service design project to prevent obesity that I am very proud of. The elevator pitch for it is:

“Two friends sign up for the Fresh Start service and make a commitment to cook with each other on a regular basis. On scheduled days, the Fresh Start service delivers to each of their homes a recipe, along with the required ingredients. Each friend receives a recipe with a different half covered. Using communication devices in their kitchens, each friend talks the other through their half of the recipe. At the end of cooking, the friends remove the sticker to reveal the complete recipe.

The Fresh Start service helps people develop healthy food habits they can utilize throughout their lives. By activating existing social networks, the Fresh Start service enables both the cultivation of routine and education through a process of learning by doing”

Curious? Well we’ve presented the project to the Design Council, TechnoGym and wrote a paper for CHI 2006 and now we’re presenting it at the poster session of Emergence, a service design conference going on in 2 weeks that Dave will be attending as well.

All details of the project will be released soon as we are also putting together a website for the conference.