I went to a conference and a few days later my friend Michelle came up with “Twitter compliant” as a way of rating presentations. Today I walked around the beautiful new Maxxi museum of Modern Art and Architecture in Rome (another Zaha Hadid project) and thought that some 21st century compliance would really help.

The fact is that whether they like it or not, these types of museums have to compete with the Moma, Palais de Tokyo and Tate Modern, or more locally Triennale. That this is the first radically modern building in a while in Rome almost takes a back seat for the average museum buff. Modern Art museums compete internationally in terms of architecture, curation and services and this one, while succeeding fantastically on the first fails at every other level.

Just to name a few challenges that can be easily fixed:
- Lack of toilet seats (!!!!) and for such a huge space, not enough facilities
- Terribly small caffe that will very quickly be over capacity.
- No space to sit down inside, no benches unless you’re supposed to look at a movie, nothing. Makes the whole experience really exhausting as there are many long corridors in true Hadid style. You need the benches to get people to go: “wow what a great space”.
- Really bad artists info signage with clearly no real guidelines about how far away the signage is from the piece, making people look around for it.
- No signs on whether photography is allowed or not, meaning someone has to speak into a microphone occasionally to say to people not to take pictures, transforming the space into a mall or supermarket, and not a museum.
- The entrance and ticket desk becomes a nightmare when there are more than 20 people queuing. Good luck this summer.
- The book store is super tiny and not interesting. If anything is to be learnt from 21st century museums, is that its all about the book stores.
- Running your stuff on Macs means you’ll get this problem quite often and look totally stupid.

So there. Such a contrast to super-well organised events happening in the same city but clearly in a different century.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

My introduction presentation here (pdf)

Closing presentation here here.

Enjoy!