The ITT Institute of Design hosted a conference on Design Research. The conference touched the broader aspect of design research, and how it’s changing the way corporations seek new ways to innovate. You can check the videos of most presentations from the ITT website.
Shelley Evenson, from Carnegie Mellon, gave a talk on new ways of designing for service. The presentation focused on service design methods, and how they were derived from other areas such as interaction design, business process and participatory research
Dan Staffer, from Adaptative Path, posted a short piece on service vs. product design a while ago (actually almost 3 years ago), but it’s still relevant.
…service design is “the field concerned with the development of services to meet specific needs” (Shedroff) focusing on “customer experiences in industries such as retail, banking, transportation, healthcare, business-to-business enterprises, and education” (IDEO). John Thackara in his book In the Bubble makes the claim that we’re moving away from designing things (products) and towards more services, more joint ownership of things. And certainly even traditional product companies like IDEO seem to be pushing service design hard.
Daniel Pink recently published a career guide called The adventures of Johnny Bunko. He spent some time in Japan studying the manga culture, which obviously influenced his book. Instead of going through advices using the traditional, boring style that everyone expects to find in such books, he uses a manga-style story to explain six career principles that people should follow in order to be successful.
I really like the style of the book, it’s engaging, fun, and most importantly, memorable (which, I believe should be the aim of an ‘instructional’ book). What about using the same idea to produce an end-of-project report for your client? I bet that it would be much more interesting (and popular) as compared to a fifty-page word document.
And the video is amazing too! The publishers made a very smart move to market the book by editing a ‘teaser trailer’.
The podcasts from the 2007 Emergence Conference hosted by Carnegie Mellon School of Design are now available from the Emergence website. Podcasts include talks from Oliver King, Jennifer Leonard, Mark Jones, amongst others. The conference focused on how design can leverage and innovate service-related businesses:
All facets of the economy have a service component, from retail and manufacturing to non-profits and public service sectors. Emergence 2007 will explore how to best support and develop these services using topics and issues surrounding design, business, technology and social programs. This year’s conference will provide insights on current service design practices, business opportunities in services, the technology behind services, and its outlook for the future.
Apple is developing a range of applications in partnership with other companies such as Intel and Cisco to enable the iPhone to interact with other devices. This surely opens a door to create a number of services and applications around the iPhone. For example, Cisco is developing a software that enables iPhone user to ‘flick’ documents to their desktop computers.
Looking ahead, iPhones could be used as electronic wallets or virtual keys to access other services.
I saw this interesting post on Gerald Buckely’s blog: he tried to use his iPhone as an e-boarding pass on a flight from San Antonio to Dallas. And it worked!
”I asked the gate agent if he thought the PDF of my boarding pass would scan. He said, “I don’t know. Let’s try it.”
And, it worked great!
I asked him if AA had tried rolling anything like that out yet. He said not to his knowledge. He was impressed in the quality of the resolution of the barcode. Then a couple of other guys huddled around and got to thinking their Blackberry’s could display PDFs too…”
This is what I call co-creation! Innovation is all about spotting latent needs from consumers. This is clearly one of them!
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design, service design, user-centred research | Tagged: servicedesign, designresearch | 
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Posted by Erick
