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March 17, 2005
Service Design Reading
"Will You Survive the Services Revolution?" by Uday Karmarkar from the Harvard Business Review.
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Hoodie
I ordered my cap and gown and Master's hood today. The sun is shining. I removed the lining from my jacket. Spring is here, finally. The end is in sight.
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Tony Golsby-Smith
We had a visit from former Nierenberg Chair Tony Golsby-Smith. He's a design consultant in Australia, facilitating what he calls "strategic conversations" with "big organizations that don't usually hire design firms or even know about design." One of these is Price Waterhouse Coopers, and he brought along a client, Luke, from PWC.
Tony has these conversations so that by thinking together with him, the organization can better design their worlds. They are a way of turning on design thinking in organizations. During these sessions, they tackle big, strategic issues, examining them in a designer-ly way, not just an analytical way. This doesn't happen in most businesses.
In the past, organizations were much more focused internally, pushing products out into the market. But over the last 20 years, power has shifted to the markets, and the markets have turned organizations from inside --> out to outside --> in. Organizations now need to focus much more on the areas that design knows a lot about: products, services, and customers (users).
Luke talked about how PWC was trying to use design to create a competitive advantage by creating new products and services, forming better relationships with clients, and utilizing different capabilities from across the firm. To do this last item, PWC has created MindLab, a shared physical space that brings together their three service lines in order to better co-create solutions with clients using expertise from all three lines.
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March 15, 2005
Design Attitude Readings
"Design Matters for Management" and "Towards a Design Vocabulary for Management" by Richard Boland and Fred Callopy and "Reflections on Designing and Architectural Practice" by Frank Gehry. All in Managing as Designing.
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March 14, 2005
Nature of Experiences Reading
"The Contextual and Dialectical Nature of Experiences" by Sudheer Gupta and Mirjana Vajic from New Service Development: Creating Memorable Experiences
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Designing for Service
I started a new class today: Designing for Service, taught by Shelley Evenson. What is a service, and why bother designing it? Services are all around us. A service is a chain of (sequential, parallel, overlapping and/or recurrent) value-creating activities or events which form a process. Customers often take part in performing different elements in the interactions with employees of the service company for the purpose of achieving a particular result. In service design, the "users" are both the customers and the employees.
Services make up 70% of the economy. (Goods are the other 30%.) It's important to start designing services because good service is good business and a well-designed service can be a great business. Customer expectations are rising too. Fed Ex, with their allowing customers to track their own packages, started the trend of customers expecting things to happen in real-time and with them in control (or seeming control) over the service.
Dematerializing products can have a positive impact on our society and environment as well. By making less products and more services, there is a conceptual shift away from ownership of things. Customers don't have to own the product anymore, just the service. What if, instead of a washer/drier, you instead purchased "laundry service" from Sears?
Services are intangible, but designers are good at leaving tangible traces to experience. We can create the tangible evidence or artifacts of the service experience. So is service design really experience design? Yes and no. A service is a thing, and the experience is the environment of the service. Experiences have personal meanings. You can't design an experience (or activities), but you can provide the environment and tools for activities and experiences to happen. This environment is composed of people, products, and places--a setting with resources with potential for interaction and participation.
Service design is about many different touchpoints that happen over time. A service design language has to function (provide resources) across all levels of the system and as the experience develops among constituents (customers and employees), in stages of time, through different channels/methods of service, and at different touchpoints (the objects themselves).
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PI Day 2005
On campus today, another CMU nerdtastic tradition: written in chalk all over the sidewalks, looping all over campus are the first 16384 digits of PI. All this in honor of 3.14.
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T-Minus Two Months
It's an unusually bright and sunny day for Pittsburgh as I return back to school after break to start the last two months of school. The last ten percent of anything is usually the hardest, and I'm sure that could be the case as I wrap up my two-year odyssey here.
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