My Conversation with Sarah – Paypal’s Virtual Agent
Has a virtual agent been helpful for anyone, ever?
Creative Change Is Scary
If there’s one thing I have learned as a designer who studies behavior to make informed but creative decisions about future products and services, it’s there’s a disconnect between what people think they believe and what they actually do.
Brandon Schauer at Service Design Drinks
Tonight we kicked off service design drinks 2012 strong with Brandon Schauer doing a repeat performance of his keynote talk from the Service Design Network Conference: The Business Case for (or Against) Service Design (PDF 19.7 MB). His provoking talk identifies a huge imbalance of spending, where many more billions go to advertising (telling people how great [...]
Pretend you’re in a focus group.
Of all the things I have pretended in my life, and I have pretended a lot, I never once considered pretending that I was in a focus group. Talk about boring! Dear ING, pretend I’m a normal human being and talk to me like one. Thanks.
This Is Service Design – UX Week 2011
Jared Cole and I ran a one-day workshop at UX Week 2011 called This Is Service Design. The title borrows from the the title of the book, This Is Service Design Thinking, which I contributed to. The workshop builds off last year’s workshop, From Products to Services, but with a couple changes. We dropped sketch [...]
San Francisco Service Design Drinks Video
Here’s a video montage of the last SF Service Design Drinks that Chris McCarthy, Director of the Innovation Learning Network and an Innovation Specialist with Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy, put together and posted on his blog. SF Service Design: Facebook | Twitter
Happy 2011!
Two years ago, while at Nokia, I worked on a project called Vision 2010. Although we were looking into a not-too-distant future, it was still the future. And yet today, 2010 is a thing of the past. It’s time to reflect and also look ahead to what this new year may bring. Last year I [...]
Service Design Talk at SIGUX Seoul
During my last visit to Seoul, I had the pleasure of presenting From Product to Services, the intro presentation Jared Cole and I used at our UX Week workshop, to the SIGUX group in Seoul. My colleague Peter Merholz also presented during the event. The audience included folks from Samsung, SKT, KT, LG, the DNA, [...]
Consider the Fate of Empathy
From the New York Times article, “I Tweet, Therefore I Am“: “But when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy? The risk of the performance culture, of the packaged self, is that it erodes the very [...]
May SF Service Design Drinks Recap
On May 20, a group of very interesting people got together for the fourth SF Service Design Drinks. Unlike the previous events, which were held in bars, this one was hosted at Adaptive Path, who graciously provided the venue plus beers and snacks for the attendees (it helps that I work there). The turnout was [...]
Design Overstretch
In the continuing debate about design thinking, there’s great article on Core77, Design Thinking: Everywhere and Nowhere, Reflections on the Big Re-Think, which covers thoughts coming from the Big Rethink conference held by The Economist in London. Nearly every point in the article made me stake stock of my own beliefs, practices, and pontifications on [...]
Cities as Products
I’ve been thinking more about the design of cities recently. As such, the Guardian article The urban age: how cities became our greatest design challenge yet caught my eye. The author talks about cities as products, as commodities even. If you’re interested in cities as products (or services), you should read it. Here are some [...]
Service Design Thinking?
A Brief Guide to Service Design (UX Brighton) by Paul Thurston & Nick Marsh View more presentations from Harry Brignull. I’m glad to see many similarities between this presentation and the one I presented at IxD10. Ideas that definitely overlap include: services are important, services are everywhere, they are designed by everyone, and they are [...]
Can Service Design Take Off in the US?
Despite the growth of service design firms in Europe, the success of the Service Design Network, and the globally self-organized service design drinks, including one in San Francisco, service design still really hasn’t made its move on the United States. And while many designers I talk to are very interested in service design, businesses are [...]
First Official SF Service Design Drinks
I’m excited to report that the first official San Francisco Service Design Drinks this past Thursday was a success! People actually showed up! It was awesome! The only negative: I forgot to take photos! Everyone seemed really excited and positive. So we decided to make it a monthly event. Bar 821 was a bit loud, [...]
Service Design: an Interaction Design Perspective
On February 5, 2010, at Interaction10, I presented Service Design: an Interaction Design Perspective. Since studying interaction design and service design at Carnegie Mellon University, I have wrestled with the relationship between the two. During an interview with Jeff Howard, a few days after graduating, I tried to address this relationship. It was both a [...]
iPad as Service Enabler
It’s hard not to be underwhelmed by a product that we already had a good idea of what it would be, especially if you’ve ever used an iPhone. But aside from there being little surprises, and an arguably terrible name (there’s nothing poetic about iPad), what I find more interesting are services the device will [...]
Service Design Drinks SF
A small party of Bay Area peeps interested in talking about service design got together this past Friday at Lime in the Castro. The somewhat last-minute event was organized by Aidan Kenny, who was here on business from Kilkenny, Ireland. The gathering included people from organizations like the American Heart Association, Adaptive Path, Apple, Intuit, [...]
Design Thinking, Simply Put
“To me, design thinking is the productive combination of analytical thinking and intuitive thinking.” -Roger Martin in response to Peter Merholz’s Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You While Peter’s original post was in October 2009, the Harvard Business Review called it out in their January/February 2010 print issue. As I tend to think about definitions [...]
Speaking at IxD10
I will be speaking at the Interaction 10 conference on Friday, February 5 in Savannah. The title of my talk will be “Service Design: an Interaction Design Perspective.” What is service design? How is it different from interaction design? Or isn’t it? As an interaction designer with service design education and experience, I will offer [...]
Service Design Network Conference 2009
Two weeks ago, I was on the island of Madeira, Portugal, for the second annual Service Design Network conference. Like last year, I was part of the planning board. My main role was to review content submissions and help put together the conference program. I also served as a judge for the service design competition [...]
Intro to Drawing at SF Art Institute
As a designer, I draw a lot, whether it’s visualizing a conversation or depicting an experience through a storyboard. To improve my skills, I’m taking a 12-week course at the San Francisco Art Institute. I am now halfway through the course. Here are some of my latest drawings.
Directionally Correct Design
The value of design often butts heads with the rigor of quantitative proof. But as the design advances into more complex territory, proof becomes even more challenging. While at the Institute for the Future HealthCare 2020 open space meeting on Science and Technology in Health, Chris McCarthy, Director, Innovation Learning Network at Kaiser Permanente, talked [...]
Technology Enablers vs Scientific Rigor in Healthcare
One huge problem for US healthcare is that technology moves at a much faster rate than the system of change and adoption in the current system. For obvious reasons, there are a lot of regulations, studies, and tests to help ensure effectiveness of processes and products that are introduced into healthcare services. Unfortunately, this system [...]