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 great privilege and opportunity to share my thoughts at Interaction10 two years later.

Talking about service design at an interaction design conference had its challenges. I covered why I thought we should be talking about service design, what service design looks like, how it’s different from interaction design, and what interactions designers can do if they’re interested in service design. I was happy to get a lot of positive feedback after the talk. But going in, I didn’t know what people would make of it.

OH: “When I hear ’service design’ I reach for my gun.”

This was tweeted from the conference the night before my talk. While no one shot at me, one audience member did say the talk rubbed him a bit the wrong way. And another person in the audience took issue with service design as an emerging field. He seemed to ignore that I said the design of services is not new. But the conscious application of design practice to services is new and emerging. Subtle but significant difference. I suppose this all supports some rumors I heard that my talk was controversial.

Good! I further heard that the talk generated a lot of good conversation. That’s what I hoped to do, so I am happy.

If you were there and have feedback, good or bad, I’d love to hear it. I spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between interaction design and service design, but it’s definitely a work in progress.

Finally, I’d like to thank Jared Cole, Kip Lee, Imran Sobh, Carrie Chan, and Susan Dybbs for their feedback.

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 my insights into what role interaction designers have in this emerging area of design.

I am super excited to be talking at the premier conference in my field along with others, including Paola Antonelli, Bill Moggridge, Nathan Shedroff, Ezio Manzini, Jon Kolko, and Dan Hill. If you’re attending, make sure you say hello.

Dan Saffer recently asked, “If I asked you to name the most influential interaction design products, you would say…?”

I found this question a bit confusing. It raised a lot of questions. My instinct was to respond by asking, “What product does not involve interaction design?” Next, “What do you mean by product?”

Further, is this a question of form? What is the form of interaction design? How easily can you point to it like you can industrial or communication design? How does this question apply to services and organizations? We can say quite easily, that is a great service, or that organization really works well.

But when (if ever) we hear, “that’s great interaction design,” to what might someone be referring? Is that a true picture of interaction design? Could we answer Dan’s question with democracy, the Holocaust, Christianity?

I saw a screening of the film Objectified, after which the director, Gary Hustwit, and two of the designers featured in the film, Bill Moggridge (IDEO) and Dan Formosa (Smart Design), did a little Q&A.

One audience member asked Moggridge to reflect on defining interaction design as a discipline. In his response, he said that it was necessary at the time to define it as a discipline because software was so new and no one knew how to design it. But now that it’s pervasive, interaction design as a discipline may no longer be necessary.

As someone with a masters degree in interaction design, this caught my attention. Though because I have a design job that is neither industrial design nor communication design, it seems that interaction design, or at least some form of design that deals with the less tangible, is needed. However, his statement speaks to the many communication and industrial designers who feel they have had the same focus on behavior that interaction designers, including myself, like to refer to as their domain.

With the interaction design community still struggling to define itself, this statement is worth some thought.

For a while now, when people ask me about being an interaction designer, I have explained it as designing for behavior: what, how, and why someone interacts with a product, service, or organization. As an interaction designer, I tread in the land of emotion, motivation, action, need, and desire. Like design itself, there need not be a limit to which this approach may be applied. However, not everyone sees interaction design in this way.

While I did not go to this year’s IxDA conference, I was glad to hear the dialogue about what is interaction design kicked up again by Robert Fabricant’s keynote, wherein he stated interaction design is not about computing technology, it’s about behavior. Given my perspective on interaction design, this is not a surprise to me. What is surprising is people feeling that this is wrong.

What’s even more surprising is that what Robert said is nothing new or shocking. In Designing for Interaction, arguably the most accessible book on interaction design, Dan Saffer says, in the very first chapter, “interaction desing is about behavior.” And that was way back in 2006!

Notwithstanding, there are areas of focus for interaction design, and there is overlap with other design disciplines. But I totally agree with Dan and Robert, interaction is about behavior. And it has nothing inherently to do with making wireframes, interfaces, websites, or computing technology. Why this is new or shocking, I don’t know. But if the assertion miffs enough people in the community to cause a stir, then we need to have a talk and sort it out. Because believing interaction design is about computing technology is not healthy for the future of interaction design.

Adaptive Path recently hosted a brown bag lunch with Jeremy Yuille regarding interaction design education. I skirted up from my Nokia office a few blocks away to take advantage of AP’s open invitation. It took me a while to realize that Jeremy is on the IxDA board, and that I had met him at the IxDA conference last February during a discussion about future IxDA conferences.

Jeremy is also Program Manager at ACID, Digital Media Coordinator at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Communication Design, Interaction Designer at overt.creation, according to LinkedIn. And he is working on a PhD in design, which was the impetus for coming to AP to talk about interaction design. To paraphrase, he wanted to talk to industry stakeholders before making claims about interaction design as an academic.

For an hour, the group—six folks from AP, Dani Malik, who heads the San Francisco IxDA chapter, and me—shared our backgrounds and experience as designers. An overarching theme of the discussion was why formal design education is or is not important for interaction design. With the speed of which interaction design has gained relevance over the past few decades, and with many interaction designers having not been formally trained, the question deserves exploration.

Most of the participants had some form of design or art background—three of us had gone to Carnegie Mellon University. We talked about the value of crits, learning to both give and taken constructive criticism, working in teams with people from various backgrounds, and gaining an understanding that design is not a yes/no question. Other points included the importance of typography and composition, attention to detail, being able to explore, tinker, and play.

We also briefly touched on the boundaries of interaction design through a discussion on what we tell other people when asked what we do. I went off on my usual tirade of not wanting to call myself an interaction designer due to the associations many people have with interaction design and the web or software or even all things digital (interaction design can have nothing to do with digital). Jared Cole, a fellow CMU alum who also participated, stated his insistence on simply being called a designer. I too now simply tell people I’m a designer at Nokia, rather than imply any specialization.

Undoubtedly, web design, or UI design, are specializations within interaction design. But the boundaries are either much broader or endless, and we have only begun to push at them. This is something I learned through design education, a perspective that industry has yet to fully gain.

Overall, I enjoyed the discussion. Given that we ran over time and seemed to have a lot more to say, it seemed the other participants found the conversation engaging and worthwhile as well. It was good to begin having the discussion outside the walls of academia, and I look forward to Jeremy’s thoughts on the matter.

I’m not sure Carnegie Mellon’s master of tangible interaction design is news to me. I sort of recall hearing something about it last spring. But today was the first time I saw a curriculum for the program. Like several of my former peers, I am intrigued by this program. And as a master of interaction design, I am curious how this program relates to my own, given the only difference in name is the word “tangible.”

During my two years as an interaction design student, I took courses with several of this new program’s faculty. So I wonder what these students will get that I did not. What they will get, and what is a question for some of my peers, is a master of design distinction despite the program being part of the school of architecture and not the school of design.

From the program description…

The Master of Tangible Interaction Design program is a one-year program at Carnegie Mellon University centered around new computational technologies in making. The program serves two distinct groups: those with significant engineering and/or computer science knowledge who wish to master design or artistic skills, and those with significant design, art, or architecture experience who wish to master technological means of making. The scope of study in the mTID program is broad, including digital fabrication, analog and digital electronics, media and materials, and computer programming.

Some comments collected on Twitter:

Phil Robinson yeah we were discussing putting ‘extreme’ before our name, or making us interaction designers of everything

Kyle Vice is it just me, or does this feel thrown together? 

Jared Cole does the mTID fall under the realm of art or design? are we talking MFA or M.Des? Art, I can see… Design, I cannot

Jodi Forlizzi yes, just add water and prerequisites, you’ve got yourself a master’s program.

This sounds like a cool program. It’s new, so I can excuse its haphazard appearance. But I do consider my master of interaction of design to include all types of interaction, tangible and intangible. So is this a subset of what I studied? To a degree, with a lot less emphasis on design. And it does not seem like a focus within interaction design, but more experimental, particularly with its deference to art and computer science.

Certainly, it will only benefit humankind if more people that make products with embedded computing (which is how I interpret this program) have some exposure to design. But a master in design (albeit mTID, which is even more obscure than mDes) from the school of architecture? Curious.

Erik Stolterman has been visiting Carnegie Mellon for the past few days, during which he gave a lecture on “The Design Paradox – and the nature of design research.” The premise of the talk, aimed at HCI researchers, was that HCI research, which is mostly aimed at improving design practice (his assumption), does not seem to influence practice. Hence, the paradox.

But the design paradox was not what interested me most. I was more intrigued by his argument that HCI researchers need to understand the nature of design; and for that matter, that designers themselves need to better understand what they are doing. Why? It helps practitioners to make the case for what they do. A more developed theory and philosophy of design will help designers recognize what they do and help other people understand that. This happens to be the basic premise of my thesis paper.

So what is it that researchers and designers themselves don’t understand? The rigor, logic, and discipline of design. “A good designer understands the rigor and logic of doing design in a disciplined way,” Stolterman says. After the lecture, I asked how we can better understand the rigor, logic, and discipline. He did not have an answer.

Nevertheless, the co-author of The Design Way had some great points about the nature of design and how it is different than art and science. In fact, Stolterman said he puts design on the same plain as art and science.

“Design is not art, design is not science, it’s its own tradition. It’s a choice to use design. An approach to change the world.”

As an approach, he argued, design gives us results that the other approaches don’t deliver. Design is set up to deliver unexpected outcomes. If we knew what we wanted, we wouldn’t use design, he said. Further, in understanding design, you must accept the complexities of design practice: mind set, knowledge set, skill set, tool set. In addition, must accept that design is mind and hand: sensibility and judgment; craft and skill.

He also provided a simple definition for judgment, which was great for me because I have been struggling to understand what this means in the writing of my paper. He said judgment is being able to recognize good quality. Now if I could just explain simply how a designer develops judgment, I’d be set.

As for interaction design, he said it is one of the most important fields in our society today. I got goosebumps when he said this, then quickly turned skeptical, then appreciative.

One remark that I didn’t understand was that someone who has no knowledge of the nature of design can move through the design process successfully. I thought I misheard him because it seemed like he was saying the opposite of this: that you need to understand the nature of design to move through the process successfully. This is a question I have pondered in my thesis.

Fortunately, I had the opportunity today to ask him to clarify the remark when he dropped in on our thesis meeting. Yes, he said, you can go through the design process without understanding design and be quite successful. But his belief is that understanding the nature of design will make you a better designer. I think I both believe this and disagree, and presume it will be on my mind for a while.

Overall, I really enjoyed the talk, even though it was very familiar. If you’re interested in these ideas, I recommend both The Design Way and Thoughtful Interaction Design, both of which I am referencing in my thesis.

I got back from the first Interaction Design Association (IxDA) conference, Interaction08, late Monday night after an 11-hour drive in a rented minivan with five other of my Carnegie Mellon peers. Rather than provide a blow-by-blow, I’ll apply a little bit of poetic license and start at the end.

At the end of the second day of the two-day affair, in lieu of one of the presentations, anyone who wanted to share their thoughts on the conference and what it should be next year was invited to attend a group meeting. At first, I wasn’t going to go, but one of my peers, Kyle Vice, was going, and the previous presentations were not inspiring me.

Kyle and I were the only ones to show up, initially. But eventually a small band arrived, totaling nine, though most were already IxDA board members. Thus, CMU students represented 25 percent of attendees. Not counting the board members, 50 percent. Gregory Petroff led the session and asked each of us to say why we came, what we thought could have been better, and what we would like to see next year. That seems like a reasonable way to construct this post.

Why did I attend?

I agreed with Bill DeRouchey, who was also present, who said that it felt important to be at the first conference on interaction design. I also mentioned that as an interaction design graduate student, who has been in the bubble of academia for the past two years, I wanted to see what the discipline thinks of itself, and contrast that against my thoughts of interaction design attained at Carnegie Mellon. What I didn’t say was that at the School of Design, we explore interaction design is a broad sense, and often talk about design and interaction design interchangeably. In design, there is no subject matter. My peers and I bring this perspective to interaction design and are thus interested in applications of interaction design beyond the screen and software.

Many of my peers were frustrated and angry with a lot of the presentations, as was I. Though I was tempered by the expectation that there would not be much new material, given that my life is currently devoted to the study of interaction design. That said, we found the application of interaction design by the representative community narrow, which brings me to the second question: what could have been better?

What could have been better?

I told the group that I would have liked to have seen a discussion and attempt at defining interaction design. Of all places and times to address this question, the first conference on interaction design seemed to be a likely place. And as this is a question that plagues every interaction designer, and serves as fodder for heated debate on the IxDA discussion list, I hoped it would receive some attention. Instead, the definition of interaction design escaped discussion, which I found disappointing. In relation to this, I also said that I would have liked to have seen a greater exploration of the boundaries of interaction design. What I didn’t say, and what my peers echoed, was that interface and software received too much attention. Surprisingly, there was very little presented regarding mobile interaction, physical products, ambient devices, gestural interaction, wearables, ubiquitous computing, and the role of interaction design in experience design, service design, organizational change.

Ironically, during the closing remarks, Dan Saffer listed five themes he garnered from the conference. The first was that we were exploring the boundaries of interaction design. In addition, he remarked that we skipped the question of the definition of interaction design, which received cheers from the crowd. This distressed me for the reasons stated above.

Five Themes

Since I brought it up, now seems like a good time to go over the five themes, mentioned in Saffer’s closing remarks.

Boundaries Where is our role? What defines us? Answer: comes from what we’re working on; common tools and prototyping

Tradition Not practicing in a vacuum

Context Space/time; organizations

Argument Providing tools for argument; and products are an argument

Influence How the products we create influence the way people behave

As I said, I did not think there was enough exploration of the boundaries, evidenced by the gap between what my peers and I think of interaction design and what we saw as practice at the conference. I disagree that what defines us is what we’re working on. It may be how others currently perceive interaction designers because other opportunities do not exist. But it doesn’t define us.

In talking with other attendees, I was glad to hear that people entertain the application of interaction design to more arenas. But it seemed evident that everyone was limited by their current circumstance and no place else to go. This is a fear that many of the students at the School of Design have when considering employment opportunities. If this is the situation, perhaps interaction design needs to design its way into other areas.

What would I like to see next year?

In the meeting, I said it would be great to see more representation from outside the community, like business and management. And for presentations, it might be nice to see designers and clients presenting both sides of the endeavor. What I didn’t say, perhaps because I felt it was assumed by my earlier comments, was that I would like to see a good and constructive discussion of the definition of interaction design, or some acknowledgment of the struggle. We did this at the Emergence conference with the question of service design both in the first and second year, and people seemed to respect the discussion and appreciate the struggle.

In addition, it would be great to see more case studies with actual projects. Heck, it would have been interesting to hear about the role of interaction design in the Charmr project. But what about interaction design for a service design project? Or the process of interaction design in organizational strategy?

One of the group participants mentioned a forum where attendees could show their work. This is an intriguing idea, which would allow greater attendee participation and provide greater exposure to the different types of work in interaction design. One project on interaction design in an area that is off the radar could spark debate and inspire curiosity and further broadening of current practice.

The Good

OK, now that I’ve offered some criticism, constructively, I hope, let’s talk about the good.

Dan Saffer, who according to my understanding, put together a lot of the content, did a great job of attracting some quality speakers. I especially enjoyed seeing Alan Cooper and Bill Buxton (not that I agreed with them). And I could see the attempt to have both practical and more philosophical presentations. Other speakers I enjoyed include Matt Jones and Carl DiSalvo.

Savannah is a great location to have a conference in February. T-shirt weather. Not too big. Lots of bars and restaurants. Also, the Savannah Collage of Art and Design was impressive. Carnegie Mellon should take note.

The food was top notch. Sunday’s lunch was better than any wedding I have ever attended. And parties with free food and booze are always welcome, and I would say essential for a successful conference.

As with any conference, the best part without doubt were the people that attended and the conversations that ensued. I was happy to run into designers who knew me from Emergence and UX Week, and to see some CMU alumni. Best yet, I made some new friends whom I hope to see at the next conference or elsewhere in the small but healthy interaction design community.

While I haven’t covered everything, these are the things that are resonating with me. I am happy that I went and feel that overall for the community it was a success. I am very curious to see how things shape up next year.

In total, eight interaction design graduate students from the School of Design attended the conference: Kipum Lee, Srividya Sriram, Carrie Chan, Kyle Vice, Beste Nazilli, Joe Iloreta, Imran Sobh, me.

For this service design project, our team worked with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Center for Quality Improvement and Innovation to identify design opportunities for Dr. Amin Kassam’s Neurosurgery Clinic. Due to being able to perform a rare brain surgery by going through the patient’s nose rather than cutting open the skull, Dr. Kassam’s once-a-week clinic is overwhelmed with patients.

Our team spent a fair amount of time at the clinic observing and interacting with patients. We worked closely with the staff and shared our process and insights with them every step of the way, which built trust and gained their support. This enabled us to gain access to patients in the exam room and interactions between Dr. Kassam, his staff, and patients. We also shared our concepts with the patients, iterating as much as we could to refine our ideas and final solution.

Team

• Melissa Cliver
  Interaction Design
• Jamin Hegeman
  Interaction Design
• Kipum Lee
  Interaction Design
• Leanne Libert
  Communication Planning and Information Design
• Kara Tennant
  Communication Planning and Information Design

Deliverables

• Dr. Kassam welcome booklet
• Concept and process documentation
• Clinic Chat concept video

Process

After many visits to the clinic, we had to sort hundreds of photos and observations.

Me, during a group meeting to synthesize the data.

Service blueprint of the patient experience highlighting opportunities for engagement.

We engaged with patients to get input and feedback as our concepts developed.

We generated and visualized numerous concepts through words and sketches.

Concept storyboards generating to solicit patient feedback.

In trying to understand the emotions and needs of the patients during their journey, we created this visualization, which we included in our final book for UPMC.

Concept rendering.

Page layout from the welcome booklet we created as an artifact UPMC could implement right now.

Visualization of the ideal interaction between patients, Dr. Kassam, and his staff.

Page from the book delivered to UPMC.

A system overview of Clinic Chat.

A part of our research, we went to the OR to see Dr. Kassam perform brain surgery.

More process and solution photos