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 the best ever, and I was really happy to meet new people interested in service design, all of them with really good questions and really smart things to say. In attendance were folks from EA, Cooper, Hot Studio, RIM, and Apple to name a few.

Taking advantage of the space, I solicited feedback from attendees to find out what they called themselves (titles), why they were there, and what they wanted to see for future events. My biggest takeaway was that people still don’t know much about service design but are very curious about it. Many people called themselves UX designers, but weren’t sure if that was the right term for the work they did or wanted to do. “Could service design be it?” some wondered.

I also heard, not surprisingly, that people wanted more hands-on service design learning. While it seems it’s great for people to have the opportunity to get together to chat with others who are interested in service design and have some drinks, they want more than ad hoc conversation.

Which brings me to planning an SF Service Design Thinks event (example). I’m shooting for the end of July. More details to come, but it seemed like something folks would be in to.

If you have any thoughts on what the SF SD Thinks event should be or who you’d like to see speak, I’d love to hear them.

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 mostly not designed very well.

I also appreciate another point that keeps surfacing in conversations I’ve had about service design and something I thought about a lot while preparing my service design presentation.

Service Design enables you to move up the value chain and have conversations about projects at an earlier stage – thus shaping the work more, and creating bigger projects.

In other words, designing a service from the whole to its parts allows designers to be more involved in what gets designed and why. Given our proclivity for empathy, this can only be a good thing.

What I’m not too keen on is the separation made between service design doing and service design thinking.

Service design thinking is about:

• Helping people think like a designer
• Helping people focus on the user
• Helping people use design methods
• Helping people visualize

There are two reasons for this. First, I generally do not support separating the thinking from the doing as activities that can be pursued independently if the plan is to actually design something.

Second, as described in the presentation, the activities that fall under service design thinking seem more like education. Education is definitely something that can and should take place during the design process, if possible and practical. Education can also happen without even trying as others observe what designers do during the process. Overtly empowering people by helping them develop their inherent capability to design is a great service. But I don’t understand why that has been given the label of service design thinking.

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 not demanding it.

Does this mean service design cannot take off in the United States? No. I think it’s got a shot if we can show businesses the value of such an approach.

During the Interaction10 conference, I had the opportunity to meet with Birgit Mager and Shelley Evenson, both founders of the Service Design Network, to talk about plans for a US conference to promote the value of service design to the business sector. One possible location we discussed is Boston, given Shelley’s current ties to Microsoft there. There have already been rumors that Microsoft will sponsor the event. Though these rumors, I have been told, are premature.

But if all goes as discussed, the one-day conference will take place in October around the same time as the Berlin conference. The plan is then for a full US service design conference in 2011, similar to the Berlin conference with content for practitioners, academics, and students. I hope to have a hand in both events, and am excited about bringing the conversation about service design back to the US after the dearth that resulted after the Emergence conference ceased.

While bringing conferences to the US will certainly help raise the profile of service design here, some designers I have talked to either dismiss service design or don’t think it will take hold. What do you think?

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, so I will be searching for another venue for next month’s SD drinks.

You can find San Francisco Service Design Drinks events on servicedesigning.org, Twitter (@servicedesignsf), and Facebook (group: Service Design SF). Many thanks to Geke van Dijk, Nick Marsh, and James Nel for the helping on the backend and the encouragement.

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.

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 enable.

I work for Nokia, so I’m either working on or analyzing new service opportunities created by mobile devices. I’ve been using an iPhone since 2007. At this point, the phone itself is no longer what impresses me. It’s the services that others have built on top of the platform that continue to impress. It’s the same for Nokia devices. Sure, our phones have some pretty solid technology. But it’s the services that mobile devices enable that are really compelling. Nokia Life Tools, which provides agriculture, education, and entertainment services in emerging markets, is a good example. So is a mobile service I worked on last year to help HIV positive youth take their medication.

And While the iPad isn’t marketed to address agricultural issues for farmers or medication adherence for HIV positive youth, I cannot help but wonder what services this new device (and I predict future devices much like it) — somewhere between a mobile phone and laptop — will enable given its size, portability, slick interface, and robust application delivery platform. So while the iPad seems somewhat predictable, the new services it will enable are not. And that, I find exciting.

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, Nikon, and, of course, Nokia (me!). The intimate affair gave me a chance to talk to everyone and hear different challenges for service design, from incorporating it more into business development to finding places to practice it. I even got an idea or two for my upcoming service design talk at IxD10.

After coming back from the Service Design Network conference last October, I toyed with the idea of starting up service design drinks here in San Francisco, as it seems to work for the European crowd. I had resolved to kick it off this month, so was happy to find out that Aidan beat me to it. However, since he’s not from these parts, I will try to keep it going. I am looking into some venues and will aim to have a meet-up in February after I get back from IxD10.

Let me know if you’re interested.

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.

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 sponsored by Volkswagen, ran a workshop on building the SDN community platform, co-facilitated a workshop call “Learning from Failure” with Stefan Holmlid, and I again held the microphone and played the role of master of ceremony.

This was the fourth service design conference I had attended in as many years, and the third that I had helped put together. Overall, I thought it turned out well. But there was a lot of discussion on how to do things differently in the future. With so many great designers in one place, there was bound to be analysis and ideation on how to redesign the conference. After the conference, the planning team mulled over what we heard, what we through went well, what didn’t, and what to do in the coming year. Here are some of my thoughts and reflections.

Location

Madeira will be hard to beat as a conference backdrop. But its remoteness meant fewer attendees and students. The network is hoping to decide on a location for next year’s conference soon. I know Birgit Mager (network co-founder) got a lot of feedback on possible locations. My money is on the UK, though not necessarily London.

We also talked about venturing into the US, perhaps as a second conference next year.

Format

It seemed everyone I talked to was in agreement that the format of the conference felt too traditional and rigid. More breaks, more time for ad hoc conversation, more workshops (more doing), were all things I heard desired. I shared my experience with unconference formats with the planning team and I wouldn’t be surprised if that becomes part of the structure in the future. Personally, I would like to see the conference be more of a facilitator of conversation and action rather than a speaker platform.

Content

While the content was good, it didn’t knock my socks off. I thought it was an improvement over last year. Still, it seemed like a lot of the same territory and ideas were covered (maybe I’ve been to too many of these). I’m hoping that with some format changes and some speakers from outside the community (someone mentioned Richard Branson), things will get shaken up a bit. The best content seemed to exist in the conversations that took place within the conference white space.

Community

“We should do this more often,” seemed to be the sentiment about having conversations and sharing ideas. The problem: the current SDN website does not make this easy. We got a lot of good insights into the needs of the community during the workshop I ran, and now the network is deciding on a course of action. I agreed to advise this activity, so if you have ideas what and how the network communicates with the larger community as well as its role in facilitating conversation and growth, let me know.

The Challenge

There is no shortage of good ideas for next year’s conference and what happens in between. The challenge is making it happen with limited resources and getting input from the service design community. It’s great to see that the momentum the network and conference have gained over the past two years inspired good debate on Twitter and a site to capture ideas for the 2010 conference. During the next year, the network needs to harness this energy and provide leadership while also facilitating grass roots activity.

Last week I had a chat with Jeff Howard, during which I described the presentations at the Service Design Network conference in November. My observation from the conference is that service designers seem to know what service design looks like. The process shown during the presentations looked very similar. This prompted Jeff to suggest that process is no longer a differentiator.

I’ve been pondering this statement since then. How true is it? And what could that mean? The design process has received a lot of attention over the past few years in part due to the push of user-centered design and a focus on experience over features. The best design firms rely on a strong design process that implements various methods. For the most part, methods are known, but flexible enough for variation. A lot of design education, whether it’s in the classroom, a conference presentation, or workshop, focuses on teaching process and methods. Even in the realm of business, design methods have been adopted to incite innovation.

The design process and methods are not very difficult to learn. For those who want to learn them and for design firms that believe them, there is not much room to grow in the process arena. Sure, new methods are created all the time. But I don’t think they revolutionize the process as a whole.

So that leaves us with all good design firms using a similar process with similar methods. How then do you differentiate? Or what is it that actually differentiates one design firm, or one designer, from another, especially if they have a similar focus, like service design?

While there are several ways to answer this question, one I find interesting is the culture and values that a designer or a design firm possesses. These forces affect the thinking during the design process and the making that results. But they don’t receive a lot of attention. Understanding the role those forces play in design process could be a way of articulating value and differentiation when the landscape of process execution looks the same.

I think it would be really interesting to hear design teams talk about how their culture and values influenced the decisions made during the design process that led to the chosen solution. Perhaps less how and more why.