Design for Service

Last month, on a tip from Alex Nisbett’s blog, I decided to check out an article in Fast Company about a writer who had gone undercover to work in retail as a front-line employee in a string of service companies for his new book.
From Punching In:
During a two-year urban adventure throught the world of commerce, [...]

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino guest-posts over at 31 Volts on the need for service design education and rounds up a few international design schools that’ll be on the forefront of the discipline in the coming years.
I’d add the Carnegie Mellon School of Design to the list. Graduates of the now-defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea are also going [...]

A few weeks ago, Core77 blogged about a panel at the InterSections conference with Chris Downs, Gillian Crampton Smith, Heather Martin and Jeremy Myerson that sounded intriguing. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any other information online. No blog posts, no photos on Flickr; I was beginning to think they made the whole thing up.
The conference organizers [...]

Karl Long of Experience Curve reports on his recent flight on Virgin America. He describes a few innovations in the cabin servicescape: computerized drink ordering, in-seat chat, ubiquitous power sockets and some disarmingly quirky safety videos on YouTube.
Update: Leah Buley from Adaptive Path has her own first-hand observations.
[via Work.Play.Experience]

Nick Marsh links to some damning evidence from a Bain study on customer-led growth. Only 8% of companies who believe they provide a superior experience have customers who agree. 72% are fooling themselves and 20% know their offering isn’t superior (the so-called service laggards).
Bain’s “Delivery Gap” chart is meant as an implicit defense of management [...]

When I pulled together my service design literature review this summer I was surprised to find that none of the papers in the service marketing canon mention the term “touchpoint.” It’s a pretty glaring omission so I decided to dig into the history of the term and find out where it came from.
As it’s used [...]

Laying the groundwork for an upcoming book, Bob Jacobson shares his phenomenal survey of experience design on the Total Experience blog.
It’s going to take a while to dig through this, but required reading is Experience Design and the Design of Experience by Erik Davis from Arcadia: Writings on Theology and Technology. As Jacobson puts it, [...]

Inspired by the recent New York Times article about anthropologists collaborating with US Armed Forces in the Middle East, design anthopologist Dori Tunstall raises the issue of ethics in service design over at Design Observer.

How should the design community respond if the U.S. Army asked us to join teams to do “service design” projects in [...]

Paul Adams observes real time customer experience feedback at the Beijing airport.

Something is driving a customer centered border experience. After checking your passport and visa, you are encouraged to rate your experience: Greatly satisfied, satisfied, checking time too long, poor customer service.

A comment on the post mentions feeling uncomfortable about the repercussions if bad feedback [...]

It seems like car sharing is an ever-popular service design example so I thought this might be interesting to the community. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

For the past two years, the Bay Area has been the most competitive market in the nascent but booming business of car sharing … but the competitive landscape is changing. [...]