Design for Service

William Choi and Antoine Sindhu’s archaeological history of the slot machine includes a fascinating analysis of casino design, focusing on practices they characterize as manipulative and deceitful. Some techniques are well known, including the noticeable lack of natural light and clocks. A few are more surprising:

Other features of the casino, including the music, carpeting, and [...]

I’ve been digging through more of the InterSections 2007 transcripts this week and found a great session that touches on the differences between management consulting and service design: What can design bring to strategy?
Our strength is in bringing those threads together and telling stories. A management consultancy report can be quite dry and statistical which [...]

I saw a sad little sign at a car wash this weekend and was intrigued by the idea of “stealing a service.” They’re claiming that if you use their change machine to get quarters for the laundromat then you’re stealing their service. I don’t know if the car wash owner is any more persuasive than [...]

Witold Rybczynski’s most recent book Last Harvest is an overview of traditional neighborhood development (TND) in Pennsylvania. For me, Rybczynski’s architectural writings often contain oblique insights into interaction design but in this case I think there are some parallels to service design worth exploring.
One of the themes running through the book concerns the messy [...]

Mark Vanderbeeken of Experientia talks with Hilary Cottam about her work at the UK Design Council, her new firm, Participle and her approach to navigating bureaucracies. The interview is posted over at World Design Capital.
Transformation design is a kind of catch-all for a very interdisciplinary way of working, because the projects and work we [...]

Despite my skepticism about retail design, I find myself getting sucked into the Retail Design Diva weblog. For some reason they constantly refer to themselves in the 3rd person (”Diva thinks this, Diva thinks that” but don’t let that turn you off. There are plenty of insights into customer service, the hospitality industry and store [...]

Jari Koskinen’s article Service Design: Perspectives on Turning-points in Design [PDF 1.1MB] represents an overview of an evolving discipline as seen from the CID Research Group & Lab in Finland. They’ve launched a new website called servicedesign.tv that contains this and other articles. Koskinen also has a great bibliography that’s worth checking out.
[via choosenick]

In case you missed their report earlier this summer, or just don’t feel like reading an 86-page PDF, Peer Insight’s Jeneanne Rae has an overview in Business Week of some of the patterns from the Seizing the White Space report for the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology & Innovation:

While the individual cases are intriguing, [...]