Archive for January, 2008
Ever since Disneyland adopted the term “guest” for their customers in 1955 the theatrical analogy has slowly spread. I heard it just the other day while I was in line to get popcorn at the movies. But Ron Knoth at Retail Design Diva isn’t having it: I understand the machinations, but have failed to accustom [...]
Expanding on the theme of control in experience design that I wrote about a few weeks ago, I’ve been reading a wide-ranging blog by Dan Lockton called Architectures of Control. Most of the posts look at architectures of control designed into products, systems and environments, which seek to force the user to behave in a [...]
From Good Magazine: Two companies are promising major entries in the “lifestyle zeppelin” class of air travel in the next few years. They are designed for medium-haul flights (like transatlantic crossings) while providing every possible amenity, from spas to casinos, not to mention staterooms that will “rival the luxury cabins of the world’s greatest ocean [...]
One of Live|Work’s contributions to the canon of service design theory is the concept of service envy. If we want to make people desire services more then products, we have to create services that help people tell each other who they are. Our major challenge is to enable people to express who they are through [...]
Alix Rule, in an article for In These Times challenges the framing of designer as social entrepreneur. In particular, design metaphors obscure the ideological—and political—decisions involved in tackling societal issues. Depending on your perspective, “drunk driving” can be a symptom of some broader systemic failure (from un-walkable suburbs to deficient public education), a lapse of [...]
While I sat in the snarl of traffic caused by an abandoned Christmas tree on the interstate this afternoon I thought about the possibility of approaching the problem of Christmas tree dumping from a service design perspective. Several days earlier I noticed a tell-tale path of evergreen needles leading down the staircase from a rogue [...]
Arne van Oosterom on the perils of service jargon: If I start orating about co-production, empowerment, service-delivery-blueprints, costumer-journeys, touch-points, service-ecology and so on, my clients generally start to get nervous. “What the hell is he talking about? I thought we were working on a marketing plan?”
The 4th season of The Wire on HBO opens with Snoop, a young drug dealer from Baltimore, walking into a Home Depot to buy a replacement nail gun. An employee comes over and helpfully explains the pros and cons of all the different models: SNOOP: I’m gonna go with this right here. How much I [...]
Carleton Christensen, a philosophy professor at the University of Sydney, explores some of the unspoken assumptions about sustainability, human rationality and the repercussions of shifting from a product to a service economy. From the outset we are assuming that the shift from product to service involve an ethically motivated search for a way of living [...]
When it comes to communicating design scenarios I’ve tried everything from dense written narrative to full on video. It depends on the project, but lately I’ve been gravitating toward simple storyboards that provide a balance between text and image. They generally involve a basic visual narrative accompanied by captions that carry more detail. The images [...]
