Design for Service

Robert Sommer’s 1969 book Personal Space: the Behavioral Basis of Design should be on every service designer’s bookshelf. Sommer was a student of Dr. Humphrey Osmond and continued Osmond’s research into sociofugal and sociopetal patterns.
What is needed is a middleman who is acquainted with the design field as well as the social sciences to translate [...]

Here’s a nice overview out of the Cabinet Office in the UK. Pocket Guide to Service Design Principles [PDF 1.8MB]
Service Design should be an integral part of policy making — policy should be developed with full regard to how it would be implemented and delivered. That means understanding the customer, the delivery chains, the organisation [...]

Over the weekend, I decided to visit the Olafur Eliasson exhibit (Take Your Time) on its last day at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. It turned out to be a compelling synthesis of experience design principles.

Eliasson nimbly merges art, science, and natural phenomena to create extraordinary multisensory experiences. Challenging the passive nature [...]

I came across a surprising perspective on HBR and McKinsey while compiling a list of business magazines a while back. This is from a thread over at Metafilter:
I find the Harvard Business Review somewhat of a joke. It’ll have good case studies and an interesting article from time to time, but it lacks substance. It [...]

The prosaically-named SERVQUAL scale for measuring service quality originally contained 22 separate metrics for evaluating services. Recognizing that the scale was too complex the authors grouped the attributes into five categories: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. It was a step forward but it wasn’t until 1992 that they hit upon a clever mnemonic for [...]

I was intrigued by the concept of “experience report cards” in the Joie de Vivre podcast earlier this week so I did some digging and came up with an actual example. It’s from the new 2007 edition of The Experience Economy (a response to Pine and Gilmore’s classic 1998 book of the same name).
The authors [...]

Geoff Mulgan’s NESTA pamphlet Ready or not? Taking innovation in the public sector seriously [PDF 336K] is a fantastic exposition on the subject. The paper sheds some light on the obstacles to public sector innovation and provides a wealth of great examples. The appendices and bibliography alone are a goldmine.

In the public sector, as in [...]

Interesting diagram over at Tangible Critical Service Design that examines the process of consumption:

Consumption can be seen and dealt with from a number of angles, some of which I have attempted to map. When we decide to spend time and money on new things, there seems to be a rather complex combination of influences backing [...]

This is coming across my radar a little late, but if you happen to be in Copenhagen next month the Institute of Interaction Design is holding a Service Design Symposium on March 6th and 7th, 2008. Scheduled speakers include Bill Moggridge from IDEO, Lavrans Løvlie from Live|Work, Oliver King from Engine and Shelley Evenson from [...]

Peter Merholz interviews Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre Hotels about how they create unique experiences at dozens of boutique hotels around California. Conley describes a tool called “experience report cards” which seem akin to service usability in terms of quantifying the intangible:

Each of our hotels are graded twice a year by someone who goes [...]