Archive for the 'insights' Category
I enjoy listening to podcasts about design and I’ve posted quite a few to this blog but I’ve noticed a disappointing gap in podcasts as a service. They never seem to provide transcripts.
Podcasts are engaging, but the human voice is a terribly low-bandwidth channel for communicating information. It’s much too linear. Podcasts are difficult [...]
In the latest issue of Interactions, Don Norman explores the parallels between queues and interaction design. While he views this primarily as a metaphor, I think service designers can view the same subject matter without the abstraction:
Whenever two systems must interact, unless every event of one is perfectly synchronized with the events of the other, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Paco Underhill, the author of Why We Buy, contends that seating is perhaps the major issue in the design and furnishing of public spaces. He’s pretty passionate about it:
I love seating. I could talk about it all day. If you’re discussing anything having to do with the needs of human beings, you have to address [...]
In 1957 a doctor named Humphrey Osmond began observing the effects of environmental change on the interactions of patients in a mental hospital in Saskatchewan. From that research he eventually identified two major systems for patterning space. Sociofugal space (gridlike) tends to keep people apart and suppress communication while sociopetal space (radial) does just [...]
Kevin Kelly on finding value in a world where digital copies are ubiquitous. He uncovers eight categories of intangible value: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage and Findability.
There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I think the [...]
Legendary film director Howard Hawks once said that to make a great movie all you need are three great scenes and no bad scenes. It’s a pretty simple formula for success. What if we looked at service design through the same lens? It’s not a perfect analogy, but each service encounter is composed of touchpoints. [...]
Service Untitled is a traditional customer service blog that might be worth checking in on from time to time:
This blog will talk about quite a few things. There’ll be a mix of actual examples and how the involved company could make the service experience better, tips and advice for improving the customer service experience, examples [...]
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 myself [...]
