Design for Service

Kip Lee and Jamin Hegeman are recent graduates of the Masters program at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. As part of a team of graduate students, they collaborated on a service design project for the neurosurgery clinic at UPMC in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I interviewed Kip and Jamin at CMU on May 13th, 2008.
Read Interview

Carrie Chan is a recent graduate of the Masters program at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. Her thesis project focused on the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I interviewed Carrie during a break in the thesis presentations at CMU on May 12th, 2008.
Read Interview

For the past four years, Carnegie Mellon has been at the forefront of service design here in the United States.
The discipline has been slowly filtering up into the thesis project level, so last month I visited the CMU campus to attend the School of Design thesis presentations and get a first hand view of some [...]

Neil McGuire interviews Deborah Szebeko of ThinkPublic, a London design agency focusing on public sector service design. Here’s the podcast [MP3 11.7MB]

My thoughts now, especially after working on quite a few projects in the public sector, is whether we actually need to be focusing on innovation all the time or are the services actually 30 [...]

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 [...]

The alumni magazine of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto has an interview with Experience Economy authors Joe Pine and James Gilmore. It’s from the Winter 2005 Experience Issue [PDF 8.6MB].
That [charging admission] points to the fact that time is the key differentiator between services and experiences, whether one charges for [...]

Peter Merholz interviews Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar.
There’s always an evolutionary process in the background. One thing that we’ve done is really started to employ what Toyota calls their kaizen techniques. Anyone in the company can raise their hand and say, “I see an inefficient process,” or “I see a user experience issue,” and if [...]

Antagonistic interview/profile with Sir Michael Bichard, newly minted chairman of the UK Design Council.

Bichard’s arrival sees the Design Council moving into still more controversial areas—the reform of public services. Bichard has long been an advocate of “service design,” reshaping the structure of services. Is that really design, or just a fancy name for management consultancy? [...]

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 [...]

For the culmination of the 2007 Design of the Times in Newcastle, several students from Köln International School of Design have launched an unofficial service design blog to share their photos and observations. They’ve also posted interviews with service designers Alex Webb Allen from live|work and Julia Schaeper from Engine.
Update: John Thackara’s overview [...]