Design for Service

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 [...]

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 [...]

John Thackara on the role of designers, the problems of sustainability and the failings of Design education:
It’s rather obvious to me that design is one of a whole range of things that we have to be good at in order to meet the challenges of the age, which has probably always been true… The contribution [...]

The organizers of the Emergence conference at Carnegie Mellon University have posted MP3s from last year’s proceedings. They don’t have all of them, but the closing keynote by Richard Buchanan is available and deserves wider play.
It’s difficult to excerpt but he uncovered four boundary themes for service design and tied them into an exploration [...]

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 [...]

A few weeks ago, Core77 blogged about a panel at the InterSections conference with Chris Downs, Gillian Crampton Smith, Heather Martin and Jeremy Myerson that sounded intriguing. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any other information online. No blog posts, no photos on Flickr; I was beginning to think they made the whole thing up.
The conference organizers [...]

Business Week has a nice little podcast from April with the head of the CMU School of Design, Dan Boyarski, talking about Service Design and Carnegie Mellon’s upcoming Emergence Conference, September 7-9, 2007. This friday, June 1 is the deadline for submitting papers and July 1 is the early registration deadline.