Archive for the 'research' Category
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 [...]
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 [...]
I didn’t realize examples of service evidencing were quite so rare until I was faced with illustrating the concept for a project I’m working on. I posted about service evidencing last week but the only really clear, public example I’ve found is from a Live|Work presentation at Doors of Perception East in 2003.
Chris Downs [...]
As a complement to the recent New York Times article on refocusing the customer experience at Starbucks, I came across a paper examining their efforts to adapt the service experience in China [PDF 180K] from the Journal of Business Studies.
In this paper we explore how young, urban Chinese consumers transform the iconic global brand [...]
Nick Marsh writes about a filmmaking technique applied to service design called design documentaries, from a Ph.D thesis at the Royal College of Art in London.
Design documentaries are a new, visual method to discover what matters to people. They inform and inspire design processes at early stages. The method emerged from my exploratory filmmaking [...]
Marion Buchenau and Jane Fulton Suri’s 2000 paper on Experience Prototyping at IDEO is the newest addition to my service design research collection. Their paper was one of the first to popularize the concept of bodystorming, an improvisational technique developed at Interval Research in the early nineties for brainstorming design problems “in the wild.”
In bodystorming—brainstorming [...]
In case you missed their report earlier this summer, or just don’t feel like reading an 86-page PDF, Peer Insight’s Jeneanne Rae has an overview in Business Week of some of the patterns from the Seizing the White Space report for the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology & Innovation:
While the individual cases are intriguing, [...]
Last month, on a tip from Alex Nisbett’s blog, I decided to check out an article in Fast Company about a writer who had gone undercover to work in retail as a front-line employee in a string of service companies for his new book.
From Punching In:
During a two-year urban adventure throught the world of commerce, [...]
