Service Design Drinks, 26 February 2010

This Friday 26 February will the be the second 2010 Service Design Drinks in London! Here's all the essential info:

• Date: Friday 26 February 2010
• Time: From 7pm
  
• Location: The Bunch of Grapes. 2 St Thomas Street, Borough, London SE1 9RS (it's just a hop away from London Bridge tube stop)
• RSVP: Sign up on Eventbrite here (and see who else will be around)
• And to find us, look for the Service Design Drinks London sign!
  

If you can't make this one, we'll be doing a regular Service Design Drinks London on the last Friday of every month. So sign up to the mailing list here to keep up-to-date with the latest happenings.

As you already know, the cities of Amsterdam (Netherlands), Dublin (Ireland), San Francisco (USA), Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Sydney (Australia) organise and host Drinks and other events via the servicedesigning.org website. We're pleased to announce that Berlin and Cologne (Germany) organised by Minds and Makers and Glasgow (Scotland) organised by wearesnook have also joined servicedesigning.org!

Remember, if you are traveling to one of these cities, check in at servicedesigning.org and to see if anything is on. And if you, or anyone you know from another city is interested in coordinating service designing-type events, please get in touch with us at london@servicedesigning.com. We'd love to have a chat and help by providing tools and insight into organising and hosting events and activities to help develop service designing communities around the world.

Interdisciplinary discovery through design workshop, Monday 28 September 2009

Yesterday I was at the Interdisciplinary discovery through design workshop, hosted by Tom Inns of the University of Dundee and who leads the research initiative, Designing for the 21st Century.


Here's what the workshop invitation said:

The Designing for the 21st Century research initiative was originally conceived as a platform for building new interdisciplinary research partnerships between the engineering and technology communities and researchers in the arts & humanities... A broad portfolio of projects have delivered on this agenda, interestingly however, many have gone far wider bringing in researchers and stakeholders from across the UK research council communities. In all of these projects a design research perspective has allowed interdisciplinary research teams to explore a range of business and social issues in new ways.

This one-day workshop will profile the work of six research teams that have worked in this way. Participants at the workshop will then have the opportunity to reflect on the emergent roles for design research within the interdisciplinary research landscape and strategies that might be adopted to capitalise on this approach.

Throughout the workshop, it wasn't defined if we were talking about design research in practice or in academia. But the good thing for my own research is that it is currently working in both contexts ie. My research topic looks at the changing and expanding role of the designer, and my research process is a discussion about a researcher looking into design (the latter is key to a PhD because one's research process needs to be articulated in order to asses the reliability and validity of research findings or theory).

The workshop was held a the Imperial War Museum in London and was well-attended by mostly academia, quite a number of people from the Design Council and a few PhDers such as myself as good friend, Qin Han, aka Design Generalist.

I did tweet some notes during the event, but operating my new phone isn't quite at the level of efficient translation of my thoughts, but I do want to thank Lauren (redjotter), Fergus, Tamsin, James and Nick who responded to a few tweets (and I did try and include some of your comments in the conversations) and thanks to those who watched updates.

The workshop began with a presentation from Tom. He spoke about the current archipelago of design practice which sees many different islands represent current and emerging practices of design such as product design and service design.

Tom and Tom's archipelago of design

I love this analogy because it not only maps a terrain but also reflects the state of the different design practices, which are always similar in nature but aren't often connected in any other way. It also illustrates many new islands of design practice, which have popped up alongside the traditional modes of product, fashion and communication. These new island include service design, social design, design for development, design for sustainability etc.

Furthermore, Tom's archipelago is influenced by deltas (design history), currents (such as design thinking), lighthouses (such as the Design Council), cold fronts (lack of research funding for design), oceans of uncertainty, banks (of management), inlets, streams and the analogy goes on.

The research projects for the Designing for the 21st Century initiative were to act as ships either navigating the islands, or landing on them to explore ethnographically what was happening on the islands. Either way they were, as Tom mentioned, to be the Scott of Antarctica- finding new knowledge about design, especially since traditional notions of design have changed (or expanded) over time. One of Tom's slides showed this and below I have adapted a short cut version of his slide:

Traditional notions of design -------> Extended roles of design

generating ideas ---------------> facilitating ideas
managing trade offs ---------------> negotiating value
visualising the tangible ---------------> visualising the invisible
accommodating uncertainty ---------------> navigating complexity
profiling users ---------------> mediating stakeholders
synthesising futures ---------------> synthesising strategy

Adapted from Tom inns presentation for IDD, 28 Sept 2009

We then had five presentations from the Designing for the 21st Century initiative to give us insight into the initiative's projects. The projects profiled were:

1. Improving healthcare through design research by Prof Alastair Macdonald, Glasgow School of Art: Looked at how visualisation and participation could help in healthcare in the Ideal States project
   
   
2. Mobilising older workers through design research by Prof Jeremy Myerson & Jo-Anne Bichard, Royal College of Art, London: Looked at reinventing the workplace for the aging population in a project called Welcoming Workplace
   
   
3. Engaging audiences through design research by Prof Chris Rust, Sheffield Hallam University: Looked at the My Exhibition project which sought to explore how “affective” communication could help personalise experiences.
   
   
4. Designing interdisciplinary research by Dr Lucy Kimbell, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford: Looked at the Designing for Services project which explored how service designers worked with SME's involved in science and technology
   
   
5. Reducing crime through design research by Adam Thorpe & Prof Lorraine Gammon, University of the Arts, London: Looked at the Bikeoff Project where design was used to help reduce bike crime.

To give an overall feel for the projects, some commonalities I noted seen across the projects included:

• The wide variety of stakeholders used on each project
• This made the methodology complex, such as in Lorraine Gammon and Adam Thorpe's project where they attempted to visualise the process (check out their methodology map here)
  
• A bit of theory was often overlaid on the project to help explain it, and most of the time the theory was literature from another discipline
• Most projects were done "through" design ie. the academic researcher was doing the project as well as reflecting upon it. Lucy Kimbell's project however took a more ethnographic approach to exploring designing services in SME's. But this last point raised the question I had at the beginning of the day which was, were we talking about design research in academia or in practice?
  

After the five presentations, it was a break for lunch and back for a workshop.


The workshop asked us to reflect on the presentations and contribute our notes on what was the role of design research? More specifically, what perspectives, skills and methods do design researchers bring to the table?


Below are some tweets I got back when I asked the question on Twitter:

Jamesamperi: "Role of design research- to inform, inspire & set parameters around the activity of design giving it a better chance of success"

fergusbisset: "Role of Des. Res. is to make explicit what has hitherto been implicit within process of design and amongst the design community"

TAMSINA: "Role of design research... [doing all we can] for the sake of designing awesome experiences"

In our group we talked about the spectrum of doing design research in academia and in practice. Some differences were noted, such as more time and more theory being overlaid in academia. Some key words we identified among our individual scribbles in response to the question were:

• Giving people a voice
• Navigating uncertainty
• Openness
• Communication
• Flexibility

Under the the question, what skills and methods do design researchers contribute we said:

• Flexibility
• Rapid learning
• Iteration
• Awareness (of people and markets)
• Visualisation (making the implicit explicit, thanks Fergus)
• People-centred
• Bringing insight

The same kinds of words did keep on popping up and TAMSINA tweeted in response to the 2nd group of words: "Basically all the skills of a designer then!?! Design research is an oxymoron." The first part of Tamsin's comment was later repeated by a delegate in the final group discussion.

Tom did a quick overview of all the posters, drawing our attention to the fact that openness came up in many of the posters in response to the first question. Delegates raised issues with this saying that with openness, who owns the project? And also, how do Uni's teach this?


Under skills and methods, Tom drew out the fact that participation was the dominant theme, and mentioned that workshops were a great platform to allow this. A delegate commented in response to this theme that design and its visual nature allows a more democratic process as its not tied to a particular vocabulary.

The final exercise we did was listing challenges and opportunities for design research and what some action steps could be. My small group chose to focus on Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and we noted that the key challenge was having all disciplines in silos and a key opportunity would be to have them all work together by identifying, supporting and rewarding a catalyst. We also spoke about shifting paradigms of HEI's from places of teaching to places of learning. It reminded me of Sir Ken Robinson's awesome TED talk where he discusses creativity and how schools kill creativity.


In the final discussion for the day, more observations and issues were raised. Here are some I noted (but I think Qin might have more soon):

• Design academia and practice need a better relationship
  
• We have been talking about "different manners" of design research today
• Design as a word has many uses which can be confusing

The workshop ended at 4pm and I went home a bit exhausted and soaked like a sponge! But it was great to hear more about the Designing for the 21st Century projects, Tom's design archipelago, reflect on design research (in academia and in practice), meet new people, old friends and also consider where my own research sits in the wider context of academia and practice.

- Update -

For further reflections on the workshop, see Qin Han's Design Generalist blog post. She goes indepth on the Bikeoff project and also Lucy Kimbell's presentation on Designing for Services.

Lauren Currie's blog has a public lecture of Tom's at Dundee University's MA Exhibition. Titled, The End of Design, both Lauren and Qin tell me Tom adapted this lecture for the workshop presentation written about in this blog post. Lauren's also posted a video of the lecture, so check it all out here.

Universities exploring Service Design- An update

In October last year, with the help of many others, I compiled a long list of Universities exploring Service Design. In February this year, Jeff Howard's Design for Service weblog tracks developments from US Service Design education. Leave a message for Jeff if you know of any other service design courses or universities not present on either lists.

Design at the Health Innovation Expo, London 18-19 June 2009

The other week I attended the Department of Health's Health Innovation Expo. Among a sea of shiny hospital gizmos, five design companies exhibited at the NHS Institute's Design Zone and Workshop space, showcasing what design could do for service innovation and improvement in health.


Here's what the expo's website read:

Today’s designers are expanding their domain by using innovative design methodologies and techniques to redesign public services and address the social challenges imposed on society. We believe that building the knowledge and skills to use this type of design as a strategic stimulus to healthcare innovation will help the NHS tackle some of the challenges around our ageing population, chronic disease, health inequality and rising public expectations, especially in a time where the global economic downturn will aggravates [sic] existing pressures on our health system. At the NHS Institute we’ve worked and learned from this new breed of ‘designers’ translating their techniques to empower the NHS workforce create the high quality and personalised services.

The five design companies which exhibited were: Engine, thinkpublic, We are all designers.com, live|work and impact innovation. See some photos from the expo below.

Engine

thinkpublic

Image from Thinkpublic website

We are all designers.com

live|work

impact innovation

Alongside the showcase, both days held 30 minute workshops by all the design companies so attendees of the expo could interact and experience design methodologies in action.


All the workshops were really different in delivery and lots of fun. There were interactive exercises to get us thinking about challenges and pitching ideas, models that helped explain clearly how design could be applied in a health context, experiencing the design process live and a focus on key design methods such as prototyping.

I got a really positive feeling from the workshop attendees who ranged from commissioners to doctors to trainers in health. The showcase and workshops demonstrated to them how design brings a different perspective (or a different way of seeing) of how health services can be developed, designed and improved. This different perspective is both people-centred and creative ie. services are developed putting the people, not a piece of technology, at the centre of its development. It's also a creative process which can bring loads of new and different ideas and also be fun.

Equally as important is prototyping. Before services go live, design gives a space for testing and developing the service before its launched. I met a few workshop attendees and one of them told me about how he developed a service, only to launch it and find no take up. He mentioned that this was the "hard way" of learning that the people who will use and interact with the service, need to be part of its development. We also talked about prototyping his services, and he was in attendance of all the workshops so I left most of the conversation on, 'what is prototyping' and some examples of its effectiveness up to the designers.

I know some of the design companies have been present at health expo before, but being able to see them at the Health Innovation Expo and hear the feedback they were getting, was incredible.

I think the feedback the designers got at the expo is something to really illuminate here. According to them, the interest and positive feedback, has been unlike anything they have experienced at previous expos. I asked one of the designers what had changed. They mentioned government policy. I also suspect that it is also the ever-growing evidence from projects that highlight the potential for design in new and different areas, such as health.

The expo was great insight into the efforts of both designers and their clients in bringing design into the third largest employer in the world. The designers have such an immense commitment to innovating design practice by applying it to a new and different area such as health. And the collaborators and/or clients, in this case the NHS Institute, really do support the fact that design has something valuable to offer beyond posters, chairs, fashion etc.

I think design and designers are at a timely opportunity to really demonstrate and show how design can offer something valuable, beyond just how things look, to many other disciplines. I believe there will be exciting times ahead, and that we really are working toward breaking down old perceptions of what design is and can be.

For other postings on the Health Innovation Expo see:
steveleedesign

Touchpoint (service design journal) and other service design knowledge disseminations

The Service Design Network has just released Touchpoint, a journal about service design. Some of the content reviews the Service Design Conference held in Amsterdam last year.


If you are looking for other (more academic) reading on service design....

• The Service Design Network provides a neat list here.

• Service designer and long-time service design blogger, Jeff Howard, also compiled a great collection of service design-related articles, mostly from business and marketing journals here.

• In 2006-7, Lucy Kimbell and Victor Seidel, set up an academic research project called, Designing for Services, which looked at observing and understanding service design in science and technology SMEs. Live|work, IDEO and Radarstation were the design consultancies who participated in the project. I blogged the event on my travel blog here.
  
  D4S produced a blog, short film and publication which brings together multi-disciplinary perspectives on service design (highly recommended alongside Jeff's website to get a good grasped of the state of service design).
  

• The Design Council also have a recommended reading list on service design here. Their Public Service by Design team are also doing timely and excellent work in the area of how designers can add value to public sector services. Some related links on my blog here.
  

Some service design researcher blogs I know of include:

• Qin Han's blog, Design Generalist
• Lauren Currie's blog, Redjotter

Some service designer blogs I know of include:

• Nick Marsh, Choosenick!
• Jeff Howard, Design for Service
• Experentia, Putting People First ('service design' category)

Finally don't forget previous postings on this blog:

• Design-led consultancies involved in service design
• Universities exploring service design (which includes some links to conferences on service design).

Banks 'breaking all the rules' in bushfire (Sydney Morning Herald)

It is heartbreaking to watch the online news about the Australian bush fires in the state of Victoria. Before moving to the UK, we traveled through country Victoria. One of our favourite places was the country town of Marysville.


Marysville was a small country town, just outside the Yarra Valley wine region, surrounded by beautiful dense natural bushland and waterfalls.


On Sunday morning, we learned the township was completely destroyed by the fires. We read this news in disbelief. It's hard to comprehend that a place we visited, very much enjoyed and hoped to return to one day, doesn't exist anymore.

Many fires are still burning in the state of Victoria, and the financial cost is escalating. In the news today, an Australian bank went to press about what they are doing to help. In response to the emergency situation, they are "breaking the rules" to set up temporary bank locations in townships destroyed by the fires as locals won't leave, fearing they may not be allowed to enter again:

"What the team did, breaking all the rules, is shove some money in a cash box, take some scraps of paper for deposit slips and then set up in the local library. It normally takes us six months to open a branch and they did it in 30 minutes."

What great empathy. What great service. And I think this just goes to show- if a large organisation really wants to do something- anything for their customers, they can.

Services Round-up Online

Here are some recent links I have found on the web related to designing and developing services.

On the meaning of the design of services
Author of the blog Orange Cone, Mike Kuniavsky, has posted some notes on service design from a chapter in his a book he is currently penning. He tackles the hotly contested meaning of service design in his post, Detangling the meanings the design of services, and gives us insight into the different perspectives from the software services point of view and design point of view, which focuses on the end user. There is also a nice summary of service design-type concepts eg. Product-Service-System, Service Blueprinting etc. And finally, a list of references he has been using, including a like to Jeff Howard's comprehensive and informative Service Design Research site.

Designing services in the public sector
Here's a link to a blog posting on the Creativity and Business International Network on Designing people-centred policy: how can user centred design help public services. It was written by Nick Marsh of Engine. He mentions in his article design research, protoyping and co-designing for developing more people-centred policies. There are links to some of Engine's work in the pubic sector and some good links at the end of the article for further reading.

Service design is about three things
Idris Mootee, a business and innovation strategist, blogs that Service design is simple. It's about three things: creating compelling user benefits, optimising based on the separability of the service and makingeducated trade-offs between human and technology. Hrm, doesn't sound simple, but read on to the case studies to understand more what Mootee is getting at.

Live|work on Design for Darzi
Ben Reason of Live|work writes, Design for Darzi, for the Design Council website on applying service thinking to healthcare. Here's an excerpt:

As the Darzi Review makes clear, health services that care for people only when they become sick are not enough. We need to support people to lead healthy lives, stay out of hospital and feel good. This requires a shift from the traditional industrial thinking focused on quantity and productivity and a narrow definition of efficiency (how many cancer patients can we treat with these resources?) to a new way of thinking. At live|work we call it service thinking. A service thinking approach focuses on creating personalised services where we think about how to support the individual health needs of each and every NHS patient and help people to maintain their health and overall wellbeing.

Later in his article Ben writes about 4 key element of service thinking that they applied to their work with the NHS:

1. Personalise services for individuals
2. Design engaging experiences
3. Make the right connections with service users
4. Think about long-term sustainability

Great public service experiences
Here are some neat illustrated stories of great public services as experienced by some participants of the Public Service by Design workshops hosted by the Design Council in 2008.

Live|work on 'Creating social solutions for MS patients'

The International Herald Tribune published this article on Live|work's work in healthcare on January 16 2009. The article details Live|work's people-centred approach to tackling the issue of Multiple Sclerosis with the Ealing Primary Care Trust.

Thought it was interesting to note how the article describes Service Design:

Service design is one of the new disciplines that are redefining design by taking it into the realm of what's called "user experience." This is business school gobbledygook for ensuring that services (everything from online bank accounts to airline booking systems) can be used easily and efficiently. The service designer literally designs every aspect of the customer's experience by applying the type of thinking that designers use intuitively in conventional projects, such as analyzing problems and inventing unexpectedly effective solutions. Often they do this in collaboration with other specialists, like anthropologists and economists. Good service design schemes are so intelligently planned and executed that we barely need to think about whether we're using them correctly. The bad ones (and, sadly, we've all suffered from them) are confusing, inefficient and infuriating. How often have you been flummoxed by an impenetrable online booking system or call center?

A sudden surge in Service Design this month

Hrm. Is it only because I am diving back into the literature this month or all of a sudden is everyone writing about Service Design? Here's some things I have picked up in the past few days:

Design Management Review on Service Design
Roberto Saco and Alexis Goncalves write Service Design: An Appraisal offering us "an overview of the field and practice of service design, including a definition (not as odd as it sounds, considering the wealth and breadth of issues that contribute to the design of services) and a look at how such companies as Ritz-Carlton, Herman Miller, and Egg Banking incorporate service into their design strategies. They also discuss trends in service design, including IBM's SSME (service science, management, and engineering) initiative, which seeks to encourage service-related research, and the UK Design Council's RED project, which explores the impact of design on social issues." You can download more Service Design articles from the issue here.

Fast Company Magazine: Using Design to Crack Society's Problems
Interesting how the DMI leaves us at the end on the topic of social issues.. This month, Fast Company Magazine profiles Hiliary Cottam and her company, Participle. Here' a bit of what they have to say: "Cottam is one of a new wave of design evangelists who are trying to change the world for the better. They believe that many of the institutions and systems set up in the 20th century are failing and that design can help us to build new ones better suited to the demands of this century. Some of these innovators are helping poor people to help themselves by fostering design in developing economies. Others see design as a tool to stave off ecological catastrophe. Then there are the box-breaking thinkers like Cottam, who disregard design's traditional bounds and apply it to social and political problems. Her mission, she says, is "to crack the intractable social issues of our time." View the entire article here.

Fast Company Magazine: Three More Who Design for Sociey
A little on what 3 others namely, Ezio Manzini, Marcia Lausen, and George Kembel are all doing in the same social design space.

Design Council Magazine: Service Design issue
The Design Council have archived all issues of their Design Council Magazine (DCM). Check out DCM Issue 3 which is mostly about Service Design.

Service Design Conference Amsterdam
And don't forget this one happening in a month's time. More info here.

Universities exploring Service Design

Following on from the previous post, here are some Universities I know of exploring, researching and/or teaching (usually as a subject) Service Design. To date, there is no running course in Service Design (but I am aware there are definitely some on the cards shortly).

Northumbria University (UK)
In 2006, Northumbria University held the first Service Design conference called ISDN (International Service Design Northumbria). Since 2006 the University has held 2 other conferences around Service Design, one later in 2006 and the most recent, this year in April (download presentations and listen to podcasts here). I am currently doing my PhD research out of Northumbria and 2 other peers of mine are also exploring PhDs with strong Service Design themes.

Birmingham City University (UK)
Birmingham City University’s Service by Design programme is funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and seeks to raise awareness of Service Design in SMEs both in the private and public sectors. The SbD programme does this by developing their academics as “Innovation Managers” to work with SMEs. In September, SbD held a Dissemination Event explaining the progamme, experiences, learnings and results. You can download a presentation file of the event here.

Imagination Lancaster (UK)
Imagination Lancaster is a research lab situatated at Lancsaster University. One of the lab’s focal areas is Service Design undertaking research and projects into service design models, processes, evaluation and tools. See details here.

Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
Since 2004, CMU has taught and been involved in Service Design. CMU have also hosted conferences called Emergence in 2006 and 2007 exploring the boundaries of Service Design. Their next conference will be in 2009.Having worked with CMU design graduates before, I am quite familiar with their robust user-centered design methodology applicable to both products and services.

Kingston University (UK)
This year, just began a Master programme called Design for Development, which "focuses on the value of design as a vehicle for addressing social and ecological concerns in both the developed and developing worlds." Core modules include strands dealing with service design and sustainability, and optional modules include subjects that deal with human rights and politics.

Koln International School of Design, Koln University (Germany)
Since 1995, Koln University has been involved in Service Design research, teaching and publishing, spearheaded by Professor Birgit Mager. In 2005, Klon joined forces with other international Universities and design practices to set up The Service Design Network. In 2006 Mager founded sedes research (the Centre for Service Design Research) at Koln University.

Polytechnico di Milano (Italy)
Having produced some of the first Service Design PhDs, Polytechnico di Milano also runs a Master of Science course in Product-Service-Systems Design.

Domus Academy (Italy)
Offers 8 Masters degrees with Service Design strands throughout.

Laurea University of Applied Sciences (Finland)
In 2009, Laurea University will offer a Master of Business Management degree progamme in Service Innovation and Design. Click here to see more detail.

Kuopio Academy of Design, Savonia University of Applied Sciences (Finland)
A source tells me they are about to launch a BA in Service Design in Autumn 2008. I’d be keeping up to date with their News page to see when it finally launches.

Linköping University (Sweeden)
The University is currently undertaking projects around developing design techniques for service development, projects in healthcare, IT and learning labs for innovation. More details here.

Said Business School, Oxford University (UK)
This project, named Designing for Services in Science and Technology-based Enterprises (click on the name to go to the blog), ran from 2006-7 and looked at what would happen if you put Service Designers with science-and-technology SMEs. Academics also participated in the project, attending several workshops throughout the project process to make observations on what was happening. A key deliverable was a report published earlier this year, edited by Lucy Kimbell and Victor Seidel who lead the project.

University of Technology, Sydney (Australia)
As mentioned in an earlier post a few months ago, I completed my undergraduate design degree at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Service Design is a major one can do in their Master of Design Degree.

Here are some further additions to the piece I have been informed about.

(From Jeff Howard's Design for Service blog)

Rhode Island School of Design (USA)
Rhode Island's Service Design Studio is currently running a course which "explore[s] opportunities, tools and methods in the emerging field of Service Design."

Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design & The Danish Design School (Denmark)
The schools, in collaboration, will be piloting a Master of Interaction Design programme with a large Service Design component. See curriculum outline here.

(From Nico Morelli)

Aalborg University, School of Architecture and Design (Denmark)
Nico says, "We have been teaching design of Product Service Systems for about 7 years now, as a part of the Master in Industrial Design. Some of the outcome of this activity and some research, methodological and strategic results of our research is available at the wiki servicedesign.wikispaces.com."

(From John)

Illinois Institute of Design (USA)
Are currently teaching a class called 'Services in an Evolving Society.' The description reads, "This class will discuss the trends driving this dichotomy of constraint and abundance and explore how services can uncover new possibilities for people to live well in a resource constrained world."

(From Qin)

University of Dundee (Scotland)
The University's Master of Design degree covers Service Design in its focus on multi-disciplinary design research and practices.

Thanks Jeff, Nico, John and Qin!

Just in...

Glasgow School of Art (Scotland)
Their Product Design degree teaches Service Design, recognising that the term 'product' needs to also encompass the design of systems, services, interactions & organisational behaviours.

Design-led consultancies involved in service design (public and/or private sector)

I get asked this question a lot, so I thought I'd provide a list and links below, of design-led consultancies (in alphabetical order) I know of currently involved in service design (please note that most of these consultancies offer many other services so their websites are definitely worth exploring!).

Most of the following consultancies will be UK-based as I currently undertake my research and reside in the UK. Please feel free to contact me if you know of any others, or if you are one!

United Kingdom
Design Options
Direction Consultants
Engine
Fresh voice
Hygge
IDEO
live|work

More Associates
Participle
Plan
Plot
Radarstation
Spirit of Creation
Teko London
Thinkpublic
Uscreates
We are curious
?Whatif!

Europe
31 Volts (Netherlands)
Copenhagen Living Lab (Denmark)
designthinkers.nl (Netherlands)
Ego (Finland)
Experienta (Italy)
fuelfor (Spain)
IDEO (Europe)
live|work (Oslo)

USA & Canada
Adaptive Path
Design Continuum
HumanCentered
IDEO
Peer Insight
Work Worth Doing
Ziba

Australia
2nd Road
Future Canvas
Proto Partners
Thinkplace

In the coming weeks I’ll do more posting lists on intuitions I know of, such as Universities and think tanks, also exploring Service Design, and a few blogs that I visit frequently. Keep tuned!

Service Design Conference 2008 Amsterdam

Image from Conference website

Great speaker line up (often called the "usual suspects"), great workshop leaders and great city to bring together Service Design practitioners, students and academics.

Check it out and register here.

Service Design in M. Design at UTS, Australia

Sometimes it's funny to be led right back to where one started.

I completed my undergraduate design degree at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia and just discovered they have added new majors to their Master of Design Degree, inclusive of Service Design. Here's what it says:

Service Design

The future of business is the delivery of customised experiences. This future depends upon design, on the expert ability to visualise and plan interactions. This specialisation puts designers in the driving seat of a major economic shift now underway. It shows designers how to shift from product development to service innovation through techniques like experience notation, service blueprinting and touchpoint management. This is the first service design degree program in Australia.

Get T5 some Service Designers please!

We all know the dramas of T5.

Here's an article in today's Guardian citing the Government on T5 as an "unacceptably poor travel experience" and the need for British Airways 'to place a "much greater emphasis" on the needs of passengers.'

But what is more desperately needed is a proper systems design. The backlog of 28,000 bags demonstrates there is definitely something broke in this sordid system.

The financial costs are also ridiculous.

Someone needs to hire some Service Designers.

CIID's Service Design Symposium

I am rather disappointed that I missed out on the Service Design Symposium at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). The 2-day event brought together a great line-up on speakers and from the symposium recap here it sounded like a great exchange forum on the emerging area.

The CIID have already begun to post some of the symposium's happenings, beginning with an excerpt from Bill Hollin's presentation.