Filed under: Red Jotter Work, master of design, service design | Tags: Berlin, design process, dundee university, method, product design, rosan chow, service design
The question of when a project formally ends is one that I usually take for granted. But this project has been different - our client was real, the budget was concrete and it all felt true.
Berlin felt like a whole new place in the sunshine…
I have learned a whole new way of designing that was really challenging, but ultimately very liberating. It challenged the process I have been taught since high school . We didn’t find a problem – we didn’t evaluate concepts – we let all ideas and possibilities collide. At times this felt too random, too unstructured – but the vast amount of ideas generated in such a short space of time was nothing like I had experienced before.
RIP and MIX places the focus on the process of existing design knowledge, objectified in the form of existing products and services. I have a new found respect for that knowledge.
Filed under: made me think, service design | Tags: bbc, directory, mobile phone, service design
“For most of the 20th century, the landline was the only phone around. With the mobile you’re always available, so it’s the number most of us dial first.
So it is perhaps not surprising that a directory service is starting up that allows people to find out someone else’s mobile phone number in the same way we’ve always been able to do for landlines.”
An excellent video from the BBC explaining exactly how this service works.
Thanks to my mum, who was a BT telephonist in the early days of her career, for discovery :)
Robin Chase co-founded Zipcar, the world’s largest car share service, in Cambridge, MA in 2000. You can now share Zipcars in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, London, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington DC and at university campuses across the country. The last couple years she’s been working on GoLoco, which aims to do for ride sharing what Zipcar did for car sharing: to make it easy, efficient and commonplace to share car travel, split costs, and reduce emissions. Urban Omnibus recently teamed up with our friends at The Infrastructurist to ask Robin about everything from mesh networks to taxi stands to why the infrastructure we build determines our destiny. Make no mistake: she thinks BIG.
Zipcar was a very early application of wireless that wasn’t cell phones. I thought, “Wow, this is what the Internet was made for: sharing a scarce resource among many people. This is what wireless was made for: we can make transactions very easy for end users and brokering those transactions will cost us next to nothing.”
Filed under: Red Jotter Work, master of design, service design | Tags: ruby slippers, service, seth godin
Seth Godin asks “If you could make one thing come true that would change everything for your project, do you know what the one thing would be?” One breakthrough client, one technical advance, one testimonial? One achievable change in the world?
“For Google, the one thing was a big thing, “we need to be the place people come to search.” But for many sites, many companies, there isn’t a thing. They can’t articulate it. They have no wish. If you have no wish, how can it possibly come true?”
So what is my thing? What is my wish? for my MDes project:
“my service needs to be where young designers go to learn about service.”
Filed under: made me think, service design | Tags: business, design education, graduation, jase cooper, service design, students, work experience
Jase Cooper’s project has big potential – keep up to date with the Small Fish blog!
Thanks to Adam for discovery.
Filed under: made me think, people I like, service design | Tags: NHS, patient, service
The UK’s first academic health science centre in partnership with Imperial College London has a shiny new website.
It is full of good stuff such as the patient experience section:
“Welcome to the patient information section of our website. Here you can find all you need to know about your hospital visit, such as how to get here and what to expect as an outpatient or inpatient.”
and Project Smile:
“To help ensure our maternity patients are treated with dignity and respect, we have created a short training film to raise awareness of how different behaviours might look and feel to women. The film will be used in mandatory training sessions for all doctors and midwives.”
Good find from Kate!
Filed under: made me think, people I like, service design | Tags: design education, design week, mindset, product design, rsa, service design, social design, sophia parker
Social Animals: Tomorrow’s designers in today’s world was released on Monday, written by the inspirational Sophia Parker.
This is the most relevant and worthwhile report I have read recently. It is a must read for all designers who are on a social mission, students, design educators…the list goes on.
The paper addresses:
“The tensions and contradictions of service design: the most appreciable design movement of our times.”
The reality that social design is a mind set not a curriculum reinforces the core of my Masters project “A guide to a new mindset” .
I believe it is important that students realise it is not about product design or service design it is about good design with a social brief. I was intriguied to discover that only 6% of UK Design Firms focus soley on service…not quite sure how I feel about that statistic.
Social Animals has been causing quite a stir although has received some criticism from Kenneth Fitzgerald who tweeted about the “Jargon, buzzwords, wild generalizations, the obvious restated”
What do you think?
Filed under: people I like, service design | Tags: design education, public services, rsa, service design, sophia parker
The Royal Society of Arts is calling for design education to focus more on the design of services and move away from what it says is an emphasis on product and industrial design.
“An RSA paper released today, Social Animals: Tomorrow’s Designers in Today’s World, says students need to gain a broader range of communication and research skills to help them work within public services.
It outlines six challenges for design educators, among them the suggestion that students should be taught how to be ‘problem finders’ as well as problem solvers, to help find new ways of delivering public services.
RSA head of design Emily Campbell says, ‘We are currently seeing huge opportunities arising in service innovation, which stems from all the time trying to get public service providers to invest in service design.’
She adds, ‘Generally speaking design schools are not preparing for that at the moment.’
The paper, which was authored by Sophia Parker and emerged from this year’s RSA Design Directions award competition, also looks at how redesigning prison visits could benefit inmates and their families and reduce reoffending rates.
It suggests strategies such as creating a system of visiting ‘pods’ to offer enhanced privacy, and introducing virtual prison visits through a secure Internet connection.
Campbell says, ‘Recently announced plans for new prisons holding 1500 offenders each to be built in the next decade provide Government with a real opportunity to “build in” recognition of the importance of design in modelling and prototyping facilities.
‘There is an ongoing debate about the role designers could have in improving health and education services. Here is an opportunity to bring those skills to the prison environment, which provides us all with an essential public service.’”
This is a crucial topic that is at the heart of my research question (pictured above). I am happy to see my undergraduate experience of product design courses not embracing service design echoed in this call for change in design education.
Filed under: Red Jotter Work, master of design | Tags: Berlin, case transfer, deutch telekom, rosan chow, transferring today to tomorrow
“Berlin Calls” once again! The 6 month project “Transferring today to Tomorrow” that commenced in January with Deutch Telekom laboratories is now in it’s final stage. We are flying over to relay the final outcome, in the form of a book, to our Berlin counterparts. Wish me luck :) You can view pictures of the process here and learn more about my last visit to Berlin in February.
When I come back from Berlin I am flying to a place where the sun shines all day every day.
If everything goes to plan I will return rested, cleverer with more freckles…
Last month, Dougald Hine asked how we could use social media to help people cope with the personal consequences of the recession. I met Dougald at our letter writing party and I am really excited about his new intiative: Signpostr.
From today, they are looking for people to start trying out one of those projects – specifically, young people who are leaving education into the toughest job market for a generation.
“Signpostr is a response to the rapid rise in unemployment here in the UK and elsewhere. The site is about helping each other find a way through the recession. It gives people a space in which to:
- talk honestly about the realities of the current job market
- find and share information about resources that are useful for finding work and living cheaply
- create projects, gather people and resources, and get things started
If you’ve just left college or university and are looking for work, try it out – add some Resource listings for things you’ve found that help save money or increase your chances of getting a job; create a Project for that idea you’ve got that you’d like to make happen; tell people what you need and what you can offer.
If that’s not you, can you help us by spreading the word to people you know who are leaving education this summer? Send them a link to: http://alpha.signpostr.com/
Finally, you can follow @signpostr on Twitter, where they are talking about the site, sharing ideas about looking for work, living cheaply and helping each other through the recession.”
Filed under: Red Jotter Work, service design | Tags: master of design, opinion, people, public, research, service design
This weekend, I spent an afternoon in Dundee city centre asking people about their good and bad service experiences. I carried out this research to gain a deeper understanding of how the word ’service’ is perceived by the public. As part of my Masters project pitch I highlighted that the public are unaware of just how many services they interact with on a daily basis .
Speaking to this range of people showed me that this is very true. It also showed me that people are very passionate about the services they use and how they are treated as customers.
You can see photographs of the day here – taken by Kate Andrews.
The Social Enterprise Coalition commissioned photographer Charlie Pinder to take portraits of people served by Open Door, a social care enterprise in Grimsby, Lincolnshire. Open Door offers medical, nursing, social support services and alternative therapies to around 50 different people each day. Pinder took clients’ photographs and asked them about their lives. The photographs are published today to mark Social Enterprise Day.
Rachel Welsh, 40: “I’m a recovering drug addict. I have two kids – one aged 16 (Hayley, pictured) and a four-year-old.”
Filed under: people I like
A recently published French report asked the question: What is social innovation?
“During a study tour organized by the 27th Region, we went to explore British social innovation, meeting most design firms and major actors involved in redefining the role of users in public services. How is innovation is it practical in people’s lives? Can be done without technology innovation? Innovation is it to enter politics?”
This report highlights The Lift Conference: an International conference on innovation, creativity, technology and society, happening in Marseille on the 18-20 June 2009. It also includes work from Engine, Livework, Particple, Charles Leadbeater and others.
Filed under: service design | Tags: design thinking, fast company, systems thinking
Fast Company’s Fred Collopy writes about Lessons learned – Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking.
Last month I read about Systems Thinking and spent an afternoon talking and asking questions about it.
Design and “design thinking” is gaining recognition as an important integrative concept in management practice and education. But it will fail to have a lasting impact, unless we learn from the mistakes of earlier, related ideas. For instance, “system thinking”, which shares many of the conceptual foundations of “design thinking”, promised to be a powerful guide to management practice, but it has never achieved the success its proponents hoped for. If systems thinking had been successful in gaining a foothold in management education over the last half of the 20th century, there would be no manage by designing movement, or calls for integrative or design thinking.
Callopy argues that Systems Thinking never really captured the imagination of business leaders. And we must learn from its mistakes. He proposes we learn and subscribe to a theory or system of thought that is based on ideas from design and managers and policy makers will become designers of a sort particularly suited to their circumstances.
