“Here at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, we explore how to best use new thinking and new tools to make the experience of the twelve major Edinburgh festivals even better – for audiences, performers and the festivals organisations themselves. As part of this ongoing work, this week saw the launch of Festivals Design DNA, a project which began life as a simple question: what happens if we approached innovation through the eyes of a designer, and in particular a service designer?
Working together with Glasgow-based service design agency Snook, we have created a set of practical tools to help cultural organisations use the principles and approaches of service design to improve the experiences they produce – supporting the innovation process all the way from ideation to delivery.”
Why service design is the next big thing in cultural innovation
Welcome to the post-digital world
“The new magnetism of congregation seems universal. Every online service or forum promotes an event, an invitation, a club night, something for which subscribers will pay, much as online dating points towards a meeting. Demonstrators are never content with online but want to “seize back the streets”. Religious sites plead for church attendance. Courses plead for students to go to colleges. Never have coffee bars been more popular, with Starbucks this week announcing another 300 with 5,000 staff to be employed. Anything for a bit of buzz.” [...]
“As consumer spending evolves from “needs to wants”, from goods to experiences, the post-digital age focuses on personal contact. Post-digital is not pre-techno but exploits technology for a civilising purpose, human congregation and intercourse. The money is at the gate.”
Another Life Is Possible – Homage to Catalonia II
The video, which is a project of Joana Conill, Manuel Castells and Àlex Ruiz of IN 3, the High School Institute of Research of the University Open to Catalonia, investigates new economic cultures, new forms of living and of understanding the economy. For the .
In particular, it studies the social impact of the economics|economies that do not follow the patterns of the market, where profits are the priority, and that have the satisfaction of the needs and the desires for the persons as a goal.
The video is a tool for research, not a finished or closed work, and is available for free under a Creative Commons license. This is the English version, there are also versions in Catalan and Spanish.
Watch video (Youtube)
Watch video (blip.tv)
The anatomy of an experience map
“The experience map highlighted [on the left - click to enlarge] was part of an overall initiative for Rail Europe, Inc., a US distributor that offers North American travelers a single place to book rail tickets and passes throughout Europe, instead of going to numerous websites. They already had a good website and an award-winning contact center, but they wanted to get a better handle on their customers’ journeys across all touchpoints, which would allow them to more fully understand where they should focus their budget, design and technology resources. Derived from this overall “diagnostic” evaluation, of which the map was just one part, were a number of recommendations for focused initiatives. The experience map helped create a shared empathic understanding of the customers’ interactions with the Rail Europe touchpoints over time and space.”
End-user development
Computer users have rapidly increased in both number and diversity. They include managers, accountants, engineers, home makers, teachers, scientists, health care workers, insurance adjusters, salesmen, and administrative assistants. Many of these people work on tasks that rapidly vary on a yearly, monthly, or even daily basis. Consequently, their software needs are diverse, complex, and frequently changing. Professional software developers cannot directly meet all of these needs because of their limited domain knowledge and because their development processes are too slow.
End-user development (EUD) helps to solve this problem. EUD is “a set of methods, techniques and tools that allow users of software systems, who are acting as non-professional software developers, at some point to create, modify, or extend a software artifact” . In particular, EUD enables end users to design or customize the user interface and functionality of software. This is valuable because end users know their own context and needs better than anybody else, and they often have real-time awareness of shifts in their respective domains. Through EUD, end users can tune software to fit their requirements more closely than would be possible without EUD. Moreover, because end users outnumber professional software developers by a factor of 30-to-1 , EUD “scales out” software development activities by enabling a much larger pool of people to participate.
The chapter was written by Margaret Burnett, professor of computer science at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, and Christopher Scaffidi, assistant professor of computer science in the School of EECS at Oregon State University, and includes also a video conversation with them.