“We have the technology to do anything. To make things happen you need to turn to design and redesign the context, the decision making and the question.” – Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica, figured out that smart citizens are necessary to make smart cities. The institutions are collapsing, we have to decide on our own!

He spoke about all this at the end of April at Next Berlin.

Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and transdisciplinary studio based in Treviso, Italy. A designer and urbanist, he has previously held leadership positions at Sitra (the Finnish Innovation Fund), Arup, Monocle, and the BBC. He is strategic design advisor for Domus magazine, as well as blogging at cityofsound.com.

Dan Hill will be the second speaker at Experientia’s Talking Design lecture series now co-organized with three other companies and organizations: Deltatre, GranStudio and ITC-ILO. The talk will be at the beginning of July and we will announce it here very soon.

It seems like the UX community has been struggling a bit to reach a common definition of UX strategy. Is it a framework or an approach? Is it a methodology or a philosophy? According to Mona Patel, there are three concepts and perspectives that are all the rage in our larger design and development space — service design, lean UX, and disruptive design. Cumulatively, she says, these three trends give us a solid working definition of UX strategy.

“Brand is everything, offline and online. Therefore, the overall experience is what gets people to engage, buy, use, and connect with a given product or brand. The UX strategy defines how this happens.

And UX strategy actually makes it happen. [...]

The UX Strategist’s role is to help an organization want to consider and understand the user’s experience first and foremost. The UX Strategist’s job is to create a connection between the people who work in an organization and the people who might purchase its products and services or otherwise engage with the organization. It is to teach an organization how to embrace design thinking.”

However, the use of government data throws up many issues surrounding privacy, policy-making and the uses to which the data has been put. These need to be tackled before simply opening up these digital to all comers.

Some remarkable quotes:

“Anonymized personal data has to be treated as personal data and not open data.”

“The main problem with correlation is that if you look at enough data you can find correlations in almost anything.”

“It is very dicey when you start talking about causation… You know, we have real problems to solve.”

The UK Design Council and three other members of the SEE Platform (Sharing Experience Europe) – the Danish Design Centre, Design Wales and Aalto University, Finland – on Tuesday published a new report, Design for Public Good, encouraging the European Union and its member states to adopt design-led innovation to create the next generation of public services and policy that can meet the pressing demands of the future.

The report follows the publication in March of the Design Commission report, Restarting Britain 2, which calls for design thinking to be used to improve UK public services. Design for Public Good now brings this message to the EU, but also extends it to look at the potentially huge gains design methodology can bring to policymaking as well as services.

The report describes the key benefits of design thinking for government as follows:

• Design-led innovation is a joined-up process, with no inefficient handover from analysis to solution to implementation
• Rather than jumping straight to expensive and risky pilots, design process tests iteratively, starting with low-cost, simple models (prototypes) and designing out risk with each new version
• Rather than disjointedly patching together incremental solutions as problems arise, design thinking looks at the entire system to redefine the problem from the ground up
• Design thinking starts by understanding user needs in order to ensure solutions are appropriate, waste is avoided and end users buy into them
• While the factors that cause silo structures in government may be stubborn, design methods offer uniquely effective ways of understanding which teams and departments are relevant to a problem and engaging them in collaborations.

Press release

The UK’s Behavioural Insights Team – known as the “nudge unit” – will join with a commercial partner and become the first policy unit to be spun out of Whitehall, reports the BBC.

It finds ways of “nudging” people to make better choices themselves, rather than through state intervention.

The team, established after the 2010 election, applies insights from academic research in behavioural economics and psychology to public policy and services.

In addition to working with government departments, it has worked with local authorities, charities, non-governmental organisations, private sector partners and foreign government to develop proposals and test them in government policy.

A competition will be held to find a business partner for the unit.

Article published in the April 2013 issue of the International Journal of Design
By Dan Lockton, David J. Harrison, Rebecca Cain, Neville A. Stanton, & Paul Jennings

Design for behaviour change aims to influence user behaviour, through design, for social or environmental benefit. Understanding and modelling human behaviour has thus come within the scope of designers’ work, as in interaction design, service design and user experience design more generally. Diverse approaches to how to model users when seeking to influence behaviour can result in many possible strategies, but a major challenge for the field is matching appropriate design strategies to particular behaviours (Zachrisson & Boks, 2012).

In this paper, we introduce and explore behavioural heuristics as a way of framing problem-solution pairs (Dorst & Cross, 2001) in terms of simple rules. These act as a ‘common language’ between insights from user research and design principles and techniques, and draw on ideas from human factors, behavioural economics, and decision research. We introduce the process via a case study on interaction with office heating systems, based on interviews with 16 people. This is followed by worked examples in the ‘other direction’, based on a workshop held at the Interaction ’12 conference, extracting heuristics from existing systems designed to influence user behaviour, to illustrate both ends of a possible design process using heuristics.

Click on image to view slideshow

CasaZera is part of the ECOstruendo program, funded by the Region of Piedmont, and promoted by Polight, the innovation centre for sustainable construction at the Turin Environment Park. The apartment is an inhabitable prototype, demonstrating ways to utilise decommissioned industrial areas for residential use, and adhering to five main precepts: zero consumption of soil, zero waste of resources, zero time, zero energy and zero project errors. The apartment itself is a fully-designed and equipped residential unit, which has been integrated into the framework of an old factory, instead of creating new zones for residential construction.

The apartment is around 30 square meters, with a bedroom, living-room/kitchen and bathroom. It contains state-of-the-art technology for home automation and resource management, with 75% of the energy used in the apartment produced by renewable solar, photovoltaic and biomass sources. Experientia’s role, as consultants to DE-GA S.p.A, was to employ human-centred design methodologies to make this cutting-edge technology easily usable for the everyday people who will live in the unit. The tablet-based solution Experientia created allows people to interact with key functions for controlling the home appliances and heating and cooling systems, and shows simple visualisations of how the energy in the home is being used – a “living room” view of the household consumption.

As part of Experientia’s holistic approach to enabling more sustainable lifestyles, the final solution also helps connect the residents of the apartment to local services. This includes information on frequency and time of local public transport, bike sharing availability, and locations of local markets, stores and pharmacies.

The apartment systems will now be tested for 10 days with the unit empty, to gather feedback on how systems are working. After this time, two students from the Turin Polytechnic will move in, and will test the apartment systems over the course of the next year. The students will provide an in-depth look at how well the system performs in the long run, and how easy it is to use for people who are not specialists or involved in the system development, but are representative of the people who will eventually live, work and study in similar constructions.

Turin council member for the environment, Enzo Lavolta, was present at the opening, praising the initiative as a “concrete example of a smart city”. Giorgio Gallesio, DE-GA S.p.A’s managing director, and head of the project, and Matteo Robiglio from the architectural partner Tra, also spoke. Much of the debate of the day centred on how affordable the solution is, and the vibrant possibilities for urban renewal it offers, reclaiming existing urban areas for residential use, without waste. The project aims to be an Italian example of a new mindset, and demonstrate an innovative method to create zones for rental property.

Experientia senior designer, Renzo Giusti, who helped implement Experientia’s contribution to the project, also spoke about Experientia’s vision for sustainable, high quality urban development, and how this was channelled into the final solution.

Experientia’s work on this project was as consultants to DE-GA S.p.A. The other partners in the initiative were: Tra architects, experts in social and co-housing; Confortaree, experts in housing fixtures and fittings; Habicher Holzbau, specialised in wooden residences; Teclmp for heating and cooling fixtures; Golder Associates, environmental and energy consultants; Onleco consultancy service; and Tebe, research group on energy technology for construction.

As part of Experientia’s involvement in the award winning Low2No project in Helsinki and in particular its strategy towards demand management and behavioral change, we are proud to announce that Dan Hill (former ARUP and Sitra, now Fabrica) has just reminded us of last year’s long review (and a download link) of the Low2No smart services workbook created by Experientia and ARUP:

“This aspect explores the potential of contemporary technologies – particularly those increasingly everyday circling around phrases like social media, “internet of things”, “smart cities” and so on – to enable residents, workers, visitors and citizens in general to live, work and play in and around the block in new ways. These are predicated on the same low-carbon outcomes that drives the Low2No project in general, but also a wider “triple-bottom line” approach to sustainability, which might include beneficial social and economic outcomes, as well as environmental. We’d had this element in from the start, from the Arup-led consortium’s original competition submission in 2009, and today we’re sharing some of the work-in-progress as it developed, in the form of the “informatics workbook” developed by the design team, as a tool in the design process.”

Thank you, Dan.

On March 25, the Healthcare Experience Design (HxD) conference took place in Boston. Speakers discussed how human centered design and design thinking can improve the quality of health service delivery and digital interactions, helping all of us achieve better health.

Videos of all sessions are now online.
 

PLENARY SESSIONS

Opening Address [14:32]
Amy Cueva, Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer, Mad*Pow

Evolving Health IT User Experience: The View from DC [No video yet]
Ryan Panchadsaram, Senior Advisor to the US CTO, The White House
Jacob Reider, ONC HIT, US Dept of Health and Human Services
While federal government’s meaningful use incentive program accelerated the adoption of technology in hospitals and medical offices across the United States, users of these systems express concern about their usability and safety. This session will provide a glimpse of the Federal efforts to help health IT designers & developers bridge the gap between where they are and where their users wish them to be.

Opening Keynote: Sneaking Up Sideways on Behavior Change [36:08]
Jane McGonigal, author, inventor, co-founder, Reality is Broken, SuperBetter
Jane McGonigal is a world-renowned creator of alternate reality games, or games designed to solve real problems and improve players’ real lives.

Health Behavior Change and Beyond: The Health Benefits of Success Experiences [35:38]
Dr. David Sobel, Medical Director of Patient Education and Health Promotion, Kaiser Permanente
While sustained behavior and lifestyle changes can lead to improved health outcomes, there may be another pathway to health. Namely, the increased sense of confidence and control that comes from being successful at changing ANY behavior, even if the change is not sustained, can also improve health outcomes. Learn how to avoid the tyranny of prescribed failure experiences. Learn how to prescribe success by aligning with passions, discovering patient-generated solutions, and celebrating success.

The Happiness Project: Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun [27:46]
Gretchen Rubin, Author, The Happiness Project
Gretchen has a wide, enthusiastic following, and her idea for a “happiness project” no longer describes just a book or a blog; it’s a movement. Happiness Project groups have sprung up from Los Angeles to Enid, Oklahoma to Boston, where people meet to discuss their own happiness projects. More than a dozen blogs have been launched by people who are following Gretchen’s example. On her companion website, the Happiness Project Toolbox, enthusiastic readers track and share their own happiness projects.

Closing Keynote [36:22]
Jamie Heywood, Co-founder, Chairman, Patients Like Me
Jamie’s scientific and business innovations have been transforming the intersection of biotechnology and pharmaceutical development, personalized medicine, and patient care.
As chairman of PatientsLikeMe, Jamie provides the scientific vision and architecture for its patient- centered medical platform.
 

BREAKOUT SESSIONS

Theme: Behavioral change

Systems for Self-Regulation [29:56]
Dustin DiTommaso, VP User Experience, Mad*Pow
By better understanding the factors that govern self-regulation of human behavior, we can begin to design products and services that more reliably facilitate healthy changes in behavior.

How to Design User Habits [27:06]
Nir Eyal, Consultant
In an age of ever-increasing distractions, quickly creating customer habits is an important characteristic of successful products. How do companies create products people use every day? What are the secrets of building services customers love? How can designers create products compelling enough to “hook” users?

Theme: Team Dynamics

Playing Nice: Facilitating Multi-disciplinary Teams to Create Better Holistic Experiences [34:21]
Toi Valentine, Experience Designer, Adaptive Path
In this talk, Toi explores the challenges that come with collaboration within a traditional organizational culture and some creative methods and strategies to overcome those obstacles.

Influence Mapping in Healthcare: How information design and organizational dynamics can improve the quality of health communication [31:27]
Dante Murphy, Global Experience Director, Digitas Health
This discussion will demonstrate how applying the techniques of influence mapping in organizational Dynamics and information design can help discover the points of failure in healthcare interactions and address them with appropriate content, tools, and techniques.

The Embedded Designer: How to Make Designers an Integral Part of Your Team [28:12]
Cassie McDaniel, Design Lead, Healthcare Human Factors, University Health Network
This session will outline how to lay down the infrastructure for designer and clinician collaboration by sharing case studies, challenges, opportunities, and tips and tricks, particularly from the lens of the largest human factors design team in the world devoted to health.

Theme: Health Literacy and Public Health

Reader-Centered Design for Health Communication [29:12]
Sandy Hilfiker, Principal and Director of User-Centered Design, Communicate Health Inc.
Molly McLeod, Creative Director, Communicate Health Inc.
The presenters have designed and tested health Web sites and interactive tools using the strategies outlined in Health Literacy Online (edited by CommunicateHealth co-founders). The presentation will include examples and case studies, with a focus on content developed for audiences with limited health literacy skills.

Where We Are: Designing the Environment for Health Impact [No video yet]
Andre Blackman, Founder, Pulse + Signal
Seamlessly integrating health into what citizens are already doing (e.g. not more health posters) is what will help shape the future of health.

Inclusion by Design [27:02]
Dr. Ivor Horn, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Children’s National Medical Center and George Washington University School of Medicine
Social media and mobile technology are disrupting the way patients and health systems interact and our expectations of how individuals and systems manage health and wellness in addition to illness. As early adopters, minority populations, who suffer from some of the greatest health disparities, are positioned to take a lead in leveraging innovations to improve their health outcomes. However, it is important that we discuss ways for companies and developers to partner with underserved populations and the providers who care for them to create solutions that are applicable and relevant to the realities of the environment (economic, social and physical) in which they live.

Theme: Methods for Research, Strategy & Design

Research and Design Methods in Healthcare [1:04:03]
Megan Grocki, Experience Design Director, Mad*Pow
Adam Connor, Experience Design Director, Mad*Pow
Michael Hawley, Chief Design Officer, Mad*Pow
Designing experiences that are elegant, simple, intuitive and valuable is hard. Organizations often have a difficult time coming to consensus around design decisions or leveraging outside perspective and research into their design process. In healthcare, the complex web of patient behavior, regulatory systems, and multiple players make the design process that much more challenging. In this fast-paced session, we share our experiences designing for the multiple facets of healthcare experiences. We discuss core research and design methods that help overcome organizational barriers to good design, and review research and design methods that work for patient, provider, insurer and other players in healthcare specifically.

The C-Factor: Boosting Your Content’s Clout [29:40]
Colleen Jones, Principal, Content Science
Getting strategic about content for your website or mobile application starts with analysis. Would a doctor prescribe a solution without first conducting a thorough exam? Of course not! In the same way, your organization can’t fix its content problems or make the most of its content opportunities without taking a close look at your content situation.

Theme: Well-being: Foundation for Health

Stress is the New Fat [29:12]
Jan Bruce, Founder, CEO, meQuilibrium
Stress is the #1 inhibitor to people adopting healthy behavior changes like diet and fitness. Stress costs employers $300 billion each year in healthcare expenses and absenteeism. One in 4 adults now characterize their stress as high or severe, and 80% understand that, left unattended, stress is making them ill, overweight, unproductive and with a diminished quality of life. This session will cover the common misperceptions about stress and its significance in behavior change; and then explain how stress can be managed in new ways, which give important clues to helping people with other behavior change issues.

Vulnerability is an issue like never before… is it treatable? [27:24]
Alexandra Drane, Founder, Chief Visionary Officer and Chair of the Board, Eliza Corporation
Join our session to better understand how we can help measure Vulnerability in actionable ways, develop solutions based on successful models outside the traditional healthcare space, and then analyze the results of these interventions to determine whether or not this pervasive condition is in fact, treatable.

Calming Technology [27:34]
Neema Moraveji, Director, Calming Technology Lab, Stanford University
As interactive experiences pervade everyday life, the potential for stress and anxiety increases. How can we utilize the power of interactive tools without sacrificing our sanity? The answer lies in a dual-pronged approach: (1) cultivating contemplative and calming practices in our personal lives and (2) increasing awareness of designers to mitigate stressors in interactive products. In this talk I will discuss our research from the Calming Technology Lab at Stanford University towards this aim.

Theme: Patient Stories

Preventing Nightmare Patient Experiences Like Mine [21:28]
Richard Anderson, Principal Consultant, Riander
Richard will detail some of his nightmare patient story, some of what was responsible for it, and some of the implications for how healthcare experience designers and researchers need to work.

Live a Full Life with Chronic Illness [24:00]
Nina Gilmore, Principle UX Designer, Oracle Corporation
Nina will share her experience as a patient and adventurer in the world of healthcare. She’s been poked and prodded, helped and harmed, treated sometimes with compassion and sometimes with indifference. As a designer, she is passionate about opportunities to create experiences more conducive to healing and hope. She’ll talk about what’s worked and what hasn’t worked, and she’ll share her curious experiences on this journey.

When the Designer is a Patient: A View from the Inside [30:59]
Samantha LeVan, Senior User Experience Designer, Mayo Clinic
Patient experience researchers are trained to minimize the influence of personal opinions on the design of a product or service, but when the researcher is also a patient, those personal experiences may be difficult to set aside. In this talk, Samantha will share how being a cancer patient has shaped the direction of her user experience design career and highlight a few tricks to using personal experience as an advantage, rather than a hindrance to patient-centered design.

Patient Innovators and Instigators [31:43]
Katie McCurdy, Experience Design Consultant, Mad*Pow
Meet these bold patients who are creatively using the tools at their disposal to take control of their healthcare. This panel brings together patients who have ‘hacked’ their own healthcare to improve communication, connect the dots between their providers, and generally create a more satisfying patient experience. These problem-solving trailblazers give us a glimpse into a future of highly informed, connected and empowered patients – so we’d be smart to listen to them now.

“…but a sword:” Art, Icons and Medical Advocacy< [24:43]
Regina Holliday, Founder, Patient Artist Activist, The Walking Gallery of Healthcare
Description TBD.

Theme: Consumer Expectations

The Digital Revolution: Leveraging the Consumer Journey to Deliver Transformative Health Experiences [30:27]
Brian Tilzer, Chief Digital Officer, CVS Caremark
Digital trends are changing consumers- expectations of the interactions they have with the healthcare system, and pharmacies sit at the forefront of this transformation. Empowered customers are increasingly managing their own care using an array of digital tools and now have access to technology everywhere they go. To stay relevant, health care companies must adapt their customer experiences to these new ways of doing business.

The #NEXT Generation of Healthcare [25:16]
Sean Brennan, Senior Envisioner, Continuum
As patient satisfaction starts to matter more and more, healthcare services will need to figure out how to deliver for this audience – what attributes does Gen Y seek in its experiences and services? What can we learn from sectors outside of healthcare about what this next generation of healthcare consumers are going to demand from their healthcare experiences? And ultimately, what does that mean for design?

HxD: from the Big Picture to Painting by Numbers [30:09]
Rodrigo Martinez, Life Sciences Chief Strategist, IDEO
Designing better experiences in healthcare is complex, difficult and often overwhelming. What if we were to build these experiences bottom-up, from isolated touch points and principles towards a cohesive system? How might we apply simple lessons from great experiences in other industries?

Theme: Care Experiences

Case studies [32:28]
- Jeff Stevens, Web Content Optimizer, University of Florida Academic Health Center on building an integrated patient-focused website for the University of Florida Academic Health Center
- Chris Herot, CEO and Co-Founder, SBR Health on how SBR health has created a video communication web services model to support healthcare designers who are incorporating today’s low cost and cloud-based televideo technologies into their own applications
- Valerie Mais, Project Lead, Center for Innovation in Complex Care, University Health Network on implementing new ways to capture and display patient experience, care quality, efficiency and interprofessional team “health” in meaningful ways for frontline healthcare providers.

Case Studies [30:27]
- Jeanine Kierkels, Design Research Consultant, Philips Healthcare Design on experience design for labor and delivery
- Brian Loew, CEO, Inspire on Inspire’s rare disease communities
- Zen Chu, Medical Tech Entrepreneur & Investor, MIT on MIT’s H@ckingMedicine program.

Health Navigation [32:11]
Dan Brousseau, Partner, Emperia LLC
Dan’s talk describes how service at hospitals can help transform the overall experience. He describes of how a large unit within a major teaching hospital that he worked with is innovating the concept of service and support through ‘health navigation’ to engage patients and families at a deeper level and bring new value to their healthcare experiences. He provides strategic context for customer experience at hospitals and show how a technique called Experience Value Mapping can be used to examine and redefine the customer experience from the outside-in.

Breaking the Mold [29:56]
Jess Kadar, Principal Product Manager, Iora Health
Details coming soon.

Rethinking the Fertility Patient Journey [28:36]
Peter Eckert, Chief Experience Officer, Projekt 202
Kijana Knight, Senior User Experience Researcher, Projekt 202
Aliza Gold, Senior Experience Designer/Researcher, Projekt 202
The Reproductive Medicine Associates of Texas (RMA) is not the first client to engage projekt202 in the hopes of becoming better, faster, more efficient, and more creative in their approach to problem-solving and ways upon they offer their services; but they are the first to ask us to apply our processes and skills to finding solutions in physical and emotional space. We believe that our findings and the documentation we have begun to create in response to our observations and hypotheses offers an opportunity to begin a very fruitful dialogue between interaction designers and healthcare providers on how the principles of user-centered design can be applied to improve the experience of medical service for both patients and providers.

Theme: Design Innovation

From Malawi to Minnesota: Hyper-Local System Design and Global Scale [No video yet]
Christopher Fabian, Co-leader and Co-founder, Innovation Unit, Unicef
Bringing best practices from design and start-up culture to the world of development challenges is daunting – but allowing for failure, co-creating solutions, and recognizing that almost everything we build in New York does not, in the end, work in the field have forced us to be humble and look for ways to facilitate solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Design and Innovation: The Human Perspective [29:56]
Ryan Armbruster, VP, Innovation Competency. UnitedHealth Group
In this session, Ryan will share frameworks for explaining and understanding this interrelationship which have been effective at helping healthcare leaders grasp and pursue design and innovation effectively within their organizations. In addition, he will share recent examples of how UnitedHealth Group, one of the largest and most diversified companies in the healthcare industry, is applying design to enable more successful innovation.

Theme: Chronic Condition Management

Understanding Networks of Diabetes Care: A Research Framework for the Healthcare Innovation of Tomorrow [26:11]
Eilidh Dickson, Project Leader and Senior Interaction Designer, CIID Consulting
Helle Rohde Andersen, Interaction and Service Designer, CIID Consulting
Working with Novo Nordisk, CIID Consulting assembled a 360º view into the networks of care, that support diabetes patients. By approaching the research from a systemic level and studying a patient’s network of support rather than individuals in isolation, the result was a rich and emotional view into the complex interactions and relationships encompassing a patient’s journey with the condition.
This talk shows how a new research framework and information visualization methods can inspire you to tackle challenging healthcare issues in ways that will provoke new understanding and build user empathy.

Am I Normal? Findings from Research on Text Messaging for Women with Diabetes [28:35]
Janna Kimel, Senior User Experience Researcher, Regence
The session goes into detail about how to insert qualitative research into a quantitative environment, with best practices for getting answers from study participants. This discussion also reviews key findings about how to interact and message disparate populations, as well as the pros and cons of using text messaging to influence health outcomes.

Theme: Health Trends

Designing Work for Health and Profit [31:19]
Martin Adler, Co-Founder & Director of Product Management, Healthrageous
This session will address how cutting edge science and technology can be used to change behaviors and optimize workplace health. In doing so, we will define steps that individuals can take to improve their health and wellbeing immediately, how change makers and organizations can cut costs by improving the health of their workforce and how technology is revolutionizing the way we’ll work tomorrow.

As part of Ethnomining, the April 2013 Ethnographymatters edition on combining qualitative and quantitative data, edited by Nicolas Nova, Fabien Girardin describes his work with networked/sensor data at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Based on this inspiring case study, he discusses the overall process, how mixed-methods are relevant in his work, and what kind lessons he learnt doing this.

Fabien Girardin @fabiengirardin is Partner at the Near Future Laboratory, a research agency. He is active in the domains of user experience, data science and urban informatics.

Scott Smith of futures research lab Changeist writes in Quartz about the long history of alternative currencies, and criticizes Bitcoin because “they set too high a bar for the average person”:

“There have been various alternative currencies kicking around developed countries like Britain and the US for years, but the global recession has spurred increased interest in setting up small local systems of payment using money designed around local needs. These range from the gray hairs of local currency such as the Brixton Pound, set up five years ago in the South London neighborhood that gave it its name, to more recent entrants like Bavaria’s Chiemgauer, a currency that started in a school and has spread to wider use, and the Credito, used by the Damanhur eco-community in Northern Italy.”

See also his 2012 article: “The Future of Informal Economies“.

Access to big data is growing at an incredible pace. With increased information from various sources available on smartphones and tablets, many companies now realize winning services will be those that transform big data elements into personalized data experiences.

The key to creating great service experiences lies with uncovering data and using it in meaningful contexts that have real benefits to users.

Recent advances in wearable tech, location-based data and sensors are driving greater interest by consumers in personalized data experiences. Google Glass and the Nike FuelBand are pushing boundaries on what users can expect inside the services of tomorrow.

For designers, however, data presents a very interesting challenge: How can we better understand the value of data and leverage it to make digital experiences more meaningful?

Jason Napolitano, service design lead at Fjord, provides some examples of emerging companies that are embracing the conceptual power of data to create truly breakthrough services.

Service Design by Industrial Designers
By Froukje Sleeswijk Visser
Technical University Delft
2013, 104 pages

Design practice is changing. The applications of design skills, knowledge, activities and processes seem to become wider everyday. More and more designers are tackling complex societal issues, and apply their design skills to projects where product development no longer plays a big role. Many refer to these applications as ‘service design’.

This book is aimed at people who want to learn more about the current dynamics and challenges the wave of service design brings to design practice. We critically reflect on recent developments related to service design and specifically on the consequences for the education of a new generation designers to deliver value to design practice.

It is the result of a think tank at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology with a group of 25 master students, 8 staff involved in service design research and education, and 9 design practitioners.

Dr.ir. F. Sleeswijk Visser (Froukje) is Assistant Professor, Design Conceptualization and Communication, at the Department of Industrial Design of the Technical University of Delft.

In the book The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg explains how habits are formed and what it takes to break an ingrained habit. The book references a 2006 study from Duke University that found that 40% of the actions that people perform each day are habits, not purposeful decisions. Habits impact our daily lives in many different ways, even in how we interact with websites and applications. Being aware of how habits may influence interactions users have with your products can help you design better user experiences.

In an insightful blog post, Reboot principal Panthea Lee asks if open government initiatives make citizens more informed and engaged, and make governments more accountable to their people? What impact have open government initiatives had so far?

Reboot is a USA-based service design firm working in the fields of global governance and development.

Four questions, she writes, might be worth considering for those working to measure and achieve impact in this space:

1. Who gains from Open Government?
Which populations have the access and motivation to use these channels? Frequently, programs and platforms privilege certain groups over others.

2. How do we reach “The Other Side”?
There are two sides to the open government coin: citizens and governments. The goal is to facilitate constructive dialogue between the two, but many projects seem to focus on one side or the other.

3. Can we do better than equating scale with success?
Replication and scale are not always appropriate indicators of success. The effectiveness of most open government initiatives will be context dependent. Replication requires programs to standardize as many elements of its models and activities as possible.

4. How do Open Government processes change people?
Open government initiatives seek to mobilize citizens and to motivate governments to respond. But what are the processes through which change occurs?

An ethnographic study of participatory budgeting in Rome (conducted by Julien Talpin of the University of Lille) found that participation skewed towards those who were already active in civic affairs and in relative positions of power. Sixty-three percent of participants were activists. White-collar workers and those over 50 were also over-represented.

Abstract

The study of the individual effects of participation has mainly focused on the impact of deliberation on actors’ preferences, mostly based on quantitative and experimental research. I argue here that ethnography, based on a praxeologic and process approach, can offer broader results on actors’ learning in participatory devices than the cognitive effects generally emphasized.

Grounded in a case-study of a participatory budget in Rome, the research shows participation allows learning new skills and civic habits but may also bring about a greater distrust with politics.

Explaining the learning process, the paper stresses the different learning potential of participatory institutions. A condition for the durability of the effects observed is that participation be repeated over time. This requires integration within the institution, which happens for only a few; the majority of participants being disappointed stop participating. Speaking the language of the institution, some participants are however integrated enough to acquire further civic skills and knowledge, and even to endure a politicization process.

Finally, the study of actors’ long-term trajectories allows drawing conclusions on the social conditions of civic bifurcation. Ethnography thereby allows grasping the long-term consequences of civic engagement.

How do we help or support people that live in situations that do not fit into a system’s categories, e.g. by transforming perceptions of what a system can be? This question is constantly reoccurring in the development of our public service systems, writes Jesper Christiansen, anthropologist at MindLab, a Danish cross-ministerial innovation unit, on the NESTA site.

“A very obvious example where this matter is persistent is the area of social care for vulnerable families. This area is increasingly becoming a nightmare scenario for Western nation states across the world. These are often at-risk families, which access many different services and are involved in several case plans at the same time. The challenge is to coordinate and integrate services that are addressing such different issues like child behaviour and education, domestic violence, drug or alcohol abuse, unemployment or work injury, financial crisis, unstable housing, physical or mental illness or other more or less common hardships of everyday life.

Working with Australian design agency ThinkPlace, MindLab took part in a project that set out to address these issues and transform the service system dealing with vulnerable families in the ACT region of Australia. The purpose was to develop new capabilities and processes to co-design and co-produce services with current service users as part of introducing a new human-centred, systemic approach to improve outcomes for vulnerable families.”

Other recent readings by MindLab:

Co-production (pdf)
How do we ensure collaboration with all the actors who can potentially make a contribution to the challenges we face? Can juvenile first time offenders be sentenced by youths with a criminal record? To see the citizens’ resources and design welfare with them rather than to them – that is what we call co-production. Read cases and useful principles on the subject in this pamphlet. [Video]

Design-Led Innovation in Government
Christian Bason’s reflections on design-led innovation in the public sector and the three challenges it raises.
(Published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review)

The UK Government Service Design Manual provides a (draft) digital by default service standard, as well as guidance and tools for building world-class digital services.

The Government Digital Strategy set an ambitious target for teams building services: services so good that people prefer to use them.

(via InfoDesign)

Design and Public Services is the second publication in the UK Design Commission‘s ‘Restarting Britain’ series. The first set out the strategic importance of design education as a driver of economic renewal and growth. This 64-page report turns to the question of public service renewal.

In the context of politics and governing, the word ‘design’ is applied liberally – the design of legislation, the design of policy, the design of public services – with little thought as to the significance of the word itself. Here the Design Commission shifts its focus to that word ‘design’, and explore its potential for creating cost-effective public services in the 21st century. Part-polemic, part-manual, this report is the culmination of a nine month inquiry, and the Commission’s response to a substantially increased appetite for more information on the subject of design in public services.

Co-author Nat Hunter of The RSA writes: “Design can make a huge impact in public service but is not commonly used to do so. It is still often misunderstood as being all about posters and soft furnishings, and not seen as a discipline that has potential to create enormous change that is better for the end user and saves money to boot. Good design turns problems on its head and starts with walking in the shoes of the users, not with the problems of the providers. During the inquiry we heard many examples of how great design had created huge organisational change, bringing empathy and kindness into public service, bearing in mind inclusion and access at all times, and, of course, saving vast amounts of money.”

Service Design – From Insight to Implementation
by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie & Ben Reason
Rosenfeld Media – March 2013
(book will be published tomorrow)

We have unsatisfactory experiences when we use banks, buses, health services and insurance companies. They don’t make us feel happier or richer. Why are they not designed as well as the products we love to use such as an Apple iPod or a BMW?

The ‘developed’ world has moved beyond the industrial mindset of products and the majority of ‘products’ that we encounter are actually parts of a larger service network. These services comprise people, technology, places, time and objects that form the entire service experience. In most cases some of the touchpoints are designed, but in many situations the service as a complete ecology just “happens” and is not consciously designed at all, which is why they don’t feel like iPods or BMWs.

One of the goals of service design is to redress this imbalance and to design services that have the same appeal and experience as the products we love, whether it is buying insurance, going on holiday, filling in a tax return, or having a heart transplant. Another important aspect of service design is its potential for design innovation and intervention in the big issues facing us, such as transport, sustainability, government, finance, communications and healthcare.

Given that we live in a service and information age, a practical, thoughtful book about how to design better services is urgently needed.

Along with many other insights, this book offers:

• A clear explanation of what service design is and what makes it different from other ways of thinking about design, marketing and business.
• Service design insights, methods and case studies to help you move up the project food chain and have a bigger design impact on the entire service ecosystem.
• Practical advice to help you sell the value of service thinking within your organisation and to clients.
• Ways to help you develop business, design, environmental and social innovation through service design.

Also of note: Free webcast by the authors (recommended!)

After technology received so much attention as a key differentiator for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, Cooper Managing Director Doug LeMoine asked Scout Addis, the Director of User Experience at Practice Fusion, to discuss his experience working on the campaign and how design and technology worked together to help win the election and change the future of politics.

“I would encourage every designer to apply his or her skills to the political process to help make it better. We need more designers helping with civic engagement. Working on a political campaign is unlike working for any company you can imagine. It’s so fast, so fluid, so data intensive, that you’ll learn more in a day about what works and what doesn’t than you will in a month at most other companies.”

Read the interview

The Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities – a cooperation between University College London (UCL), Imperial College London and Intel – was launched in May 2012, which a focus on how to enable future cities to be more connected and sustainable. Their activities entail investigating, developing and deploying adaptive technologies that can optimize resource efficiency, and enable new services that support and enhance the quality of life of urban inhabitants and city visitors. Their approach is interdisciplinary, combining methodologies from computer science, the social sciences, interaction design and architecture to improve how cities are managed and maintained in order to ensure and enhance citizen well-being.

The Institute is directed by Duncan Wilson of Intel, assisted by Charlie Sheridan. Other people involved include David Prendergast (Intel senior researcher and anthropologist), Yvonne Rogers (UCL Professor of Interaction Design and Director of the UCL Interaction Centre), Licia Capra (UCL Reader in Pervasive computing), and Johannes Schöning (professor of computer science with a focus on HCI at Hasselt University, Belgium).

According to an initial overview article, the focus of the Institute is to be human-centred:

“Our perspective in the Sustainable Connected Cities Institute is to be human- centred. We have wide-ranging expertise and background in user experience, interaction design, ethnography, together with research in the built environment, commerce, engineering, anthropology, the arts, and social psychology. We also work as inter-disciplinary teams that can make a real change to enrich and extend city dwellers lives.” [...]

We will develop and exploit pervasive and sensing technologies, analytics and new interfaces, putting humans at the centre of technological developments. Our approach is to address four main themes:

• City Experience: How do we enhance the City Experience and communicate services?
• City as a Platform: How do we create the digital platform of the city from sensor/edge to cloud?
• Sustaining Sustainability: How to sustain behavioural change?
• Connecting the Invisible City: How do we visualize the Human-Environment Interface?”

Meanwhile the Institute has published its first research papers and articles:

Toward a real-time city health monitor
A common metaphor to describe the movement of people within a city is that of blood flowing through the veins of a living organism. We often speak of the ‘pulse of the city’ when referring to flow patterns we observe. Here we extend this metaphor by hypothesising that by monitoring the flow of people through a city we can assess the city’s health, as a nurse takes a patient’s heart-rate and blood pressure during a routine health check. Using an automated fare collection dataset of journeys made on the London rail system, we build a classification model that identifies areas of high deprivation as measured by the Indices of Multiple Deprivation, and achieve a precision, sensitivity and specificity of0.805, 0.733 and 0.810, respectively. We conclude with a discussion of the potential benefits this work provides to city planning, policymaking, and citizen engagement initiatives.

Smart Citizens in the Data Metropolis
Article with some insights on the discussions around smart citizens and community engagement. It was original published in the website of the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona.

Reflecting on the Institute, Mandeep Hothi, programme leader at the Young Foundation, writes:

“Much of the institute’s outputs will be relevant to local government. For example, a recent study shows a link between measures of multiple deprivation and patterns of passenger flow on public transport in London.Researchers propose that this data could become an early warning system for identifying areas of high deprivation, helping local government to better target its resources.

Data sensors such as Oyster card readers are becoming ubiquitous and the availability of real-time data is going to vastly increase.

It is important that the applications that emerge are co-created with local citizens, using ethnography and design as the starting point. Not only will this maximise usefulness, it should ensure technologists and officials respect issues such as personal privacy and autonomy.”

How do we design a resilient socio-technical system, asks Ezio Manzini in Design Observer.

“Let’s look to natural systems; their tolerance of breakdowns and their adaptation capacity (that is, their capability of sustaining over time) may give us direction.

As a matter of fact, it is easy to observe that lasting natural systems result from a multiplicity of largely independent systems and are based on a variety of living strategies. In short, they are diverse and complex. These diversities and complexities are the basis of their resilience – that is, of their adaptability to changes in their contexts.

Given that, it should be reasonable to conceive and realize something similar for man-made systems. The socio-technical systems that, integrated with natural ones, constitute our living environment should be made of a variety of interconnected, but (largely) self-standing elements. This mesh of distributed systems, similarly to natural ones, would be intrinsically capable of adapting and lasting through time because even if one of its components breaks, given its multiplicity and diversity, the whole system doesn’t collapse.”

Although I don’t agree with the implicit meaning of this Fast Company title (i.e. that public services currently do not help people – whereas the real issue is the degree of impact), I am always excited to hear the latest updates on Reboot, a design agency that focuses on service design in international development, particularly if it is through an interview with Reboot principal Panthea Lee.

“Plenty of thought goes into good industrial design and good interaction design. We do the same for public and social services. In our view, service design is a multidisciplinary approach to creating more useful, effective, and efficient services.

In the space of international development, we find designers particularly well suited to the task of creating good services because they are highly analytical systems thinkers.

Services are more than just pulling a lever to get a result. Services are a complex series of interlocking relationships and institutions, and each one is different. Their design requires deep empathy for users and a nuanced understanding of context. And you’ll never get it right on the first go–they require significant testing and refining until they’re right.”

Marco Steinberg, who directs the strategic design efforts of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, announced last week that Sitra’s Helsinki Design Lab will close in June 2013.

Helsinki Design Lab is an initiative by Sitra to advance strategic design as a way to re-examine, re-think, and re-design the systems we’ve inherited from the past.

According to Steinberg, “design at Sitra is shifting from a strategic to a service role. The current members of the design team (Bryan Boyer, Justin Cook, and myself*) are committed to strategic design and will therefore pursue this interest beyond Sitra. In the spring Sitra will hire for a new role to grow service design within the organization.”

[* The fourth member of the team, Dan Hill, left earlier, and is now the CEO of Fabrica in Treviso, Italy.]

During the next five months Brian, Justin and Marco will be converting the site into an archive of the most recent phase of HDL. The archive will be legible, free, and open, they write, so that the “work and experience of Helsinki Design Lab be useful not just for the next phase of design at Sitra, but for the community as well.”

The team is now compiling the case study research from Helsinki Design Lab 2012 into a forthcoming publication on stewardship, with a tentative publication date of May 2013. This completes the existing publication “Recipes for Systemic Change,” which you can download for free.

We can also expect a public event in Helsinki on June 10th, 2013.

Over the last years, Experientia has worked intensively – and to our great satisfaction – with Sitra and with the team of the Helsinki Design Lab in particular, through our involvement on the Low2No project. We wish Sitra and the HDL team the very best in the coming months and afterwards, and we are sure that we will find many ways to collaborate in the future.

(For more reflection on the closing, check also this post by Bryan Boyer).

A Sustainable Building Promotes Pro-Environmental Behavior: An Observational Study on Food Disposal
by Wu DW, DiGiacomo A, Kingstone A
PLoS ONE 8(1): e53856. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0053856 – January 2013

In order to develop a more sustainable society, the wider public will need to increase engagement in pro-environmental behaviors. Psychological research on pro-environmental behaviors has thus far focused on identifying individual factors that promote such behavior, designing interventions based on these factors, and evaluating these interventions. Contextual factors that may also influence behavior at an aggregate level have been largely ignored.

In the current study, we test a novel hypothesis – whether simply being in a sustainable building can elicit environmentally sustainable behavior. We find support for our hypothesis: people are significantly more likely to correctly choose the proper disposal bin (garbage, compost, recycling) in a building designed with sustainability in mind compared to a building that was not.

Questionnaires reveal that these results are not due to self-selection biases. Our study provides empirical support that one’s surroundings can have a profound and positive impact on behavior. It also suggests the opportunity for a new line of research that bridges psychology, design, and policy-making in an attempt to understand how the human environment can be designed and used as a subtle yet powerful tool to encourage and achieve aggregate pro-environmental behavior.

The UK government’s deficit reduction plan may fall short of its targets, prompting speculation that austerity measures will have to continue into the next parliament.

Local government officers who have already seen substantial cuts are now looking at a further 20%, and casting about for help in redesigning their organisations and services, aware that scaling back simply won’t go far enough.

Enter design.

A Design Commission inquiry (with the help of the Royal College of Art and Ideo) is now investigating whether design skills and design thinking might be able to respond to this demand.

Brand experience agency edenspiekermann_ and Volkswagen’s Service Innovation Team explored what it takes to define a service that would play a relevant role in people’s lives.

“We started with: Who are the people that use carsharing? How can we expand the service to exceed their expectations? How do people find, explore and adopt this new service? How can we design a service that is easy, enjoyable, useful and valuable? We mapped out and designed the customer journey along the different touchpoints of a carsharing service.

We explored every touchpoint: from the key that opens the door, to the iPhone App to find a car on the street, to the signs that indicate a reserved parking spot. We developed prototypical solutions and tested them with real users in real environments. Also, in-depth interviews brought insights into what works and what does not. We burned through thousands of post-its to record all aspects of what we learned in our tests. It was a reality check. At Edenspiekermann service design goes way beyond research. We win insights by creating refined prototypes that provide a sophisticated experience to users.”

The current commercial version of Volkswagen’s carsharing service is „Quicar“, available in Hannover.

Brooker has now summarized the content of the workshop and some innovative new financial services.

The full service design agency Pars Pro Toto in Ghent, Belgium built the “Wereld van Nestor” [Nestor's World], a social design tool meant to help local governments in Flanders create a better world for their elderly citizens.

The tool is built on 10 personas and their experience with eight different topics. These eight topics – housing, mobility, public spaces and the built environment, social participation, respect and social engagement, active participation and employment, communication and information, public and health services – are areas where local government can make a real difference for their elderly citizens. They are based on the WHO report Global age-friendly cities.

Local governments can now construe their senior citizen plans based on the relevance and impact of their planned services on one or more of these personas.

The project came about through a collaboration with the Social Welfare Agency of the City of Ghent, and with the support of Design Flanders. The research that it was based on is not very clearly described, but the site mentions interviews and workshops.

For now the tool only exists in Dutch (and the socio-cultural context is also distinctively Flemish), but if you have any special questions, please contact Johan Bonner (info@parsprototo.be) on +32 (0)9/244.62.20.

The NEXT Service Design videos keep on coming, but very slowly. Here are another three:

A Facebook for Things – Turning Physical Products into Digital Information Services
Andy Hobsbawm, Evrythng
There’s a revolution going on in the interaction between the physical and digital worlds. Innovations in smartphones, connected chips and physical tags are creating amazing new service design possibilities. Andy discusses how super-charging physical things with dynamic, socially-connected apps and content helps brands get closer to customers and turns physical products into a channel for personalized digital services, real-time communications and 1:1 relationships.

Service Design – Buzzword or Magic Method?
Pia Betton, Edenspiekermann
Following the rising complexity in the communication and service environment, service design has become a widely used method to solve manifold challenges.
As service providers within the areas of innovation, communication and design, we play an important role in the way we guide our clients through the wilderness of market and user exploration and ideation methods and processes. We need to ask ourselves if service design is always the right thing – or if it can be a blind path?
How do we accompany the necessary changes, avoid frustrations and ensure the ROI of service design processes? Let’s take a look at the needs and challenges of clients and discuss the roles we can (and can’t?) play.
Pia Betton is managing partner and director consulting at Edenspiekermann. With a background in design, she looks back at more than 20 years of work experience within the areas of innovation, user experience, branding and communication.

The Design in Service Design

Service Design is often, well deserved, praised for its analytical and strategic advantages. But if we forget to acknowledge the most central aspect of the discipline it will loose its true glimmering power. Because it is Design that makes Service Design happen. Design as in creating and executing. Design as the element of surprise. And Service Design is not Design just because we call it Design. We have to nourish it. Lisa Lindström, Managing Director at the design firm Doberman shares her thoughts on how Design can bring true value to the management and innovation of services.

Earlier videos are here and here.

As part of ServiceD, a three-year service design project, which researched future educational needs and piloted service design education, Lahti University of Applied Sciences from Finland and The Estonian Institute for Futures Studies from Tallinn University have published two remarkable service design publications:

Service Design: On the Evolution of Design Expertise (pdf) is a 196-page book that describes the developments and changes in Estonian and Finnish design competences since the 1960s and analyses how service design has emerged as a field of its own. The book also discusses how design has taken a turn towards the immaterial and provides insights to design education; how should education be developed amidst changing needs and environments.

Service design magazine (pdf, 84 pages) highlights fresh, global phenomena related to the outcomes of service design, city planning, drama and interaction studies, and futures research.

Last week I posted links to a few videos from NEXT Service Design, the European conference for designing digital services, which took place on 8 October in Berlin.

In addition to the presentations by Alexander Baumgart and Pedro Custódio, two more videos have now been uploaded:

Service Design – Are we still talking about this?
Chris Downs, Method
In its early days, service design had a clear and compelling purpose – to shift our addition from owning products in favour of services. Products were bad, the thinking went – they encourage greed, envy and waste. Services on the other hand, were good – they led to community, sustainability and fulfilment.
Ten years on, the technological landscape has fundamentally changed and today it is almost impossible to distinguish between a digital product and a service. Where does that leave service design? Most importantly, why are we still having this conversation?
In this talk, Chris explores design in a world where the old notions of product, service and brand are blurring. He argues how services of the future will be more like the services of the past and explains why you should never ever refer to him as ‘a consumer’.

How lean and service design methods can create innovative, digital products
Magnus Christensson, Socialsquare
Drawing upon the design, development and launch of a client project for Denmark’s largest online bookstore, Magnus will share some of his experiences and insights from applying lean startup & service design methodologies to build a client product and business that challenge the market.

NEXT Service Design is the European conference for designing digital services, which took place on 8 October in Berlin. It focuses on design methods including design thinking, user-centric design and interaction design.

Two videos are currently online.

Strategy is a Service! What business leadership can learn from service design
Alexander Baumgart, Systemic Partners
An exploration (and provocation) on how service design does create new perspectives on (and for) strategy and planning practices – at helping leadership harness the in- and out-bound powers of a holistic human-centered design approach to leverage lasting competitive advantage.

The Experience is the Product
Pedro Custódio, Experience Designers
We’ve been riding on a wave of consumerism since the best part of last century, product of the industrial and services revolutions, the amount of products and services outpaced even the most wild thinkers. There’s just to much of everything! Choices are good, but hard to make! Product features first, product design next used to be central to developing new products and attached services, but clearly we’ve passed those days, so if it’s not about features, nor it’s design how do we create meaningful and attractive differentiation for our future products and services propositions? This is the question that Custódio works to solve and this presentation gives a bit more insights on how we can tailor amazing experiences in order to create valuable futures.

(via InfoDesign)

Through the application of analytics to Big Data, as well as ethnography — the design and implementation of qualitative field studies to observe cultural patterns — Xerox is answering important questions about traffic congestion, our reaction to it, and how city governments most effectively can provide services to address this and related needs.

To explore these issues, Ben Kerschberg of Forbes interviewed together Ken Mihalyov, Xerox Chief Innovation Officer for Transportation Central and Local Government; and David Cummins, SVP, Parking and Justice Solutions.

Here are the ethnography questions:

Q: At what point do you think technology reaches its limits and thus requires ethnography to make the program as efficient as possible?

Ken Mihalyov: I think we’ve found that we like to get ethnography involved as early in the process as possible. There are things that we can certainly accomplish with our algorithms and Big Data alone. We can look at the data and see trends that we would not otherwise see. Ethnography is a strong counterpart to looking at the data a certain way and drawing conclusions from it. We can confirm that we’re working on the right problem, that we haven’t missed something and that our interpretations are correct. Ethnography helps us confirm those factors and that we’re seeing the bigger picture that includes human interaction.

Q: I can imagine that ethnography could be as important to observing a manufacturing line as it is to dynamic parking. Do you think there is an over-reliance on Big Data without looking at important human elements such as expertise gained by years on the line or on the streets?

David Cummins: I’m not sure that it’s Big Data versus ethnography, but rather we’ve found that they complement one another in indispensable ways.

Ken Mihalyov: Data can take you a long way, but when people are involved it’s not always the whole story. You need to understand and document the way things really work, especially the interactions between different processes. There’s very often a difference between what you expect to have happen and what’s actually happening when people are involved, and that’s very enlightening.

On Saturday 27 October, the Italian-speaking Swiss city of Lugano will host the 4th edition of the UXconference.

The 2012 edition of the conference, which is organised by the Sketchin team, will focus on the relationship between digital services and people’s lives, with particular attention on the home and the city.

Speakers this year come from Switzerland, Italy, US and UK, and include Carlo Ratti from MIT’s Senseable Cities Lab, Stefan Klocek and Chris Noessel from Cooper, and Experientia senior partner Jan-Christoph Zoels.

Jan-Christoph will discuss supporting sustainable lifestyles.

Metropolis Magazine asked seven visionary design teams, both established and up-and-coming, what they predict a fully accessible city might look like (and better yet, how it would function).

“We broke the city into its component parts and then, like casting directors, asked, “Who would we like to tackle this one?” The eager and inspired responses from our dream team thrilled us.”

“What follows are imaginative, practical, funny, high-tech/low-tech, humanistic design solutions that make room for everyone and, in the process, invent new ways of making cities.”

Getting Around: Transit Hub
by Grimshaw Architects
Grimshaw Architects, which designed the award-winning Southern Cross Station in Melbourne, Australia, believes that a seamless transportation network is the key to our future. Grimshaw designed a hub that adapts to the evolving city and provides all people, whatever their needs, with a way to get around town.

Picking Up the Groceries: Public Market
by West 8
Farmers’ markets in parking lots aren’t the only solution to sustainable commerce. In 1995, the urban design and landscape architecture firm West 8 reinvented Binnenrotte Square in Rotterdam, closing it off to traffic and letting the locals take over. The firm used that experience to create our inclusive marketplace.

Sharing Resources: Community Center
by Interboro Partners
Interboro Partners has been compiling The Arsenal of Exclusion
& Inclusion (www.arsenalofexclusion.blogspot.com), to look at how cities admit or exclude people. The firm’s ideas for the community center in our new city draw upon the book, which will be published by Actar later this year.

Taking a Walk: Streetscape
by Linearscape
Linearscape have made it their mission to understand the built environment’s relationship to landscape, so they take an integrative approach to streets, applying existing technologies and reconfiguring the sidewalk for people of all ages and abilities. Linearscape’s won the 2012 Emerging New York Architects competition for imagining a future urban landscape.

Finding Your Way: Urban Navigation
by OPEN
OPEN believes in continuously reinventing itself. Yet it doesn’t always look to the future; sometimes the old way of doing things is the best. Its way finding system for our new city isn’t technological. OPEN suggests that people who are lost in the city do something unusual—ask someone for directions.

Living Together: Multi-Generational Home
by John Ronan Architects
John Ronan Architects is concerned with how a design takes into account building performance over time. So for our new city, the firm “interviewed” a 120-year-old great-grandmother in the year 2120. John Ronan Architects won a 2012 AIA Institute National Honor Award for their design of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago.

Working Virtually: Workspace
by LUNAR
The key to good design is knowing what people need. This is what the product design firm LUNAR focused on when considering how people in our new city would work. Addressing the growing number of virtual offices, the firm created products to encourage natural interactions even when people aren’t physically together.

Article by Francesca Salvadori, Scuolalvento blog
Translation from the Italian

Technology is probably the last thing that comes to mind when you think about poetry and how it can be captured and transmitted. But this emotional and colourful voyage with Ulysses would not be the same on paper.

The application is based on a book with gorgeous illustrations and wise and simple storytelling, but without the diffuse backlighting of the screen that transforms even the deepest greys and blues into something lively and vibrant, the enchantment of the narration would never be as strong.

Polyphemos really walks into you, ever bigger and frightful; the captured winds in the bag of Aeolus hurl themselves on the sea; the lure of the Sirens, seated between corals and opaline jellyfish, hypnotises you; and the shining Calypso, notwithstanding her blond grace and the surrounding flowers of an eternal spring, has a broken heart due to the hero’s rejection…

It’s hard to imagine a more convincing introduction to the Odyssey. And although events have been ordered diachronically, resulting in the loss of the flashbacks and flashforwards that characterise the typical circularity of the time of Ulysses, we capture the tragedy of the shipwreck at the glance, seeing him exiled in the waves of the vast Mediterranean Sea.

This little jewel – created by the Milan publishers of Elastico – will be precious for anyone who needs to engage young people with the works of Homer, as it is full of synthetic but intelligent page scenes and narrated by an assuring, fluid and relaxed voice, while containing a coherent selection of the story’s episodes.

The simple and moving digital story allows any of us to seed the taste for literature with children and pupils, paving their way into the pages of poetry.

And hopefully they will start to love other literature as well.

The Voyage of Ulysses (available in English and Italian) cost 3.99 Euro (4.99 USD).

But even if it costed 10, it would be worth purchasing…

The interplay between efficiency and quality in a service experience is often what separates a merely transactional interaction from a valuable and pleasurable one, writes Patrick Quattlebaum of Adaptive Path.

“The former gets the job done; the latter does so while creating a more human connection and an enduring relationship between service provider and customer. Unfortunately, in most cases efficiency wins out. Most organizations lean heavily on analytical methods to define rigid processes and procedures that are designed to reduce waste and increase predictability in service delivery. This approach views the organization as a machine to be fine-tuned and the customer as a rational actor who enters and exits processes like a rat in a well-designed maze.

Yet, customers are less rational than they would like to admit and more complicated (i.e., human) than process engineers would prefer. Much of this derives from how the unconscious mind affects behavior. [...] And, the unconscious mind is not only molded by individual experience, but by societal norms and rituals deeply embedded within a culture.”

Read article

A four step guide from the Milan Expo 2015:

Step 1
Ask your main sponsors (in this case Cisco, Enel and Telecom Italia) to indicate the relevant “Smart City” technologies that they already have, are currently working on, or are generally trendy.
In the Milan case these are push technology services, QR codes, smart phone apps, mapping services, RFID tags, biometric identification, security services, electronic walls, gestural interfaces, augmented reality (and eyewear), immersive virtual reality, 3D avatars, health tracking services, and foldable tablets.

Step 2
Agree with these sponsors to hire an advertising agency to develop a short video scenario of the Expo 2015 visitor experience, using all these technologies, and obviously adhering to the general vision and principles of the Expo.

Step 3 (VERY IMPORTANT):

• DO NOT make it realistic by introducing context, such as the City of Milan, traffic, other digital services people might use, other people, or anyone who may not be familiar with smartphones, gestural interfaces, QR codes
• DO NOT base your ideas on the actual behaviour of people – since it will be impossible to say how people might behave in 2015, any user research is distracting
• DO NOT show any use that goes beyond what you can already do on a smartphone or website in 2012 – like navigating, browsing and communicating – and emphasize passive media consumption
• DO NOT indicate that people (and small companies) can create their own bottom up services – as this might be a security risk

Inadvertently doing any of the above, will diminish the power of the perfect visitor experience you aim to create.

Step 4
Use this video in key presentations on your Smart City credentials and highlight how these services will resolve the key visitor experience problem that came to the fore during the recent Beijing expo: queues.

The result: Expo 2015 Smart City video (Italian version)

(I hope you capture my irony.)

THE customer is king. So some firms have started appointing chief customer officers (CCOs) to serve the king more attentively. These new additions to the (already crowded) C-suite are supposed to look at the business from the customer’s point of view. They try to focus on the entire “customer experience”, rather than on individual transactions.

An article by The Economist reflects on the matter, and refers to the book “Outside In” (Amazon) by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research, who observe that customers are growing more powerful.

“The internet makes it easier to shop around and share complaints with a wide audience. Yet poor service persists. Mr Manning and Ms Bodine have been asking customers about their experiences with American companies for years. In 2012 a third of the 160 firms they asked about were rated “poor” or “very poor”. Health insurers and cable companies fared worst.”

The article ends with this hilarious recommendation: “Phone a firm that has appointed a chief customer officer and see if you can reach a human being. If not, that CCO might as well be tossed from an executive-floor window, no doubt clutching his collection of ‘journey maps’ and ‘customer archetypes’.”

SDT2012 was the first international conference on service design thinking in the travel and tourism industry. For the first time, the conference brought together a community interested in the practical application of service design thinking within the travel and tourism industry.

The conference was the closing event of the project “Service Design in Tourism” funded by the European Union under the CIP Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme, and hosted by MCI – Management Center Innsbruck, Department of Tourism.

A free 142 page e-book with Case studies of applied research projects on mobile ethnography for tourism destinations.

Abstract

Tourism becomes more and more transparent through social media and tourism review websites. Nowadays, it’s the individual guest’s experience that makes or breaks the success of a tourism product. Thus, the focus in tourism shifts from mere marketing communications to meaningful experiences. Service design thinking can provide an in-depth and holistic understanding of customers required to cocreate meaningful experiences with guests.

The book provides an introduction into service design and tourism and presents seven case studies of European tourism destinations, which used the app myServiceFellow as a mobile ethnography research tool to gain genuine customer insights. The book reports lessons learned of these case studies, gives managerial implications and an outlook on future research fields for service design in tourism.

“Service Design and Tourism” is the written outcome of the research project “Service design as an approach to foster competitiveness and sustainability of European tourism” funded by the European Union under the CIP Competitiveness and Innovation Program.

MindLab is a Danish cross-ministerial innovation unit which involves citizens and businesses in creating new solutions for society. It is also a physical space – a neutral zone for inspiring creativity, innovation and collaboration.

They work with the civil servants in three parent ministries: the Ministry of Business and Growth, the Ministry of Taxation and the Ministry of Employment. These three ministries cover broad policy areas that affect the daily lives of virtually all Danes. Entrepreneurship, climate change, digital self-service, citizen’s rights, emplyment services and workplace safety are some of the areas they address.

Working with user-centred innovation requires a systematic approach to what needs to be investigated plus a wide variety of methodologies. MindLab’s methodologies are anchored in design-centred thinking, qualitative research and policy development, with the aim of including the reality experienced by both the public and businesses into the development of new public-sector solutions.

Their work is based on a process model which consists of seven phases: project focus, learning about the users, analysis, idea and concept development, concept testing, the communication of results and impact measurement.

MindLab is instrumental in helping the ministry’s key decision-makers and employees view their efforts from the outside-in, to see them from a citizen’s perspective. They use this approach as a platform for co-creating better ideas.

MindBlog, MindLab’s blog, is very rich in content and worth delving into. The keywords are: citizen-centred innovation, anthropological methods, service design, public development, communication, idea and concept development, innovation strategy and cross-institutional collaboration.

The findings from the initial scoping study indicated that a focus on service design is of the utmost importance, as it is an interesting field both in the design profession and in academic research, and one in which there is considerable opportunity for engagement with business:

“In relation to the UK design industry and the disciplines that we reviewed, we think it would be fair to say that the area that is perhaps most neglected is the developing sector and discipline of service design. It was certainly the area most regularly cited as in need of attention across all of the stakeholder research that we have conducted, but also has the potential to make major contributions to innovation and to major challenges such as health and sustainability.”

We believe that it is bringing together economists, design businesses and design researchers in multidisciplinary teams that will generate evidence that can fill some of the gaps currently seen in the literature.”

The Design Council will now conduct a study of service design that will conclude in November.

Italy

In Italy, there is a strong tradition of service design at academic level, with high-level English language Masters programmes at Domus Academy (directed by Elena Pacenti) and at the Milan Polytechnic (directed by Anna Meroni).

But too few of the students end up working as service designers in Italy, and despite good initiatives such as Feeding Milano (LIFT conference video), the impact of these programmes on public services is still scarce.

We at Experientia contribute to making that change happen, having hired former students from both programmes and also recruited their interns. They work with Italian and global players in multi-disciplinary and evidence-based projects, as recommended by the Design Council scoping study. Experientia partners Jan-Christoph Zoels and Mark Vanderbeeken also taught service design this Spring at resp. Domus and the Polytechnic, eager to inspire future positive change in the Italian context.

Walking through IKEA over the weekend with two young children, writes Shailesh Manga on UXMovement, was a healthy reminder of what contributes to an ideal customer experience: innovative product design and thoughtful service design.

IKEA covers product design with innovative home furnishings that are cost effective.

Providing this outstanding product experience is only made complete by wrapping an amazing service experience around it.

“Design Principles for Eating Sustainably: Bridging the Gap Between Consumer Intention and Action” is the title of an ethnographic research driven service design project by Canadian design and innovation firm Cooler Solutions.

Experience suggests that our intentions and actions are not always aligned. This is certainly true when it comes to eating: where food is concerned, making real, lasting change is challenging, even when the desire is there.

In their study of sustainable eating, the Cooler Solutions team conducted ethnographic research to explore the relationship that people have with their food and to determine ways to elicit positive change. From this research they identified actionable design principles in order to guide service designers, retailers, policy-makers and other interested parties to ultimately increase sustainable food-consumption behaviours among the public.

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- Download report

This is Service Design Thinking: Basics – Tools – Cases
Edited by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider
BIS Publishers, 2011
376 pages
(Amazon link)

This is Service Design Thinking outlines a contemporary approach for service innovation. Service design and design thinking are lately evolving into buzz words for management and business consulting. This is Service Design Thinking strives to unveil the practical meaning behind these terms in everyday use. The book introduces this new way of thinking to beginners but also serves as a reference for professionals.

Although service design and design thinking in general recently gains vast interest by both business and research, until now there was no comprehensive textbook outlining the approach, including its background, process, methods and tools as well as contemporary case studies. A set of 23 international authors created this interdisciplinary textbook applying exactly the same user-centred and co-creative approach it preaches. “The unique visual language of This is Service Design Thinking extends the idea of a classic textbook. Based on workshops and contextual interviews using prototypes of this book, the reader is now supported with various visual aides to facilitate a pleasurable and effective reading experience” highlights Jakob Schneider, co-editor and graphic designer of the book.

Change is a constant: Innovative service concepts and ground-breaking business models outrun established products and services. Social media empowers customers and cause an overdue shift of companies from classic advertisement towards service quality and customer experience. Social media as the customer’s megaphone broadcasts the perceived service experience to a growing audience. Thus, the perceived experience becomes the key factor for success of both new and established offerings. This entails business opportunities particularly for small- and medium sized companies, since customer recognition does not necessarily rely on mere market share anymore.

“The strength of service design thinking is that it is not a defined and thus restricted discipline, but rather a common approach and process including various tools and methods rooted in different disciplines from design to engineering, from management to marketing.” explains Marc Stickdorn, editor of This is Service Design Thinking. An appendant website to the book offers free downloads of ready-to-use tools such as the Customer Journey Canvas.

The Helsinki Low2No project team just released a smart services and informatics workbook that was developed by ARUP and Experientia.

Low2No is a broad project, initiated in collaboration with the Finnish innovation fund Sitra, aimed at the development of a Helsinki mixed-use city block called Airut on the Jätkäsaari peninsula, which will have low or no carbon emissions.

The 110 page booklet describes work-in-progress on the smart services and urban informatics component of the Low2No project activities.

In the words of Dan Hill, “the aspect of ‘smart services‘, also known as urban informatics, explores the potential of contemporary technologies – particularly those increasingly everyday circling around phrases like social media, ‘internet of things’, ‘smart cities’ and so on – to enable residents, workers, visitors and citizens in general to live, work and play in and around the block in new ways. These are predicated on the same low-carbon outcomes that drives the Low2No project in general, but also a wider “triple-bottom line” approach to sustainability, which might include beneficial social and economic outcomes, as well as environmental.

“Today,” he says, “we’re sharing some of the work-in-progress as it developed, in the form of the “informatics workbook” developed by the design team, as a tool in the design process.”

Hill describes that the team wanted “to use the building project as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to warrant a reason to look at this potentially powerful combination of smart technologies and services — with an emphasis on the latter — and in enabling positive behaviour change amongst the various groups who will use the block.”

“This work often involves positioning these otherwise technology-led areas in a more human-centred, and behaviour-oriented, framework — getting well beyond the hype about “smart cities” — whilst also trying to connect it to business drivers (the lack of the latter has hampered pretty much any serious progress in smart cities.),” he adds.

Arup and Experientia worked on this aspect of the project, together with partners Sauerbruch Hutton and clients Sitra, SRV, and VVO. Over a couple of years of engagement, with Experientia leading and driving, and Arup working on the informatics aspects in particular, the project’s design team produced some rich thinking about how to embed the potential of this area at the core of the project, that are now presented in the workbook.

Read more and download booklet

So how are we doing to augment our senses through digital technologies?

Here are some of the products currently on the market that allow people to augment their sensing (and sense-making) through external sensors, with result summaries visualised on smartphones and the web:

- Health and healthy living: AsthmaSense, DigiFit, FitBit, Up
- Sleep: Lark Sensor (WSJ article), WakeMate, Zeo
- Sports: Nike+ (running), Strava (cycling), Wahoo
- Home energy: Nest Learning Thermostat
- Plants (!): Koubachi

It feels like a lot more is to come.

Not so long ago, cell phones were only used just to make phone calls. Today hundreds of thousands of applications and services are available for smartphones. With them, people can communicate, play games, find places, and organize their day. However, the vast amount of possibilities can confuse users when choosing the best option. In addition, the global mobile content market makes it hard for users to find local solutions. This thesis in collaboration with Nokia proposes services that aim at:

1. helping customers to meet closer their needs by customizing the mobile phone content at the time of purchasing; and
2. generating means of collaboration among content developers, retailers and customers for producing mobile content targeted to local needs

A Participatory Design approach was applied for developing the customization services. Observation, contextual inquiry and cultural probes methods were implemented to learn from diverse users. A co-design session was conducted to explore new opportunities with Nokia stakeholders. The results are several scenarios envisioned for Mass Customization services of mobile phone content at the point of delivery. The thesis offers:

1. a framework of collaborative creation models for Mass Customization; and
2. insights on customers’ engagement in the activity of customization.

Download pdf

(via International Service Design Network)