Design and the social sector

An annotated bibliography on design and social innovation

This is a project by Curtney Drake and William Drenttel, on design contribution to social issues and in particular to social innovation.

Joana Conill, Manuel Castells and Àlex Ruiz produced a new and interesting documentary that collects stories, cases and reflections on a different way of running economy and life. it’s about services, it is about new currencies, it is about local and sustainable production and consumption, lifestyles, social innovation,and many other things

A new book on service design

I just received a new book on service design. The book is “design for services”, by Anna Meroni and Daniela Sangiorgi.
I just browsed it and it seems quite promising, with a lot of case studies on different areas. I am particularly curious to see the areas of service co-design and on the future of service design. This could be the first real text book to support service design teaching

describing journeys as narrative

On the basis of Jean-Michel Adam’s definition of Narrative I dare defining a use case (or a Customer’s journey) as a narrative.

Is service design boring?

My thoughts and my doubts on service design, or at least on my approach to this, after the service and experience design workshop in Kuopio

Re-Pubblic, an Online Journan on innovation in political theory and practice, has published a special issue on Innovative Service Design for All, to which I contributed.

The issue, coordinated by Artemis Yagou, includes contributions of different kinds, from theoretical aspects of the industrialisation of services (my paper)  to dyslexia-friendly classes in Greece. With this special issue, the online journal proposes the discussion of service design in countries, like Greece and India, where new issues, such as environmental concerns and multicultural challenges are imposing an open discussion on the transformation of services.

A new blog on Service Design Research

 

There are many blogs on service design, but few of them focus on research aspects, for this reason a group of scholars from different universities havejust opened a new blog on Service Design Research. The blog will support a dialogue on ideas and concepts related to the ongoing research on service design. The blog will collect interviews on service design from some of the major experts in this area and in the area of strategic design, together with several other initiatives.

Check it out at http://www.servicedesignresearch.com

Help finding scenarios

I’m organising a project on tracking systems for elderly people. The scenario is as follow:

Elderly people, their relatives, friends and assistance personnel living in a specific area can carry a GPS device (it maybe their own mobile phone) which make it possible to visualise their position on a map (maybe google maps). They can also send short messages as in Twitter or Google Latitude. The visualisation may be possible both on a mobile phone screen or on a computer at home, possibly using applications like facebook (or any other application that support any kind of social interaction).

I’m trying to figure out how this scenario could define new services for 

• functional use (i.e. telemedicine, assistance services, ask for help)
• Persona use (i.e. reassurance when living alone)
• Social networking (i.e. inviting people for lunch, going out for a walk)

 

So, this is a call for contribution: any idea about how to use this opportunity?

I promise that I will publish a list of all the possible scenarios on this blog. We may also think of an award for the best idea, but if I promise for instance a trip to Aalborg I’m not sure I will have too many contributions.

Google latitude:the net becomes local

I was waiting for it, and finally, here it is: a google maps application to connect maps with mobile phones, in order to “trace” people’s geographical location.  the application is Google Latitude, With this applicatio you can locate your mobile phone on a google map and you can also see where your friends and family are (provided that they want to make themselves traceable). You can exchange messages with them and you can decide upon activities to do. In the past there were other applications, such as Brightkite, which had similar funzionalities, but this application on Google seems more powerful to me, because it directly works on google maps, which is now commonly known by many people.

Why is it so innovative?

Because I think this is just the beginning of a big conceptual change in the use of the internet and Web 2:0 applications. So far those applications have been relatively indefferent to geographical locations, you could chat with friends on the other side of the world or those next door, but their position was not relevant, after all. Of course in facebook and with Twitter people were sometimes using messaging to take appointment or to exchange information about local happenings, this means that there was a need to bring context-neutral Web2:0 applications to reality, to local contexts. With goolge latitude people can have a rapid view of what is going on in their city/neighbourhood, check what their friends closeby are doing, and possibly retrieve local-related knowledge. In other worlds this application has a huge potential to support geographically placed communities, to support active social participation to local life, to generate social innovation

I’m thinking of using those applications for elderly people living indepdently, this should be a research project, however, at the moment I’m looking at other users of latitude, to check the potential of this application. Anyone around?

Three good reports on service design

Three very interesting reports are on my desk in this moment. I’m very slow at reading them, but I think they are a must for whoever wants to work on service design, especially in the public sector.

The only one I managed to read so far is “the Journey to the Interface”, by Sophia Parker and John Heapy (Engine) (Parker and Heapy 2006). The other two are…