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.

A cashless society?

I’m following a VERY interesting blog that develops scenarios of a cashless society or a society with alternative currencies system. The discussion in the blog called Kashklash is animated by very interesting people, such as Bruce Sterling, Joshua Klein, Nicolas Nova, Irene Cassarino. It explore the scenarios dominated by digital currencies, online communism, Bartering systems and many other hypotheses. There are also some interesting dilemmas

Radiomamma, improving life quality and creating social innovation

Whoever can read Italian and has an interest in social innovation should have a look at Radiomamma: a network of people living in Milan, who are sick and tired of a tremendous situation in which they have no assistance from public services and decided to help each other in finding solutions to very simple problems for everyday.

The co-creation spectrum

The co-creation spectrum is an interesting reflection on different form of user involvement in value-coproduction processes, from mass customisation to community product design

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The lunch currier: the video

I found a draft of the video presentation for the lunch currier project (see previous post). We created this presentation for the “changing the change” conference in Torino, Italy, in July 2008. The draft is in fact better than the final version, because the request from the organisers was to compress the video to 35 seconds and I haven’t learnt to be so concise, yet.

An excellent resource for service design researchers

I found a very good list of relevant literature on service design, edited by Jeff Howard.

A list of relevant papers in the past thirty years would have been good enough, but Jeff did more! he excerpted the abstracts and introductions to the papers and cross-referenced examples and concepts so that it’s easy to follow the development of ideas across multiple papers. We (service design researchers) needed it!! Thanks Jeff.

Paper prototype

A good example on how to use paper prorotype and videos.