The Life 2.0 project is a EU funded project that aims at supporting elderly people’s independent life through a platform of geographical positioning and social networking services. The project started in November 2010 and is now starting a pilot phase in which such applications will be tested in 4 pilot locations in Denmark, Italy, Spain and Finland.

The project is also involving elderly people in training centers (such as Kastanjegaarden in Aalborg, Denmark) community centers (such as  Agora in Barcelona) and local library (as in Joensuu, Finland and Milano, Italy).

In this blog I extracted a synthesis of the first results of the ethnographic analysis, the scenarios and the use cases the full deliverables and more information about the project are available at www.life2project.eu.

The professional profile of a service designer has so far been discussed in conferences and research projects, but so far no design education had offered a master program on this. Aalborg University is now proposing a master that will mix creative/design competences, together with IT and organisational/management skills. The master is open to international students and will be based on the work of researchers and professional practitioners working in relevant areas for service design, such as Industrial Design, IT and media communication, interaction design, experience design, user-driven innovation and strategic design.

More information about the master at www.servicedesigners.dk

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

I found this description of the characteristics of a narrative on edutechwiki (according to Jean-Michel Adam’s definition)

• a narrative involves a succession of actions (a description of a landscape is not a narrative);
• a narrative involves at least one character, even if this character is not human (animal, object);
• a narrative concerns a transformation from one initial state to a final state;
• Unity of action: the actions is organized into a bigger unit, which forms a whole.
• Causality: actions are causing other actions. Actions are not just following each other but are a consequences of each others.
• Final evaluation: a narrative intends to exhibit a point of view, either explicitely (in the morale) or implicitely. In that sense, a narrative is a communication device.

Can a use case (or what many call “the user’s journey” be considered as a narrative, on the basis of this definition?

I hope someone will see this post and give me some feedback

The first day was mainly a seminar with Prof Mager and many other very interesting speakers; the second and third day was organised in 3 parallel workshops on different service design themes. I was particularly impressed by the organisation of the workshop on the hotel experience (for the use of personas and touch points, very well planned) and the use of the concept of journey (but I call it routine), to describe the average day of some of the actors, in the workshop on healthcare.

I also visited some colleagues at the Joensuu University of Applied Arts. In both cases I had a chance to expose my idea about service design as something that should not be just the design of the “front office”, as implicitely suggested by the idea of Experience design. I believe that if designers run the risk to get stuck, once again, in the position of “decorators”. The idea that product designers are just good at decorating the surface of products that have been technically defined by someone else is far from being antiquate. I believe that the idea that designer should just look at services as experience is more or less the parallel of this position in service design. I thing engineers and managers, who now claim their “ownership” on service design, would be very happy if we, designers accepted the idea that service desgin be just related to a series of human intervention to make the fron office more acceptable for users. But I cannot accept this role. I think we should work on the “mechanism” of a service, that means working on the organiational structure, on the technological infrastructure, and even on the business aspects of the service.

Well the reaction to this position have been positive in general, but a couple of comments struck me more: one of my colleague called me “engineer”, that implicitely means that he associated me with a sort of “machinistic” or even tayloristic idea about desgning services, nothing farther from my intention. Another comment, this time from a business professor, was that, seen from the perspective I propose, service design is boring. I may agree with this last comment, in the sense that the technical aspects of service desgin may imply less emotional involvement. However, given my whort past as an Architect and designer, I must say that I found the technical part sometimes challenging and even interesting!

However those comments, and especially the second, left me with the doubt: can service design be boring? If so, do we risk to make this discipline less “sexy” and therefore to loose students in the coming courses of service design? And above all, should we bother about this (And this is not just a rethorical question, I’m really asking this to myself)?

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.

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

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.