Thoughts on emergent design practice, with an emphasis on service design, as well as other interesting stuff. If you have interesting stuff, please send it to me!
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Last night I went to Shunt with Steve, Davina and others. We actually went to see a great band play on the underground pirate ship, but that wasn’t the best bit - The best bit was the simulated air crash experience/scary zip line into a blinding light as part of a project called Airphoria, organised the talented chaps at Aerial. As they say on their website:
“…to acknowledge such incidents [air crashes] as being thrilling is considered taboo. Experiences and memories of thrill are displaced by the horrors of human tragedy. Thoughts of thrill are only reintroduced at a ‘respectful’ later date through sanitised stories of heroism. But what if the emotion of thrill prevailed, and the act of creation were nurtured beyond the moment of fusion? Airphoria explores one possible alternative.”
I screamed like a girl and lost my hat. Awesome.
We had an interesting Friday Friday session with Geke van Dijk and Bas Raijmakers from STBY research. Bas showed us some video anthropology from his Design Documentaries phd thesis, and left us with a lovely poster!
From Bas’s site:
“Design documentaries are a new, visual method to discover what matters to people. They inform and inspire design processes at early stages. The method emerged from my exploratory filmmaking practice, influenced by documentary film ideas and techniques.
Design documentaries present the perspectives of people behind and in front of the camera in conversation with each other. The filmmaking is the research and the films present these conversations. Design documentaries invite design teams to join and continue these conversations in the design process.”
I always find that its the translation space between research and design that determines the sucess of design research activities, and its great to see two research Phd’s be so upfront about the need to empathise with designers, and indeed borrow from design practice in preparing research briefs - They were confidant that their experience would always enable them to know if they were doing design or research, and it’s this confidence that is crucial to sucessful translation.
As Bas puts it, successful (i.e appropriately inspirational) design documentaries are a mixture of observation, compliation, intervetion and performance.
Bas showed us design documentaries made for a team at Philips Medical Systems that were designing personal heart monitoring products and supporting services. The films were moving, inspirational and very short - He mentioned that the optimum time for video research as inspiration is probably under three minutes. Anything more than that and designers start to get fidgety as they’re having ideas they want to share - this is certainly true for me!
It also turned out that Bas had worked with Nadine, whilst doing his phd at Goldsmiths with the Interaction Research team. Small world! I hope we can do some work together in the future, video is certainly an area we’re ptting a lot of resources and effort into at the moment…
Various significant heavyweights debate the future of design. I particularly like Hillary Cottam’s assertaion that “every parliament should include at least one designer.”
I’m guessing she means Art School graduate right? All parliaments have, after all, been designed.
Several posts on service design with some great pictures - Covers the Emergence conference quite thoroughly… IN particular, Mark Jones of IDEOs talk on redesigning a call centre:
“The methods they used to help their client involved doing observations, domain study, working with stakeholders, experience maps (”the health journey”), workshops on finding a focus (”be clear about your role: guide? teacher? coach? expert? financial advisor etc…”), scenarios, personas. They did experience prototypes and acted out scenarios in workshops with the client. They also delivered a set of service design principles for their client as a deliverable and a prototype (fictional call to show how a the specialist can seize key moments with the customer.”
Which sounds quite similar to a project that we did with Sky. We really need to get out to some more conferences and start talking about our work more!
From an NYT article called The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life Stefan Olander gloabl director for brand connections at Nike says:
“We want to find a way to enhance the experience and services, rather than looking for a way to interrupt people from getting to where they want to go. How can we provide a service that the consumer goes, ‘Wow, you really made this easier for me’?”
Nike, of course are long past being a manufacturing company, and are seen largely as a marketing organisation. However it’s interesting to see a senior executive use the s-word. Now if only they could stop couching everything in the language of mar-comms agencies, and start talking a little more service design…
