Joel has posted some
interesting reflections on the recent Department for Health
Innovation Expo. He asks/states:
- Why does social care appear to be the poor cousin to health care?
- Design: it's a chick thing. 60% of delegates were women, women are spearheading service design in the NHS. (This is true. Definitely)
- Service design is a big deal. Darzi basically put it front and centre in his keynote.
- Tele health is going to be big. Agree.
Check out his
thoughts on his blog. Steve has also
posted a review with some reflections of his own.
June 25th, 2009
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Short vanity post - Choosenick (in blog form) is two today! Here's the
first post. Prior to that, it was an Expression Engine
powered portfolio site, and before that ... hand written html, of which the only record is now on my computer. Those were the days!
June 22nd, 2009
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Thanks to everyone who came down to service design drinks 4. It was great, nice to see some new faces, and to catch up with more regular service design drinkers! In no particular order, it was great to catch up with
Arpit,
Dan,
Olly,
Mayo,
Gavin,
Tamsin,
Richard,
Lauren,
Jaimes,
Melanie,
Joel,
Luke,
Fergus,
Tobie,
Steve,
Alex,
Erick, amongst others - if I missed you or didn't say hi, sorry! Next time!
Speaking of next time, next time we'll use Eventbrite to coordinate and we'll have badges to identify us, which should make it easier to figure out who's there! Here's a
few photos from Alex of the event - if anyone else took any, please let me know.
June 20th, 2009
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Fergus Bisset is thinking about not thinking about design thinking in order to design better things. Phew. Let him know what you think
here.
June 14th, 2009
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Dan Lockton has posted a
long appraisal of Robert Fabricant's
recent essay on design with intent for Frog design's online journal (which itself borrows a lot from Dan's thinking).
It's definitely worth
reading in full, as it summarises much of Dan's thesis in a single post, which is great, and contains loads of links to lots of good further reading. Of course, there's
much more to Dan's work, including loads of practical stuff.
Some of the best content is around the apparently uneasy relationship between user centred design and design for behaviour change - although Dan doesn't see a tension:
"I would argue that in cases where design with intent, or design for behaviour change, is aligned with what the user wants to achieve, it’s very much still user-centred design, whether enabling, motivating or constraining. It’s the best form of user-centred design, supporting a user’s goals while transforming his or her behaviour."
Anyway,
check it out, and let Dan know if you're applying any of his thinking or tools in your service design work in the comments!
June 14th, 2009
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It’s back! For the fourth time! Come along for London’s premier (and only)
service design drinking and talking about service design drinking event!
The last event was the best yet - lots of really interesting people (about 50!) from a wide cross section of the service design community, all in one place, all drinking and talking to each other about their service design practice. It was great. Lets make this one even better...
19th June 2009
The Slaughtered Lamb, Clerkenwell
From 7pm
RSVP via email to drinks at servicedesigning dot com
May 31st, 2009
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Jaimes Nel has posted a
thoughtful piece on how to harness the perceived methodological tensions between 'traditional' social science practitioners (academic anthroplogists/sociologists etc) and the
young upstarts using these techniques to inform design and innovation initiatives in the service industries.
This is creating confusion (and sometimes arguments) as traditional social science research tools, created for getting at answers and evidence get hacked and modified to suit the new needs of the design industry - principally questions and inspiration.
I know this from first hand experience. My Dad, a professsor of sociology, is always appalled at what he sees as my slap dash/good enough approach to what he calls 'social science' that I refer to as design research. I'll call a couple of home visits an 'ethnography', he thinks an ethnography is two years in the field. Of course our ends differ (him, understanding the fundamental dynamics of families, me, trying to improve the experience of airport check in - sigh), but its surprising how much our means cross over.
Anyway, in
the article, Jaimes posits that a re-conceptualisation of what constitutes 'the field' might help bridge the gap, at least for design researchers working in the context of service. He imagines a new definition of the field to be the service design process, a kind of constantly iterating, temporal field in which we (designers, researchers and subjects alike) are protagonists, all participating in a simultaneous, continuous programme of researching and re-designing. Jaimes is a social scientist by training, but with a strong sympathy for design. This comes out when he pragmatically states:
Frankly, I’m quite happy to just drop the use of the word ethnography altogether, just as I’ve happily dropped the use of anthropology or sociology. These are increasingly market orientated terms and get away from the goal, which is to discern understanding of the past in the service of the future. Maybe what we are engaged in is “designography” and our completed work, our theory is the design itself.
He goes on to make a startlingly obvious point that I hadn't really considered before - 'traditional' research is in the business of finding answers, but the type of design research practiced by Jaimes and other service design researchers tends to be in the business of finding questions and options - often to fuel creative design work. (Design itself is firmly in the business of the future, or as Jack Schulze calls it '
cultural invention'.)
Inspiring stuff. Head over to his blog and
let him know what you think in the comments.'
May 26th, 2009
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