Over the years I've worked with digital services in different spaces, from sports performance to house buying to students on campus and training in the workplace. And there's this one picture that resurfaces in service after service. I need to get it out of my head and into the world, where I hope others will help me develop … Continue reading Seeing over the next hill – a service design pattern
Three days in the spectacular Derbyshire countryside with a bunch of clever, skillful doing and making people. Lots to digest, but for now here's what I found in my notebook this morning..."simple single purpose things"learn > sell > make > record > learn >source > scale > repeatthe circus printerArtefact cards + iPad + Gorillapod + projector"do the … Continue reading Some things I wrote down at Laptops and Looms
I've been thinking about this exchange with Roberta... @mattedgar Lots of people _talk_ about getting users in the room. This weekend @mHealthLeeds is actually doing it. #mhleeds @RobertaWedge @mattedgar Users of what? In a health-care context, the term covers layers of euphemism. @mattedgar @RobertaWedge fair point. Alternatives to the word 'user' gratefully received. (Often but not always "people" … Continue reading Not All Mammals! In defence of designing for “people”
A lightning talk at Service Design in Government... There’s a growing interest in hacks and jam events in the public sector. Over the past months in Leeds alone, we’ve seen events around open government data, mental health, cycling and public transport. Great stuff can happen at these events, yet they can also be unfulfilling for participants … Continue reading How I learned to stop worrying and love the jam
A couple of Fridays ago, 14 of my favourite people gathered down at the Leeds Museums Discovery Centre for a bit of a get-together. Besides being responsible for some pretty amazing projects of their own, they'd all been involved in some way in my first two years of independent service design and innovation consulting. I wanted them to … Continue reading Annual Report Number Two
The lovely thing about designing for service is the intangibility. You can prototype it in conversations. You can act it out. No tin required - the virtual is so much more pliable. Then again, the maddening thing about designing for service is the intangibility. People have trouble getting their heads round it. How will service … Continue reading The Lost Robot Manoeuvre
"Managed by her nine-year-old niece." - Bryony Kimmings "We should create and imagine and lie. It's good for us." - Jane Pollard "Being creative is sometimes about connecting the dots and taking two things and combining them." - Kyle Bean "What file formats want..." - Kenyatta Cheese "'Unfortunately the Arts Council is interested in something Miss Littlewood isn't. … Continue reading Some things I wrote down today
Our economy will not grow bigger in scale, but we will see it become more specific, more diverse, more adapted to individual needs and desires. The economy that served us well is giving way to what I call the informative economy. According to my dictionary, “to inform” means to “imbue or inspire with some specific … Continue reading It can be these, but…
For the third time in the past few months I'm assailed by a survey so shockingly poor that I wonder why the service provider in question has bothered at all. First it was East Coast trains with a lengthy paper questionnaire about my journey, conducted entirely in mind-boggling forced-choice price/quality trade-offs. Then came a letter … Continue reading Which part of “the customer is always a co-producer” don’t these people understand?
Way back in June, as part of Andrew Wilson's wonderful HannaH Festival, a group of citizens fanned out from Wharf Street Chambers into the summer drizzle clutching maps to four quarters of our city. We briefed participants to look for evidence of Leeds' past, present and future. On returning to base we shared what everyone had found … Continue reading A found Leeds litany, raw notes from an afternoon walk
It puzzles me that technology so easily becomes the dominant metaphor for explaining society, and not the other way round. "Self-organise like nanobots into the middle," exhorts dConstruct host Jeremy Keith as we assemble for the afternoon session at the Brighton Dome. We shuffle obligingly to make room for the latecomers, because everyone here accepts … Continue reading dConstruct 2013: “It’s the Future. Take it.”
Andrew Wilson has Kickstartered something rather wonderful in the first HannaH Festival, which runs next week at venues across Leeds. My own contribution is a Friday afternoon stroll through the city's past, present and future. I do hope you can join me. Here's the plan. We'll spend the first hour in small groups on the streets … Continue reading The future, on foot
As a child I hated Cubs. All that running around and shouting, the church parades, and camping on a damp field at the edge of Danbury Common. But in a twist of fate I find myself parent to three boys far more enthusiastic than I ever was; my oldest recently got a badge marking seven … Continue reading Keep the campfire burning: a thread of whimsy from Baden-Powell to Berners-Lee
... what the designers and engineers see as “pain points” aren’t necessarily that painful for people. The term satisficing, coined by Herbert Simon in 1956 (combining satisfy and suffice), refers to people’s tolerance — if not overall embracing — of “good enough” solutions... Frankly, I discover satisficing in every research project: the unfiled MP3s sitting … Continue reading In praise of the good enough
Exactly 365 days ago I set out on my independent consulting adventure, complete with the de rigueur intent to document my progress in weeknotes. Week one was an intense blur of 5am flights, meetings and bratwurst; it went un-noted. Weeks two and three likewise. For a while, I told myself there’d be “monthnotes” instead. By … Continue reading Annual Report Number One
Matt Edgar writes here 