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
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…
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
SPOILER ALERT: It might not end well for the natives. Having spent more than a decade with job titles alternately containing the words "product strategy" and "customer experience," I'm all for the sentiment behind John Willshire's slogan: "Make Things People Want > Make People Want Things". And when I hear this thought presented as some … Continue reading Ad agencies are discovering products like Columbus discovered America
On Valentine's Day 1997, I left my job as a newspaper journalist to work with the small, smart team who were building a pioneering news service for the web in a squat, Leeds-look, edge-of-centre office block. "You can always come back," said my editor, "if this Internet thing doesn't work out." For a long time … Continue reading Week 790: Leaving Orange
The depths of winter, two weeks off to take stock of where we are and where we're going, a chance to catch up with family and friends. We travelled through blizzards, cooked and ate good food, lit fires, drank wine, fiddled with MP3 play-lists, time-shifted TV, and made one (thankfully minor) visit to Accident and Emergency. We … Continue reading And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet
So, narrative capital. The social scientist has it like this... ... the power [research participants] have to tell the stories of their lives. This ‘narrative capital’ is then located in the ‘field’ of social science research and Sen’s capability approach is introduced to prompt the question: What real opportunities do research participants have to tell … Continue reading Who wants to be a story millionaire? Some thoughts on the value of Patient Opinion
Matt Edgar writes here 