Businesses and organisations the world over are seizing the chance to re-imagine the way we do everyday things, to make them more accessible, enjoyable and productive for everyone. The tools and techniques they're using vary widely, but some of the best fall under the umbrella of service design, and its flashier cousin design thinking. This growing … Continue reading Announcing the first Service Design Drinks in Leeds
The Ignite London challenge of telling the story of my 1794 heroes in five minutes and 20 slides set me thinking about other ways to package up a narrative in the most minimal way. In parallel with preparing my talk, I used the slides as the starting point for some printed material. My experimental recipe … Continue reading 1794: Prototyping a small story
Something to watch, something to read, and something to ponder on. First, I watched my former colleague Clive Grinyer's TedXLeeds talk on the Democratisation of Design. If you weren't fortunate enough to be there on the night, you can now catch it on Youtube... "We are all designers. Get used to it," says Clive. I'd buy … Continue reading Curiosity saved the service designer
This post was going to be all about newspapers, but the more I thought about it the more I realised that before writing about the news I have to explain the paper, specifically the cheap, low quality paper we call newsprint. It's a fascinating story which, I think, explains why short-run, nichepaper projects such as Newspaper Club … Continue reading On newsprint: the potency of cheap paper
I've always found it strange that Eric S. Raymond chose the cathedral as his metaphor for closed development in free software, because the construction of our great medieval cathedrals must have been a very open process. Passing peasants were doubtless discouraged from picking up a chisel to hack at the nearest stone, but Gothic buildings … Continue reading Mobile Gothic: a flight of fancy
Lower down this post, you'll probably find some high-flown stuff about gestural user interfaces going mainstream, but in all honesty the thread that joins together the following two-and-a-half things is that they've all left me grinning like a fool. A hand-waving grinning fool. And a bobbing my head up and down like Churchill the nodding … Continue reading Duck, dive, scribble, spray – now gestural interfaces are within everyone’s reach
In a single Noisy Decent Graphics post, Ben Terrett effortlessly segues between my two preoccupations of the moment - agonised middle-class parenting, and the superiority of mobile web over fixed. How could I resist? "City kids are not like country kids", he notes, "... the space available to play is smaller... so they learn to play smaller." … Continue reading Play Small: why mobile challenges designers to make a better web
What a stroke of genius to commission Scott McCloud to tell the story of Google's new web browser, Chrome, in comic form. McCloud's own books have communicated his enthusiasm for the past, present and future of comics themselves. Now his fluid, conversational style perfectly captures the diverse passions of project team members - passions that … Continue reading Brushed chrome – the story of Google’s browser in comic book form
In the 21st century, few consumer services follow a neat linear model of awareness, consideration, purchase and use. Instead we see a web of customer expectations and perceptions where little things can make a big difference. It's the job of service designers to cut through the mass of insight to find the decisive moments where … Continue reading The unexpected moment of truth: Disney’s $100,000 Salt + Pepper Shaker
To the RCA for Innovation Night, tied in with the college's summer show. The evening included awards for students in the Helen Hamlyn Centre, which uses people-centred design to support independent living and working for ageing and diverse populations. Focusing on the needs of people often ignored by mainstream business and design is obviously a … Continue reading Dementia and Dopplr – how designing for extreme users benefits us all
Chris Heathcote's abstract pointillist Powerpoint toolkit once again reinforces the received wisdom that Microsoft's near-ubiquitous presentation software presages the end of civilisation. Unlike the army of total Powerpoint rejecters, Chris' solution is to fight pixel with pixel, subject to three strictures: POINT ONE: Presentations are about IDEAS, not TEXT. POINT TWO: READING from SLIDES is … Continue reading All this rubbish Powerpoint must be telling us something
A few years ago when we extended our house to create a new entrance hall we greatly enjoyed flicking through the relevant pages in Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction". So much of it rang true with those "oh yeah" moments as we looked with fresh eyes at the way we used our … Continue reading The Waist-high Shelf
Thus somebody - and nobody quite seems to know whom - said of Johannes Gutenberg. But even with the belated arrival of the "w" to make up the Latin alphabet to 26, this once mighty army now seems barely enough to log into Bebo. There are forces at work. Web-based services demand that users have … Continue reading ШITH TШЗИTУ-FIVЗ SФLDIЗЯS ФF LЗДD HЗ HДS CФИQЦЗЯЗD THЗ ШФЯLD
The conversation in our household goes like this: Me: I'm clearing the digital camera. Its memory's nearly full. My spouse: I don't like the idea that all our photos are just on the computer. Me: Well they're safer there than in tatty envelopes under the bed... Spouse: Yes, but why can't we print them all … Continue reading Relax, your photos are in the sky (but I’ve burned a CD just in case)
Maybe it's just me, but as we enter the latest phase of convergence with more and more big web properties moving onto mobile, I've noticed a trend for work in progress to be developed and presented mainly on PC screens. In my (possibly mythical) golden age, presentations and design reviews were stacked full of phones … Continue reading Paper – Scissors – Phone
Matt Edgar writes here 