22. January 2010 by Aidan.

While I was in San Francisco last week I had the opportunity to attend one of the AIGA’s D.Talks events. The theme of last weeks event was “Crowdsourcing“. The event was well run with Josh Levine of Great-Monday as moderator and a panel consisting of Jason Aiken (99designs.com), Jody Turner (Cultureoffuture.com) and Christopher Simmons (MINE).

The mood in the room (full of graphic designers) was predominantly of gloom over the threat from crowdsourcing websites, such as 99designs.com where you can get a logo designed for about $300. The concern was that this was undermining what these professional designers were offering for 10 times the price. The argument for the crowdsourcing side was that the low price attracts many businesses that would have never paid a designer for a logo and it also allows designers to build a portfolio of work based on the submissions.

It went around in circles for a while but what it ultimately comes down to, as I said on the night, is that when you are buying a logo on a website for $300 you are buying a product. When you work with a designer to develop a logo for your business you are purchasing a service and you are paying a premium to develop a relationship with the designer, work through a design process with them and ultimately end up with a logo that is more meaningful to you and your business. (Of course it may or may not look better than the $300 logo - that’s a matter of taste!).

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18. January 2010 by Aidan.

We had a first SD Drinks event in San Francisco last Friday night at Lime Bar on Market St near Castro.

It was a good evening with lots of stimulating conversation and it was great to meet up with a group of new friends who have similar interests. In addition to myself there were designers from a number of companies including Nokia, Intuit and Adaptive Path in addition to American Heart Foundation and some independent designers & educators.

As is usual, the question “what is service design?” was raised a number of times and as the evening and the drinks progressed we became more creative in answering it.

Jamin Hegeman   has offered to organise the next event.

Many thanks to all who attended, it was a great way to spend a night in SF. Special thanks to Ayana Baltrip for her help in organising this event and for taking all the photos.

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8. January 2010 by Aidan.

After lots of input the venue has moved to Lime restaurant and bar on Market St, San Francisco. Here are the details :

Where: Lime, Market St, SF

When: Fri. 15th Jan 2010

What time: starting 6:00-6:30pm

Any questions? contact details below…..

Aidan

Original Post: 

As I am in San Francisco next week I thought it woud be a good idea to try to get some service designers together for a few drinks and a chat. The Service Design Drinks idea follows on from other successful events in locations are diverse as England, Australia and Brazil.

This is just an informal gathering of people interested in service design and design thinking. Why not come along?

As I have no idea how many people will turn up, and with a nod to my home country, I have decided to simply meet up in the one pub (bar) that I usually end up in while I am in the city, Johnny Foleys on O’Farrell Street. If anyone has a better suggestion then please let me know.

So here are the details and all are welcome:

San Francisco (informal) Service Design Drinks

Friday Jan 15th   from 6:30pm

Johnny Foley’s Pub, 243 O’Farrell Street, San Francisco

Lime Bar, Market Street, SF

See you there, I’ll be the Irish guy in the corner! (or you can call me on +353 87 233 44 51 / email: aidan@servitize.com )

Posted in Service Desig, international, General | 2 Comments »

20. December 2009 by Aidan.

My daughter (14) has a mobile phone on the Meteor network in Ireland. It is a pay-as-you-go phone and once she tops up the credit (or in fact once I top up her credit) by €20 every 30 days she gets free calls and texts to everyone else on the Meteor network.

All of her friends are also on the Meteor network and topping up by €20 every 30 days to get the same deal.

I asked her about usage of the phone. We checked, and she sends about 85 SMS messages per day, so about 2,500 per month. Her calls total about 5 hours per month. (She assures me that this is conservative usage for a 14 year old). Most of these are included in the free text and calls package, unless she calls or texts myself or my wife, because we are on another network.

So the deal is that the phone company gets about €240 per year from her (actually from me) and my daughter gets 30,000 SMS messages and 60 hours of calls a year.

There are other deals out there from other phone companies that include calls and messages to all networks or charges less than €20 per month but my daughter won’t switch. The reason she won’t switch is because if she did then her network of friends would no longer be able to SMS and call her for free. So the power of the offer from Meteor is not only the bundled offer for a fixed price, it is the fact that everyone within my daughters network of friends are on the same deal and so no-one will leave the network.

I did ask her whether everyone would switch to another network if they could get the same deal from another network for less money. Her reply: “Only if you could get it for significantly less, say €10 per month!” So this market would need a significant incentive to switch to another carrier but if that incentive was there there would be a risk of large scale switching.

An eye opener for me was a few months ago when my daughter came downstairs after being on her phone for some time. I asked who she was talking to and she said she was on a conference call! Apparently each evening over the holidays 8 or 10 of her friends held a nightly conference call to catch up on what was going on and the latest gossip. This is a very switched on market!

Posted in Service Design in Ireland, Customer Service, General | No Comments »

15. December 2009 by Aidan.

Posted in Service Desig, Communication, General | No Comments »

27. November 2009 by Aidan.

Here is a visual tool that I have put together to assist in outlining the key steps in the Service Design process.

The LADDER moves from assessing the LAndscape->Discovery->Design->Evaluation->Roll-out and it captures some of the key tools and thought processes involved along the way.

Here is a PDF version: SD LADDER PDF

Posted in Service Desig, Customer Service, General | No Comments »

5. November 2009 by Aidan.

I attended the “Designed in Ireland” event in Waterford last night, as part of 2009 Design Week. The event was very well organised by Marcus Notley and his team and was held in the City Library. In addition to poster presentations of the work of many designers in the South East, there were two talks from Sean McNulty of Innovator and Siobhan O’Dwyer of Threesixty.

Sean, MD of Innovator, spoke about the different business landscape in Ireland at the moment and the need for everyone to take their destiny into their own hands and re-evaluate their business model in order to survive and prosper. He argued for the application of Design Thinking to all of our businesses and introduced many of the tools that can be used to implement this. This would be very much in line with what I have been saying for some time also (see Service Design & Innovation Ireland Linkedin Group) and I would be in complete agreement with Sean.

Siobhan, Brand Director of Threesixty, spoke about the future of design and consumer patterns. We have been forced out of our rampant consumption culture by the need to cut back on spending, but even if the money does start to return to our pockets, will we return to the consumption patterns of before. Siobhan believes that we will be much more discerning about our purchases and that we will tend towards purchasing fewer, better designed products. I tend to agree that our buying patterns will be altered significantly. She also spoke about the future of eco and green products and services. Siobhan wrapped up by introducing us to the term “nonsumers” as the future consumers, her term for people who have turned their back on mass disposable consumption. It was a great talk with a lot to think about.

During the evening I also had a long chat with the wonderful Denise Ryan of Fineline Interiors. Denise has worked on some major commercial design projects and in a lesson to all service providers has now expanded her offerings by teaming up with Tony Clayton-Lea to provide bespoke music designed to complement the design and ambiance of your premises. Great example of extending your service offerings.

Overall it was a very enjoyable evening and a great success.  

Posted in Service Design in Ireland, innovation, consultants, General | No Comments »

4. November 2009 by Aidan.

I attended a breakfast briefing this morning at the Smurfit Business School at UCD, Dublin. The briefing was to introduce a new Executive Education Programme that the school will offer from the end of this month.

The class is titled “Innovate in the Services Sector - Strategy & Skills” and covers the following areas :

• An understanding of what Service Innovation looks like and how methods have been developed to treat it differently than product innovation, along with frameworks to explore opportunities and make your vision a reality.
• An overview of best practice, an understanding of methods and models that work, so you can confidently set an innovation course. If you’re ready we can take the first steps together.
• An innovation-teaming experience where you’ll design or improve a service or “servitise” a product company. This will give you the intuitive grasp of what your teams need, how they’ll function as innovators themselves.

This mornings briefing gave a broad overview of the class and was presented by Keith Finglas and Chris Kurjan from Innovation Delivery. There was a broad mix of people at the briefing and I was surprised by the number from the financial services sector. There was some active discussion and it was good to see the level of interest in this emerging area.  

Here is a link to the details of the class: Innovate in the Services Sector

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4. October 2009 by Aidan.

Here is a collection of some of the Service design related conferences that are scheduled to take place. The problem is deciding which ones to go to. Please add a comment with any others you are aware of, thanks, Aidan.    

• SDN - Service Design Network Conference 2009 
  • Madiera, Portugal.  
  • October 26th, 27th 2009
  • Details    

• First Nordic Service Design & Innovation Conference
  • Oslo, Norway.  
  • November 24th to 26th 2009
  • Details  

•  Service Experience Engineering Forum 2009
  • Taipei, Taiwan
  • October 14th, 15th 2009 
  • Details    

• 2010 International Conference on Service Science
  • Hangzhou, China
  • May 13th, 14th 2010 
  • Details   

• 18th Annual Frontiers in Service Conference
  • Honolulu, Hawaii
  • October 29th to November 1st 2009
  • Details  

• International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR)
  • Seoul, Korea
  • October 18th to 22nd
  • Details  

• 11th International Design Conference
  • Dubrovnik, Croatia
  • May 17th to 20th 2010
  • Details

• Design Research Society Conference 2010
  • Montreal, Canada
  • July 7th to 9th 2010
  • Details

• SOLI10 - IEEE International Conference on Service Operations 2010
  • Qingdao, China
  • July 15th to 17th 2010
  • Details

Posted in Service Design in Ireland, Service Desig, international, General | No Comments »

24. September 2009 by Aidan.

I have set up a “Service Design & Innovation - Ireland” group on Linkedin.

Here is the overview from the Linkedin page:

There is a growing international reliance on design in the race to develop radically new, innovative, service offerings.
The demands for Service Innovation are highlighting the need for the practical application of Service Design and Product Servitization techniques.
Ireland is well positioned to play a leading role in the world in these areas however there is no cohesive approach being taken in Ireland to ensure that the experts in these fields are working together towards a common goal.
This group offers practitioners and other interested parties the opportunity to connect and start the discussion about how to move this forward and tap into the opportunities that exist today.

I am looking forward to having interested people join this forum with a view to improving Ireland’s overall standing in the areas of service design and innovation, before it’s too late!

Here is a link to the group page. 

Aidan

Posted in Servitize, Service Desig, Service Design in Ireland, Selling "Services", innovation, consultants, international, General | No Comments »