Seeing tomorrow’s services
by Brandon SchauerI remember when the prior MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte predicted in his 1995 book Being Digital that,
“what [information] is in the air will go into the ground and what is in the ground will go into the air.”
He was talking about the wireless spectrum and broadband wiring, and he was predicting the inevitable, how information could easily travel through either channel to people. Negroponte called it “trading places.”
A current-day prediction of the inevitable could be another case of trading places and gray spaces: that of products and services. As time goes on, things that are products will become more like services (think iPods, mobile phones, and spimes), and things that are services will become more like products (think NetFlix, FedEx, or JetBlue).
This interplay creates interesting new experiences, and new challenges for designers. Services have become design-able experiences that need the same thoughtful care and attention that products do, if not more. The emergence of service design has revealed new approaches and tools to making services more human and more valuable.
Even more promising is the overabundance of services in our daily lives. Services make up a larger portion of the U.S. economy (about 68% in 2006) than products. And services have retained their value in the downturn. As BusinessWeek noted, “prices of goods fell 4.1% last year; prices of services rose 3%.”
And from electronic health records to green energy, tomorrow’s economy hinges on well designed services to help us all change from old behaviors to adopt new ones.
Within this broader trend, I’m happy to be hosting a panel in conjunction with the CMU Bay Area Alumni on March 19 at Adaptive Path titled, Seeing Tomorrow’s Services: A Panel on Service Design. I’m lucky to facilitate a discussion between three dream panelists:
- Shelley Evenson, an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Shelley’s been an early teacher and thought leader for service design in the U.S., focusing on tapping into the needs of users of the service.
- Robert Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information, and he focusins on the contribution of the service’s “back stage” where materials or information needed by the “front stage” are processed. Just read his co-authored paper on the topic with Lindsay Tabas to be impressed.
- And Christi Zuber leads an internal Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente where her and her team have co-designed numerous new services with patients and clinicians that lead to measurable improvements on patient safety and satisfaction — demonstrating that service design has a big societal impact as well.
If you’d like to join us, remember to register ahead of time. And if you have ideas about the panel or the topics we should cover, comment here or twitter with the hashtag #stspanel.
Entries (RSS)
February 24th, 2009 at 9:51 am
I’m looking forward to this event and to hear where Bob and Shelli are on the current state of the services industry.
Lindsay
June 12th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
[...] Jones’s presentation on the convergence of products and services echoed some of Brandon’s thoughts from earlier this [...]
November 21st, 2009 at 9:25 pm
[...] was pretty amazing to see the citation, and my name in print. It’s also great to know that someone else read what I had to say on a topic, and found it thought-provoking enough to share it with others in their own [...]