If you’re in San Francisco this week, please join us Thursday night for a packed evening of content and enjoyment. I’m hosting a most excellent panel of experts on service design titled, Seeing Tomorrow’s Services. Also, Kicker Studio is having their launch party. Each is perfectly timed for you to make both events with a very short walk through South Park.

The service design panel at Adaptive Path will be from 6-8pm, featuring three panelists with three very different points of view on service design:

• 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.
• 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.

And it’s time let you in on two more interesting things about the panel. First, we’ll be doing a bit of light service design of the panel event itself, giving people the opportunity to think through the design of a service that they’re experiencing. The service blueprint below is one example of how we’re trying to think through the event.

Secondly, I’m asking the panelists to tell us how they’d plan and design for a new service. I’m providing them with this simple business case, and asking each to pitch how they’d shape this service:

So if you’re in San Francisco, here’s how you might structure your evening:

1. From 5-6pm go to the New Interactions: Touch, Tangibles, and Gestures panel at Kicker Studio.
2. Rush over to Adaptive Path for the Seeing Tomorrow’s Services panel from 6-8pm.
3. Return to Kicker Studio for their launch party and the opening of the Tangible Tech Exhibit.

I’ll see you there, and on twitter (#stspanel). And don’t forget to register for the panel in advance.