"service design" entries

Design to reflect human values

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Martin Charlier on industrial and interaction design, reflecting societal values, and unified visions.

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Designing for the Internet of Things is requiring designers and engineers to expand the boundaries of their traditionally defined roles. In this Radar Podcast episode, O’Reilly’s Mary Treseler sat down with Martin Charlier, an independent design consultant and co-founder at raincloud.eu, to discuss the future of interfaces and the increasing need to merge industrial and interaction design in era of the Internet of Things.

Charlier stressed the importance of embracing the symbiotic nature of interaction design and service design:

“How I got into Internet of Things is interesting. My degree from Ravensbourne was in a very progressive design course that looked at product interaction and service design as one course. For us, it was pretty natural to think of product or services in a very open way. Whether they are connected or not connected didn’t really matter too much because it was basically understanding that technology is there to build almost anything. It’s really about how you design with that mind.

“When I was working in industrial design, it became really clear for me how important that is. Specifically, I remember one project working on a built-in oven … In this project, we specifically couldn’t change how you would interact with it. The user interface was already defined, and our task was to define how it looked. It became clear to me that I don’t want to exclude any one area, and it feels really unnatural to design a product but only worry about what it looks like and let somebody else worry about how it’s operated, or vice versa. Products in today’s world, especially, need to be thought about from all of these angles. You can’t really design a coffee maker anymore without thinking about the service that it might plug into or the systems that it connects to. You have to think about all of these things at the same time.”

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Designing on a system level

Andy Goodman on service design, embeddables, and predictive analytics.

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I recently sat down with Andy Goodman, designer and group director of Fjord’s US studios. Goodman has been designing and managing design teams around the globe for the past 20 years. Goodman is a contributor to Designing for Emerging Technologies — our conversation covers embeddables, wearables, and predictive analytics. To kick off the conversation, I asked Goodman to define “service design”:

“It’s well-known that if you ask a service designer to define “service design,” you get 10 different answers. For me, it’s really about thinking on a system level about design … It’s thinking about how systems, and not just computer systems, but how human systems and computer systems and physical systems all interact with each other. You need to be thinking not about individual moments; you need to be thinking about journeys and flows, and thinking about how a human being will naturally, without even thinking about it, move from one context to another using different devices, using physical objects, being in physical spaces. For me, it was very appealing, this idea that you can design more than just interactions in a way, more than just interactions on a screen. You can actually design other things that are more about the way we live and work and play.”

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