“[In service design] the only one to see the big picture is the client.” said John Holager, Senior Service Designer, live|work at the Innovation and Service Design conference, 29 Jan 2010, Malmö, Sweden.

This is a wonderfully simple and revelatory observation that made so much immediate sense!

Most businesses are divided into specialised departments and divisions, each focused on their own little specialisation. Service design is an activity …

Designers should be advocating for end users; these being the users of the actual final outcomes (a product, a process, a services etc), and not the users of the designer’s services.

It can be all to easy to get caught up in advocating for the users of the designer’s services – also called the client. Especially if the client is the noisier wheel. Doing so is detrimental to the …

As I have spent several days thinking about and talking to people about service design, I thought it timely to highlight a post I wrote several years ago about attention and services.

A service business is not really about the quality of service, but rather the quality of the attention paid to customers. … the demand for quality attention giving services will increase – therapists, counsellors, escorts, personal assistants… …

“A German magazine has taken the ‘brave’ decision to use real women as models. … a ‘revolution’ going on in fashion. A ‘new era’ has dawned …”

This is so laughable and when compared to the other design sectors – it really shows how out of touch with reality many fashion “designers” are, and how the whole industry, including customers, participate in this grand denial.

Imagine these headlines:
“Architects specify …

Design is by its nature innovative.

Design is a process of doing or making something better. The designer asks: How can I solve the problem at hand better? How do I do what I have to do better?

Every design process I have seen so far – be it from industrial, graphic, service or process design professionals – are variations on the same framework:…

Service design has two aspects: technical execution and relationship building.

Technical execution is about making the mechanical bits work. For example: the aircraft takes off and lands without unnecessarily killing anyone on board.

Relationship building is making people feel good about the process. For example: hot pre-flight towels, good in-flight movies and service with a smile.

Technical execution is easier to plan, implement, and measure. In many cases, good execution is …

I upgraded to Picasa 3 recently and was shocked to discover it’s Face Detection functionality crawling through my photos and pulling out faces – without my knowledge and without my permission. And I had to struggle to find out how to stop it.

The technology is impressive of course. But I found the whole thing rather invasive and nasty for some reason. Faces are …

At a recent exhibition of the Singapore Design Festival I came across a great little product design idea – a tea “stick.

Essentially a combined stirrer and tea bag, it is a tube of gauze containing tea and a central stiffening rod terminating in a finger tab. A most elegant and simple idea.

Unfortunately it was meant to be disposable. “It’s only a small plastic stick” was …

There is some odd typography in the December 2009 issue of Qantas magazine I picked up recently. The pull-quote that starts off each page of at least two of the articles used an odd, distracting and definitely non-standard mixture of capital and small letters. I am not sure if this is some gimmicky new trend, or a Caps Lock key malfunction. Can anyone …