A Sustainable Train of Thought

I just found a new wiki dedicated to Service Design at the aptly chosen domain of ServiceDesign.org. It’s been set up by the nice guys at live|work and will hopefully turn into a great repository for service design related information.

I’ve also been reading a compilation of articles with a service-design focus that was put together by the professors from our service design course. It’s making for some compelling reading—I want to talk about it, but I’m a little too tired right now to form complete thoughts.

In other news, today we received a brief to create a screen-based video game with physical inputs by this coming Wednesday. No small task, to be sure, but our experience with the physical computing class last fall and our recent introduction to instantSOUP (an IDII special project) should see us through.

We’re also starting to firm up thesis concepts around this time, beginning to develop our Mattel project concepts, and (in my case) continuing to look for summer internships. I’ve got my new portfolio up and running—let me know if you have any problems with it. I’m actually pretty happy I managed to get the PHP working, as the menuing system would have been a pain to maintain any other way.

As for an internship: I am particularly interested in service design and interaction design internships, but I am also interested in design firms that focus on the general themes of sustainability and experiences. I am interested in working with physical objects and experiences, and the systems within which they exist. I am also interested in the visualization of data and systems.

My thesis topics and concepts are a bit broad and vague at this point, but hopefully I can get some help from the professors with focusing/narrowing them. And the team I’m in for the Mattel project looks to be focusing on service-design concepts, which is cool.

That’s about it for now. My parents are visiting Italy for the week, and will be arriving in Milan in a couple of hours. I should probably catch some sleep before they arrive, so that I can show them all Ivrea has to offer once they arrive. This should take about 30 minutes, and then we’ll grab a coffee.

This was a long week: Tuesday felt like Friday, which is never a good sign.

Since I’ve been remiss with a definition of Interaction Design, here’s the Wikipedia to cover my oversight. And it just so happens that Interaction Design Institute Ivrea is part of the definition. Cool!

On Saturday Technogym came to visit the school. Technogym is the second-largest gym-equipment manufacturer in the world, which is a pretty big deal in Italy since they’re an Italian company. The average age in the company is 29. The cool thing was that the CEO and several directors of the company showed up on a Saturday morning at 8:30AM to see our projects and learn more about the school. Their home base is about a five hour drive away, so they arrived on Friday evening and stayed the night in Ivrea.

After showing them around the school and introducing them to some of the projects we’ve done here at IDII, several faculty lead them into a classroom where we were ready to show them three of the service design projects from last semester. I was in one of the groups that presented, and after the last group finished there was a long conversation in Italian spoken at high speed. I didn’t catch everything that was said, but later I learned that the CEO was describing to everyone else what an experience prototype is. Which was really cool because we hadn’t really explained the concept in depth and hadn’t talked about the benefits of it. But he got it!

Simply put, experience prototyping is a way to prototype a service experience. Because services take place over time and through a variety of touchpoints both human and object, and generally tend to involve intangible, qualitative aspects, they require prototyping in a way that’s different from how objects or spaces can be prototyped through, for example, models. Experience prototypes can be documented through video, but they are not video prototypes. Video prototypes are where things are made to appear to work a certain way in post-production. Rather, experience prototypes attempt to create a situation in which people behave and interact as if the service already exists. The interaction designer then looks for user insights into how the service performed as a way of grounding design decisions.

Experience prototypes are very new tools, developed only in the last couple of years, and the methodologies and body of work behind them is limited. Which is exciting for me because it means you get to discover and make the rules as you implement an experience prototype. live|work is pretty much the leading company in service design and experience prototypes, and they came to work with us during the service design project. Experience prototypes were definitely a hard sell to me, because I’ve always been taught to look at the quantitative information: 50% of people do X. But the reality is that sometimes looking at extreme cases, or designing for a specific person, can have far-reaching benefits. The best example I’ve heard so far involved the design of buses.

If you design a bus for the middle 50% of the people, as market research would tend to encourage, you will end up with one kind of bus. However, if you look at an extreme of the bell curve and design for someone who is in a wheelchair, for example, you will end up with a completely different design. However, the design for the person in a wheelchair will most likely be more convenient for everyone, not just the person in the wheelchair. I encountered this phenomenon myself in California, where the buses have low floors that are curb-height, and the interior is laid out in a more intelligent and spacious way. In other words, it was good design that benefited everyone.

This presentation wasn’t about selling a particular project, but promoting the way our school practices design. So we were really showing off the design capabilities, methodologies, and types of results the school produces. We’ll see what they think, and if they’re interested in working with us at a later date, but at the very least it was neat to have them visit us. Here’s a quick photo of them looking at one of the exhibits set up downstairs.

This past week was Salone di Mobile, the largest annual furniture show in Europe. The IDII exhibit in the Tecno space went very well. It’s interesting to see all the companies that are coming through the school these days, because a large number of them found out about the school at last year’s Salone. So it takes a while for them to make it here, but they’re definitely showing up! Technogym is an exception to this, but Frog was here a couple of weeks ago, and I believe they checked out the exhibits last year.I was also at the San Siro event on Thursday. The second-years presented some of their work, and there were a bunch of other groups and people who took over the stadium with their work, including Matthew Barney. I didn’t hang around for long, but it was probably just like any of the other parties that spread out within Milan during Salone.

Let’s see…and today we started the Mattel project, in which we design toys and games for the next four weeks. Should be fun! It’s been a while since I’ve been in the head-space of a 3 to 10-year-old, so I’m definitely getting a bit of a brain workout trying to relate to them.

Otherwise, I’m trying to finish up my portfolio. School projects are done, and I’m almost done with my past work. It will hopefully be completely online by Wednesday. Anyways, I’d better get some dinner and then cracking on it.

And yes, I will get to the rest of the trip photos just as soon as I finish my portfolio obligations.

Photos from my first day in Rome are now online in the gallery. I’ll be adding photos from more days as I get through processing them.

I have a program that came with my Canon S400 which helps to stitch panoramic shots together. For the most part it does a pretty good job, even if the GUI is ugly. However, I’ve been fooling around in Photoshop to achieve the same effect and I enjoy the process a little more. I have a couple of shots that I’ll assemble from my Rome trip.

I’m very happy with my little S400, but I’m starting to hanker for something more powerful. I definitely like the small size, which makes it easy and unobtrusive to carry around, and its durability has definitely been proven and tested on several occasions. I’m just finding that sometimes it can’t take the shots I want to take.

In reality, though, I don’t think I’d want to walk around with an SLR strapped to my shoulder—the S400 is definitely convenient, and for that reason it’s perfect for vacation photos! The new SD500 looks pretty awesome: 7 MegaPixels in a body that’s smaller than my S400 (with its 4 MegaPixels). And Canon just came out with a new Digital Rebel. I’m interested to see what Nikon comes out with next…

It seems strange that January was only about three months ago. I’m currently working on some documentation for my Applied Dreams project for Hitachi (the one I can’t talk about, remember?) that we finished in January. As I’ve been working through it, I’ve found myself getting excited about the concept all over again. It’s a nice feeling.

There comes a point in a project where you’re just sick and tired of dealing with it, no matter how cool it is or seemed to be at the beginning. My project for Hitachi wasn’t like that at all (OK, so I basically developed it in four days and presented it on the fifth, so there wasn’t much time for me to get bored with it). But then came Service Design and I essentially forgot all about the Hitachi project.

While on vacation I had some time to think about my potential thesis topics, and I came back with an old favorite. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but I’m not exactly sure what to do with it. The concept is in a really difficult and challenging area, and I think I’m a bit nuts to pursue it, but the challenge of it beckons as it has for quite some time now.

And then I sat down to do some more work on the Hitachi project…

I suppose there are worse things than to be excited about multiple projects. Now I just need to find the time to work on them. Right now is the quiet before the storm: Salone di Mobile is happening this week, and Tecno (the furniture company) commissioned the school to present work from the Strangely Familiar exhibition. And I’m volunteering for another event in the San Siro stadium on the 14th. Next week we’re also starting the Mattel project…

Well, first thing’s first: time to get Hitachi documentation out of the way! And thus ends this post…

Got home yesterday afternoon from Roma, where I expect things were a little crazier than usual. I’ve got a lot of photos which I’ll be posting soon, and I’ll write in the gallery and in my blog about some of my experiences along the way.

My final intinerary was Ivrea → Roma → Napoli → Pompei → Sorrento → Capri → Napoli → Roma → Ivrea. My means of transportation were trains, buses, boats, and my feet. I haven’t actually worked it out, but I estimate that I was walking an average of 3-5 miles (at least) a day. While it wasn’t as traditionally relaxing as I would have liked, I did manage to read three books, see a lot of different things, meet a bunch of people, and I got to practice my Italian.

While I get the gallery ready, here are a couple of phone-cam shots.

Store in Chivasso. I took this photo while waiting to transfer to my train for Roma on the first day. I’m not exactly sure what they sell.

Police car in Roma. Note that most police cars in Roma are NOT like this one, which I happened to see patrolling a park.

I needed to do some food shopping this afternoon, and I took a couple of photos of some interesting products I found on the shelves.

Are “niblets” universally understood? Gigante Verde should be easy enough to translate.

I was a bit confused with the lid for this jar, but yes, it is actually shaped like a mushroom. No, it is not actually a mushroom. I believe the contents were sliced portabella mushrooms.

Ok, have to get some work done, but I’ll be sure to get some of the trip photos online.