A Sustainable Train of Thought

I’ve had the chance recently to see a lot of live music (or at least what constituted “a lot” for me) and on each occasion I’ve found myself really thinking hard about the experience. As the Music and Memory project demonstrated, music is more than just a sequence of noise. It can conjure emotions and memories and literally transport you to another place and time.

Most of my experience with music has been through records, tapes, CDs, and digital files (MP3, AAC, etc.). And the effect for me of conjuring the past through music has been that of a trigger: the same track brings back the same memories. In some ways it’s a very static effect, as if engaging one particular sense (hearing) in a particular way (a certain song) summons the bookmarked memory.

Live music is an entirely different experience.

The effect is that of the band creating a space outside of time, as though the music has imprinted in it some memory of its own, and for those five minutes the band can bring those memories back to life, can replace those five minutes in the present with five minutes from the past.

I suppose my fascination lies in the reality of simultaneous production and consumption and the effect that it produces. After the band is done with their set, you can’t point to anything in particular as being a result of their work. They work exclusively in the manipulation of time.

The effect is completely different from listening to canned music on a file. The band is there in front of you. There’s something to the immediacy and proximity that distinguishes it from recorded music, perhaps because it’s clearly other human beings who are creating it. It is more obviously being produced rather than replayed. It is more obviously a unique event rather than recorded.

You could say that musicians play music. But that’s like saying an architect draws. It misses the larger point and purpose of the event. That is to say, it’s not the event or the action itself, but the results it produces.

And of course I can’t help but see connections to service design. It’s the little things which construct the overall experience. But it’s also about creating a time out of place. It’s about creating memories and triggering those memories to produce a compounding effect: what one might call “the present plus”.

Like live music, services are produced and consumed simultaneously. Yet the experience is much more than the event itself. In some hokey way I suppose this is a reference to those “touches of home” which hotels and suchlike purport to provide. The fundamental flaw in such statements becomes clear: it’s about my home, not some generic home. As such, the experience tends to fall flat. If there were some way to tap into my reality, my experience, and my memories, services could produce effects which speak directly to me. They could draw upon my memories to augment their experiences, making them more personal and meaningful, and they could create experiences and produce memories from which they could draw upon in a future interaction. Successful service delivery is about making those connections.

Does a service need to tap into existing memories to successfully serve a customer? Not necessarily. A general archetype might be used at first, but the danger in those is that you can’t look too closely at them or they tend to fall apart. For example, walking into a hotel room at the Hyatt or the Hilton, thinking “now this is luxury” and then noticing the torn weather-stripping around the window and the scratches on the arm chair. The illusion is punctured.

Better is to create memories which reference that specific time and place. In other words: provide good service, create good memories. Those memories will be the foundation for future customer interactions. Clearly, the details need to be strong for the overall experience to prosper, but don’t get trapped by the thought that service exists only in objects, in the way the room looks or smells. Service is also the front-desk experience, the check-in at the airport, the smile in the voice of the customer-service representative.

Future experiences with that service will exist in the present plus: the current experience, plus the experiences of interactions past. How many times have you gone back to a store, to a restaurant, or to a hotel because the service was so good, the staff so friendly, or because the store-owner remembered your name?

People talk about “rich interactions”. I think of Present Plus as rich service, as a depth beyond the immediate interaction, that draws upon all past experiences in the process of fulfilling the present experience.

Memorable service. Memorable music.

I originally wrote this piece after watching Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and being struck by its positivity. In the course of the film, Dave Chappelle puts together a massive block party in Brooklyn. That’s the what. The why is unclear: perhaps because it sounded like a good idea. I tend to think it’s because he enjoys making other people happy, and because this was a way to give something back to people. I was particularly fascinated by the creation of something from nothing, that all this energy and hard work went into creating something so ephemeral, yet so lasting.

Then I got distracted by some other things and I forgot I’d written this. Forgotten, that is, until I read Fabio Sergio’s recent post The product (is the system) is the culture of use, in which he talks about time and its role in cultural change and impact on design.

I distinctly remember at the end of our Service Design course at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, we had a wrap-up session, in which I commented on how I saw Services as the overarching connector between interactions. That is, services provide the larger context in which interactions exist. I also remember that comment receiving a cool reception at the time.

I’ll be curious to see how the discussion unfolds this time.

Straight from Wired (IPod [sic] Will Be the New CD – the “I” in iPod should never be capitalized, since it’s a trademark, but what do I know):

Well, the iPod could become the new CD, especially if Apple starts offering cheap shuffle iPods pre-loaded with hot new albums or artists’ catalogs. Imagine a whole range of inexpensive, special-edition iPods branded with popular bands containing a new album, or their whole catalogs.

Flash-memory drives are now so cheap, software companies are starting to use them to ship software. H&R Block, for example, is selling the latest version of its tax-preparation software on a flash drive for $40—the same price as the CD version. How much would it cost Apple to add a few music chips and some cheap earbuds?

Three major problems with this proposal:

1. Apple will never turn the iPod into a commodity. Period.

2. iPods have sex appeal. Taxes do not.

3. The ecological ramifications would be enormous.

Regardless of how “cheap” a “disposable iPod” might be in terms of manufacturing costs, we all know that prices in our current economic system fail to account for the true cost of products and services. For example, what about the e-waste generated by all these cheap, disposable iPods?

Here’s what would ideally happen in the H&R Block scenario painted above: you bring your existing iPod into the store and you get a discount on the software which accounts for the costs not associated with: packaging; transportation of physical materials, including tolls, fuel, pollution, etc.; licensing fees to Apple; materials to construct the CD or disposable iPod; storage of the CDs or disposable iPods; labor to manufacture, assemble, distribute, the CDs or disposable iPod, etc. etc. etc.

But of course I need to wake up and smell the….pragmatism? I thought the whole point of having things in a digital medium was to speed their distribution and reduce costs. Silly me. Marketing trumps reality.

I just ran across a company called Recordant.

They use microphones to capture conversations between salespeople and customers. Those conversations can later be analyzed to determine which specific words used at specific times in the course of a conversation led to a sale.

From their FAQ:

2. Do you have to tell your customers they are being recorded?

Recordant™ is a competitive advantage for your business. It tells customers that you are serious about giving them the best possible shopping and service experience. We require you to provide and post adequate signage to inform your customers that their conversation is being recorded for quality assurance purposes and employee training.

3. How do customers respond when they learn they are being recorded?

They respond very favorably. One survey showed they believed that when a transaction is being recorded the quality of “their” service is truly important to the retailer. Many customers also viewed it as assurance that they were being dealt with fairly and within the policies of the retailer. On a rare occasion a customer may not want to be recorded. In that instance, the employee can simply turn off the audio capture device.

I can see the analytical possibilities and benefits from the standpoint of running a company, but is anyone else bothered by this? Specifically, the false sense of “customer service” that’s being promoted: “quality assurance purposes” are in fact the “optimization of closing practices”, which really has nothing to do with “customer service” per se and everything to do with “convincing customers to buy”.

I suppose this is always the case whenever you’re on the phone with the bank and they’re recording your conversation for “quality assurance purposes” (which method of stonewalling is most efficient), but I never made the connection until now.

Noting the ambiguity inherent in the phrase “quality assurance,” I wonder if this is a benchmark by which to assess whether a company is interested in actual customer service or simply the mechanics of their sales mechanisms.

ArsTechnica comments (Flickr’s shift to Yahoo ID requirement sparks (virtual) rioting) on the need to recognize the effort and contributions that early adopters make in support of fledgling social networking sites.

Those who run online (and offline) communities know that you can’t please everybody, and that old-school members are the most demanding and change-resistant. But when it comes to major community status markers you have to bend over backwards to accommodate the members who really value this sort of thing. In Flickr’s case, some kind of differentiating marker for legacy members would be nice, like a badge or a title, or some other visible signifier of the major investment that these senior users have made in the community.

Seniority perks and visible signifiers of in-group status are “Anthropology 101,” and no amount of Web 2.0 pixie dust can change that basic fact of human nature. Community sites that forget this in the midst of changes and genuine improvements do irreparable damage to the very social networks that they’re striving to build.

To be clear, I’m not questioning the business case for the Flickr and Yahoo merger, nor am I questioning the supposed benefits which await newly anointed Yahoo email address owners in the form of single-sign-on to all of Yahoo’s properties (or most of them, anyway).

Rather, as I’ve said before, I’m trying to point out that in the rush to make the business case I think people are overlooking some basic human needs, which the ArsTechnica article begins to highlight. Furthermore, in projecting this kind of reaction into the future, I feel that unless people pay attention to the underlying causes behind this reaction, rather than the reaction in and of itself (which could be passed off as whining or whatnot), this whole notion of a participatory internet may just hit a few roadblocks.

Just think about it. Without the uber-geeks falling all over themselves to make Flickr what it is today (a property of almighty Yahoo), would your (insert stereotypically computer-illiterate demographic here) be posting photos on Flickr? Do not vex/anger/enrage/put out/incense/annoy the uber-geeks.

Anyways, as one of the ArsTechnica members (Traddy) succinctly points out:

You could argue that the reason the site was valuable to be bought out is because of their [the Old Skool-ers] work; since the site is all about “community”.

Well put.

There are a couple of other interesting posts lying around the interwebs:

Slashdot
The Zooomr CEO

Oh, and if you’re wondering what “kthxbai” means, here’s your answer

There’s been a lot of attention lately to power consumption on the part of Google (their data centers have huge power requirements) and something started to bother me about the new Nintendo Wii after reading this post over at Phicons. In short, the problem with having a device that constantly draws power—the Wii has low power consumption, but it’s intended to be left on 24 hours a day so that the latest updates and game data can be downloaded and ready for the next time that someone uses the console. Obviously this somewhat negates the energy saving features.

Consequently, there have been a lot of comments about the literal energy use and power consumption, but I’d like to pose a different question. Google worries about its power consumption because its computers are on-site and therefore Google has to foot the bill for its servers’ energy use. Nintendo doesn’t, because its units are sold to customers and the customer pays for the energy use. This perhaps makes sense in the case of an electric razor: my use of it is my own and I am responsible for its energy use. But although the Nintendo console is still “attached” to Nintendo through the always-on nature of the device, and it will actively suck down data on a nightly, as needed basis, the consumer is still personally paying for the power costs incurred by the console.

This isn’t a big deal on an individual level, where a couple of kWh of “lost” energy may add up to a couple of bucks. But multiply that minor amount by the several million consoles that any one company ships and the total energy and economic consequences soon become something entirely different. The problem is that by distributing the cost, that overall figure (the total energy cost of the Wii or XBox 360 or PS3) is a non-issue because nobody will ever see it.

So how do we make someone (person, business, etc.) care about a problem whose distributed nature means that nobody really cares about it? Good question, and I’d be interested in hearing some suggestions. My thought is that large companies care about millions of dollars. So somehow the total bill needs to be connected to the company that bears responsibility for creating the object, not unlike how car manufacturers face emissions regulations. I’m not suggesting regulation as a cure, but as a motivator to get companies to innovate. In this new age of green, companies will do well to tout their environmental accomplishments. And what better way to do so than to talk about energy efficiency in the grand scheme of things. It speaks well of the company’s intentions, their attention to detail, as well as their eye on the big picture. A good citizen, if you will. What company wouldn’t want that kind of publicity?

Setting aside that observation for a moment, where along the timeline of a product’s lifecycle should we draw the line where corporate responsibility ends and the individual’s responsibility begins? If a company continues to offer services through a product it’s sold, has its product really left the scope of that company’s responsibility? Put another way, if Nintendo had manufactured a device that required a lightbulb to be turned on 24 hours a day, people would notice and probably not be too happy about footing the bill. After all, Nintendo is the one stipulating that the device must remain on. It’s not a choice on the consumer’s part. As it stands, we will now have a cute little device in our living room that’s plugged into the wall and, combined with the several other million units sold across the country and around the world, will probably require at least one new power station just to meet its aggregate power demands.

For Google that would be a disaster (more money out of their pocket…yes, they have a lot of it, but humor me). But for Nintendo it’s a non-issue because the cost is passed along to the consumer. Something doesn’t seem right, but I don’t see the situation changing….yet.

Right now the tech industry is just waking up to the fact that energy costs related to computing are the critical path, so to speak. So there are already rumblings and developments which address the energy issues on a per-processor, per device basis.

At the same time, Nintendo seems to be entering a phase between products and services. You used to buy the console and that was it: you pay for the energy use because it’s directly tied to your use. Now you buy the console and it’s tethered to a company, which uploads content and updates information as needed throughout the lifetime of the device.

In a way, the Wii may be heading towards the model of thin clients. (The form factor of the Wii has an uncanny resemblance to that of thin clients.) Formalizing a relationship in those terms makes it easier to connect the device in the user’s home with the company that spawned the device, because the former is clearly dependent on the latter. Thus, services bring with them increased environmental sustainability because some of the intangible costs associated with devices are now brought back within the service infrastructure of the company. What had been previously ignored or shunted elsewhere has now been brought back under the company’s responsibility, making it in their interest to reduce these costs.

Clearly we have some ways to go before realizing such a situation. However, it’s only a matter of time before people start asking the question “who pays?” just as any business in their right mind would ask. And if the answer is “you, the customer, pays” it’s only a matter of time before those small costs aggregate to create an untenable situation, both on the household and the global scale.

It’s been a while, so let’s get back on the Service Design train…

While on vacation this past winter, I read a Wall Street Journal article (It Happened One Flight) about social travel sites.

These are sites which enable you to meet other people and coordinate travel. This could be for something as simple as sharing a taxi ride to the airport, or something more serious like sitting next to a person from a particular industry so you can network during the flight, or perhaps find a date.

(The following descriptions are taken from the respective sites.)

www.airtroductions.com – “Make your next flight more interesting, and choose the person who sits next to you! Build a profile, enter your itinerary, match, and sit with them on your next flight!”

www.hitchsters.com – “Connects travelers so they can share taxis (and thus split the fare) to and from an airport.”

www.soulescape.com – A U.K. based company, “SoulEscape™ can connect you with travel companions whose interests, personality and itineraries mesh with your own.” Take “travel companion” as you will.

www.tripmates.com – “Whether you are interested in meeting locals or fellow travelers during a trip or finding a “trip buddy” so you don’t have to travel alone, Tripmates gets you connected before you depart.” Not specifically a dating site, but it could be.

www.2insteadof1.com – “2insteadof1 is your new travel gateway for anyone who would rather travel with someone than alone. You have the great opportunity to meet and find your ideal travel partner for a nice vacation or maybe …for the rest of your life…”

Personally, I find hitchsters.com the most interesting, specifically because it enables the increased efficiency of resource usage through coordination. However, it requires a critical mass of subscribers to be useful. I was thinking that maybe websites aren’t the best channel for this kind of service, since you have to be at a computer to use it. But if you could SMS that you’re looking for a cab to the airport and it would hook you up with another person in the immediate vicinity in real-time…that would be useful.

It reminds me of what happened in NYC during the transit strike in 2006, where cabbies were driving around asking people on the street where they were going so they could maximize their passenger load. I feel like this kind of text-message-enabled taxi service is such a standard interaction design cliche though…

I think that there’s something about in-flight social networking, but I’m not convinced just yet. I think it has to do with needing critical mass, because otherwise your odds of meeting someone are a little too low. It might be interesting if applied on an airline by airline basis. So Jetblue starts offering fliers the opportunity to put a little online profile alongside their seat selection. Things could get weird or creepy though, really quickly…elderly men choosing to sit next to young girls traveling alone, or people putting in false information (“I snore…very loudly!”) so that nobody will sit next to them.

However, it does make me wonder why seat selection criteria is so limited. For instance, I would be very happy if I could choose to sit far away from little babies on long flights. On the other hand, by virtue of random seat selection sometimes you get to meet people you wouldn’t otherwise. Just some thoughts….

I just discovered that the Fresh Start project is listed as an example of service design on the INDEX:2007 web site!

I’ve been meaning to document my thesis work, but other matters have been more pressing. Eventually I will create that site, but in the meantime I thought it might be nice to pick out what I consider some highlights from my thesis explorations and present them in my blog. You know, maybe get some people to read them and hopefully comment on them…but more importantly, it would be nice to advance my theories as my own and claim ownership of them by documenting them. With the rate of change we’ve been seeing in the world lately, reality has been steadily overtaking my thesis work, and I’d prefer to say “here’s something cool I thought of” before someone goes out and does it, rather than vice versa.

In the spirit of drawing this process out as long as possible (and so I don’t have to think of new content all the time), I’ll post a section every few days and perhaps add a little commentary to expand on the concepts or talk about any shifts in thinking I might have had over the year.

Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?

My thesis year at IDII was spent investigating how individuals could make a difference in such a large issue as sustainability. On the one hand we have initiatives to encourage individuals to recycle or carpool. On the other hand in the realm of nation states we have the Kyoto Protocol. A huge gulf separates the two extremes of action. And yet, after reading several compelling books (The Ecology of Commerce and Collapse, among others), and feeling an overwhelming urge to do something, I found myself lacking for direction. The Kyoto Protocol is way beyond my influence, and I already did things like recycling. I wanted to do something more, but what?

In the course of my research, I found that many people felt the same way. They read the same books, had the same realizations, and were full of energy and enthusiasm, yet they found (as did I) that there was no outlet for them. There was no way for them to make meaningful contributions to sustainability.

With this realization, I saw some opportunity to act.

Service design seemed like the best way to go for a couple of reasons: it offers opportunities for involving people in processes and it can promote dematerialization—while working on a thesis about sustainability, it seemed hypocritical to create yet another fancy widget.

My first step in the thesis process was to get my bearings within the land of sustainability and develop some approach vectors which might indicate more promising areas of investigation and development.

First was the realization that sustainability is a murky word because it is a quality, not a thing. You can’t point to sustainability and say “Aha, there it is!” Nor can you pin sustainability down to a specific checklist, because its qualities vary depending on the specific situation. For example, the concept of a “sustainable home” differs between the Sahara and the Arctic: an igloo wouldn’t last two minutes in the Sahara.

By the end of my thesis process, I grew incredibly tired of the word sustainability. While it encompasses a lot of concepts, its murky generality renders it almost a nonsense word. You can talk about sustainability this and sustainability that and in the end have said not much of anything. I also found its use and abuse extremely frustrating. A variety of industries seem to have found sustainability the new buzzword: the sustainable chair, the sustainable this, the sustainable that. Great, it’s sustainable, but what exactly are you doing? Sustainability necessarily encompasses a huge amount of complexity, and to think that “sustainable” can be bestowed upon an object because it’s made from recycled soda bottles is a violent misconception (if I can use that phrase). As Cradle to Cradle points out, that’s merely down-cycling material, not re-envisioning and re-making how we produce, consume, renew, or dispose of things. How can a light-bulb be “more sustainable” when its electricity comes from a coal-fired power plant?

I was struck by the need for massive change (to use Bruce Mau’s terminology), perhaps what one might even call a revolution. I saw a need for revolutionary thought and action, and yet all I saw were incremental, step-wise iterations of existing products, services, and systems. And this struck me as bizarre, because once you see the incredible amount of opportunity for innovation, with the attendant intellectual property, patents, royalties, and so forth, you’d think that companies would be stumbling over each other to innovate, to become leaders in their fields.

My future posts will explore this situation and where I think some of the solutions lie.

I ultimately moved away from working specifically on this area for my thesis, but I found Guiding Principles for Sustainable Transportation from an entry in the ClimateBiz newsletter during some research and thought it would be worthwhile posting it. The article has quite a few other sustainable transportation resources. What’s interesting to me is the order of principles: Access, People and Communities, Environmental Quality, and Economic Viability. Not your usual order of operations, so to speak.

Switching gears, Throwplace is a web site where businesses and individuals can list for donation excess inventory or unwanted objects and other businesses, charities, and people can get them either for free or for a fee. I find Throwplace interesting because it’s a marketplace enabler, similar to Craigslist or eBay, but with a different mandate.

I’m a little unimpressed with Google lately. I signed up for Google Checkout, and at the end of the process this is what I received instead of a confirmation of having signed up for the service:

So was my sign-up successful? I’ll never know…