Yesterday, in between job-oriented chats with CMU design students, I attended a session that Shelley Evenson gave on service design.

Shelley herself made clear that there’s not yet a single definition of service design. Dan wrote about this a year and a half ago, and his take is pretty much the same as mine:

Service design, in contrast, has multiple touchpoints (environments, processes, people) and is about these touchpoints interacting with users over time. Users can be exposed to multiple experiences via repeated exposure to the service, and it requires multiple stakeholders to make a service come alive, usually through complex choreography. Moreover, there are multiple pathways through a service; it’s usually bigger than any one pathway, so you can’t design the service in a controlling way.

During Shelley’s talk, I realized that I had, in part, been practicing service design, though not calling it that. And then I realized when you utilize exploratory research methods (ethnography, contextual inquiry, and the like), you pretty much end up with a service design mindset, because you inevitably recognize that it’s not about any one thing or product, but how a host of interactions contribute to a larger experience. It ties directly to a post I wrote about dining with anthropologists, and how they are wedded to particular domains.

Anyway, I think Shelley is onto something with her pursuit of service design, and I look forward to the work of her and her students help bring some shape to this idea.

Speaking of which — I really dug meeting the CMU students. Such a bright and engaged bunch of folks!

Yep. It was on March 2, 2001 (scroll down) that Adaptive Path launched. It’s been a great 5 years, and to celebrate the occasion, on March 2, 2006, we’re having a party, and you’re all invited!

Luke comments on Samsung’s Design Vision, which spurs me to rant. Because Samsung has gotten a lot of press lately about how they’ve embraced design.

Yet, if my experience with the P777 is any indicator, all those designers in their employ aren’t doing squat. Investing in design, talking up design, even engaging in thoughtful design processes isn’t enough if the end result is poor.

I don’t see Samsung’s “design vision.” I see “design as PR.”

A few weeks ago (I’ve been behind in my feedreading), Niti posted an email she got that from Douglass Turner, where he marvels at how the “elite design agencies” don’t seem to get “Internet 2.0.” Take a moment to read it, and her responses.

Okay. You back? So, I feel obliged to join this discussion, because it revealed to me a lack of awareness of some of the basic issues. The primary fallacy that Niti makes is to equate “blogging” with “Web 2.0.” The second fallacy is to state that it’s okay for design agencies to remain ignorant of such Web 2.0 things, because it’s only for the online engagements. If design agencies behaved that way, they’d be doing their clients a huge disservice.

Douglass was right to wonder, “How can companies so talented in other domains so completely miss the fundamental transformative and disruptive power of Internet 2.0?” A blog or a podcast does not Web 2.0 make. Web 2.0 is fundamentally about relinquishing control, putting creative power in the hands of your users, and developing systems that benefit from such communal use. Such concepts are anathema to the thought, philosophy, and practice of “elite design agencies.”

Such design agencies, and the folks that work there, tend to believe their role is to *control* the user’s experience. They have no greater fear than other, non-designers, contributing to the design of the product. I don’t mean “user-centered” design here — the elite agencies have by and large come around to that. I mean, going many steps further, placing the control of the product in the hands and minds of the users.

The people and firms that Niti lists as “Web 2.0” designers don’t ring true to me. Pretty much the only one that I buy is the Management Innovation Group (and that’s because I know them, and I know they get it, and they publish stuff like this).

I don’t know what “Interface Innovation” is, but Web 2.0 has actually very little to do with interface, and everything to do with the systems underlying them, and how best to take advantage of those systems.

Niti then makes the claim that it isn’t a problem if these design agencies don’t embrace these tenets because they are “creating customer experiences and enabling users around products and processes that reach far beyond the web.” This doesn’t make sense to me, because there’s hardly a business on earth for whom their online strategy isn’t a key component. Because, and this is the thing a lot of people still don’t get, “Web 2.0” isn’t about the web. The web is where it most obviously plays out, but web 2.0 is about relinquishing control, embracing openness and transparency, demonstrating actual authenticity, and empowering your customers to create, and leveraging that creativity to make better experiences for everyone. As the LEGO Mindstorms article in Wired discussed, this isn’t simply about web sites — it’s about introducing new paradigms to improve businesses’ chance of success.

In short, I agree with Douglass that it’s something of a travesty that “elite design agencies” remain so ignorant of the social, cultural, economic, and business shifts at play that they aren’t engaging with what is *really* happening when we say “web 2.0.”

In the interest of managing some of the outstanding details of my life, I’ve also booked my ticket to Vancouver for the IA Summit.

Year in and year out, the IA Summit is my favorite conference. The content is consistently good and the people are great. This is the one event that all other obligations must be planned around.

This year I’m honored to be giving the closing plenary. Honored, and terrified. And hopeful.

Here’s my cheeky bio for the conference:

At the first IA Summit, in 2000, Peter Merholz was nearly booed off the stage for suggesting librarians were responsible for the tyranny of hierarchy demonstrated on most websites. He has attended every summit since, unexpectedly becoming an evangelist of information science thinking to the broader community.

In 2002, Peter publicly lambasted the announcement of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. Three years later, he became president of the rechristened IA Institute, which reminds him of the Vulcan proverb, “Only Nixon could go to China.”

Professionally, Peter is the director of practice development at Adaptive Path.

See you in Vancouver!

Technorati Tags: iasummit

For the first time since 2002, I will be attending the South by Southwest Interactive conference (as I like to think of it: the best web conference with the worst web site!).

I am moderating a panel on Sunday morning, currently titled What’s Hot in Web Applications. It currently features folks from three companies–Meebo, Zimbra, and YackPack (when I mentioned this to my girlfriend, she thought I suffered glossolalia.) Unlike Jeff’s similarly-themed “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps”, I’m focusing on companies that are still pre-acquired and mighty small. I’ve also decided to take a focus on communication/collaboration, which each of my panelist products displays. I’ve also also decided to focus on the whole business — so expect discussions of product design, technology development, and business strategy.

I’m on the lookout for one more product/company, and ideas are welcome. Preferably: companies not in the Bay Area.

Technorati Tags: sxsw, web 2.0

Bradley Horowitz, whom I admire for being a staunch Alameda advocate, inaugurates his blog with a post on Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers, which includes the thesis, “we don’t need to convert 100% of the audience into “active” participants to have a thriving product that benefits tens of millions of users.”

I’ve spent the last 30 minutes trying to find any writing of mine that echoed this, because when I worked at Epinions, I realized this. When Epinions launched, we were hell-bent on getting *every* user to write reviews. Over time we realized that a) that would never happen and b) it wasn’t necessary. We ballparked it at about 5% of our audience wrote reviews, and that was fine. It seems that I never wrote about it, though. Anyway, it seems as if that pattern continues to play out, as Bradley’s post suggests.

A few weeks before our 5th anniversary, the news is metastasizing across the blogosphere — Google has acquired Measure Map. And with it, one of my business partners for the last 5 years, Jeffrey Veen. So, this is definitely a bittersweet moment.

I’m remarkably excited about the acquisition. It’s validation for the work we did, and, importantly, for the philosophy underlying our inaugural attempt at a product — that good design redefines categories and opens opportunities that hadn’t been realized. It’s what we saw Google do with Maps — people had pretty much considered the map space finished before then. I discussed this a bit back when I talked about enterprise apps being eaten from below – there was definitely an opportunity to approach analytics in a new, user-centered way, which is what Measure Map did.

Jeff’s departure will take a long time to sink in. Over 5 years ago, when I first was talking up the idea of a “user experience” company, Jeff was one of the first people I got in touch with. We had spoken at conferences together, and he had even brought me in to do some work at Hotwired, so I knew we had similar notions. Jeff has been instrumental in the evolution of Adaptive Path — his efforts lead directly to our events line of business, and then, two years later, to our first product. He has been probably our most public face (though Jesse is gaining fast), speaking around the world to a variety of audiences. He developed some of our best speaking material — his knack for storytelling helped communicate the value of user experience, whereas my overly analytical approach tends to leave people scratching their heads.

And within the office, day-in and day-out, we won’t have him to lead the charge for burritos, coffee, or beers at (House of Shields, Nova, _insert bar here_), to cut through the bullshit we occasionally find ourselves getting worked up over, to, well, to be so tall.

That said, this is clearly a remarkable opportunity for him, and I’m thrilled I could help make it happen. Jeff isn’t someone you can replace, and Google is getting a remarkable person to join their ranks.

I’m eager to see what’s next, and looking forward to him doing great things there.

One of the fears of globalization, and the hegemonic spread of certain powerful cultures, is that everything will end up being the same. Visit Tokyo and you can eat at McDonald’s or KFC. Visit Russia and they’re all listening to Britney Spears (or some such).

While such forces certainly exist, they are not the only, nor, I suspect, even the predominant ones. My experience is leading me to think that what’s much more likely than a prevailing homogeneity is recombination — memetic splicing that leads to something different from the elements that contributed to it.

Food is an obvious example… Here in the Bay Area the idea of a “fusion” restaurant is becoming passe, because chefs are drawing from all manner of sources to develop culinary products. I had dinner at a neighborhood restaurant in Berkeley where the salad was vietnamese-inspired, the soup was thai-inspired, Stacy had a delightful Mexican-inspired dish, and we all enjoyed tapioca pudding for dessert. The restaurant didn’t make a big thing out of the cultural progenitors — the chefs simply decided to pick and choose and create a menu that made sense.

Another obvious example is music. Take The Punjabi Rapper. Actually, that’s it. Does any more need to be said?

An example closer to my professional work life. Stacy, who is getting her Ph.D. in anthropology (archaeology, specifically) attended a design ethnography workshop at the American Anthropological Association conference. There, she learned about affinity diagrams (aka, playing with sticky notes), and realized that her practice could benefit from this method that had been developed in HCI as a way to make sense of user data. And, of course, HCI had long been drawing from anthropological practice to understand user populations.

This is a trend affecting society at every level. And it’s not simply a matter of taking two distinct things and having them combine to make a third. It’s a matter of taking a part of two distinct things can now be recombined in any number of ways, because each of those original things can be broken down, and have its elements combined with elements of the other, leading to an explosion of possibilities.

The best example of this process is molecular biology, and it wasn’t until we understood genes, combination and recombination, mutation, and selection that we could really have a framework to appreciate what’s happening in our cultural world.

So, I guess I’m saying — don’t get down in the face of global sameness; relish the opportunity for recombination to lead to infinite cultural possibilities.

Photo by Stacy!