I was watching a TED presentation on being wrong, and liked the road runner analogy used. Basically what it feels like to be wrong is like in Loony Toons where the coyote chases the road runner right off the cliff, but the coyote keeps running in the air until he realises he is in the air. He then falls.

Because we live life in the present tense we are always living in the belief that we are right. Therefore being wrong feels like being right. Realising your wrong feels different.

But what can you do with this new found perspective? I thought this was a good analogy to go along with Paul Saffo’s Mantra “Strong Opinions Weakly Heard”.

Paul explains it well here: “my mantra for this process is “strong opinions, weakly held.” Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then –and this is the “weakly held” part– prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction. Eventually your intuition will kick in and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble, ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again. You will be surprised by how quickly the sequence of faulty forecasts will deliver you to a useful result.” http://www.saffo.com/journal/entry.php?id=898 

I don’t like the use of the words right and wrong when talking about design, its too black and white. But criticism of decisions and designs can bring up our defences of not wanting to be “wrong”, so next time your being challenged keep your strong opinions weakly held remembering you could be the coyote.

Yesterday at Service Design Conference 2011 in San Francisco the closing keynote speaker Richard Buchanan was fantastic. It was interesting to hear his view that Management is a design practice and that Service design is an emergent practice, not a novelty.

He also gave the group a bit of tough love, by saying; “The role of the designer is to be the facilitator not the center”, and the crowd responded with applause.

Some other points include:
- Advocating design playing a key role in implementing strategy in organisations.
- Teaching managers design skills so they can synthesize
- Useful, Usable and Desirable fits in the core of management itself…
If you dont have a quality of character…. a sensitivity and care for your customer, then you have a crippled business model
- The arousal and fulfilment of expectation
- Profitability is important in a company, but not the purpose of a company, the purpose is to provide goods and services

This was the best speaker of the two days, hope you all enjoy.

I’ve read quite a few definitions, and thought i’d start putting them back up here for reference, the below video i thought was a great introduction:

Service Design Network, Learn Basics Page:

SDN national conference Paris 2011_Birgit Mager from sdnetwork on Vimeo.

Within Service Design, Service Interfaces are designed for intangible products that are, from the customer’s point of view, useful, profitable and desirable, while they are effective, efficient and different for the provider. Service Designers visualize, formulate and choreograph solutions that are not yet available. They watch and interpret needs and behaviours and transform them into potential future services. In the process, exploring, generating and evaluating approaches are used similarly and a redesign of existing services is just as much a challenge as the development of new innovative services.

http://service-design-network.org/learnbasics

The definition in the video is ok. re: “Application of design concepts and design methods to services in order to create solutions that are useful, usable, desirable, efficient, effective and different” at 10:59.

I like this statement in explaining what service design does 19:09: “Service Design went into the user perspective, created the system a concept, Visualised it”…

Also the 10 basics are worth listening:

1. Look at your service as a product
2. Focus on the customer benefit
3. Dive into the customers world
4. See the big picture
5. Design the customer experience
6. Design a visible service evidence (e.g. the toilet paper fold in a hotel)
7. Go for standing ovations with your service (it takes happy staff to have happy customers)
8.  Define flexible standard
9. Create a living product (learning processes, designed into the service)
10. Be enthusiastic (look at the culture)