Dori is swimming to raise money for Parkinsons with Team Fox.

The MC introduced the night saying this was a forum created for women to build confidence and share knowledge. There are no gurus here, she said, you can ask any question. As if there were an imminent threat, she declared this place is safe.

Kate Curruthers was the special guest. Her presentation on private and public boundaries online was about negotiating the terrain of social media from a personal and business perspective. Her central thesis for the night was that nothing is new. There are real world parallels to all online behaviour.

Kate Curruthers spoke of the changing attitudes towards privacy over time and how social networking has taken everyone back to the village. Now, like before, everyone knows each other’s business. Curruthers spoke of how the web quickens and amplifies communication and of the risks of social media engagement:

• reputation—and the lack of control of others content about you
• job risks—personal and professional boundaries blurring
• personal safety—what information you should disclose publically; and the sometime vitriolic nature of dialogue online.

Her advice to those in the room, wanting to engage with and use social media was don’t do online, what you wouldn’t do offline.

Carruthers also spoke of the benefits of always being connected: convenience, friendship, guidance and business benefits. The new digital divide, she said, was not whether or not you have a computer but how connected you are willing to be.  Her most pressing piece of advice for the night was around the use of social media in the workplace. She warned that one should not question a young person’s right to be always connected. An audience member recommended that all businesses have a social media policy (and referred the audience to Telstra’s social media employee guidelines). Kate agreed and added that you cannot discipline employees for misuse of social media if you do not have rules in place.

At this point the talk opened up into a forum where problems, anecdotes and advice were shared. This was the most interesting aspect to the night. The event delivered on its promise of being a safe place where people can ask anything. Questions were answered by guest speaker and by audience members alike. This made me see the whole point of the introductions at the start of the event. Everyone had a sense of what each other did, be that PR professional, journalist, accountant, business coach, stylist or small business owner—and knowing the people in the room made everyone comfortable to talk.

Social Media Women sits somewhere between a digital industry get together and a business networking function. Many did learn a lot of new information. I learnt about the questions, fears and apprehension some people have of social media, no doubt thanks to the thought provoking presentation by Kate Curruthers.  I’ve been to a lot of industry events. The diversity in the audience and the range of discussion about using social media made this night the most authentic and refreshing forum I’ve attended for a while.

The talks couldn’t have been more different at this weeks service design drinks. Stephen Cox, Customer Experience Manager at Westpac opened the night with a presentation on touch-point workshops. Janna DeVylder from Meld Studios invited the audience to ponder whether the service designer has a role to play in the execution of projects. The first was a talk around design education, the second a discussion about design implementation.

Stephen Cox’s workshop is taken from At-One and a more detailed description of it is available at service-innovation.org. Participants are asked to design an experience for a persona across a journey using a range of touch-points cards. To see if the freshly designed experience stacks up, participants then consider if it works with a different persona; and if the experience is still coherent if touch-points are removed.

Stephen’s team is responsible for shifting Westpac culture to be more customer centric. But it seems his team could also affect  the corporate culture itself. The sessions involve participants from different areas of the bank that may otherwise not get the chance to work together, let alone meet one another. The workshop sessions have participants design their products and services for touch-points they may not have traditionally considered to be in their remit, and to consider their output as existing within a broad range of experiences.

The next discussion asked whether the service designer should get their hands dirty in implementation. Janna DeVylder asked “How do you design for the implementation of service?“ It’s an interesting question that goes to the heart of a utilitarians view on user experience design itself—that its easy to conjure up the perfect solution when you don’t have to be responsible for rolling it out.

At first the audience seemed to be in some sort of consensus that a service designer should play a role in implementation and all that is needed for this to happen is a suitable metaphor to communicate what they are doing in the trenches, be that director or composer. As the discussion unfolded other considerations arose:

• Is it just a matter of passing on appropriate tools to get the client to the next stage?
• How do you work towards change management?
• How do you make prototypes for service design?
• How do you test concepts?

Having worked in implementing web projects I advocated that producers are needed—people that are responsible for the detail but who understand the vision. Some people thought that I was still riffing on the director metaphor, but I wasn’t. By the end of the discussion everyone agreed concept and implementation are two very different types of engagements.

The first presentation was about building design thinking in a corporate culture. The second was about the designer playing a role end to end. Advocates need to be built within organisations. Someone else is ultimately responsible for the products, services and experiences that we may be designing. They are the ones who need to take ownership of the ideas as they are the best placed in seeing them through. I don’t think that concepts don’t get implemented because a designer isn’t there to realise their vision. Concepts don’t get implemented when they don’t have people championing their cause.

I worked for the Swatch Group many many years ago. I was already a watch obsessive and I loved Swatch. I was quite the tragic.

So, it was sad to hear of the passing of Nicolas Hayek this week, credited with saving the entire Swiss watch industry. Luxury plays its role in creating desire, defining categories and setting fashion trends. It’s hard to imagine a luxury market without the watch category and without brands like Omega, Longines, Rado and Bregeut. Proving that the profit is at the lower end of the market these brands and many others were saved by a plastic watch.

Nicolas Hayek invented the Swatch concept to compete against inexpensive Japanese time pieces that were decimating the Swiss watch industy. It was genius product design. The mechanism was built into the plastic case making it super tough and mass producible. Seasonal ranges made the brand exciting, cute, fashionable, fun and sometimes even controversial. Swatch was a design triumph and celebrated designers and artists alike with special editions.

I think the brand plays it a bit safe these days, but in its day it was a revelation of product and graphic design.

Thank you Mr Hayek.

There are 7 images in total. Feel free to download all the images from Flickr for your reference.

The dust jacket front image went over too far on the right edge. I was thinking to try and refold the dust jacket but the spine was printed in exactly the right place. The soft cover image did fit, but only just and it didn’t look quite centred.   It was interesting to see how differently the same image alligned on the dust jacket and the paperback. The image is a lot bigger on the dust jacket and didn’t fit at all. This could be improved by Blurb.

The solution? Well I think I was a bit ambitious making an image that was reliant on lining up just so. I have redesigned the cover so the image is much smaller and is well away from the edges. I think the new cover looks much better too.

Lessons learned:

1. Keep important parts of the image well away from the edge, even a bit further than book smart software suggests.
2. Make the image for the dust jacket design a bit smaller than the paperback cover image.

Oh, and by the way, I was not at all fussed by the experience. I won a voucher for the books from a UPA meet up, which gave me the opportunity to try it all out for free. Thanks Blurb!

The package label

Wrapped in plastic

Crooked dust jacket

Linen hard cover

Paperback: The image only just squeezes in to the top and bottom edges.

How I thought the cover image would line up

Inside cover

Original cover design

Plates cover version 2

via creativereview.co.uk

Andreas Gursky has always had a macro view of the world. He seems to have gone omnipotent!

“The work apparently originates from Gursky being struck by the pictorial quality of the back-of-seat display as it showed the wide expanse of water that he was flying 35,000ft above (with the Horn of Africa to the far left of the screen, a tip of Australia to the right).”

Although Gursky uses digital means to create his images, no one is preoccupied by it. Maybe that because his images are always so beautiful, and meaningful enough that people aren’t distracted by any tricks. ‘”Gursky used high-definition satellite photographs which he augmented from various picture sources on the Internet,”… “The satellite photos are restricted however to exposures of sharply contoured land masses. Consequently the transitional zones between land and water – as well as the oceans themselves – had to be generated completely by artificial means.”‘

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2010/april/andeas-gursky-ocean-i-vi
http://spruethmagers.com/exhibitions/258@@viewqex2

Posted via web from everyday eri

Mathew Hodgson, an IA/UX type, writes and speaks about agile project management. I have never done an agile project, and this is not a piece about agile versus waterfall. What struck me to think about that article and Tamara’s story was a blog post and graphic that Mathew published a few weeks ago about careers and the Agile team.

In the team roles are categorised into groups, as being focussed on either:

• Process
• Output
• Analysis
• Build
• Customer, or the
• Client

The usual job titles can still be found in there, there’s an Information Architect, a DBA, a BA, a Developer an Interaction designer; but there is an emphasis on what people are doing, and what their preference is.

I wish I had thought about what job suited my personality when I was younger—I may have come to my career a lot sooner. I think this graphic would be a handy tool for any career advisor to show kids who are considering a job in IT, and especially for those who may not yet be considering the field, what they may be suited to and encourage them to think about what it is that they enjoy doing.

If you have not been, Service Design Drinks is a casual meet-up, where guest speakers present and take questions from the audience. It’s held regularly at the Trinity Bar in Surry Hills. The fourth event was held on 18 May and was attended by 30 or so user experience designers, including a team from Different.

The last event was a panel discussion moderated by Damian Kernahan, from Proto Partners. The panellists were:

• Opher Yom Tov, formally of Ideo, now working with BT
• Rod Farmer, Co-founder and Director of Research, Mobile Experience
• Susan Wolfe, Managing Director, Optimal Experience
• Faruk Avdi, from the NSW Department of Education and Training

The opening question put to the panel was “What is service design?”

• Opher Yom Tov: Weaving together discreet experiences in an ongoing relationship.
• Rod Farmer: Meaningful value at the point of interaction.
• Susan Wolfe: Thinking about the broader context. Experience design is service design.
• Faruk Avdi: The ecosystem a product exists; experience design is a subset of service design.

Much of the early discussion veered around product design, defined as designing for the experience and the utility that it brings, and not focussing exclusively on the product itself.

A conversation followed about the importance of leadership and change management in service design projects. Several challenges were discussed:

• How do you model relationships?
• If the bar is always moving, how do you exceed the standard that has been set?
• Companies do not measure people’s performance on delivering a whole service. What KPIs should be set to help put service initiatives into operation?

The final question put to the panel was, who’s doing it well? This was best answered by Ant from Different who said that the best service experiences are being had at the ma and pop stores. Everyone agreed; the challenge is getting big organisations behaving like small business. (Interestingly, Mark Pollard made the exact same analogy at a Social Media Club event when asked about the challenges businesses face in participating effectively in social media).

It was a lively discussion, where the panel conceded that service design is a fairly new term. It was interesting to see that the industry is still forming its opinions as to what service design really is, and how it differs to experience design and also interesting to see how the field of user experience is expanding and defining itself.

An edited version of this post first appeared on the blog Different UX

Postscript June 17, 2010

Audio of the event has been published on the Service Design Drinks blog:
http://servicedesigning.com.au/2010/06/17/service-design-thinks-drinks-4/

Often it is difficult for speakers to share lessons learned in work, because of client confidentiality, and because sometimes it’s not good business to give too many secrets away. To solve this dilemma Collis delivered his presentation on how to start a web business by discussing a hypothetical case study. His words of wisdom are summarised below.

How do you come up with an idea?

• Solve a problem you have yourself experienced.
• Observe and look for audience niches that experience this problem.
• Your solution should help other people make money
  • e.g. the 37 Signals Basecamp application wasn’t making money from the consumer market but became a success when it was marketed to business.
• Test your idea with research.

How do you do good business?

• Not all businesses are equal. The Envato network has dual business models of publishing and market places.
• Don’t underestimate marketing. While its essential to have a good product, it’s vital to have great marketing.
• Spread the word. Present and blog about tangential topics that appeal to people who want to use your service.
• Build your user base with free content then add paid services.

Collis was one of the highlights of weDU for me. Keep an eye out on the webDU site. They will be publishing audio of the talks in coming weeks.