31Volts [service design] » presentation

Slides and notes from the talk on Mobile Design (Challenges) at Crosslab

Marc Fonteijn — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:39:48 +0000

This post is a short recap on the talks I gave at the Crosslab event on Mobile Design. Crosslab is an event organized by the Willem de Kooning Academie (media art design education) which is part of the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. This Crosslab evening was filled with interesting app demos (check the i3DG palm top theater!) and inspiring cases cases (MoMA AR exhibition and bikey). In my presentation I took a more conceptual look on mobile design. By looking at all the great things mobile has brought us but also by posing 3 design challenges that currently aren’t being address all that well. You can scroll down to part 2 if you want to skip the preliminaries of the presentation and head right over to the design challenges.

You can also find these slides on slideshare (without the notes).

Part 1

Hi, thank you for inviting and giving me the opportunity to share some of my ideas about mobile design.

Let me start with a very brief introduction about myself. I’m Marc Fonteijn, one of the co-founders of the service design agency called 31Volts. We use design to create better service experiences, like that of a train ride for instance.

Next to that I co-organize a leading event on mobile innovation called Mobile Monday Amsterdam. It’s free to join, so if you’d like to connect with the pioneers in the mobile field, be sure to sign up for the next event.

So the combination of 31Volts and Mobile Monday Amsterdam puts me right in the overlapping fields of design & mobile.

The funny things is that I actually also scored an appstore hit some time ago with “de beslisvis”, but thats a whole different story that I’m not going to talk about today.

To share my perspective on mobile design today, I’ve divided my presentation into 2 parts.

In the first part I’m going to look at what the mobile phone has actually become. Based on a true story.

In the 2nd part of the presentation I’d like to pose some design challenges that I think are important by aren’t being well addressed by designers at this moment.

Mobile is great. No let, me rephrase that. Mobile is f*cking aweseome!

When it comes to the usage of a mobile phone I’m that guy that usually gets asked “why on earth would you need that for”? You argue that I eat, drink & sleep mobile. Let me give you some examples of what I mean…

I’ve compiled a quick list of the things I use my phone for on daily basis. It’s my address book, calendar, map, ﬂashlight, shopping list, remote control, diary, photo book, tv, cd collection, clock, weather forecaster, arcade machine, translator, city guide, broadcasting station and compass. Yes, I use a compass on occasions!

In the near future it will probably also be my wallet, id card and doctor.

The examples I just gave are not just the things a modern mobile phone can do. They are based on my personal and daily use. And all the pointers are that this usage is only going to intensify!

Isn’t it great that a small device like this has made us less dependent (traveling in London having the tube map in your pocket), has given us more comfort (you don’t have to get off the couch to control stuff), more knowledge (knowing if you need to take an umbrella before walking out the door), more fun (playing angry birds is just a great way to kill time) and made it easier to share our experiences (using twitter as your diary).

I’m a designer. I make a living out of asking questions. So when I stop for a moment and take a broader perspective on these great things mobile phones have brought us, I question what the downsides are? Have we given up on certain things in order to have this swiss army knife on steroids in our pocket? Are we loosing things? And if so, what?

Part 2: Mobile Design Challenges

In this second part of the presentation I’d like to raise some design challenges that I think aren’t being address well enough.

These challenges are not unique to mobile, they probably apply to a lot of media (tv, internet). The thing is that mobile just amplifies these challenges and makes it even more urgent to think about them.

The first design challenge is what I call the eating without smell. Anyone who has tried it knows that food tastes completely different when you eat it while pinching your nose (and that you look funny). If we use just one of our senses the experience of eating just isn’t what it could be. Strangely enough this is exactly how we design for mobile.

We are at a party, concert, b’day and what do we do… we stare at our phones to capture the moment in a photo, check-in on foursquare and send a twitter that we are there. We create mobile applications that tend to suck up all our senses. Mobile phones connect us with the rest of the world but in the same time it disconnects us from the moment.

How can we design for mobile so that it’s inclusive on all our senses and the world around us? So that it enriches our experiences instead of distracting us from them?

I mentioned before that this mobile device gives me (the sense of having) more control. As long as I have this with me I don’t need to get lost anywhere in the world. That’s great but the intensity of having this control over our lives gives us the feeling that we are loosing things like serendipity, coincidence, unpredictability and risks in general. Everything has become so serious and calculated.

This has been happening for quite some time now. Ever since the (dry) compass was invented in medieval Europe around 1300, people have been relying on technology instead or their gut feeling to get where they need to be. But in the 1300s nobody blamed the compass of depriving them of serendipity and the sensation of getting lost. Everyone was happy they could finally find their way!

Of course we can create applications that help us get lost today. That’s not the point.

The design challenge current is how do we seamlessly incorporate these aspects into the mobile age and thus back into our lives.

Some of the clues on how to approach this design challenge may very well lie in play and playfulness. Play is all about trying new things, taking risks and exploring but within known boundaries.

The last design challenge I’d like to address is what I call the flat world.

The whole social media revolution and more specifically services like twitter have made it very easy to find and connect with people you like. These connections are not just digital, think of all the tweet-ups that have spun around the world. For some people these new online connections become real life friends.

If you take a closer look at who connects to who you see a pattern where people tend to connect with other people of that share the same interest. So you’re surrounding yourself with more people who like you enjoy jazz music, go to the local soccer club and work as an interaction designer. So while we are expanding our social network, we are in danger of narrowing or world view.

How can we design for mobile in a way that we stimulate our curiosity to broaden our perspective on the world. A great DJ doesn’t only play the records we like, he also helps us discover new music styles. What or who is the DJ in the mobile age?

I started out by showing how awesome mobile is but also elaborating on some tough design challenges.

So to wrap, I’d like take a quick look on what is the future of mobile could or maybe even should be.

The future of mobile is more connected to our human senses and to the world around us.

Mobile will be more fun. We will be more playful probably without even calling it play.

But most of all the future of mobile will be… even more awesome!

Please share your ideas on how you think we can approach these design challenges.

Thank you.

The presentation took just 10 minutes. After that there were some interesting questions from the audience that sparked a discussion about the value of being disconnected in the future. Crosslab recorded all the presentations so the video should be online soon.

Service Design at the Creativity Company Conference 2010

Marc Fonteijn — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:40:27 +0000

September 14th 2010 was the day for the 4th edition of the Creative Company Conference (photos). The speakers at conference turned out to be a very diverse mix of creatives. It was a ride that took the audience from design thinking to transmedia storytelling and everything in between. The goal of the organization was to make this years conference more interactive then the previous editions. They for instances introduces “Questions from the Couch” which where very loosely formed panels. Another interactive break from the regular program where four workshops by members form the Dutch Service Design Network. Our workshop was titled “Service Thinking in Practice”.

Service Thinking in Practice

The workshop was spilt in 2 parts. In the first part I talked about the main ideas behind service thinking; people, experiences, stages and timelines. The second part was made up of an exercise in which the audience had to reframe the value of an existing offering.

Service Design Thinks #2: Exploring the O-Gap

Anouk Randag — Tue, 18 May 2010 09:50:36 +0000

12 mei vond de 2e editie van de Service Design Thinks plaats in Amsterdam.

Exploring the O-Gap.

De O in O-Gap staat voor Organisation. ‘Hoe zorg je ervoor dat je prachtige plan niet struikelt bij de uitvoering in de organisatie.’
2 presentaties, afgewisseld met opbouwende discussies. De sprekers zoomden elk in op een methodiek; één vanuit design perspectief en een vanuit business perspectief.
Het was een inspirerende avond, met 2 presentaties, goede discussies en napraten met een drankje.

31Volts was ter plaatse en bracht verslag uit voor de site van het Service Design netwerk Nederland.
Het verslag is hier te lezen, inclusief presentaties. Ook kun je hier aankondigingen van nieuwe activiteiten volgen.

Presenting at Marketing Pioneers 2010 and Freelance Friday

Marc Fonteijn — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:19:07 +0000

In last 7 days I had the opportunity to present at 2 very different events. Different audience, different themes, different preparation and different reactions! This is my short review of Freelance Friday and Marketing Pioneers 2010.

Freelance Friday

This was the first Utrecht edition of a successful event that has been running in Amsterdam for quite a while. A very relaxed and informal event with around 60 attendants and 4 speakers on the topic of trends.

The organizers gave me 15 minutes to talk about trends in service design. But because for most people in the audience this would be their first encounter with service design in general, I decided to just explain what we do in our studio. Service designer can be so abstract in describing what they do that at the end of the story you don’t have a clue what he or she actually does (yep, happens to me a lot). This time would be different! So I basically create a slideshow using >40 photos from our projects and show all the situation we get our self into from day to day and tell the story.

This resonated pretty well with the audience. A lot of positive feedback and I even got a “So you’re into usability… cool” and “you improve processes right…” instead of the usual “…so what do you do again?”.

Marketing Pioneers 2010

I got invited to Marketing Pioneers to give a short pitch on service innovation. There were about 250 people, primarily with a marketing or sales background. This edition of Marketing Pioneers was all about “supersize your sales”. There were different 5 pitches in total which all had the challenge to squeeze 18 slides into 6 minutes… something no-one managed.

The lead character in my presentation was Carla, a small entrepreneur from Utrecht. I talked about the challenges Carla encounters while running her business. My goal was to show the audience why an insurance company must invest in new and better services for Carla in order to survive. I also talked about the 3 biggest barriers for organization why not to invest in service innovation. Although I got the message about the need for better services across, I ran out of time before I could shed some more light on actually how to do it.

Luckily there were a few minutes for Q&A so of course the first question I got was the famous “and what is it that you actually do”. So I could straighten that out a little but people still felt somewhat left in the dark I guess. A questions you can expect from a sales crowd is “how do you measure the results of your work“, I said that it was thought but a much better answer would have been that we actually don’t.

What did I learn

I noticed that a lot of people really like to see the inner works of a service design process. Showing a creative session done in a regular train gets a lot of people into the design spirit. It might be better to tell a high-level story using down and dirty examples.

What does a service designer do?

Marc Fonteijn — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:51:29 +0000

I was invited to present at the 2nd Meet & Create (dutch) session. This session was dedicated to service innovation and especially the uprising of service design.

Because this was a very creative crowd I took the opportunity to focus very much at the here and now of service design. This resulted in a presentation titled “the life of a service designer”. Trying to give the audience an overview of what they would experience if they’d join our studio for a week.

My leading questions was “What does a service designer do?”

To answer this I just simply looked at what it is that we actually do at 31Volts… I ended up with a short list where I accompanied each item with a real-life project and some tangible deliverable.

This is what service designers do:

we design the process
we take you outside
we develop tools
we bring insights and concept to life
we help people co-design
we try stuff out

It was very refreshing to do a very practical presentation for once. Usually service design presentations tend to be pretty strategic and discuss things on a meta-level.

I’d love to hear If you have some valuable additions to the list!

Update: here’s the presentation:

The video of the presentation should come online in the coming days but the whole thing is in Dutch so better start practicing ;)

User Centred Design & Innovation in Service Systems presentation

Marc Fonteijn — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:25:11 +0000

As you might know 2009 is The European Year of Creativity and Innovation. I was pointed today to a terrific presentation that is published on the website of the European Commission. Now this not being the most user friendly website this presentation and probably a lot more valuable information is sitting there totally undiscovered by the people in the real world…

The presentation by Bruce Tether, professor at the Imperial Collage in London, addresses “User Centred Design & Innovation in Service Systems“. It sounds more complex than it actually is because what it boils down to is the way design has evolved and the key role it has in service innovation. Bruce’s presentation shares a lot of elements Marcel also uses in his presentation “Service design, a new design discipline” that he posted earlier this week.

Although the whole presentation is great, I especially consider the last 3 slides valuable because they make things actionable!

I’ve uploaded the presentation onto slideshare to make it more accessible and easy to share. Of course all the credits and copyright belong to Bruce. You can download the orginal PDF of the presentation here (it contains flipped pages!).

Service design, a new design discipline.

Marcel Zwiers — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:43:17 +0000

For my talk at crowdsourced innovation event Community of Talents. In a room full of professionals in the area of service innovation, I had the privilege of closing the day with a talk on the evolution of design (as a verb).

I finally translated my presentation in Enlish. Here it is:

The world is a garage: designing services is a messy job

Marc Fonteijn — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:35:22 +0000

I had to opportunity to present at the CHI Netherlands Conference 2009 which hosted some really interesting and diverse speakers. The theme of the conference this year was “change” (what else). Because Service design is really gaining momentum in the Netherlands, the conference organizers dedicate a whole track to it. Needless to say that this was a great opportunity for me to share the passion and dedication we have for this field at 31Volts.

My goal was to show the most important lessons we’ve learned in our projects over the recent years. I took a somewhat different approach that is usual for a CHI conference. No scientific theories or models on Service design, but rather practical and inspiring stories from working in the field. I titled my talk The world is a garage: designing services is a messy job as I realized that our lessons learned somehow miraculously also apply to a mechanic working in a garage.

I discussed 4 lessons learned:

Doing research is messy
Be pragmatic with tools
Balance between co-creation and experts
Design frameworks and embrace hacks

The takeaway that I wanted people to remember after attending the presentation was “that in order to create value for people, today’s challenges require organizations to get messy”.

Below are my slides to which I added a few quick notes so you can make some sense out of all the photos. The presentation was also recorded on video. As soon as I get my hands on that I’ll update this post so you can hear the words that come with the photos.

I skipped past the “what is service design” part completely as I assumed the audience had some background information and there was a whole keynote dedicate to the topic later on. So it could very well be that my presentation made more sense to some people after they had seen the keynote on service design basics :)

I really enjoyed the Art-Track at the conference, good move by the organizers! But the highlight for me at the conference was Gilbert Cockton who stunned the crowd with his talk “Designing is at Least Quadricentric”. My head is still spinning from that presentation. I would recommend everyone to view the video registration (at least twice) as soon as it comes online!

Designing Experiences by Bill Buxton at MIX09

Marc Fonteijn — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:35:34 +0000

Here’s a great presentation by Bill Buxton who you might know from his book Sketching User Experiences. At MIX09 he talks about the value of experiences and the fact that we can design them. Don’t focus on the next product you want to design, focus on the unique experience you want to provide.

(You need Silverlight to watch this video)

Design Research blindness

Marc Fonteijn — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:41:22 +0000

Good design research is the cornerstone any design process. There is a big focus on anthropology, especially in Service design. So big that sometimes you get the feeling we’re unable to look critically at what we’re actually doing. Are Service designers getting “high on their own supply”?

In his ~~great~~ brilliant How to Lie with Design Research presentation, Dan Saffer sheds an interesting light on design research by putting things in perspective. Check out the video and slides below.