I, however, loved this thing more or less like I loved my pet, Skrållan the cat. Completely uninterested in the more comfortable station wagons that my dad drove, my four-year-old heart belonged to the DAF, and I would object loudly to the idea of selling it. I even made a miniature of it using matchboxes, which, thanks to the no-nonsense design of this car, turned out very similar to the real thing.

Cars are among the objects people most often anthropomorphize, according to scientists. With their fronts easily interpreted as human faces, and the fact that they move, sound, smell and respond to your actions, it’s no wonder that they’re given nicknames and get called “unreliable” or “sexy”. In all likelihood, the friendly little face of the DAF was the main reason why I took a liking to it. Just look at its white cousin now as it stands in this promotional photo, a happy and gentle family member – don’t you want to, like the male model here, scratch it a little above its front door?

So, of course, anthropomorphizing cars is a common marketing strategy. Like Max the Beetle.

But does it affect you, treating your car like it’s your friend? Yes, according to Jesse Chandler and Norbert Schwartz, in their article Use does not wear ragged the fabric of friendship: Thinking of objects as alive makes people less willing to replace them (in Journal of Consumer Psychology 20 (2010)). When induced to think about their car in anthropomorphic terms, consumers were less willing to replace it. Also, their decision whether to sell their car depended less on pragmatic considerations, like how well the vehicle actually worked. Instead, they chose to keep or replace depending on whether their car (here, specifically, its colour) was described as “warm” or “cold” – a feature that belongs more in the interpersonal domain.

Why? Well, thinking about their objects in anthropomorphic terms makes people start using knowledge about the social world instead of thinking like they normally do about dead objects. And you don’t discard someone close to you just because they, being old or sick, can’t serve a useful function anymore. You care for them.

This way of thinking is not necessarily good news for either consumers or marketers, say the authors. Hanging on to your hopeless car just because it’s an old friend will mean unnecessary repair costs. And well, brands do want you to change cars on a regular basis. Instead of talking about products as living breathing things, anthropomorphize brands themselves, Chandler and Schwartz suggest.

A smart way to use this phenomenon, however, is used by (the generally smart) Zipcar. When the company named all of its rental cars, they found that it led customers to be more careful with them, putting more effort into cleaning and maintaining them. Not bad.

P.S. I fully support the intention of Dutch art hipsters to bring back the DAF.

From Hartmut Esslinger, A Fine Line (2010), p. XII

And, when we design a new and better object or a more inspiring human experience, the design itself becomes a branding symbol. People recognize visual symbols as cultural expression, and we embrace those symbols that reflect our deeper values, such as a delight in simple, elegant usability. In essence, design humanizes technology and helps businesses appeal to the human spirit. And it is the cultural context of design that roots business in history and connects it to a more profound future.

Here it is. Enjoy your read.

Why service design? Basically, service design is all about creating great user experiences. This is quite different than the creation of a product, which is something that still needs the magic of human interaction to be meaningful (a great user experience can very well include the interaction with a product, but that’s another matter). The experience is what moves people, what they seek and what they remember. And the experience is a powerful thing: a strong, positive experience can create a lasting bond to the entity that provided it. Contrary to much market communication, it has value in itself to the user, it does not need to be associated with a marketable product/service in an artificial way. Instead, the service experience is the embodiment of the brand. Additionally, with its insistence on building value for the user, service design seems like the more modern way of building brands in a world where the mass marketing concepts of target groups of consumers being served story telling and randomly attached values seem increasingly out of touch with reality.

But is it that simple, really? No. Focusing on the design of services can mean a too narrow conceptualisation of how people see value and how they make sense of the world. In its most basic form, service design can seem almost obsessed by just simplifying daily life with a nifty service. But if too single-mindedly concerned with the sheer practicalities of a good service, there is a danger of forgetting the emotional aspect of human life. There’s a danger of falling into a service variety of the frankly quite naïve “cut the marketing bullshit, make a good product” rhetoric I ranted about a while ago (here).

This is the power of traditional branding: with its symbolism and metaphors, it talks to the powerful emotional, expressive part of the human brain. The part that dreams, imagines, plays. The part that makes the experience of getting a coffee in a small coffee shop in a tiny Italian village a memorable experience of excellence, even though the same coffee served in a high street chain would taste unremarkable. It seems to me that the real power of service design as a way to build brands lies where its user value focus is combined with a creative way of thinking about what a good user experience is. A way that accounts for both our longing for being told the myth of the Hero’s journey, and for being able to buy our train tickets with the help of an iPhone app.

During the 00s, there has been a trend for service companies whose products are considered dull, complicated and a necessary evil by consumers (banking, insurance, etc) to look at where consumers do enjoy to go and consume: shops selling designer objects or clothes, coffee shops, and try to emulate the positive experience of visiting these places. The concept is rather simple: by borrowing bits from a service experience that is fun or pleasurable, the service provider deemed less exciting by consumers becomes more enticing. Even though the coffee or the smartly designed umbrella is just a small part of the actual business, the feeling of being in a positively charged, relaxed environment like a café or a shop puts you in a different mindset than at the traditional bank office. Most importantly, if successful, it changes behaviour at the branch. To talk with Mary Jo Bitner, customers exhibit more approach behaviours: coming in, staying, spending money, coming back.

Approach or avoid? A decision based on reactions to the servicescape.

Two Scandinavian examples of this from the last decade: Danish Max Bank rolled out their Max Café concept in 2004, where you can “get a cafè latte, a talk with your bank manager, or see what banking products we can offer”.

Having a coffee at a Max Café. Images from the Danish Design Council.

Similarly, Swedish banking and insurance giant Länsförsäkringar built their Länsförsäkringar Shops (concept start: 2007) around the pleasurable consumption of consumer goods. The servicescape, an elegant and inviting space created by Swedish retail branding firm Bas Brand Identity, is similar to a design store with added space for meetings. The shop sells a selection of items that are related to Länsförsäkringar’s banking/insurance products (e.g. smart shopper with protection from pickpockets) or, not all that related (e.g. hand crocheted iPod cover).

Inside a Länsförsäkringar Shop. Image from Bas Brand Identity.

Incidentally, the same phenomenon could be seen within art spaces at the same time (the 00s). In my bachelor’s thesis, for example, I discussed how the Modern Museum in Stockholm moved towards the retail shopping and café experience – both in its visual communication and in the increased prominence of its museum shop, as well as the addition of an espresso bar (adding to the Modern Museum/Architecture Museum’s existing two restaurants).

Both the Max Cafés and the Länsförsäkringar Shops are, in my opinion, excellent examples of how using the service environment strategically can transform how customers interact with their service provider. I wonder though, when it comes to borrowing concepts for your less exciting service, what will come next. The idea of shopping and coffee shop visits as the most pleasurable of experiences is of course cultural, and therefore in flux. The attraction with these places is often connected with the idea of turning your space into a meeting place, and this role can change. Perhaps the critique of the excesses of consumer culture will lead to a radical shift in direction for where we want to meet and relax, for example towards connecting with nature? And in turn, will next-generation banking be placed in rooftop gardens? Or, more weatherproof, the bank branch turned into a relaxing orangery? (Or a zoo. Just imagine…)

It’s interesting as well, that these two activities (shopping for pleasure, drinking lattes) are typically seen as female-oriented. Either it’s a conscious targeting, or just the fact that they are easily incorporated into a service business of this kind (the banking pub could be problematic, after all). But maybe there’s an opening for servicescapes of a less gendered kind here. In any case, the more services move completely on-line, the more we’ll see innovative service environments that will offer us enjoyment and pleasure. even when using the provider’s main service doesn’t. Otherwise, what’s the point of having them at all.

In this short talk, I’ll present the field of service design to you – a field that has grown a lot over the recent years, but is still rather unknown for many leaders of small to medium sized companies.

Today, the service sector makes up the biggest part of the economy, up to 75% in Western Europe. This number is a result of a major shift during the last century, as you know: the move from an industrial, product-based economy, to a post-industrial, knowledge- and service-based one.

On top of that, the digital revolution has blurred the boundaries between product, service and communication. It used to be quite simple … you had your product, designed by a product designer and packaged by a packaging design firm – and then you used various kinds of market communication to get it out to your customers. If you worked with services, the process was much the same, even though most likely, nobody consciously designed or packaged your service.

Now, however, there’s increasing confusion about what actually constitutes a product, service or brand communication – it all comes together on the web, in phone apps, etc. Also, even in traditional products, there’s a trend for a larger service component: in a world where getting ahead of the competition becomes harder and harder, it’s a way of obtaining a competitive advantage.

But weirdly enough, even though services are so dominant in the economy, many companies don’t invest at all in the design of them. Even though practically every company that makes products take great care in their design, only a fifth of service companies do the equivalent.

Of course, services are not as straight-forward as design objects as products. They have certain characteristics, that have to be taken into account when designing:

First of all, services are created here and now – in the moment of their consumption. This means that they are harder to control fully with design; utterly, the success of a service is always dependent of the person who executes it. Secondly, a service is both tangible and intangible – a hotel night, for example, is not just the access to the physical room, but also many, intangible, interactions. Design of a service, therefore has to be multi-dimensional, taking all aspects into account. Also, it’s often difficult to measure and detect quality in a service, which makes the customer search for clues: designing visual and behavioural clues of a high quality service is important.

Here, you see the dimensions of a service that can be designed: you can design the procedures and behaviour that make up the service, its physical and visual components – the place where the service is executed, digital interfaces, etc – and how the service is communicated. These dimensions all interact to produce the user’s overall impression of the service.

How is it done, then? Well, very briefly, the process of service design is very much like the design of other things. It starts with a research phase, followed by numerous design proposals that are tested and developed, and, often after several iterations, the design is implemented.

Service design employs a number of methods for research and design, but I don’t have the time to show you more than one. An important part of designing service is producing a service blueprint – a schematic “recipe” for the execution of the service. Service blueprints are a kind of service roadmaps – tangible, visual documents that show us where and how customers and companies interact. They can be employed both in the research phase, when analysing the status quo, and as design tools.

I’ve stressed the importance of tangible elements in a service – they often play a large part in how a customer judges service quality, as the abstractness of services is challenging to people. This is especially true with more complex services like medical or professional services. That’s why paying attention to touchpoints is important. Touchpoint can refer to several things, but here I use it as a term for physical interactions between the user and the service provider. Touchpoints can be divided into interacting with staff, the physical environment of the service, physical components (like a user’s manual or a key), screen interfaces and communication (advertising, brochures).

This was a brief introduction to the field of service design. A field that, it seems, has a huge potential of growth in the coming years. Several factors imply that the need for service design will grow: for example, as I mentioned earlier, the service component in products is increasing in importance. Also, customer expectations are, on the whole, rising – today, customers expect excellence in every service of any significant value, and letting your services develop on an ad hoc basis won’t simply be possible any more if you want to stay in competition. It’s time to start paying close attention to the design of your services.

Slaves of the Feed – This is not the realtime we’ve been looking for
Thomas Petersen, founder and partner of Danish digital creative agency Hello discusses our digital life and ponders possible ways to solve the problem of information overload with design.

Re-thinking Interaction Design
Johnny Kolko claims interaction design should move away from talking both branding and user experience. I don’t agree with everything Kolko writes, specifically I find he’s muddling macro and micro perspectives on the role of interaction design (there’s both a critique of UX and branding as ways of maximizing profits, and a critique of using design for that purpose in the first place, and neither are fully explored), but there are some interesting points made about design’s role in culture.

Don Norman’s attack on design research, and ensuing debate
If you have missed this somehow, the debate goes on about what actually drives innovation, technology or design – and whether there’s actually any point in ethnographic and similar research into the consumer’s deep, subconscious wishes. Norman’s answer is basically no, as he finds that technology more often than not creates the needs it fills. Design research is only useful for small incremental changes, he claims (compare this to what Roberto Verganti says in Design Driven Innovation, a book I wrote about earlier this year!) Three responses to this claim: Bruce Nussbaum, who disagrees, Adam Richardson, who thinks Norman’s definition of design research is too narrow, and Steve Portigal, who raises some interesting questions around several points in Norman’s piece.

Not pictured: flags, plates, cups, under-bathroom-glass-paper-towels, laundry bags, pens, notepads, etc, etc.

Elite are of course not unique in this. Many service businesses whose services provide a lot of physical touchpoints – hotels, airlines, etc – put a logotype on everything they see. I understand why, but still wonder: does branding necessarily mean repeating your logotype constantly? It seems to me to be a quite dated way of doing things. Shouldn’t graphic design rather help heighten the brand experience by adding to the positive experience of the service? For example, in this case, by helping to create a welcoming atmosphere and a feeling of (mid-priced…) luxury. (You can get that in a logo, but most likely it’s more easily with other means, especially since there’s a convention of “discreet=exclusive, personal, tasteful”.) Of course there are times when a logo is very helpful on a service artifact. You want to know that the check-in kiosk is from BA if you’re flying BA. But you could still remove 1/2 of these Elite logos and still not be unsure at all of where you’re staying.

Also, the logotype is in many cases a sign of ownership. If it’s not applied with moderation, there’s a risk of the guest feeling like living in someone else’s room. Someone who’s marked all their belongings with “Property of…” before letting you move in. (Well, you shouldn’t steal hotel hangers, obviously, but that’s another issue.)

There’s also the question of standardization. You know you’re in a chain hotel, obviously, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. The standard’s more predictable, etc. But in hotels that have their own atmosphere, overuse of logotypes are unnecessarily intrusive and detracts from the hotel experience. I understand the need to make your mark as a chain, but still.

Here’s a more modern way of letting your brand visually put its mark on your hotel, in a way that heightens the experience of the service. What would happen if a large hotel chain translated this way of thinking to its own brand and clientele?

Sara L. Beckman & Michael Barry: Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking

2007 Article
Article in the California Management Review linking innovation, design thinking and ethnographic methods. Awarded the 2009 Accenture award by CMR. Authors work at PointForward, where you can find lots of short case stories of ethno-informed design.

Download article PDF, or, yes there’s a lazy option, see the Vimeo video.

AIGA: Design Meets Research

2008 Article
Article from AIGA giving a concise history of the evolution of market research for design and discussing the pros and cons of different approaches. Argues for ethnographic methods as a way to dig deeper into a consumer’s mind.

Read it here

Dori Tunstall: Design anthropology: What can it add to your design practice?

Adobe Design Center Tutorial
Quote extensive introduction to design anthropology (not a tutorial of any sort, in fact), underlying ideas, challenges, possibilities, etc. Written by Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at University of Illinois Dori Tunstall, who’s also worked for Sapient, Arc Worldwide, and AIGA’s Design for Democracy.

Read it here. The author’s blog, posts tagged ‘design anthropology’ here.

University of Dundee: Master’s Degree in Design Ethnography

Degree
If you can’t get enough of design + ethnography, well, there’s the opportunity of getting a master’s in design ethnography from the University of Dundee, UK. (Actually it sounds quite tempting … I love Scotland.)

More about the degree.

(A little disclaimer: sometimes, the design world uses the word ethnography a bit more liberally than I would. I’d say some degree of immersion would be necessary? Sometimes, the simple word observation would seem to cover some of these practices just fine. Which is fine. Non-participatory observation is fine. If you’re designing new airport signage, say, you’re very much helped by observing how many travellers that are currently confusedly circling the arrivals hall hunting for a restroom. But it won’t really help you gain much deeper insight, will it? Anyway, in one or two of the links in this review (not necessarily in this part though) it’s not all that clear how ethnographic their ethnography is, but the links might still provide for some interesting thoughts.)

Christina Wasson: Ethnography in the Field of Design

2000 Article
Much quoted academic text on the use of ethnography in a design context. Christina Wasson is an anthropologist, and associate professor of anthropology at UNT. She’s has worked for E-Lab, a design firm that uses anthropological research to develop new product ideas, where she developed an interest in design anthropology. She’s also done consulting class projects for clients like Motorola and Microsoft.

Download PDF of article here, or if you unlike me don’t have a certain sentimental fondness for badly scanned academic article PDFs, it’s online here.

Leslie MacNeil: Design Ethnography: Strategy for Visual Communications

2009 Graduate Thesis
Very, very good text that covers just about every way design and ethnography can meet (at least when speaking about tangible design and not applied design thinking), including case studies of designer-ethnographer collaborations. And, which makes it even more relevant for me, it specifically discusses visual communication, as opposed to product design which otherwise tends to be synonymous with “design” in this context (all those mobile phones!). Academia-phobics have nothing to fear, either, from downloading this since it’s a beautiful and inviting booklet designed by MacNeil herself.

Download PDF here.

IDEO + WKK Foundation: Tangible Steps Toward Tomorrow

2007 Case Study
IDEO is a human-centered design agency more or less impossible to miss talking about these subjects. In this case study, they’ve used ethnographic methods + design thinking to come up with solutions for evolving early education. Do explore other case studies from IDEO as well, many are interesting.

Download PDF case story here.

AIGA + Cheskin: An Ethnography Primer

2007 Information Leaflet
Quite basic primer, veered towards how design can be helped by ethnographic insights. As it’s targeted to designers and pitches ethnography to them in their daily practice, the role of designers solving other types of problems with the aid of ethnographic fieldwork (as in the IDEO case study) is not covered, however, it’s a nice introduction text. Cheskin is a US-based consumer insights consultancy.

Download PDF leaflet here.