Amusing Offering: Evacuation Sculptures

(Originally published in June 2013) Don't Laugh, But A Single Artist Just Totally Outshined An Army Of Government Planners A fun reminder that good ideas can come from anywhere. Especially Guerrilla Wayfinding. Keep your eyes open. Also, I wonder if fun ideas like this can scale, or if they eventually run into a signal-to-noise ratio...

Reaction: Unintended Usage

(Originally published June 2013) How mobile payments might be the global money-laundering machine criminals have dreamed about Designing for ‘Jay-Customers’, 'Negative Personas’, and Service Abuse Reading this article, I realized that service designers, myself included, often design optimistically– that is to say, we design for all kinds of users, but we naively assume that whatever...

Reaction: A glimpse into Emotional Labor

(Originally published in June 2013) Service with a Smile Wonderfully deep insights from the lives of front-stage staff Of course service design strives to be holistic, gestalt, empathetic, deep, etc., etc., etc. - and of course we use great models and tools such as service blueprints, stakeholder maps, service ecology pyramids, etc. to help us...

Reaction: Design vs. Engineering

(Originally published in June 2013) A Surprising Barrier To Clean Water: Human Nature : NPR "Getting clean water to people in the developing world isn’t just an engineering problem. . .An upside-down bottle of chlorine with a dispenser. . .is free to use. . . [but] if you test the water in people's homes in...

Reaction: Positive Outlier Airport Security

(Originally published in July 2013) The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother | Toronto Star “That’s the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.” Simple service solutions for international security problems–...

Reaction: Individual User Profiles on Netflix

(Originally published in September 2013) Netflix Makes Recommendations More Personalized By Adding Individual User Profiles | TechCrunch Netflix is rolling out its long-anticipated user profiles, allowing multiple members of a household to create personalized accounts and get personalized recommendations based on their own individual viewing habits, rather than the habits of an entire household… Whether...

Reaction: Tipping

(Originally published in June 2013) New York Sushi Restaurant Eliminates Tipping Because It Pays Waiters A Salary With Benefits: Changing the relationship between customers and front-stage staff.Studies have already shown that tipping has very little to do with the service actually received– could removing tips altogether lead to a better and simpler experience for everyone...

Customer Service is only one aspect of a Service

(Originally posted in Sept 2014) Blockbuster may have never been rude to you, but, in the end, they still failed as a service offering. That’s why it’s important to ensure that you’re not thinking about Service Design and Customer Service as synonyms. A service is defined by the Oxford dictionary as “the action of helping...