We’re fortunate to have three great presenters for the next Service Design Thinks Leeds on Tuesday 25 October. (It’s our seventh event, but we’re calling it SD Thinks Leeds | 04.) In part 1, we’ll have perspectives on service design in health from Jane Wood and Daniela Sangiorgi. In part 2, Rory Hamilton will show how you can prototype experiences easily and effectively.

Once again we’re grateful to NTI Leeds for providing the venue at Old Broadcasting House. You can find out more and book over on Eventbrite.

Oh, and one more thing.

For a while I’ve wanted to do a Leeds version of Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim’s Systems/Layers Walkshop.

In talking about our November 2011  Service Design Drinks event to tie in with the Leeds Digital Festival I realised it could work really well as a winter evening exploration, centred on Millennium Square and the German Christmas Market. Within a small area we have many features that would stimulate interesting discussion about how the network touches the city, and the glow of screens and lights would be accentuated in the darkness.

The proposed date is the late afternoon and evening of Tuesday 29th November 2011. Want to join in the planning? Head on over to the wiki.

Thank you.

Kelly Goto stands on the stage at Brighton’s Dome, head down, staring at her palm, a perfect mimic of the modern smartphone user, and issues a simple challenge to the dConstruct audience: “Help people to stay upright.”

This is the pivotal moment at which digital design finds itself. After decades training people to gaze into ever more enchanting screens, it’s time for a shake-up, to re-engage with the world around us, once more to look each other in the eye. And it may not be a comfortable experience.

Kevin Slavin dares to ask a roomful of designers why we always look to optics to provide wonder and comfort. Why do we feel the need to mediate the world through a screen, to create (according to a beautiful if only half true story from World War II USA) an upside down backwards town? Why are we not more aware of the dangers that “things that serve the eye trick the eye”? Don’t we remember the beguiling Cottingley Fairies, who showed us long ago that we can’t believe everything we see?

In place of the uncanny valley marketing vision of augmented reality – “We’ll make it magic by putting stickers on everything” – Kevin argues for engagement through behaviour. Pixelated monochrome Tamagotchi inspired more devotion than max polygon count 3d graphics, not by looking real but by exhibiting real traits – being hungry, vulnerable, rewarded and sick. And Kevin should know the power of the invisible: he admits to being spooked by his own code when Crossroads’ Papa Bones swept through the Area/Code studio late one night.

Bryan Rieger and Stephanie Rieger challenge us to engage with the world by releasing stuff that’s not finished, because people prefer it that way. For me their case is marred by over-reliance on the “accelerating pace of change” trope (on which another post follows) but I reckon they have a point about the value of good enough.

As Matt Sheret eloquently puts it: “Hacks scratch the itches that contemporary product design hasn’t caught up with yet.” Time-traveller Matt talks us through the special qualities of things you can put in your pockets – from a Victorian watch to an RFID bike hire key. “RFID is a huge gift for interaction,” he says. I think this is because of its potential as a gap-closing technology that helps link the real world with its digital mirror image.

“Think about the spaces between the experiences you are creating,” says Kelly Goto: to make things that work in the world, we have to understand its people, their rituals and the way they live their lives.

Kars Alfrink makes his own attempt to do this: pointing out the dark side of gentrification. Our cities are divided in plain sight, sharing territory yet blind to each other, like the young Hackney couple enjoying a glass of wine while a tense gang stand-off plays out around them. How do designers get out of their bubble and contribute to a resilient society?

Respect for time and memory surely have a big role to play. Don Norman, in a slide-free talk rich with insight on the state of the user interface art – says we should design memories not experiences: “A memory is a form of augmented reality,” he posits.

And Frank Chimero, who always gives good metaphor, forever replaces my previous best image for our online history. From now of it’s not data exhaust, it’s “walking through snow”. Also Instapaper, Delorean.

Full marks to Frank for the most compelling account I’ve seen of “curation” as applied to web content. Until today I’ve seen “curation” online as a pale, twisted imitation of the real thing, as practiced in museums and art galleries. But Frank put his finger on the thing that makes for good curation – not just hit-and-run picking of stuff but making an educated second pass to transform a collection of objects into a meaningful narrative.

Craig Mod seems to be on similar territory. He talks about data as if it were a living herd, needing to be corraled, then as a field of dead artifacts, in need of “excavation”. What is the shape of the future book? Kilometres high, and chopped up into a million pieces, apparently.

Dan Hon has also dedicated his career to chopping up stories – having followed transmedia storytelling from web 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond. There’s online storytelling the hard way (do it in 2001) and the seemingly easy (do it all on Twitter) though the common thread is good storytelling. Some platforms lend themselves to stories, others do not. Heello is a platform for pretending. Quora is not.

Curiously Dan and Frank both need the same tool for different purposes – something to break out of the blocky file-status-update-album-art tyranny of today’s web services into ways to tell more fluid stories. For Frank it’s about making stories from our real lives, for Dan its creating pretend lives from stories, but in essence both demand the same aesthetic. It’s an aesthetic whose time has come – one that’s authentic without being skeuomorphic. The real world is calling. It wants its designers back.

He writes…

The Bauhaus Movement (1918-1933) was based on a German revival of a purer, honest design representation in architecture, art, typography and product design. Its philosophy celebrated an austere functionalism with little or no ornamentation. It advocated a use of industrial materials and inter-disciplinary methods and techniques. The  Bauhaus aesthetic and beliefs were influenced by and derived from techniques and materials employed especially in industrial fabrication and manufacture. Artists included Paul Klee, Wassilli Kandinsky, and Feininger. Architects and designers included Mies Van der Rohe, Phillip Johnson, Walter Gropius, Lazlso Moholy-Nagy and several others.

Rahul detects the emergence of a new Bauhaus trend in interaction design, typified by the innovative new Windows Phone 7 user interface. But in concluding he asks exactly the right question by pointing to the failings as well as the early promise of the Bauhaus brand of reductionism.

If the Bauhaus movement in the early part of last century failed to resonate with users… can we as designers prepare ourselves to meet the challenges ahead?

If you can bear the profuse ornamentation, I think it’s worth looking a couple of generations further back, to the roots of the movement against which Bauhaus was reacting.

John Ruskin hated classical strictures and mass production. He loved the changefulness that comes when anonymous workers are set free to express themselves through their craft. I think his Nature of Gothic makes a good model for the amazing variety of mobile, web-enabled media, savageness, redundance and all. You can have your IxD Bauhaus, but I’ll keep my Mobile Gothic.

We have three great presenters for the next Service Design Thinks Leeds on Tuesday 1 February 2011.

• Simon East, of Drivegain, on “Designing a new eco-driving service”
• Jean Mutton, Student Experience Project Manager, University of Derby, on “Designing the Enrolment experience”
• Lauren Currie, Snook, Glasgow, (by Skype link) on “How Snook do Service Design in Scotland”

You can find out more at http://servicedesigning.org/cities/leeds/ or book your free ticket at http://sdthinksleeds02.eventbrite.com/

With thanks to NTI Leeds for providing the venue, Old Broadcasting House.

OK, so I have to get this stuff down by midnight before my head turns into a pumpkin.

dConstruct was a day well-spent, listening, tweeting, scribbling and discussing design and creativity – with nine of the most thought-provoking talks we’ll hear in the UK this year. And some of my smartest colleagues and former colleagues were there too, which was nice. There follows my highly partial first draft, to which I may return in the coming weeks.

The past is the new future. I’d seen James Bridle‘s work in print and online but never heard him speak live. Of course I’m biased,  but I found his argument about the importance of preserving our digital history both intuitive and fresh. Like the game of wiki-racing to which he introduced us, James linked effortlessly from his formative years in Geocities to the whole Internet in a shipping container, to the Library of Alexandria and back to the Iraq War.  I now see why Ben Terrett named James as one of his “five things“.  He’s a revelation and if there’s any justice in the world he’ll get his own series on BBC4 or something.

Tom Coates showed the same respect for humanity and history (Darius the Great’s superhighway!) in his talk on the network. I’ve been thinking for a while about the reinvention of everyday life through networked, connected services. Tom is way ahead on this stuff, thinking about TfL’s blue bikes as spimes, connected weighing scales and San Francisco’s smart parking meters. I’m currently conducting my own personal trial of vehicles as a service and will come back to this subject soon.

Just as Tom imagined washing machines as a service, so Samantha Warren hinted at the change we’ll see on the web as the likes of Typekit and Fontdeck bring typography to the networked developer’s toolkit, alongside identity, location and the social graph. She too honoured the history of her subject. I’d like to have heard more about the contrast between her father’s career as a printer and her own as a digital designer. Some may feel they know type already, that Samantha was preaching to the converted. But there’s a whole generation of young designers out there who’ve known only a handful of “web fonts”. As Merlin Mann warned later in the day, the trick is knowing the next things to get geeky about, and typography could be one of those.

Merlin said a lot of other stuff too, some of it very fast. And he was the second speaker of the day to trot out Henry Ford’s dismissive assertion that “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” It struck me that concepts such as user engagement, participatory design, and even customer experience were curiously absent from the whole of the dConstruct programme. From this I assume that either they have become so commonplace that everyone accepts them as a given, or (I fear more likely) we’re seeing a fightback from those  who believe designers have unique powers of creativity, unobtainable and unquestionable by mere mortals.

Marty Neumeier certainly seemed to imply this in his talk on the Designful Company. His opening felt a lot to me like the content of Robert Verganti’s book “Design Driven Innovation” (on which a separate post some time). While I can buy Marty’s idea that enduring products and services need to be both good and different from the competition, he failed to produce any way of judging “good and different” from “bad and different” other than giving the market a few years to decide, or employing the fabled “intuition” of designers, which other disciplines in business are assumed to lack.

Brendan Dawes was fun and engaging when talking about the way designers collect inspiration, on how you can break a pencil into several smaller pencils, and on the delights of designing for the new tactile user interfaces, but his process also contained a black box component in the form of “good taste” and “you shouldn’t be a designer if you haven’t got good taste.”

John Gruber took it further, hailing the auteur director in film as a suitable model for design. That’s all for the good if it makes designers feel better about themselves on a day out by the sea, but I know how most of my non-designer colleagues in business would react to this kind of a pitch, and it wouldn’t be complimentary.

I was much more convinced by the perspectives on process from David McCandless and Hannah Donovan. David had a wonderful take on the way visualisation can be used to tell a story, such as putting huge sums of money into perspective, but also how visualising a dataset can reveal the story to the data-designer-journalist. For example overlaying BNP-membership hotspots with population ethnicity revealed the two to be largely exclusive, with only a few pockets of overlap. This seems like reflective design at its best, playing with the data to see what it can teach us. David also suggested that our continued exposure to design and infographics in our culture is making everyone more design-literate. I like this idea – a suitable counterbalance to the notions of “taste” and the “intuitive” anointed.

But I found Hannah’s talk on improvisation in music the most compelling account of how design happens, as a team enterprise. Like my other favourites, her session, complete with live improv, was steeped in an appreciation of the history from Mozart to Hip Hop. To an outsider improv may seem free and effortless, but it relies on tools, structures, clarity of roles and mutual respect to make it happen. The best designers I have known have always appreciated these things; the most painful to work with behaved like John Gruber’s auteurs.

A day in Helsinki with my wife and three lively sons included a visit to the Design Museum.

We enjoyed the permanent exhibition on the ground floor. It raised questions about what is designed and how. Also, what belongs in a design museum: Aalvar Aalto, kitchenware, ceramics, chairs, lots more chairs, and – being in Finland – Fiskars scissors and a Nokia Communicator, wooden prototypes and all. But none of these could be described as the best thing in the museum.

The sight of my boys fighting over the mouse of a virtual reality interactive of the Finnish Pavilion from the 1900 Paris World Fair definitely added an extra frisson when we moved upstairs to a whole floor filled with stunning and expensive Oiva Toikka glassware. Sensational, but still not the best.

For my money they saved the best design until last. (I mean this sincerely and not in any way to undermine the contents of this wonderful museum. I’d love to return with a little more time on my hands.)

Like many other museums and galleries the Design Museum gives visitors a sticker to show they’ve paid. Thus, outside other museums we see little clusters of discarded stickers, erupting like a disease on any available surface. Like this…

Or this…

Not so the immaculate doorstep of the Helsinki Design Museum. For just inside the doorway is a box, about the size of my smallest child. The box’s role in life is to attract coloured stickers. I say with some certainty that this was the single most interactive, participatory and engaging part of our family’s visit.

I have no idea who put the box there, whether they understood its true purpose beforehand or simply permitted it to remain once the practice emerged. I’ve seen the solution elsewhere. Maybe museum people swap tips like this at museums conferences.

Whatever the story, the originator of this solution is a true design genius. It’s simple, fun, human-centred, and it solves a social problem. Without a doubt it’s the kind of thing that belongs in a design museum.

There are lots of reasons to come along to Leeds Service Design Thinks on Tuesday 14 September. So many that it’s hard to know where to start.

I could begin with the chance to meet and chat with some of the smart and passionate service designers who made it to our first Service Design Drinks event back in June, and some more who’ll be joining us for the first time. It was a bit of a gamble to bring this format to Leeds, modelled on successful events in London, Glasgow and elsewhere, but it paid off handsomely. We discovered there’s lots going on already, and lots of interest in developing a northern community of interest around service design and design thinking.

But starting there would be to neglect the fact that on September 14 we’re giving you the chance to hear from Dr James Munro about his social enterprise, Patient Opinion, and the challenge of building better services in the NHS. James already presented his work at Service Design Thinks in London, and we know it’ll be of interest to many people working in the North. I’d give up my Tuesday evening just to hear from James.

But that might give the impression that service design is only for public services and social enterprise. It’s not. We also have my Orange colleague Kathryn Grace presenting her work on retail customer experience. As a designer for a company called Everything Everwhere, Kathryn has a unique viewpoint over in-store experiences, large-scale e-commerce and e-care, and cutting-edge mobile applications. I know she’s passionate about making all these things work together to deliver a simple and engaging customer experience. Kathryn also deserves the credit for making this whole event happen in the first place. Tero and I have played supporting roles, but hers is the main drive and motivtation behind both “Drinks” and “Thinks”.

And if you’re still wavering, consider this. Not one, not two, but three amazing speakers! For we will also hear from Professor Guy Julier of Leeds Metropolitan University. When we set up SD Leeds we wanted to explore how service design approaches could make a positive difference to the place where we live and work. So Guy’s role in the Leeds Love It Share It community interest company is right up our street. He’ll tell us about “Margins within the city” a recent community development project.

There’s no end to the fascinating questions that arise when we consider these three topics together. When designing a service, where do you start? Who do you start with? And what kind of people and processes make a new service more likely to succeed? That’s why we’ve tag-lined the event “Starting Points”.

“Service Design Thinks Leeds 01 | Starting Points” is on Tuesday 14 September, from 6pm to 9pm, at a central Leeds venue to be confirmed. You can sign up now on Eventbrite, follow us on Twitter, or find out more about this and other similar events on servicedesigning.org.

Maybe it’ll be the start of something new.

I think there’s a coherent narrative to be woven between all of the following, but for now, I offer them to you as a puzzle of jumbled bullet points. Fuller posts on some of them may follow.

1. It’s been a few weeks since my colleagues and I at Orange moved offices from Holbeck to Clarence Dock. I’ve been meaning to share some photos and thoughts on the new locality, ever since I saw Mike Chitty’s blog post and Imran Ali’s interesting response, Ideas for Cities. I know that was February and this in June. I will do so soon. Just call it slow blogging.

2. For Fathers’ Day, we took a family trip on the Leeds sightseeing boat from Granary Wharf to Clarence Dock. For 20 minutes the River Aire was our Canale Grande, only without the gondolas and palazzos. Lots of cities have a river, but I reckon we could do more with ours. If you live in Leeds you should take the boat at least once, just to see the familiar from a different perspective.

3. Kathryn, Tero and I hosted Leeds’ first ever Service Design Drinks at the Midnight Bell on Tuesday. It went even better than we’d hoped. We had a broad range of interests, some fascinating conversations and new connections made, including some people who travelled a long way to take part. We can see there’s more than enough interest for us to move to the next stage with Service Design Thinks, an evening of three talks followed by an open discussion. More on that soon.

4. Mike was one of our service design drinkers. He floated the concept of an Innovation Lab for Leeds: “a process – not a place.  It usually culminates in an intense workshop to allow key thinkers, influencers, technologists and service users to come together to work intensely and constructively on developing a vision for how things could be…” Turns out Imran had already been thinking about this too. Imagining a place to imagine solutions for our city: I guess that’s meta-imagineering.

5. Finally, back in Holbeck on Thursday night Temple Works was more alive than I’ve ever seen it before, with the Sh! Awards, a prize for the region’s most promising design students run by my friends at Brahm. Having been a judge as a series of amazingly confident young designers presented their work in the edgy surroundings of the Temple Works loading bay, I’m sure the best one won. You should check out Matthew Young‘s work now, before you see it everywhere. In particular, watch his D&AD nominated winning video, The City…

So join the dots! Can tell what it is yet? if you can, please let me know.

Last week I dropped in on a test of one of our flagship products, running in prototype on a touch screen phone. The sessions I saw went well: no problems using the phone, some encouraging stuff on our product, a few issues, no showstoppers.

But then this…

• The thumb deployed to tap links, to hunt and peck at letters in text input
• The forefinger to slide and drag
• Even sometimes the middle finger to scroll

And since then I’ve been watching how people treat their touch screens – some lovingly, some harshly. And the more I watch, the more I wonder if “touch” is even the right word. More like…

• A stroke screen
• A press screen
• A smear screen
• A stab screen

This amazing, visceral dexterity at once reveals the inadequacy of the previous great user interface breakthrough, that fistful of plastic, the mouse, and its faux precise on-screen avatar, the pixel-pointed arrow. The four-year-old child who was looking for the mouse behind the TV is now a six-year-old jabbing impatiently at the screen.

Microsoft Word tells me this post has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 5.1, so to all you 10-year-old mobile designers out there, this pearl of wisdom is for you.

The way we design for these screens needs to change, to consider not just the size of the screen but the hands with which people hold and control it.

• Are they big hands or small hands?
• Does it work as well with the left as with the right?
• Does this component suggest fingers or thumbs?

In such choices lies the difference between user frustration and user delight.

Update 22/08/2010: Nice observations from Dan Saffer of Kicker Studios on Finger Positions for Touchscreens

Why? Well it goes like this…

In the beginning, was the Screen, and the Screen was a Television, and we gathered round the Television and gave it our undivided attention. And there were not many channels, so producers devoted their time and money to making good programmes in which we grateful viewers were immersed.

Then came the Web, and unlike the TV, it offered near limitless choice of sites and services. So the producers of Inter-Net Web Sites had to worry about stuff like findability, and usability, and (yuck) “stickiness”. They had competition, and we were easily bored, so they strove to give us novelty in content and agility in development. They invented SEO and pay-per-click and the Million Dollar Homepage.

Yet still all the striving happened within the bounds of the Screen. By and large the world outside the browser window was of little concern to the web designers.

Meanwhile, there were Telephones, and unlike TV and the PC-web, they existed in a world of divided attention. We made short calls in busy places, and sent hurried text messages in the gaps between other important stuff in our lives. The context of use was filled with constant distractions. As I’ve advocated here before, try using your service in broad daylight on a busy street corner, preferably in a slightly dodgy area of town, and you’ll see what I mean.

The life of a mobile service provider was a hard one, focused on finding the right customer needs and meeting them with usable solutions. Technology was fragmented and its vagaries absorbed much time and effort, but at least this meant that the few who conquered the technology could enjoy substantial rewards. The world outside the Screen was complex and confused but, compared to the wild, wild web, services were scarce and contention for “real estate” was limited.

Now, joyfully and at long last, those technical barriers to entry in mobile are melting away. Anyone can make content or services, offer them to consumers anywhere in the world, and monetise them through payments and advertising. We can experience those services on bright, light, sleek, enjoyable devices.

For those who laboured through the hard years this should be both exciting and challenging, but one thing is for certain: just turning up is no longer nearly enough. Unlike the mobile of old, today’s services exists in an era of abundance - not just “an app for that” but dozens - thousands - all vying for our attention.

To put it another way, mobile web services are born into the zone of maximum contention for the user’s attention. To succeed they must be strong enough to attract and retain the user in a state of divided attention and among an abundance of competing services.

This means mobile web design requires a special set of qualities, resting on the bedrock of solid technical infrastructure and user interface expertise, but towering far above basic functionality and product.

Key challenges faced by the mobile designer include…

• Discovery – the need to stand out from the crowd, to appear for the customer at the right point and time in their journey, both online and offline.
• Engagement – not minutes racked up in a single session, but deep engagement with the user’s everyday life and habits, spanning multiple contexts and episodes of use.
• Choreography – of touchpoints to deliver the end-to-end service experience, in which mobile plays an increasingly important, but rarely exclusive or dominant, part.
• Adaptiveness – to the needs of the customer, her contexts, her devices and the available enablers.

And it’s no coincidence that these are also the transformative characteristics pursued by service design.

Mobile web services are exciting precisely because they can reach so far into the noisy, messy real world, and because they form such a plethora of competing and inter-connecting solutions. Scan a barcode with a cameraphone, then click to call the cheapest retailer. You’ll quickly understand the potental in the palm of your hand.

Realising such potential demands, to paraphrase the Service Design Network’s Manisfesto…

• an holistic approach, which considers in an integrated way strategic, system, process and touchpoint design decisions, and
• an iterative process that integrates user-oriented, team-based interdisciplinary approaches and methods, in ever-learning cycles.

Welcome to the new world of mobile design. Step forward the service designers.