Living Service Worlds
Filmed on October 12, 2013, at “Head Heart Hand: AIGA Design Conference”
The living nature of digital services means that designers can’t design a service experience. They can only design the resources for people to bring the experience to life for themselves. Designers create affordances that help people know where to start what to do and when to do it. Services come to life through people: how they “read” the resources their personal history and their context.
Shelley Evenson and Tom Schneider see two trends placing new demands on designing for service. The first is what they call living services—the meteoric rise of mobile embedded sensors and more natural interfaces. The second just starting to appear as a broader global trend is described in the book The Intention Economy—the shift from sellers finding buyers to buyers finding sellers. In this video Evenson and Schneider describe how they think these trends will influence designing for living services.
You may not believe in reincarnation but Shelley Evenson has had three lives. She’s been an academic a consultant and an interaction design guru. Previously she worked on design and user experience at Facebook and was a principal user experience designer and manager for Microsoft. She was also an associate professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Now as the executive director of organizational evolution at Fjord Evenson’s past lives converge. She leads Fjord’s initiatives to grow talent and advance innovative knowledge-sharing practices across the company and she infuses fresh thinking into Fjord’s service perspective. As one of the founding members of the International Service Design Network she brings groundbreaking service design practices to client projects. A contributor to several books and articles on service interaction and design strategy Evenson is also a frequent speaker facilitator and instructor at design and business events around the globe.
Thomas Schneider has more than 20 years of experience in visual and interaction design customer experience corporate identity brand development and project management. He successfully built and managed multidisciplinary teams on large projects from concept through execution in contexts ranging from start-ups to global corporations. Before joining Fjord Schneider led the digital creative team at SolutionSet. His work included the development of a digital health monitoring and coaching tool for WebMD and a SMB learning platform for Google. He previously served as design director at Autodesk’s worldwide marketing group helping expand the role of web-based touchpoints across consumer and reseller channels. Schneider also served as a design director at Wired during its formative first six years.
