Practice-oriented Design of Products, Services and Experiences
It is somewhat surprising that until recently little research has focused on the design of services. Some companies are beginning to explore strategies to accelerate service innovation and have looked to human centered product design and innovation for inspiration. However when conceiving and developing a in depth service strategy, broader notions of human experience and business value become more central the design problem. Many conventional technology design approaches are aimed primarily at the design of the product functionality and user interface that support interaction between people and the designed artifact. In service, the interactions are also between people, involving relationships, and may include machine to machine intersections where data and information are transformed. With the shift to a service economy and the emergence of innovative companies like Google and Yahoo whose "product" is the services enabled by technology, it is important that we consider if and in what ways our design strategies can grow and change to enable innovation in service design. In this talk I will explore the connections between product, service, and experience design, and outline a practice-oriented design approach to service innovation.
Jeanette Blomberg manages the Service Practices group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. This interdisciplinary group explores organizational and work practice enablers of service innovation and delivery. Jeanette's research focuses on the interplay between people, technology and organizational practices. Since joining IBM Research she has led projects focused on interactions among IT service providers and their clients, collaboration practices among globally distributed sales teams, and new approaches for designing work-based learning interventions. She is currently contributing to IBM's research efforts in the areas of workplace analytics and accountable collaboration. Prior to assuming her current position at IBM, Jeanette was Director of Experience Modeling Research at Sapient Corporation where she helped establish the Experience Modeling practice and managed Sapient's San Francisco Experience Modeling group. Jeanette was also a founding member of the pioneering Work Practice and Technology group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Over the years her research has explored issues in social aspects of technology production and use, ethnographically-informed organizational interventions, participatory design, case-based prototyping, and work practice studies. She has published on these topics, given numerous invited talks, and offered workshops in the U.S. and Europe on the topic of aligning ethnography with product and service design. Jeanette is an active member of the Participatory Design community, serving as Program Co-Chair for 2006 conference. Jeanette received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis where she taught courses in cultural anthropology and sociolinguistics.