Hamilton Service Jam 2012

I was disappointed to miss last years Global Service Design Jam so I’m keen to make it to my local one here in NZ this year – hosted by Wintec in Hamilton and organised by Matt Currie of divergent (@divergent_nz). The Global Service Jam, done in the same spirit as the Mozilla Design Jams,  involves a potentially random group of people coming together for 48hours to create something – in this case a prototype of a new service.

They are the kinds of meet ups and distributed global conversations / productions that are only possible thanks to social technologies – but they pick up on a general spirit of sharing, openness, fun and collaboration that are inherent to people who like to create things together, and who recognise the possibilities of starting from nothing to build – who knows what.

The Service Jam runs (roughly)  5pm 24th February to 5pm 26th February

Find your local event on the Global Service Jam site, or

Register for the Hamilton event

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Brand and UX – what form does the overlap take

A topic that floats to the surface on a regular basis in my work is the relationship between brand and UX; an interesting, evolving and somewhat contested territory.

One way to think about brand and experience is as representing  two different perspectives: the perspective of the business and the perspective of the people that use the service or product of that business or organisation. In the past they didn’t overlap as much as they do in the case of online service delivery (or service design generally), but as technologies and practices change some interesting tensions are coming into play [*]. There are two in particular that are recurrent for me at the present time.

The first is at the global organisation or company level, the territory of vision where things are strategic and frankly, largely abstract. The other is at local level, where you have the actual implementation of a specific, concrete project/touchpoint/service (it might be the implementation of one the strategies from the global above).

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Design and Use: Tools and Trends

q. 1 How do our methods need to be extended or adapted to support design in the wild?

q. 2 How do we position our own practice in relation to this dynamic and changing design space?

These are two questions I posed at the end of a recent presentation I was invited to give at UTS to Masters students from the School of Design, Architecture and Building (edited slidedeck above). While the focus was an introduction to Personas and Scenarios (new to many of the students from outside the field of Interaction Design) the presentation also highlighted new trends or “strong currents” currently influencing design.

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