2008 April Archive at CIID

Archive for April, 2008

Mapping Crime

Published by Dave Chiu
on April 29th, 2008
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I’ve been a fan of Stamen Design since seeing Cabspotting. I also really admire their work with Trulia to visualize real estate growth patterns across the US. One project launched several months ago is called CrimeSpotting, which presents a more usable and visually appealing version of crime information from the Oakland police presented as on the Crimewatch site.

Crimespotting

Stamen’s version lets you observe trends within particular kinds of crime over time and geographic location. While such a visualization naturally raises questions about cause and effect, and the fundamental socioeconomic causes behind the crimes, it definitely makes the information more accessible. And, arguably, accessibility is the first step towards asking these tough questions.

The Crimewatch site is run by the Oakland police department, which means that the entries are “official”: someone had to sign a paper which attests to the existence of the crime. By comparison, an initiative in Brazil called WikiCrimes takes a more collaborative, grass-roots approach. If you’ve been a victim of a crime, or wish to report one, you can enter the event in the system with information describing the alleged criminal and any witnesses who can corraborate the crime.

WikiCrimes - Brazil

This grass-roots approach introduces an element of uncertainty regarding the authenticity of some claims. However, when considering the political contexts of both the Crimewatch site and the WikiCrimes site, it’s clear they are each a product of their particular circumstance. In the case of WikiCrimes, people may not trust the police and therefore may be reluctant to report crimes in a more traditional (yet “official”) manner.

WikiCrimes - Rio

By comparison, the Oakland map reflects a reliance on reporting from official sources, which can also present its own unique problems. For example, rape is considered to fall under Aggravated Assault, and thus cannot be differentiated within the statistics. Many would likely draw a slightly more naunced distinction.

Mapping crime in general can be a problematic venture simply because of the ambiguity and narrowness of the aggregate information. It is too easy to paint an entire area with a broad stereotype, or to leap to certain conclusions based on distributions or timings as presented by the map. While valuable, I suspect that these sorts of visualizations are most useful as tools with which to pose questions, rather than oracles within which we can find answers.

CHP Traffic Incidents

In sharp contrast to these sense-making endeavors is the real-time feed from the California Highway Patrol’s Traffic Incident Information Page. Here you can follow incidents throughout the state as they emerge and resolve, everything from dogs on the freeway to ambulances responding (although it should be noted that they do not report on police actions, such as pursuits).

While this tool may not enable reflection in quite the same way (although vowing to be a safer driver counts, perhaps), it does enable oversight of the otherwise invisible goings-on of a government institution. That the information is presented as pure text lends a peculiar voyeuristic edge to the experience, as does the terse language which requires a separate glossary to decipher.

I’ve wondered if this type of information could be translated into a more visual experience, but there’s something visceral about bearing witness to real-time events grounded in a narrative format which I am not convinced would effectively carry over into the visual realm. In the same way that Crimespotting and WikiCrime are about volumes and aggregations, the CHP site is about granular, per-incident information in which the geography is secondary to the sequence.

The Health of our Future

Published by Dave Chiu
on April 27th, 2008
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What will the future of health look like? Will it be a utopian vision of clean hospitals, digitized medical records, and embedded displays? Will it take a more preventative approach, encouraging education, exercise, and fitness? Or will it go the way of outsourced IT and programming as the US experienced in the early 2000’s?

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen all three visions and I thought it would be interesting to review and compare concepts from Microsoft and Apple, and see how they measure up to what is really happening in other parts of the world in the face of rising healthcare costs in the US.

Microsoft’s Vision of Health Care

This video, though posted to YouTube in March, is actually over a year old. There’s a description and more information in this blog article on Microsoft’s site, or you can watch the video here:

In terms of aesthetics, the video holds up pretty well. The UI doesn’t look too dated, and the technology (for the most part) is definitely something within the realm of a 7 to 12 year time frame, as described in the blog post. It’s all quite believably presented, and a nice, coherent story emerges which makes me feel a bit warm and fuzzy about technology’s potential for improving our everyday lives.

There are also some really nice touches: the digital tablet which recharges by the door and displays the room number when not in use, and the bedside table surface which uses colored circles to indicate whether medication has been taken.

Microsoft Vision of healthcare

However, while watching this I found myself becoming exceptionally critical of it.

In many ways, this video reminds me of those films from the 1950s: you know, the kind which purport to show the future of cars and forget about gridlock? In the case this video, I couldn’t help but think of the major oversight:

World Population Growth

This is not something which most of us think about, but in 10 years there will be almost 1 billion more people on the planet. Consider that number for a moment. And consider that the world population in 2018 is projected to be double what it was in 1970. The Phillipines alone sees 300 new babies per hour.

So this raises at least one question in my mind (and hopefully yours as well): Where are all the people in this video? I’m reminded of architectural renderings which present abstract representations of people milling about in the tens, not hundreds. Where are the shared hospital rooms? Where are the crowded hallways which would make any floor-based way-finding solution impractical, if not impossible?

The danger of presenting this kind of vision without sufficient reference to real-world circumstance is that it comes off as unhinged: I can’t help but think that this is where design begins to go off the rails and abandon all sense of reality. Do you really believe that in seven years hospitals will look like what is depicted in this video? Call me cynical or jaded, but I’ve seen enough proposals for flying cars which, on the face of it, looked very rational and in reality remained broken promises. Whether or not infrastructure can change sufficiently to deliver the physical environment depicted is one thing, but the lack of consideration for the social condition in 10 years makes this video seem almost…quaint.

To remain relevant, it seems to me that these kinds of visions need to integrate some kind of social or environmental component that serves to connect these visions with the reality that we all know and experience today, and can anticipate as living in tomorrow. It’s tempting to believe that the future will be all flying cars and household robots. But in the face of climate change, rising gas prices, and precipitous population growth I think we also need to consider the other extreme of a more dystopian environment, one which poses a host of wicked problems.

I truly believe that design as a discipline can step up and make a substantive contribution to these problems, but only if we acknowledge a common point of departure that more closely resembles what we know from everyday life. In fact, I am convinced that Design (and by association, designers) can take a leading role in this process. The question is whether we want to apply ourselves to the task at hand and incorporate more of “what is” and “what we anticipate” into our visions of “what could be”.

Apple+Nike’s Fitness System

In contrast to Microsoft’s vision, Apple and Nike offered a glimpse of their vision via some patent filings (also made about a year ago) of a more contemporary lifestyle application. That is to say, an application which could be implemented today, rather than in 7-12 years.

More details here and here, but the basic approach is to combine the video capabilities of the iPod with a more sophisticated version of the Nike+iPod running system to deliver a service that helps you with strength training and other exercises. What’s particularly compelling about this system is the promise of incorporating educational elements into the overall service.

Apple Nike Patent filing

If you’ve used the Nike+iPod running system, you know how surprisingly well-executed the service is. Seemingly from nowhere, Apple and Nike teamed up in 2006 to produce what I would consider a benchmark in service design and delivery. What’s even more surprising to me is that (as far as I’m aware) nobody else has copied this approach, which blends a seamless hardware and software combination with social networking.

But that’s old news. The new vision that these patent filings reveal is that Apple and Nike are looking to tackle full-body health and fitness regimens. The addition of video to the iPod enables clear instructions for technique, and I could imagine this would provide a very nice platform for personal coaching. Connect this data collection and feedback system to the internet (either via the iPhone or WiFi) and obtaining real-time feedback from a live coach, or engaging in real-time competition with a friend, is not inconceivable. This is all relatively obvious stuff, though.

What’s interesting to me is to see how Apple is orchestrating a shift in how we think about the iPod. Since its inception, the iPod has been about music. Now, Apple wants the iPod Touch to be the first mainstream WiFi mobile platform. This is not a minor refocusing, considering the iconic status of the iPod. So instead of going on at length about this shift and doing a lot of hand-waving, Apple is following a little more subtle (subversive?) path by simply providing functionality in such an attractive way that people rush to adopt the new mindset without really thinking about the shift itself.

So of course the iPod is more than a music player. Of course it is part of a running system. Of course it helps you lift weights. And suddenly an iPod is not just about music: we’re using an integrated, persistent, participatory device that seamlessly assists us with our primary tasks. Apple makes this stuff look easy, but I suspect this type of transition actually a very difficult path to navigate successfully.

It’s ironic that Microsoft’s vision of the future revolves around a clinical trial for diabetes, when one of the preventative measures for diabetes is exercise. Microsoft’s vision details a reactive (and traditional) approach of medical intervention and medication, while the Nike and Apple vision proposes a more preventative approach that enables personal lifestyle management. Treating and managing, or preventing and empowering? Which one do you think is more forward-thinking?

More importantly, the Apple and Nike vision illustrates the value of education as an enabler in service design. In this system, people can conceivably “graduate” after learning all the techniques. Perhaps they will stay on to remain part of the community or to receive feedback on their progress, but ultimately they are not dependent upon the service for their continued success. The same cannot be said about medication.

Medical Tourism in Bankok

In sharp contrast to both of these visions of health lies the reality of impossible deductibles and declining quality of healthcare in the US. Taking cues, ironically enough, from the tech industry, a steadily-growing contingent of so-called “medical tourists” have begun arriving in Bankok for an out-sourced take on the future of medical care. A photo from an article in the most recent issue of Fast Company (Fast Company: Medical Leave) sets the tone nicely:

The main lobby at Bumrungrad

This is not a hotel, but the lobby of the Bumrungrad hospital in Bankok. There is a concierge desk which can help you to renew your visa should you need to extend your stay, and a Starbucks brews coffee in the corner. Different floors accommodate and cater to varying nationalities. The front desk collectively speaks 24 languages.

According to the article, around 430,000 patients from overseas were treated in 2006 for everything from knee replacements to triple bypasses. And one possible direction for this trend is a move towards what can be seen as even more outsourcing. As the spokesperson interviewed for the article states:

Health care, in his mind, is not necessarily a social compact or a universal right, but a quality product to be packaged and sold at a sensible price; he assumes patients are much savvier consumers than their doctors give them credit for.

Among such phrases as “just-in-time patients” and the “Toyota-ization of healthcare”, one can sense a shift in how we’ve come to expect and experience the delivery of medical services. Is this good or bad? Hard to tell, but here’s the vision:

“In order to ensure continuity of care,” he goes on, “you’ll never leave the system. What could be better than telling an American patient they’re going overseas to an American-owned hospital? They’re going to discover the same supply-chain advantages Toyota did when it created just-in-time manufacturing. We’re going to have the same thing — just-in-time patients. Hospitals are not going to spend any more money or any more time in the movement of that patient through the system than is necessary. They’re going to get the patient in, get them on that global platform, and get them back. Now, how do they do that in a fast, efficient way where quality is kept, efficiency is gained, and prices don’t go up? It’s classic manufacturing and logistics.”

The big question is whether patients will be able to adapt (or even accept) the notion of flying 24 hours around the world to undergo surgery from a doctor they’ve never met in person before. As it turns out, money is a big motivator, both on the insurers’ end and the patients’. Some early trials have split the cost savings between patient and insurer, with the patient pocketing a part of the difference. Of couse, one concern lies in whether insurers will compell patients to choose the outsourced option, or if they can rely on incentives to lure particularly expensive procedures overseas.

Final Thoughts
So, I think this issue of outsourcing has relevance to the previous two concepts in two ways. First, the Microsoft vision of the future retains a familiar dynamic between patient, doctor, and physical space while exploring some new technologies. The scenario’s omission of social context is detrimental, but even more so in the face of outsourcing’s disruptive impact in service delivery. When confronted with the possibility of outsourcing, Microsoft must consider an uncomfortable question: the hospital and systems of the future as depicted in the scenario may exist, but will there be any patients in it?

More insidious still is the notion that perhaps we are not prepared for this type of change as presented by both the realities of Bumrungrad or the vision of Microsoft. Instead, we may be more willing to accept an approach more along the lines of the Apple iPod transition: stepping-stones which entice us towards a new future and instill a new mindset as we follow them. In this sense, Microsoft’s vision is a non-sequitor.

Ultimately, all of these visions and realities may be trumped by changing environmental and economic conditions: rising fuel costs may impact both air travel and imports (those shiny iPods have to be imported from somewhere), as perhaps will an increasing awareness of environmental costs associated with air travel. Rising populations may demand services locally which might have been directed at a more international clientele.

While such contextual influences may negatively impact the visions described above, they may also spur investment and reconsideration of more local initiatives. We will no doubt see more proposals for the future of health, and the more closely they consider the incorporate social, environmental, and economic considerations (not just technological) the more likely we are to see them realized.

Is interactivity still the new pink?

Published by Dave Chiu
on April 25th, 2008
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I know that blogs are typically about the latest and greatest, but sometimes it’s nice to reflect on some older things which hold their value well over time.

From a few years ago, Interactivity is the New Pink is one such post which I tend to return to every so often, as I find it does a really great job at parsing and distinguishing interactive design from interaction design. This might seem like a subtle and perhaps even picky distinction to make, but the difference is rather significant.

Interactive is a word, an adjective, tightly tied to digital technology roughly meaning capable of acting on or responsive to user activity. The most important clue to the mysterious disappearance of interactive in current colloquy might lie not in the word’s lexical meaning but in its syntactic roles in most sentences: Like other adjectives interactive serves as a modifier of a noun. It describes a quality of a thing and distinguishes it from similar things.

I’m always surprised when talking with Interaction Designers that many aren’t aware of the difference. Interaction, it would seem, is what happens in the space between the person and an object, whereas interactive is describing a characteristic of the object. In a way, it’s similar to how GM makes cars and Honda makes engines: one is constrained by the form, while the other is free to innovate with anything that can fit a motor.

I find it’s useful to review this notion of interactive vs. interaction from time to time, and this is a nice article which I keep bookmarked to provide such a reminder.

Service Design Symposium - Speaker: Jørgen Rosted

Published by Dave Chiu
on April 21st, 2008
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As the director of FORA, Jørgen Rosted acts as a policy advisor to the Danish Government. His presentation at the Service Design Symposium identified service design as a new area for exploration and expansion within Denmark, and described his work to create a framework encouraging the development of its practice in Denmark.

In his talk, Jørgen identified innovation as one of the main drivers behind interest in service design. According to him, “Companies today ask WHAT instead of HOW, or WHAT before HOW.” Companies want new concepts, and while the HOW can be devised both internally (R&D) and externally (management consultants, design companies) using traditional capabilities, the WHAT increasingly comes from new and different places.

Jørgen used the term “concept design” to define the method of creating the WHAT. Transformation design, service design, concept design…in his view, they’re just different names for producing basically the same thing. That is, “a new concept is a solution to a problem that has not yet been solved or which so far has been solved in an unsatisfactory way. A new concept is a platform for (a series of) new products and services.”

The goal of his work is to benchmark Denmark against the rest of the world and develop recommendations for nurturing concept/service design within Denmark. Interestingly, in the process of mapping the world’s concept/service design companies, he noted that there were few, if any, in Asia.

His research revealed three archetypes of concept design companies. The first is the holistic concept design company, which is capable of all phases of creation through production. The second is the design expert concept design company, which is very good in design and can push clients into a more holistic view. The third type is the strategic concept design company, which creates concepts and hands the work off to others for production/implementation.

One point that I found particularly interesting was with regards to user feedback. Typically, designers have to assume that users don’t really know what they want, that we have to observe them to discover their real needs. Jørgen cautioned against the blanket application of this attitude, using Michael Schumacher as an extreme case of someone who could very clearly articulate his needs. When working with someone at this end of the spectrum, you need to listen to what they explicitly say to determine what you need to do. At the other end of the spectrum is someone who cannot express their needs; in this case you need to use observation to figure out what to do.

For more details, check out the video below. Jørgen’s complete presentation as given at the Symposium also follows. Stay tuned for Ezio Manzini’s talk, which will be up in about two weeks.

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Data on the High Seas

Published by Dave Chiu
on April 18th, 2008
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Unless you live near an active port, shipping is one of those invisible functions of modern society that we take for granted to deliver iPods and bananas to malls and supermarkets around the world. I would venture that few of us pause to think about the sheer volume of shipping required to support first world consumption habits. And while there has been a lot of attention paid to personal GPS units like TomTom and Garmin recently, I hadn’t seen (or even thought) about applying the same technology to visualize shipping from a consumer standpoint. Which is a bit strange, considering how extensively GPS is used within the industry.

I’ve since found two nice examples of shipping visualizations. The first, Sailwx tracks ships globally. While the interface isn’t the most beautiful, the site contains a ton of data and I’d be curious to see what intrepid programmers could do with it.

The second example is very local and confined to the San Francisco Bay Area. Hi-Def San Francisco has a real-time map of all shipping traffic in the San Francisco Bay. It’s like Stamen Design’s Cabspotting, but for ships. What’s even nicer is that you can actually see the ships (when it’s not foggy or at night) thanks to an HD camera viewing the entrance to the Bay, so there’s a connection between the real world and the visualization which many others lack (you can’t see images of the cabs, for example).

The slightly humorous bit is that the site uses Google Maps, which, when you use the Satellite view, captures ships in its photographs. So there’s a juxtaposition of historical data mixed in with the real-time visualization. But I suppose it’s the same for city streets—ships are much larger, so they’re easier to notice. What’s also nice is if you roll over one of the moving ships (blue dot with an arrow to show direction), the map displays a path of the vessel. Elsewhere on the site is a time lapse of ship traffic in the Bay, with little trails wandering west off the map and ferry boats speeding around the Bay.

A mix of real-time and historical shipping information

Blogger Health

Published by Dave Chiu
on April 18th, 2008
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Confirming what I’ve long suspected, the New York Times recently wrote about bloggers and their health (In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop), concluding that maybe it’s not such a healthy proposition for a lot of people out there. Sleeping disorders, weight gain, and even coronaries can all be attributed to the pressure of being first to post about a subject in a 24/7/365 world.

I remember when there was talk of the potential for blogging to kill traditional journalism. (Now it would seem that blogging has the potential to kill the blogger…) But in a pay-per-click environment it is hard to put quality ahead of quantity:

[Brian Lam, editor of Gizmodo] said the evolution of the “pay-per-click” economy has put the emphasis on reader traffic and financial return, not journalism.

I think strong correlations can be made to the 24-hour news cycle of CNN, with dual pressures of both being first to report and to fill otherwise “dead air”. I would argue that this constant reportage is not healthy for the reporter/blogger, as the NYTimes article would seem to support, just as it is not healthy for the reader to be inundated with a constant stream of content. It’s a question of signal to noise, and it would seem to demand new tools to handle the flood of new content. My RSS reader is regularly at four figures of unread posts, and I must say it makes me just a little anxious at times. Anyone else share similar sentiments?

As for changing this “first post” culture that the article describes, it would seem that Google’s recent results present little argument against the fire-hose approach to blogging. However, quotes like those from Brian Lam would seem to indicate an opportunity for more journalistic, substantive approaches as well. How about it: quality or quantity?

Steering into the Ice

Published by Dave Chiu
on April 16th, 2008
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By now you’re probably seen the amazing video of the Boston Dynamics Big Dog. There’s a better-quality version on their site, but this YouTube copy certainly gets the point across nicely:

You’ll note that this video has been viewed about 4.9 million (!) times. I suspect the reason for the Big Dog’s popularity is twofold.

Biomimicry

First, the Big Dog is kinda creepy with the droning of the gasoline engine and its prancing gait—it easily assumes a kind of biological or animal verisimilitude. If you look at some of the other projects that Boston Dynamics is working on—robots that climb and swim—the theme continues, although not to the degree that the Stickybot project at Stanford pushes it (their robot recalls a flattened plastic salamandar).

This biomimetic approach makes sense (why reinvent thousands of years of natural selection) but it’s not everyday that we see something so advanced, and that’s what makes it just a little eerie. So I think that this is part of the fascination: seeing something new that’s obviously very advanced and capable.

However, I don’t think that this aspect alone accounts for the interest. After all, it’s pretty boring watching the Big Dog walk around a forest, a snow bank, a parking lot… YouTube, blogs, et al make new and interesting stuff available 24/7, and these days it takes a lot to impress.

Failure States

What I think makes this video so compelling are the failure cases it presents. Not the bit about the guy kicking the Big Dog, because that in itself isn’t really interesting (a bit shocking, perhaps, from the standpoint of kicking what represents probably several millions of dollars of research funding).

What is interesting is how the Big Dog recovers from this potential failure state: it doesn’t fall over! The ice pounds this point home: walking is boring, slipping is fascinating. It becomes immediately clear that the real challenge faced by the Big Dog project is handling these unforeseen, uncontrollable circumstances. From the looks of it, they’re doing an amazing job, and I think it’s pretty genius that they decided to steer their robot into the ice for this demo video.

I think more design projects should do the same: that is, steer their scenarios and use cases into the ice more often.

Steering into the ice

I have seen so many design projects and scenarios (service design in particular) which propose a perfect world in which every possible coincidence that could happen does. Technology always works. The sun is always shining. Cell phones always have a strong signal and perfect reception. In short, boorrrring. And unrealistic.

We all know the chances of such coincidence, and our skepticism of the context can easily bleed into skepticism of the product or service. Or worse, the company itself.

There’s something to be said about a rhetorical approach that emphasizes and reinforces a particular design element or feature. I get that. But maybe you remember those “Safe Happens” VW commercials:

I would argue that what makes this commercial so compelling is not the spectacle of failure (the crash, the airbags, the destroyed car and safe occupants) but the split-second reality of it, miles away from the aseptic, slow-motion videos of crash test dummies.

This reality or honesty (I hesitate to use that word, because it’s an advertisement after all) is what makes us take notice. We can relate to failure and imperfections. They surround us daily. Yet we correct for them and move on. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for our design work to embrace the same approach.

Show us the best-case scenario so we know what’s possible. Then move on to the interesting bits: what happens if you try to knock your project over? If someone takes a left instead of a right? If your mobile phone drops the call after you just waited 20 minutes on hold?

There’s a time and a place to steer a project into the ice, of course. But as several million views demonstrate, doing so can make a compelling case for your project’s robustness. Even if your project isn’t as fully implemented or realized as the Big Dog, at least try a scenario or two in which something goes wrong. It’ll make life more interesting and demonstrate your ability to connect innovation with reality.

Just don’t take this route:

Service Design Symposium - Speaker: Bill Hollins

Published by Dave Chiu
on April 16th, 2008
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Bill Hollins provided a nice overview of services, covering pizza (”Pizza is just ‘cheese on toast–it’s delivery that makes it attractive”) to the unique challenges that services face (you can’t store services, so you have to manage both downtime and demand which increases by the hour). His presentation focused on using design management to develop new services, and some considerations you should keep in mind during the development process. One key point, which matches observations from my earlier post, is that we need to move past “design is important” and on to “how to do it”.

Good stuff…check it out (I’ve also added some of my some notes after the video):

Some of my notes from Bill’s talk:

Because you can’t store services, the question becomes “how do you manage demand variation?” You have to take into consideration downtime, when your demand decreases and your supply/capacity must react accordingly. But you also have to consider demand which increases by the hour.

Bill observed that compared to traditional industry and design fields, services accept innovation more easily.

Customers buy benefits, advantages, USPs (Unique Selling Propositions). Therefore, what is it about your service which supplies those benefits, advantages, and USPs?

Bill’s definition of design management is “the process for developing new services”. While this term and definition might be contested by proponents of design management, service design, concept design, transformation design, etc., at the heart of all this varying terminology is essentially the same.

Culture can affect customer needs - designs for a European audience may not work in the US, much less in Asian countries.

Define success as financial - before your business or solution can create an impact in any other domain (be it social, environmental, etc.) it must survive in the marketplace. If it doesn’t survive, all the additional benefits it might have brought are now moot. Therefore, we must define success first on a financial basis and subsequently along any other metric we choose.

Realize you have both internal and external customers - External customers are your customers. Your internal customers are in effect your workforce. You should not pursue the happiness and satisfaction of one set of customers at the expense of the other.

Failure can arise from one of three factors: the market, financial, and technical.

One tactic for learning how to design good services is to simply observe: why is this a good service, what makes it so good?

We as designers need to move past the “design is important” argument and focus instead on to “how to do it”.

Note: Look for new posts on the service design symposium every two weeks. We look forward to sharing some of the great presentations that were given by the speakers and hope you’ll glean some insights from what they have to say.

And just so you don’t miss it, here is a link to the post on the Bill Moggridge presentation.

Service Design Symposium - Speaker: Bill Moggridge

Published by Dave Chiu
on April 14th, 2008
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As the keynote speaker for the Service Design Symposium, Bill Moggridge began with an exploration into the growth of complexity in design, ranging from the definition of interaction design to the rise of iMode within NTT DoCoMo. His interviews with Bill Verplank, Natsuno-san, and others shown during his presentation (available for download on his Designing Interactions website) provided a nice segue into service design.

Bill’s first piece of advice was to think of the whole journey when designing services. He offered examples of service design techniques in the development of journeys within the Acela rail service and an online bank. My personal favorite was his closing video, which described a trip in a foreign country and provided a nice example of a key component to designing services: expressing narrative through storytelling.

How to Keep a Dog Happy

Published by Dave Chiu
on April 14th, 2008
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An amazing machine that automatically pitches tennis balls for a dachshund to fetch. Incorporating IR sensors and other safety features, the pitching machine is almost as much fun to watch as the furiously wagging tail of a happy dog.

What I find particularly fascinating is how the dog can tell from the sound of the machine whether it is about to pitch a tennis ball—there’s a moment when the machine fails to load properly but the dog isn’t fooled.