Plot | strategic design & innovation agents

Servicing designers

We had the great opportunity of meeting Jeff Howard face to face! He's one of the CMU alumni who have been carving a path for themselves in new waters. He writes the Design for Service blog, and more recently has been setting up his booklist for service designers here. There isn't the history of service design here as there is where we come from, nor the jobs, nor the contracts.

It was great to be talking about the thinking and making aspects of design, the fashions of movements and the backlashes against them. The attraction to many of service design, without the chance to help it grow up a little.

I hope we get to do more with other designers while we are here, having the chance to work with them and exchange ways of approaching things. As an agency, its only when you try really hard to set these things up that they actually happen. Or, on those occasions where a client has brought in a group of agencies (and sometimes they don't even tell you that is going to happen!) there is some kind of wierd stand-off until things settle down and you can all get on with the work. Often people from the bigger agencies feel that they have to show you just how important they are. That always backfires, sadly.

So meeting up someone who is making sense of an evolving area makes a whole lot of sense to me. Nice one, Jeff.

First Impressions!

Hmmm. Pittsburgh. The friendliest of people. Switches upside down. Plug that look too delicate to take a voltage. Romantic iron bridges. School buses that look like the yellow ones in the Simpsons. Farmers markets everywhere. Footballers on the school playing field...it really happens here!

Here's a small view - taken from a cross-town bus.

Photos from a recent bus trip gives you a flavour of the place.

We're working with some great people. It's a group of people who are more like colleagues than we've seen in many organisations. Lots of collaboration, lots of co-teaching and sharing of ideas and approaches without the kinds of positioning we've seen in so many places. It's a fine place to be part of the faculty.

Students too are highly motivated and optimistic. What a pleasure!

With Dan Boyarski we've been developing a graduate studio (13 or so week project) on Digital Cities, and also a session for older designers and teachers today, which was a delight. A room filled with experience and reflective thought is a very humbling place for, as Nick put it, 40 year old who can sit on their success and think that's all there is to take forward. I hope we get to do something with them again.

So we have a talk to give at 5pm on Tuesday coming up, the main talk of our professorships, which is a dance around one of our favourite areas - sci-fi film and design. It's the right place for it. Google is investing down the road. Robots are being developed. I think this year is going to go fast, and with surprising delightfulness.

What really makes a different in designers?

I've just finished up being External Examiner for the Master of Design at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee, run by Hazel White and a team of sparky people and some great visiting guests like Colin Burns and Phillip Joe. Thanks to Skype we've been able to have meetings, and discussions and one-to-ones.

It's been a great year for them, and the years results reflect that rise in talent attracted to the MDes and the subsequent lifting of standards by all in the current cohort. Looking through my notes after the sessions with them, I realised there were a number of things I saw in what they had done which would not necessarily be on any list of 'deliverables', but are among the reasons why I believe this group of people to be worth watching.

Specific successes include:

• Getting over the challenge of taking those first steps with meeting users and external people - dealing with cynicsm and lack of interest
• Creating their own networks of contacts within a short timeframe
• Creating new processes, tools as well as projects
• Developing persistence and resilience
• Developing solid working relationships with the staff in project placements
• Sharing their work with professionals and others in an open source way
• Being comfortable with not defining themselves as a specific type of designer
• Being comfortable with trying new things, and iterating on their thinking
• Being sensitive to understanding that an engagement might need them to try out things, and re-calibrate their first thoughts.
• Developing new skills in new areas outside of design
• Learning to have patience with people and technology
• Being able to rethink direction and be open to changes
• Understanding the evolving nature of working together in groups and partnerships
• Developing an appropriate process for the final project

Well, that's my list, for what its worth. Some valuable skills there, which could be on other lists too!