Last month I blogged that I had been invited by Adrian Shaunessey to join him on Resonance FM for his show ‘Graphic Design On The Radio’ for a social design special. The hour-long show is now up on the website for your enjoyment — listen to them here.
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be joining designer Adrian Shaughnessy for a discussion on social design this Thursday at 3pm on Resonance FM. Adrian runs a weekly radio show on Resonance called Graphic Design on the Radio that “features interviews with leading designers who talk about their work and play music that has inspired and influenced them”. Social designer Rick Knowles will also be discussing his fantastic new playground in Southwark which opened last week.
So, if you would like to hear our thoughts on social design as well as some cracking tunes then go to http://resonancefm.com/listen, or if your in London simply twiddle your dial to 104.4 fm.
Nice, simple story from Peter Phillips about the business benefit of SME’s creating thoughtful design briefs.
Tickets are now available for the second Pecha Kucka Night Cardiff on Thursday 27th May. I’ll be presenting a talk entitled ‘Helping people think like a designer’, it should be a brief intro to Design Thinking, Service Design & Engagement. The night is happening at Chapter Arts and tickets are free but you do need to register, which you can do here
Pecha Kucha is a presentation format that encourages concise points, bold visuals and fun. It does this by strictly limiting presenters to 20 slides for 20 seconds each.
Last year I managed a a project at thinkpublic with The Young Foundation, Kingston PCT and The Cambridge Road Estate in Kingston, Surrey.
The project’s aim was to discover what residents living on the estate made them feel happy and healthy, by understanding these common aims and drivers the Primary Care Trust were able to make better decisions about how to deal with the long term health inequalities that existed in the area.
To engage with the local community and health services thinkpublic designed a campaign called YouCanKingston and a text message feedback system. I’m excited to say that this work has now been selected for the Creative Review Annual 2010. They have also published this year’s Annual as a very smart iPhone application.
Black Holes, Ear wax eating maggots, Beatboxing, T-Pain and Vintage Vocoders were just some of the topics discussed at TEDx Cardiff this Wednesday.
The independently organised TED event was put together by Neil Cocker and Claire Scantlebury, it was a great evening and certainly got me excited about many things I never even knew about, my highlights were:
Wendy Sadler and her excellent explination of how vocoders work. She showed some great vintage clips of the first ever vocoder performance.
Robert Simpson and his enthusiastic and simple explanation of how small and insignificant we are on earth!
DK and his Inspiration Found project, which presented his recent book project. Have a look at this here: http://gnatgnat.com
Thanks to all the organisers for the excellent line up, great venue, cheap tickets, friendly people and inspirational talks.
Pecha Kucha Night Cardiff is a new creative night of bite size presentations. It’s run by Lou Cameron from Inkling who pulled together a great mix of creatives, academics and artists. The night was broadcast live and you can watch all talks online here.
The next event will take place on the 27th May at Chapter Arts In Cardiff, where i’ll be giving a bite size talk about design thinking. If your interested in attending the next event then check www.inklingcreative.co.uk for ticket info.
User testing campaigns have been running for a long time; from Dove Soap ads in the 1950’s to Danny Baker’s ‘Daz Doorstep Challenge’ in the 1990’s. These ads presented the product as ‘hero’, a must-have item that will solve your problems. Recently though, a number campaigns have shifted this focus and presented the product or service ‘in development’, or; service design marketing.
Service design as a marketing strategy, some examples:
Windows 7 / User Insights
Universally disliked but still an interesting approach. The “Windows 7 was my idea” pulls out user-insights from different users who, we assume have been involved in the design process. Maybe it’s just me but i simply don’t trust this campaign is real. The focus on what was wrong with previous versions does strike a chord though It does demonstrate a certain amount of product honesty, like you would expect during the user-insights stage.
Image: thinkpublic
The Oxo Factor / Co-design
Launched last year this campaign invited families to come together and design a new version of the famous Oxo ads. The website contained co-design tools that supported families through the deisgn and filmmaking process. An engaging and hig-profile campaign (finalists were broadcast during the X-Factor final) that reflects the brand’s key value, ‘family’.
Confused.com / Prototype & Test
A comparison website that uses it’s UX as it’s unique selling point. Videos of what we are led to believe are user experience tests are shown being conducted by a diverse range of customers. The advertisments build trust, highlight it’s ease of use and finish with the desired outcome (i.e cheaper car insurance). This campaign’s strength is in how convincing the tests are.
Image: Fluent Studios
In service design we capture the process, visualise the insights and map out the stakeholders. We then use these to explain the journey, to evidence the depth of research and to form the basis of our service designs.
But what if we aren’t just designing a service but creating content for a marketing campaign too? Recent campaigns from Confused.com, Oxo and Windows 7 do just this, basing their campaigns around the user-insights and user-testing phases in the design process.
I’d like to see a high-profile campaign that was built around the whole service design process. A compelling design story that sold a new service as well as demonstrated the organisation’s work process. Which service or organisation would you want to see a campaign from?
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