Biography
Designing Services in Science and Technology-based Enterprises involves a group of academics, designers, and technology and science entrepreneurs from a range of disciplines working together to explore how services as designed in science and technology-based enterprises. Lucy Kimbell, Victor Seidel and Fiona Reid at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, lead the project in collaboration with James Tansey from the University of British Columbia. The study is supported by Designing for the 21st Century, an academic research initiative jointly funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
It involves two kinds of engagement:
- four short projects in which service designers help early stage technology and science entreprises based in Oxford design their services (one design company with each enterprise), taking place February-May 2007
- five events held over a year at SBS, which reflect on these encounters and attempt to develop a cross-disciplinary vocabulary for service design in science and technology enterprises.
Academic participants include Tony Dunne (Royal College of Art, interaction design), Bill Hollins (Westminster Business School, service operations), Leonieke Zomerdijk (London Business School, service operations), Jennifer Whyte (Tanaka Business School, innovation studies), Jeff Johnson (Open University, design and complexity), Bob Young (Northumbria, service design), Bruce Tether (Manchester Business School, innovation studies) and Tobie Kerridge (Goldsmiths, science and design).
Within SBS, academic participants include Mari Sako (strategy), Steve New (operations), Marc Ventresca (strategy and enterpreneurship, James Martin Institute), Dan Neyland (James Martin Institute), Kate Blackmon (operations) and Rafael Ramirez (strategy).
Within Oxford University, participants include Andrew Barry (Oxford Centre for the Environment) and Marina Jirotka (ComLab).
The four enterprises involved are:
- Celoxica, offering accelerated computing and Electronic System-Level (ESL) design and services
- G-Nostics, working in the pharmacogenetic sector
- Oxford ArchDigital, which develops hosted applications and web services for collecting, managing, and publishing large visual and spatial datasets
- Prosonix, offering ultrasonic process solutions.
The four service design companies involved in the project are:
- IBM, a global IT services consultancy and service application developer
- IDEO, an international company helping clients innovate through design
- livework, a UK-based service design and innovation consultancy
- Radarstation, a consultancy investigating design-led futures.
The project's broad research questions ask how participants' ideas about the designing of services change during the project once they are exposed to the approaches and practices within other disciplines and contexts.
Outputs will include a publication of the shared vocabulary developed in the project, as well as more traditional academic outputs such as papers for journals and conferences.