Project pairings

This project has two components. The first is five workshops at Saïd Business School which bring together practitioners and academics involved in, or studying, the design of services. The second component is a study of four examples of practice to reflect on in the workshops, undertaken by pairing one science or technology-based enterprise with one service design consultancy to go through a service design process together.

In each case, the service design consultancy will work with the enterprise for a minimum of six days between February and June 2007. The framing of these encounters will be negotiated jointly by design consultancies and enterprises, with feedback from academics and the wider discussion group. In six days it is not possible to go through a significant review of the enterprises' service offerings and re-design them. But what we are asking the designers to do is to use some of the frameworks, tools and methods which constitute their practices in their encounter with their paired enterprise. The wider discussion group will then discuss these approaches and reflect on the theories and assumptions underpinning them.

The four enterprises - all represented in the project by CEO or senior team members - 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.

Comments

[Marc Ventresca]

Lucy and all: Very energizing 1.5 days of ideas, new people, and esp the fresh tools, cognitive collages, scribing. I am esp curious to see the vocabularies, primer, and summary of 'what we can know in common'. These are version of keywords and boundary objects. Looking forward to Jan 29 and the next steps.