New Design Frontiers

Today I began reading both Experience Design: A Framework for Integrating Brand, Experience, and Value by Patrick Newbery and Kevin Farnham, and Service Design: From Insight to Implementation by Andy Polaine, Ben Reason, and Lavrans Løvlie.

Service Design

Both books (in only the first chapter) provided deep insights into both service design and experience design. In Service Design, I learned the importance of not only examining a service but the culture of an organization as well. An organization is performing theater if they provide the tools for service design but lack the supporting culture for proper development. Another interesting point was how efficient company silos may be on their own but it doesn’t translate into the efficiency of service. Customers are the first to recognize these gaps in silos because they frequently move across every silo a company offers.

Experience Design

In the first chapter, Experience Design takes a deeper look at the history of design as it relates to business. It begins by breaking down the differences between innovation, Design Thinking, and experience design. Innovation is the targeting of emerging or unmet customer needs. Design Thinking grounds design criteria in user needs and behavior. Experience design incorporates all disciplines and approaches in awareness of how to build a system that supports customers by recognizing it’s about more than a single product or project requirement.

One interesting note was on realized value and aspirational value for customers. As marketing and branding grew in the Industrial Age, consumers became more concerned with intangible and aspirational value rather than the actual value of a product. I think we can all relate to being fooled by top-tier marketing for a product to find that it doesn’t live up to the hype or promise.

The last interesting note from Experience Design is the rise in the value of a designer/maker as we shifted from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. During the early stages of the Industrial Age consumerism wasn’t in high demand, trade was more local, and businesses weren’t as focused on mass markets due to lack of transportation. As we progressed into the heavy consumerism, mass market we are accustomed to today, businesses needed to differentiate themselves. They set out to do this by utilizing design during the production process and implementing marketing and branding to further differentiate themselves from increasing competition.

Conclusion

All in all, my takeaway from the first chapters of these books is how businesses are still in the early stages of understanding how to unlock the true value of design in a business setting. Shifting from the Industrial Age to the Information Age has pushed businesses to explore new design frontiers to innovate and grow their company in the rapidly changing environment of modern business.