Seeing Tomorrow’s Services

Adaptive Path organised a panel on service design yesterday. Panellists were Shelley Evenson (CMU), Robert Glushko (UC Berkeley), and Christi Zuber (Kaiser Permanente).

No matter where the economy heads, one thing is certain: we’re living in a service economy. Approximately 70% of the U.S. GDP is services, yet far more attention is placed on the design of products than of services. That premise is changing. Beginning in the UK, Scandinavia, and now emerging in the U.S. are new practices for designing the services we use every day.

Whether it’s healthcare, energy, tech, or even governmental, services are the way people experience, consume, and pay the output of most organizations. This diverse panel of experts will divulge the basics of new approaches to managing and improving services, plus share ideas that you can make immediately applicable:
– What’s better about “designing” a service?
– What are the tools and techniques can help us design better services?
– How can we improve services today?

Panellists:

Shelley Evenson is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Carnegie Mellon University where she writes, speaks, and teaches the practice of service design focusing on tapping into the needs of users of the service.

Robert Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information where he teaches and writes on service design focusing on the contribution of the service’s “back stage” where materials or information needed by the front stage are processed.

Christi Zuber leads an internal Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente where her and her team have co-designed numerous new services with patients and clinicians that have not only lead to measurable impacts on patient safety and satisfaction, they have been spread across Kaiser’s 32 hospitals and beyond.

Jeff Howard was there and on his blog you can find a summary of the debate and all audio files.