designing memorable experiences: an introduction to service design
presentation here

Design Futures: Jennifer Bove and Ben Fullerton from Elizabeth Goodman on Vimeo.

A friend has just been diagnosed with a tumor and needs a biopsy. He’s afraid, quiet, and wide-eyed thinking of the future of his health, and projecting possible outcomes into all realms of his life. Questions come to mind: What do you say? In the moment after diagnosis, is providing a momentary diversion by friends or a doctor specifying future medical procedures most productive? Can narrative interactions between patients, doctors, and families prime for the best medical outcomes, suppress the need for medications, and help the patient make personally sound medical decisions? Realistically, what technologies and research methods might help us understand these human interactions, and harness them to boost treatment efficacy?

Narrative practice has a long history in heath care. The structure of medical knowledge, patient doctor encounters; placebo and nocebo effects; and, psychotherapeutic treatments employ narrative for medical decision-making and treatment. In this talk, we will discuss a new research methodology I developed for designing narrative healthcare technologies. The methodology scaffolds and integrates knowledge across clinical practice, computer science, and neuroscience to successfully leverage cognitive process and patient narrative histories to promote health. My current research endeavor is designing and implementing a talk therapy software engine to assist people suffering from pain and anxiety. The goals of the work are to shift the paradigm of healthcare technology from information delivery to treatment delivery; address the growing shortage of healthcare workers; and to promote broad interdisciplinary research collaborations. Most emphatically, the goal is to help people who suffer from pain and anxiety in everyday life.

Adding online services to physical objects is changing the way we interact with our environment. In this talk I will describe ways to tag ordinary objects with online resources and provide conceptual tools for analyzing their social effects. I’ll talk about a few different scenarios, including objects as:
- experience triggers: touching an object to play a song or video, or show an image or start a game
- conversation sites: objects as virtual billboards and fridge doors
- origin revealers: objects that tell who made them; when, where, and how
- social networking platforms: objects that enable their beholder to connect with other people

A talk about the political, social and technical hiccoughs encountered since the inception of Stamen Design’s Oakland Crimespotting project just over a year ago. The talk will cover the inspirations and influences of the project, and how it relates to Stamen’s recent work in web-based information visualization and mapping.

The user experience design of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) products is a new branch of design. Like Web design was different from traditional graphic design, ubicomp user experience design is different from traditional industrial design. Mike will discuss how he has tackled (and occasionally has gotten tackled by) the unique challenges of ubicomp UX. He will reposition the notion of information as a design material, and propose merging interaction design with the principles of agile software development to create new tools for prototyping new interactions.

In 1952, Grace Hopper’s compiler opened the door to thousands of new software developers. But until a few years ago, only experts could create interactive media. Today, millions of high-school students maintain custom Facebook pages. Our group’s research goal is to create the tools that will enable design generalists and lead users, not just technology experts and engineers, to design interactive systems for the next era of pervasive computing. What kinds of systems can enable people to be able to design a personal health monitor or full-body game controller?There are three main thrusts to our research. The first is design tools for pervasive computing - enabling people to create interfaces that support the richness of human bodily expression and more tightly integrate the physical and computational worlds. Second, our work introduces programming by physical demonstration, enabling designers to leverage their tacit knowledge about the physical world to specify sensor-based interactions through combined direct manipulation and pattern recognition. Third, despite its drawbacks, many users today develop software by copying and modifying existing examples. Yet current software tools are largely ignorant of design-by-modification. Our recent work introduces techniques for creating interfaces analogically by sampling elements from existing designs.

In this talk, we will present an overview of the tools and applications we developed in these three areas and reflect on our design process itself - how we go about observing, prototyping, and building interaction design tools.

This talk discusses how Human Factors research drives design by making grounded leaps from latent user needs to new product and service concepts. Example projects from a variety of domains illustrate contextual observations and co-creation exercises, the basic techniques for grounding insights, with particular attention to how the core value of empathy drives methodological choices. Next, the methodological challenges posed by two non-traditional types of design are discussed: 1) designing to transform organizational cultures and 2) designing services beyond the scope of a single artifact. The talk concludes with thoughts about current frontiers in Human Factors research.