Slide deck from paper presented at ServDes 2016, Copenhagen.
Full paper available in conference proceedings: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/article.asp?issue=125&article=050
Blended spaces, cross-channel ecosystems, and the myth that is service
1. Blended spaces, cross-channel ecosystems,
and the myth that is service
Bertil Lindenfalk & Andrea Resmini
ServDes 2016, Copenhagen
2. W. J. Mitchell, Me++, 2004
“once there was a time and a place for
everything; today, things are increasingly
smeared across multiple sites and
moments in complex and often
indeterminate ways”
3. today, affordable, mobile, consumer-grade
computing is mainstream: smartphones,
tablets, sensors, ambient appliances, and
wearables allow human-information
interaction everywhere, all the time
4. digitization and constant read/write
access to information have blurred the
distinction between products and services
5. people freely connect often competing
products and services in emergent
choreographies
6. D. Norman, Systems Thinking: A Product Is More Than the Product, 2009
“the point of a product is to offer great
experiences to its owner, which means
that it offers a service”
7. services are usually described either in
terms of what they do or by reflecting on
the different elements they consist of
Grönroos, 2007; Vargo & Lusch, 2008; Blomkvist, 2014.
8. we argue that this is a reductionist
approach whose usefulness is greatly
diminished when it comes to capturing
experiences
9. the myth that the service designer can
design a perfectly bounded artifact and
simply drop it in place within a dynamic
environment still holds fast and
unquestioned at least in the practice
10. N.Fein, Cocktail bar and restaurant at Hunts Point Market, the Bronx, NYC Black & White (http://www.nycbw.com/page/5/)
11. to properly counter the risks of
simplification and reductionism, we argue
for a shift from a holistic perspective to a
systemic approach
13. it also implies a shift from the idea of
service to that of experience taking place in
cross-channel ecosystems in blended space
14. a cross-channel ecosystem results from
actor-driven choice, use, and coupling of
channels, either belonging to the same or
to different systems, within the context of
the goals and desired future state actors
intend to achieve, explicitly or implicitly
15. cross-channel ecosystems are semantic
constructs that straddle digital and
physical spaces, locations, devices, and
contexts
16. cross-channel experiences identify a
blended space of opportunity for the
designer to intervene in, more than a finite
artifact that can be fully managed
21. design is a pragmatic intervention to
maximize social or business opportunities
and minimize individual or organizational
pain through a recast of one or more
specific channels or touchpoints
22. interventions within an ecosystem broker
between the different instances presented
by the ecosystem itself, the actors, and the
designers’ own vision
23. this creates an emergent structure and
introduces a loss of control that goes way
beyond user-centered perspectives
24. the emergent structure resulting from the
actors’ joining individual channels is also a
blended, physical / digital, space
25. “a blended space is as a space where a
physical space is deliberately integrated in
a close-knit way with a digital space”
D. Benyon, Spaces of Interaction, Places for Experience, 2014
26. as a multitude of actors freely joins
independent channels, a blended space of
services, contexts, and locations is
articulated as a digital/physical ecosystem
28. they transcend the traditional limits
encountered by service design practices
focusing primarily on organization-bound
and organization-controlled systems
29. they are a digimodernist construct, fully
acknowledging its computer-derived
textuality of haphazardness, evanescence,
and anonymous, social authorship
30. design focuses on the interdependencies
of significant existing, available, or unused
elements in the actor-driven ecosystems,
regardless of ownership
31. their complexity and emergent nature,
their unfinished, evanescent onwardness
requires a systemic framing built around
the idea of actor-driven experiences
32. designing services as a collection of related
and relatively static touchpoints is
eminently postmodern and unavoidably
reductionist in nature
33. it’s a way of framing services which is
generally neglecting the real-world usage
patterns employed by actors to reach a
desired state, inward-focused, artificially
organization-bound, and falling short of
accounting for the resulting complexity
34. this is the myth that is service, one of
change and distance: under an illusion of
completeness, services are designed within
the same constraints and under the same
assumptions that products are
35. we propose that a way to move forward is
through a systems thinking approach and
the conceptualization of cross-channel
experience ecosystems as formalized in IA