blended spaces, cross-channel ecosystems, and the myth that is service
TRANSCRIPT
Blended spaces, cross-channel ecosystems,and the myth that is service
Bertil Lindenfalk & Andrea Resmini
ServDes 2016, Copenhagen
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”
today, affordable, mobile, consumer-grade computing is mainstream: smartphones, tablets, sensors, ambient appliances, and
wearables allow human-information interaction everywhere, all the time
digitization and constant read/write access to information have blurred the
distinction between products and services
people freely connect often competing products and services in emergent
choreographies
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”
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.
we argue that this is a reductionist approach whose usefulness is greatly
diminished when it comes to capturing experiences
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
N.Fein, Cocktail bar and restaurant at Hunts Point Market, the Bronx, NYC Black & White (http://www.nycbw.com/page/5/)
to properly counter the risks of simplification and reductionism, we argue for a shift from a holistic perspective to a
systemic approach
R. Armson, Growing Wings on the Way, 2011
it also implies a shift from the idea of service to that of experience taking place in cross-channel ecosystems in blended space
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
cross-channel ecosystems are semantic constructs that straddle digital and
physical spaces, locations, devices, and contexts
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
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SMSWEBSITE
FRIEND’SHOME
BUSDINNER
PS4
BOARDGAMES
PHONE
PIZZAPLACE
SKATESBOX OFFICE
IMDB
MOVIE
NETFLIX
BUS
YELP
RESTAURANT
SMSWEBSITE
FRIEND’SHOME
BUSDINNER
PS4
BOARDGAMES
PHONE
PIZZAPLACE
SKATESBOX OFFICE
IMDB
MOVIE
NETFLIX
BUS
YELP
RESTAURANT
SMSWEBSITE
FRIEND’SHOME
BUSDINNER
PS4
BOARDGAMES
PHONE
PIZZAPLACEWHATSAPP
SKATESBOX OFFICE
IMDB
MOVIE
YELP
BOX OFFICE
IMDB
MOVIE
BUSSMSWEBSITE
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
interventions within an ecosystem broker between the different instances presented by the ecosystem itself, the actors, and the
designers’ own vision
this creates an emergent structure and introduces a loss of control that goes way
beyond user-centered perspectives
the emergent structure resulting from the actors’ joining individual channels is also a
blended, physical / digital, space
“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
as a multitude of actors freely joins independent channels, a blended space of
services, contexts, and locations is articulated as a digital/physical ecosystem
cross-channel ecosystems are service supersets, unbound, actor-constructed,
unfinished, and transient
they transcend the traditional limits encountered by service design practices
focusing primarily on organization-bound and organization-controlled systems
they are a digimodernist construct, fully acknowledging its computer-derived
textuality of haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social authorship
design focuses on the interdependencies of significant existing, available, or unused elements in the actor-driven ecosystems,
regardless of ownership
their complexity and emergent nature, their unfinished, evanescent onwardness requires a systemic framing built around
the idea of actor-driven experiences
designing services as a collection of related and relatively static touchpoints is
eminently postmodern and unavoidably reductionist in nature
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
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
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
reframing the problem space through the idea of experience rather than service
and going for a larger strategic impact as a way to set up the ecosystem for value
creation for both actors and organizations
