Hasta La Ideas

The Savannah College of Art and Design has over 9,300 students and 1,500 faculty members, so President/Co-Founder Paula Wallace is in a good position to discuss “the value of a design education,” as she does in her guest blog for Fast Company.

In this week’s installment she talks with SCAD ID professor Peter Fossick, who has an interesting take on design: It’s not so much the product designs themselves, but the services designed around them that can make the difference. In Fossick’s own words:

Everything is moving toward service design. Design is becoming more intangible, less about product and more about the experience of the product. Look at Velib, the bicycle rental program in Paris. The technology is ancient–it’s a bicycle, after all–but the program is so brilliant thanks to the service architecture. I’m not saying we’ll stop inventing new products. I’m just saying that designing the experience of the product is becoming just as fundamental as the product itself.

(more…)