Hasta La Ideas

Now in its sixth year, the Service Design Network conference lands in the UK for the first time, following past conferences in locations from San Francisco to Berlin. The annual conference will be held in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, from November 18–29 of this year, at the Wales Millenium Centre, taking the theme of “Transformation through Service Design.”

In an organisational context, transformation is a process of profound and radical change. It’s about setting off in a new direction and reaching a greater level of effectiveness. As service design gains traction within a larger range of industries and sectors the practice must keep pace with developments in the application of this. Until now service design has been used primarily as a redesign capability at the front-end of the service. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

More and more Service Design practices and customer led approaches lie at the heart of good transformational programs and by fully understanding how service design connects with all areas of an organisation service design can support transformation on a much larger scale and achieve greater impact.

Held in partnership with the UK Chapter of the Service Design Network and PDR—winners of the 2012 Core77 Design Award in the Service Design category—the three-day conference will see a “fantastic series of talks, presentations and workshops” from a broad range of speakers, representing organizations from BBVA to Herman Miller to the UK Government.

Those of you who might be interested in joining the roster of presenters can see the Call for Contributions; attendees are encouraged to take advantage of early bird tickets, available now through July 31.

About the SDN
The Service Design Network is the global centre for recognising and promoting excellence in the field of service design. Through national and international events, online and print publications, and coordination with academic institutions, the network connects multiple disciplines within agencies, business, and government to strengthen the impact of service design both in the public and private sector.

The Service Design Network was initiated in 2004 by a group of ambitious and enthusiastic believers in the value of service design. In 2008 it was set up as a non-profit organisation acting as a forum for practitioners and academics to advance the nascent field of Service Design. Our purpose is to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the science and practise of innovation. The support of service design related networks, conferences, publications, workshops are some of the SDNs activities—but also lobbying on political and economical platforms is on the agenda of SDN.

About the SDN UK Chapter
SDN UK represents and connects the UK’s Service Design industry. Service Design is an established practice within the UK, with some great companies blazing the trail. SDN UK aims to connect the community and enable knowledge share at all levels.

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Image via DMI

Reporting by Deb Aldrich

Innovate or die. Collaborate or fail. But innovate collaboratively and succeed. That’s the message shared by a variety of speakers and exhibitors at the current DMI Design Thinking Conference in Santa Monica, California. We know that designers and design thinking drive this process, but which best practices, emerging technologies and new ideas can inform our efforts?

Some highlights of Tuesday’s mainstage included keynote, Larry Keeley, President & Co-Founder of Doblin Inc., who shared insights from his practice and his book, Ten Types of Innovation and the Discipline of Building Breakthroughs. By embracing and managing the complexity of the innovation process as well as the creativity behind new ideas, he pointed out how design leaders can guarantee success in the face of accelerating innovation. Although we’ve generally been taught to bring new ideas to the forefront through a more freeform brainstorming process, Keeley suggested that real innovation success requires high protocols, great teams of thinkers and a systematic way to measure and assess progress.

Batterii, an exhibitor and the technology that is supporting DMI’s new Design Value Research project, demonstrated how their cloud-based platform can connect teams for knowledge creation, as well as innovative product development. And Sarah Brooks, founder of Networked Culture, explained how environmental and cultural systems models can help designers consider ways to move away from authorship toward co-creation for shared value and strength.

It’s like the “Jenga Conundrum”: Do you pull a peg to weaken the structure so yours is the last move, or do you work together to build the tower as high as possible? A collective orientation when combined with rigorous systems of analysis and evaluation are the keys that will not only help us communicate more effectively with clients and with each other, but also enable our businesses, economies and cultures to flourish in the future.

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SIGGRAPH isn’t an acronym—if you must know, it stands for “Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques”; its qualifier, ACM, stands for the Association for Computing Machinery—hence, ACM SIGGRAPH. The organization was originally founded in the late 60’s and its annual conference launched just a few years later, which means that this is the 40th Anniversary of the event (they’ve since launched a second yearly conference, in Asia, as of 2008).

As one might expect, SIGGRAPH2013 itself is chock full of the same events as any given academic conference or trade gathering, including a full itinerary of speakers, presentations, social events, etc., which collectively represent the latest breakthroughs in computer graphics and interactive techniques. However, I was interested to see that they’ve also produced a quick video teaser for the Technical Paper presentations, which is actually quite compelling from an outsider’s perspective:

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The must-attend design event of the summer is Michigan Modern, which takes place June 13-16 on the Eliel Saarinen-designed campus of Cranbrook. The epic line-up of lectures, discussions, tours, and films will bring together architects, critics, designers, historians, and others to discuss the role of the Great Lakes State in the development of American modernism. Come for the early concrete designs of Albert Kahn for the auto industry, stay for the array of Cranbrook-affiliated designers–Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Harry Bertoia, to name a few–who became household names through manufacturers such as Herman Miller.

The main event is the symposium, which will delve into the design legacies of figures such as Harley Earl, Victor Gruen, Eero Saarinen, Alden B. Dow, George Nelson, and Alexander Girard. Meanwhile, interlocutor extraordinaire Debbie Millman will be on hand to interview textile design legend Ruth Adler-Schnee and architect Gunnar Birkerts. As if that weren’t reason enough to register, attendees will be among the first to see “Michigan Modern: Design that Shaped America,” a major exhibition at the recently restored Cranbrook Art Museum. Early bird (read: discounted) registration ends tomorrow–plus, we suspect that this modfest is going to fill up faster than you can say “Minoru Yamasaki,” so don’t delay.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

by Sabine Zetteler London’s brand new POINT Conference launches this week offering two full days of inspirational talks from a pool of more than ); return…

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