Hasta La Ideas

Core77’s Hand-Eye Curiosity Club is pleased to host an evening with Chance Walte of Fearless Guitars. Chance is a seeker, questioner and tireless experimenter: for more than twenty years he has utilized guitars and basses as the tools to study organized sound. During this process he recorded modifications to the tuning, setup and construction of the instruments at his disposal, using the same three songs for control. In this way, he became very familiar with the variables involved in sculpting a tone.

Chance Walte will go over how the different systems and components work together to create the final feel and sound. This will touch on all the major aspects of set up, evaluation of a guitar and why one guitar feels/functions so differently from the next even when they are ostensibly the same thing.

For more details visit the Curiosity Club home at Hand-Eye Supply.

Mark your calendars and join us:
Tuesday, November 16th, 5:30 PM
Core77’s Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR, 97209

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Presenting a cross-section of innovators working in the creative industries, the sentiment behind the Influx: Meet the Makers Conference is close to our hearts. The one day event will take place at Milk Studios in New York, December 3rd, with talks from nine speakers and break-out sessions to celebrate the resurgence of making. The line-up includes:

Ashley Alsup—Remaking Corporate America
Mark Barden—Building a Brand
Scott Belsky—How to Write a Bestseller
Thomas Callahan—Making and Selling Crafted Bikes
Gary Hirsch—Creating an Instant Character
Josh Quittner—Making Time for the iPad
Sarah Rich—Making a Magazine in 48 Hours
Frank Rose—Storytelling in the C21st
Jim Wexler—Making Games

Influx: Meet the Makers
December 3, 8am-2pm
Milk Studios, New York

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Guest post by Tiffany Chu, Continuum.

The leading theme of the Service Design Network Conference was, as could be expected, a push-and-pull struggle of how to define service design. While some seasoned veterans tweeted frustration, there were many others who pushed boundaries with fresh insights on what the role could become.

On the healthcare panel, Chris McCarthy of Kaiser Permanente noted, “Service design and healthcare—this is a fascinating combination, and it’s just starting to resonate within our community and gain internal traction. We don’t call it patient-centered care, because it’s not just about them. We call it human-centered, because it’s about the doctors, managers, clinicians, everyone in the ecosystem.” Along with Lorna Ross of the Mayo Clinic, he espoused the future trend of not hiring outside service design consultants, but actually embedding them within the healthcare institution.

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Guest post by Tiffany Chu, Continuum.

After lunch, we settled back into our seats for a talk titled “Digital Service Design: Lessons from the Cloud.” It was not, in fact, another rehash of cloud computing, but instead a specific point of view on the nuances of service design within the digital realm, presented by Monica Bueno, a principal at Continuum.

The first lesson Bueno proposed was to rethink the role of staff—a surprising, not-entirely-intuitive perspective for the digital domain. She offered the example of TD Bank, who has ramped up their deployment of digital banking tools in order to free up their staff to be much more customer service-oriented and do what humans do best. She also mentioned the latest Zappos commercials, whose ironic humor highlights relationship-building between staff and consumers—an external ad campaign which is actually underlined on the inside with incentive programs for longer call times and ensuring every employee is trained in the call center.

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Guest post from Tiffany Chu, Continuum.

Amidst springtime temperatures, views of the Charles River, and a rogue fire drill, the first-ever US conference on service design kicked off last weekend in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We were excited to attend the Service Design Network Conference 2010 at Microsoft’s New England Research Development Center (aptly nicknamed the ‘NERD‘ Center) and to bring you a report of what’s happening at the boundaries of this emerging realm of design.

Trained as an industrial designer and now one of the cofounders and director of Engine in the UK, Oliver King was the first to take the stage and presented an encompassing overview of ‘What is Service Design?’ Laying a robust foundation for the rest of the day’s conversations to build upon, King articulated what this new kind of design is: “Service is the act of helping someone to do something. The important word here is ‘act.’ It’s all about an activity, which is dynamic. Services are designed by the people who provide and receive them.”

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