ServDes 2016

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. 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

8. N.Fein, Cocktail bar and restaurant at Hunts Point Market, the Bronx, NYC Black & White (http://www.nycbw.com/page/5/)

9. to properly counter the risks of
simplification and reductionism, we argue
for a shift from a holistic perspective to a
systemic approach

10. R. Armson, Growing Wings on the Way, 2011

12. a systemic approach considers multiple
perspectives at once, acknowledging that
the design process does not center around
the choice of a single optimal point of view

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

23. WHATSAPP
SKATES
BOX OFFICE
IMDB
MOVIE
NETFLIX
BUS
YELP
RESTAURANT
SMSWEBSITE
FRIEND’S
HOME
BUS
DINNER
PS4
BOARD
GAMES
PHONE
PIZZA
PLACE

24. 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

25. 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

26. interventions within an ecosystem broker
between the different instances presented
by the ecosystem itself, the actors, and the
designers’ own vision

27. the blended space resulting from the
actors’ joining individual channels for a
specific goal creates an emergent structure
and introduces a loss of control that goes
way beyond user-centered perspectives

28. “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

29. a blended space is a new type of space
with its own emergent structure and its
own novel user experience predicated on a
different sense of presence

30. a cross-channel ecosystem is a blended
space articulated through the choices of a
multitude of individual actors

31. as actors freely join independent channels,
a blended space spanning services,
contexts, and locations is articulated as a
digital / physical ecosystem

32. cross-channel ecosystems are service
supersets, unbound, actor-constructed,
unfinished, and transient

33. they transcend the traditional limits
encountered by service design practice
focusing primarily on organization-bound
and organization-controlled systems

34. they are a digimodernist construct, fully
acknowledging its computer-derived
textuality of haphazardness, evanescence,
and anonymous, social authorship

35. design focuses on the interdependencies
of significant existing, available, or unused
elements in the actor-driven ecosystems,
regardless of whatever company-owned
service they belong to

36. 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.

37. we argue that this is a reductionist
approach whose usefulness is greatly
diminished when it comes to capture
cross-channel experiences

38. their complexity and emergent nature,
their unfinished, evanescent onwardness
requires a systemic framing built around
the idea of actor-driven experience

39. designing services as a collection of related
and relatively static touchpoints is
eminently postmodern and unavoidably
reductionist in nature

40. 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

41. this is the myth that is service, one of
change and distance: under the illusion of
completeness, services are designed within
the same constraints and under the same
assumptions that products are

42. 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

43. by altering the way the problem space is
framed, service design practice can gain a
significantly larger strategic impact and
provide value to both individual actors and
organizations engaged in the ecosystem

44. thank you
bertil.lindenfalk@ju.se
@resmini