상품의 시대는 가고 커뮤니티의 시대가 온다(Community in, commodity out)

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Community in, commodity out

 

Businesses and public services alike face huge change in the new information era. They need to shift their emphasis back – to what people really want.

 

Gaynor Aaltonen

guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 17.58 GMT

Illustration: James Taylor/Debut Art, images: Alamy

 

And now, the shipping forecast …" Despite a worldwide financial crisis that hit the shipping industry particularly hard, last year the shipping arm of Sweden's Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) saw its income suddenly leap by 20%, a sum which will probably rise to 45% by the end of 2010.

It is a complex story, involving a Swedish government innovation grant, a young designer named Andrea de Angelis, and something quite new – service design.

The pundits argue that we are not just living through a time of great change but moving into an entirely new economic era. Whereas an industrial economy focuses on physical things, such as a car or a lightbulb, we are about to enter the age of the information economy – a post-industrial economy based no longer solely on manufacturing but more on knowledge, service and information industries. Businesses can best exploit this new economy by developing new services and expanding brand loyalty still further than today. The conceptual challenges are complex and include the integration of the physical and the virtual worlds, as well as a desire to live more sustainably.

 

It is partly the expansion of the internet that has prompted this explosion in service innovation. On the net it is easy to compare services and products and to voice dissatisfaction. Companies have been pressured to shift focus. Rapid erosion of technical advantage in a fierce global marketplace has also had its effect: expensive new technologies and fancy new consumer products will still be dreamed up, but with emphasis on pleasing customers and stamping their loyalty to a brand for life. People are becoming far less interested in "stuff" alone – products or commodities – and far more interested in an all-embracing experience as they interact with a product or service. Owning an iPhone, for instance, is just the beginning: it's what you can do with it – the "apps" – that matter.

 

David Kester, chief executive of the Design Council, chooses Apple to illustrate the point. "Why Apple? Because a company like that epitomises great innovation. And yet they are not a company of inventors. They were the first company to take a user interface or a mouse to market, but they didn't invent those things – Xerox did.

 

Technology is just ideas. Design is about taking those ideas and making them work for people. Apple placed design right at the heart of the business — and then reinvented the music industry. They may be about to do the same with books, and the iPad. With Apple, the product becomes emblematic of a system and a service."

 

While product design exists in the realm of tangible objects, service design deals with the intangible and the conceptual: advice, music and maps at our fingertips. And, increasingly, designers are being asked to identify service improvement in the public sector. An important factor here is the way that, at its best, the design process involves taking a problem apart, as if it has never been looked at before. London Transport's Oyster card, although first developed to fight fraud, has become a much more convenient and speedy way to travel. The NHS's innovation unit has used service design to improve surgical processes as well as ward operations. Innovation can happen anywhere, in any public or business sphere, from improving post-diagnostic services for people with multiple sclerosis to better community strategies for the police.

 

User engagement

"Service design involves a high level of user engagement, which is what we need," says Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. "I like the idea of bringing those design principles to public services. Good design process brings in a good understanding of the context: financial constraints, processes and how human beings behave."

 

Extraordinary examples of service design are cropping up everywhere. And not just in the UK. In the Netherlands, service design agency DesignThinkers was commissioned by the Dutch government to work on a national branding programme. In Korea, US design group Continuum finds that its Seoul office has one in 10 projects geared to service design, particularly in retail.

 

So where did the story start? The answer lies with consumers. Youngmihn Kim, cofounder of Continuum Korea, says: "The choice, cost — are already met. People demand more."

 

Fast food company Mcdonald's is just one example of a company under intense and often hostile scrutiny that has had to use the close customer understanding and fast prototyping typical of service design to transform itself. It has really embraced the practice, explains senior vice-president of brand strategy at McDonald's Europe Pierre Woreczeck, because it had to. "In France, in particular, we faced strong debate around globalisation. The decision was to work very hard to improve integration."

 

Similarly Virgin Atlantic faces huge competitive consumer pressures in its industry. The company's head of design, Joe Ferry, says: "This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of service design's potential. It's like design generally: 10 or 20 years ago it was seen as an add-on. And now look at companies like Apple and Dyson: their entire company is built on the ethos of good design. I think that will happen with service design."

 

So, what of the shipping forecast? While mariners struggled even to navigate before the invention of the astrolabe, today they have access to extraordinary levels of information. After Andrea de Angelis introduced the idea of service design to SMHI, he developed an integrated web service which allows ship owners to keep track of an entire fleet, in real time. They can also keep watch on their ships' speed and environmental performance compared to their last voyage. The system helps choose the safest route to take, depending on the specific ship, the value of its cargo, and the weather conditions. Now, that's service for you. basic needs of consumers — speed, convenience.

 

출처 : http://www.guardian.co.uk/service-design/new-information-era