Emergence 06: Service Design September 8, 2006

http://www.design.cmu.edu/emergence/events.htm

This is the first Emergence Conference, an international design forum hosted by Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design. It will be an annual transdisciplinary event where emergent themes and practices in design will be explored and fostered, taking place in Pittsburgh from Friday, September 8 through Sunday, September 10. This year we will focus on service design.

Design is the act of conceiving, planning, and constructing elements into wholes, which result in products. These products include communications, environments, artifacts, systems, and services. Services include the activities or events designed to support an interaction between the representatives of the service organization and the customer, including any mediating technology. Services, then, form a process, co-producing value, utility, satisfaction, and delight in response to human needs.

In a rapidly evolving economy, individuals, organizations, and communities that offer services are faced with deepening challenges. Some of these include increasing competition for skilled labor for high value services, the need to focus on contextualized development, sustainability of the environment, and addressing the requirements of different cultures of customers and workers that exist in the global delivery of services.

Services have traditionally been consciously designed, but rarely with the participation of designers or even with truly transdisciplinary teams. Therefore, we are not only working towards synthesizing useful, usable, and appropriate solutions that can be applied to a wide variety of services but looking to identify emerging design issues that that will facilitate innovation and enable us to be effective in this field.

Official Website: http://www.design.cmu.edu/emergence