What should Emergence be about next year?
While the conference is still fresh in your minds, we’d like to hear what you think next year’s conference should be about? Can we continue to explore service design? Is there another emerging design trend to consider? Can the conference be service design and something else? Would you come if it wasn’t service design?
September 9th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
[…] For comments about the theme, see What should Emergence be about next year? […]
September 16th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Suggest at least two different tracks: 1.- Service Design as a meta-narrative for our times or as a confluence of meta-narratives (Service, Design, Services), i.e. why SD and why now? What are the philosophical and cultural backdrops which make a conversation about SD even possible? Consider inviting speakers like John Thackara (Doors of Perception). 2.- Servide Design as an evolving and imminently practical bricolage of tools and applications for solving real world problems. Case studies, tool demonstrations, simulations, new advances in methodology, etc. Both tracks would convene together at least twice a day for general assemblies and key notes. This 2-track approach could broaden the discourse and attract a more diverse audience. Another suggestion: take the conference back to CMU…the Conference Center is nice and comfortable, but way too oversized and impersonal.
September 25th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Hi everybody
Both during the conference and in my daily research here in uk I’ve noticed a growing interest in ‘participation’ issues (often combined with personalisation), both in the design process (participatory approaches) and in the delivery of services (blurring of users-suppliers distinction) and both in business and public sector (see redesign of public services debate).
It could be interesting to focus next conference on this topic from different perspectives (participatory methods, new service organisation models, users behaviour/modes of participation, etc.)
What do you think?
See you soon!!
Daniela
September 26th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
I would probably attend another service design conference at Emergence, and I second Roberto’s suggestion of Thakara as a speaker, though three years of service design would tend to lock perceptions of Emergence as a “service design-only” conference, in the same way that ID is known to run a “design research” conference.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I think that it’s possible to move Emergence in other directions and come back to service design later with less danger of typecasting. One area that interests me and that I think deserves more attention by designers is ubiquitous computing. I get the impression that this is overwhelmingly an engineering-centric space at the moment.
Technologies and ideas surrounding ubiquitous computing (such as RFID and the Internet of Things) will continue to find their way into society. That integration can be handled well or poorly and it seems imperative that designers become invested in the outcome of that conversation.