think carrie, think!

I started 2008 in sunny, happy, and freezing Orlando. Our family has somewhat of a tradition, traveling to Disney World every couple of years since I was born.

Let me first make one thing clear: Disney World is not just for kids. It’s a shame that most people think this way because while yes, the Magic Kingdom theme park mostly contains rides for small children, it is not the only theme park there. I guess it doesn’t help that most of the happy travelers flocking to Disney are families with children under the age of five.

Anyway. I didn’t vacation at Disney as the regular Carrie this time. Nope. Blame CMU on this one, but I vacationed as Carrie The Designer this time around. Whereas before I marveled at the rides, the endless amounts of Disney merchandise, and the three-hour waits for rides, this time I looked at everything from a different perspective: I marveled at what had to have gone behind the scenes to design the rides, the meaning and value of Disney merchandise to kids and adults alike, and the management and innovation that goes behind the design of ride queues.

It’s amazing what Disney does. Bypassing the more childish Magic Kingdom and thinking about my favourite Disney theme park, the EPCOT center, I like to think of Mr. Walt Disney as one of my personal design heroes. I mean, EPCOT stands for “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow”. How much more modern and design-y can you get? And he proposed this park over 20 years ago. Even though Walt Disney had initially imagined EPCOT as an actual community, it’s nice that The Walt Disney Company made it into a theme park, while still maintaining Walt’s visions. Now, the park contains different attractions that highlight some of the current and future innovations in different areas. It’s almost like a giant playground to introduce the public to what we do everyday.

Of course, Disney isn’t all fun and magic. The restaurant where we had dinner at Epcot was backed up over an hour. Customers were yelling and the lobby was packed full of people who should have been seated hours ago. There seems to be some sort of disconnect between Disney and its restaurants; Disney owns all the restaurants on its sites, but manages all the reservations without knowing how the restaurants operate.

In the end, the great things about Disney make you forget about all their mistakes. Their ingenious distractions while waiting to get into attractions and rides, their Fastpass system for shortening wait times, the way they create the Disney atmosphere using everything imaginable (but never overdoing it)… a lot of companies could use some service design tips from Disney (and it’s nice to see that some have).

Thanks to good ol’ Walt for providing me with my first design eye-opener of the year ;)

As I only had two days of classes this term, the entire term zipped by almost without me knowing. By the last day of the term, I somehow managed to finish my thesis paper (though you can be sure I will be using all next term to refine it), create the other two deliverables for my 5 Minute Break project (see previous post), create a bunch of research activities for my thesis project, spend $100 to print out my thesis project poster, redesign my portfolio website (have yet to complete it though), and relax the rest of the time.

Next term, I will be completing my thesis paper and project, and will be taking four classes: Dick Buchanan’s Design, Management, and Organizational Change, Kristin Hughes and Mark Mentzer’s Color and Communication, Shelley Evenson’s Conceptual Models, and I will once again be taking Repertoire Orchestra. Very excited about this lineup; I think it’s a really great mix of different types of design, and I think all will be useful with whatever I decide to do later on.

But before I get ahead of myself, here’s the update on the rest of the term since my last post:

Thesis project
After an oh-so-exciting four months of waiting, all my IRB problems were resolved, and I am finally allowed to go talk to families at Children’s Hospital. Too bad this came a week before school ended, which means I can’t actually go in until after the break, but at least I can go. Within these four months, I talked to the staff at Children’s and have a pretty good idea of what they believe to be the problem with information overload for the parents of patients. It will be interesting to compare the staff’s perceived problems with the families’ problems once I get to talk to them.

As Masters students we are all required to create a thesis project poster for a poster session that we hold at the end of the term. Mine mainly consisted of the models I created from talking to the staff, but it also includes the four research activities that I devised to get insight into families’ experiences at the hospital. For now I am mainly interested in comparing different emotional states throughout families’ journeys at the hospital with the information they receive at these points.

Thesis paper
After a crazy Thanksgiving weekend writing session, I mostly finished my thesis paper, then really finished in the couple of weeks after. It still needs lots of revision, mostly for writing style and argument coherency, but it’s mostly there (I think, and hope). The thesis paper has been one of the hardest “assignments” (if you can call it that) for me; I’ve never been comfortable with my writing style. But it’s progressing and I hope to have a solid Masters Thesis Paper by the time I graduate, even if the only two people who will read it are me, and my advisor ;)

Grad Type
I finished my 5 Minute Break assignment with mostly a bang. Created some mockups of a proposed website, and for my third piece I decided to make small and playful keychain tags, each tag containing an idea for something you could do on a 5 minute break. It was a fun project, and really useful too. I learned a lot about creating systems, and what mediums are good for what purposes. I learned how to treat visualizations differently depending on your medium. I learned more about hierarchy (you can never learn enough about hierarchy). Most importantly, I learned that I can create things I would have never thought of doing… thinking outside the box in terms of visual design, and not being afraid to do it is I think the one big lesson of this class for me. I feel like I can approach different projects without being confined to what I know and am comfortable with, and still create something visually appealing.

Orchestra
Because of the way the class was set up, I only got to play twice this term. Nevertheless, both times were great. With most things, I always forget how fun it is until I actually do it again. But with music, I never forget, which makes a lack of music in my life a problem. My first year of grad school was the first year in my life that I wasn’t pursuing anything musical; up until my first year of undergrad I was talking piano lessons, I played in my highschool’s jazz band, concert band, and pit orchestra, I started my own chamber quintet (that was later invited to play for Canada’s Governor General), I continued competing as a pianist in my hometown’s Kiwanis music competition… in undergrad I continued taking piano lessons (at the expense of some of my academics), sang in one of University of Toronto’s 1oo-member choirs, and played piano for one of my college’s cabaret productions. Then came my first year at CMU, when I did absolutely nothing. I couldn’t even find a piano on campus that I could play on. So, playing in orchestra this year was pretty refreshing. Sometimes it makes me wonder why I never pursued music as a career. But then I look at what I’m doing in school now, and am always reminded that maybe music is better served as a hobby ;)

I think that’s enough school updates for now. Over the break I plan on finishing my portfolio, looking for places that I’d like to work at, and refining my thesis paper. Fun!

I’m done a little bit more than a quarter of my final year in grad school. What’s the smartest move to make now? Changing both my thesis paper and project focuses, of course! Duh.

That’s what happens when you’re supposed to make decisions on your thesis topics at the end of your first year in grad school, without doing an enormous amount of research to figure out if it’s really what you want to do. So, now that I’ve done some more thorough research, and have spent some time mulling about in various topics, I’ve finally chosen something I think I’m comfortable pursuing.

New and improved thesis project focus

I’m still looking at the Intermediary Care Unit at the Pittsburgh Children’s hospital. But instead of focusing on patient experience, I’ll be focusing more on family education. Imagine this: your five year old child has just gotten an emergency heart operation, is recovering in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit where the patient to staff ratio is 1:1—each child has their own bedside nurse. A couple days later your child is transferred to the Intermediary Care Unit, where the patient to staff ratio is now 1:3. Being a parent who isn’t in the medical field, you wonder if the sudden decrease of care and focus for your child is adequate. Of course, you know that your child should be okay, otherwise they would’ve have put him in the unit. But in the back of your mind, you’re constantly worrying, because you’re not 100% sure about what’s going on. You’re trying to keep up with everything everyone has told you, but at times it’s just information overload. Your child is discharged a week later, and you then wonder whether that was enough time to recuperate in the hospital. More importantly, you wonder whether you’ll be knowledgeable enough to be able to give your child the best care possible at home.

It’s a hard problem to tackle. Where should you begin educating the families about the condition and care of their child? What sorts of information should you be giving them and when? Organizing the information is a challenge… you can imagine all the different types of new information that a parent can acquire: dietary info, physical therapy info, respiratory therapy info, general care info, etc. In what mediums should the information be delivered? Should there be multiple channels of information delivery?

So that’s what I’ll be doing. Trying to develop some sort of service that will allow families to feel more empowered about caring for their children. Allowing them to feel more comfortable about the entire process, and allowing a more seamless transition between information transfer and gathering.

New and improved thesis paper focus

Before, I had plans of looking at musical notation systems to develop a new service notation framework. But to do this would require an explanation of why one should even look to music in the first place. Why look to music for parallels for notation systems?

Here’s the rough (very basic) outline of my paper [the real outline is at three pages right now]. Apologies in advance for the weird wordpress formatting of lists:

1. Service background
   • introducing service design as a new discipline
2. Paralleling Music to Service
   • looking at music lifecycles
   • looking at music as a system
   • looking at musical style
   • first impressions
3. Paralleling Music Roles to Service Roles
   • Introducing the notion of the following parallels:
     • composer = service designer
     • performer = service provider/frontline people
     • listener = customer
   • The Role of the Composer [or service designer]
     • master of elements
     • giving shape to ideas
     • keeping an organic relationship to his work
     • designing the unexpected
   • The Role of the Performer [or service provider]
     • reproduce composer’s intentions with conviction
     • supplying energy and movement to a piece of music
     • master of elements before taking the performance further
     • need to execute and interpret
     • need to be aware of performance conditions
     • establishing trust
   • The Role of the Listener [or customer]
     • role as an advocate/educator
     • four stages of listening:
     • hearing, enjoying, understanding, and discriminating
     • in the end, the listener wants an experience
     • role as a discriminator
     • Notation Systems
4. Notation Systems
   • Introduction: notation is necessary to tie and ground all the roles together
   • How the composer, performer, and listener relate to the music score
   • How this parallels to service
     • need for fidelity and conviction to notation system
     • limitations of notation system
5. Future direction
   • developing system notation systems by looking at music notation systems
6. Conclusion

Phew. Long post. I will be impressed if someone actually got to this point of the post ;)

The point is that people, probably because of their biological wiring, more easily form emotional attachments to things than to intangible services. —Dan Saffer, Designing For Interaction

Emotional attachments to services. Can we make this possible? Would this make us less likely to switch services even if the competitor offers a better experience? What would constitute emotional attachment to a service… brand, people, tangible artifacts? Can you even form an emotional attachment to something that’s not physical in nature?

… I will be filing this as Future Thesis Paper Idea #14253.

***edit / In light of the recent comments on this post:

Now this makes me wonder if there’s a difference between attachment and emotional attachment. I’m attached to Google too, but I would call it more of a functional attachment rather than an emotional attachment.

In his book, Dan talks about a Zippo lighter that belonged to his grandfather. There’s emotional attachment there; he won’t trade the lighter in even though there are better ones out there.

So that’s what I was wondering in my post: can the same type of attachment exist with services? Sure, we all have some sort of attachment to some of the services we love, but if better services come along, how easy would it be just to give our old ones up?

This past weekend I attended Emergence, CMU School of Design’s second annual student-run conference. The theme this year was Exploring the Boundaries of Service Design. Dan Boyarski, Head of our School of Design, discussed the theme by asking how service design relates to disciplines such as systems, strategy, information, infrastructure, information, interaction, and product design. We spent most of the last conference trying to define and introduce service design as a discipline, and this year sought to work at the definition a bit more by looking at different fields.

That being said, here’s a quick glimpse of what I got from the conference. I attended one workshop, nine lectures, and two panel discussions. Here goes nothing.

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