Blended spaces, cross-channel ecosystems,and the myth that is service

Bertil Lindenfalk & Andrea Resmini

ServDes 2016, Copenhagen

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”

today, affordable, mobile, consumer-grade computing is mainstream: smartphones, tablets, sensors, ambient appliances, and

wearables allow human-information interaction everywhere, all the time

digitization and constant read/write access to information have blurred the

distinction between products and services

people freely connect often competing products and services in emergent

choreographies

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”

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

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

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

systemic approach

R. Armson, Growing Wings on the Way, 2011

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

it also implies a shift from the idea of service to that of experience taking place in cross-channel ecosystems in blended space

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

cross-channel ecosystems are semantic constructs that straddle digital and

physical spaces, locations, devices, and contexts

WHATSAPP

SKATESBOX OFFICE

IMDB

MOVIE

NETFLIX

BUS

YELP

RESTAURANT

SMSWEBSITE

FRIEND’SHOME

BUSDINNER

PS4

BOARDGAMES

PHONE

PIZZAPLACE

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

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

interventions within an ecosystem broker between the different instances presented by the ecosystem itself, the actors, and the

designers’ own vision

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

“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

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

a cross-channel ecosystem is a blended space articulated through the choices of a

multitude of individual actors

as actors freely join independent channels, a blended space spanning services,

contexts, and locations is articulated as a digital / physical ecosystem

cross-channel ecosystems are service supersets, unbound, actor-constructed,

unfinished, and transient

they transcend the traditional limits encountered by service design practice

focusing primarily on organization-bound and organization-controlled systems

they are a digimodernist construct, fully acknowledging its computer-derived

textuality of haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social authorship

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

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.

we argue that this is a reductionist approach whose usefulness is greatly diminished when it comes to capture

cross-channel experiences

their complexity and emergent nature, their unfinished, evanescent onwardness requires a systemic framing built around

the idea of actor-driven experience

designing services as a collection of related and relatively static touchpoints is

eminently postmodern and unavoidably reductionist in nature

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

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

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

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

thank you

bertil.lindenfalk@ju.se

@resmini