Alicante might have a stunning new airport but some customer experiences remain the same.
This was the disheartening view that greeted us at the end of our holiday.
We joined the back of this queue to check-in our one bag, which actually took so long to do we were required to board the plane as soon as we went through airport security (with its own queuing, undressing & organised chaos). So no food or duty free was purchased and we were on our feet until we were sat in our seats on the plane.
In total, checking in this one bag both ways took us roughly 2 hours - 2 hours not spent with family or spending money at the airport (or sleeping at home).
As you queue past these machines, which look great (and very useful) but I have never once seen being used, you understand they are probably for printing boarding passes (or for DIY lost luggage recovery?) but that they are obviously not baggage tag printers and you laugh to yourself at the irony of needing to queue for 1hr to put your bag on a conveyor belt whilst being asked seemingly unnecessary questions. A frustrating disconnect in self-service.
So until designers (hopefully us) are able to help all passengers board planes quickly & conveniently with all the luggage they wish to take (however much they paid for their ticket) in ways that benefit the airline, the passenger and the airport, our advice would be to always travel as light as possible (carry on only!).
I wanted to highlight a nice - simple & very cheap - solution that has been implemented since the last time I flew with this particular airline. It is to do with their particular priority/speedy boarding scheme, which previously left customers unconvinced.
Although priority boarding passengers were front of the queue out of the airport terminal (before as now) they were often then led to a bus to the plane which seated another 1/3 of the remaining passengers (and first on the bus didn’t mean first off). So when the bus doors opened the scramble & race to the plane began.
In this new system an area of the bus is reserved for priority boarding passengers and the doors at this end open first. This works very well and has genuine benefits, which are clearly visible to the passengers who didn’t purchase speedy boarding as well as to those who can enjoy them.
These are just snippets of this one journey and only an overview – but through living these experiences designers can understand how to improve them for your customers.
*Keep your eyes peeled for the new Ideas Monster Service Design site coming soon.
In order for a community to take direct management roles or volunteer in their local services, they have to know that that particular service wouldn’t exist in the first place unless they run it.
If a service seems new or partly theirs then being a part of it becomes far more valuable and seemingly necessary than traditional ‘volunteering’.
To do this services have to be built from the ground up, involving the people who will use them.
This is co-creation...
Thank you very much to all those that attended The St Pauls Conversation on March the 19th and for all your hard work! The day would not have worked without you.
We are still in the process of collating all of the group’s efforts and talking about the best routes forward.
The teams produced some really fantastic, useful, workable ideas and I am looking forward to telling you about them soon.
As the next step, we will be putting the results from the day up on the wall in the Learning & Family Centre cafe and getting feedback from the community.
After discussing with some service design colleagues & agencies what I believed to be an exciting opportunity in our city it appeared on the news that evening.
There is the chance to collaboratively & creatively rethink how Bristol’s local library services are delivered.
And it is a unique, innovation sparking event we are attempting to create.
Where to begin...
To say you are going to redesign how all public libraries deliver their service, as if one size fits all, would not only be an impracticable challenge put perhaps somewhat naive.
It was after some fantastic meetings with some key members of Bristol City Council we were told of the very interesting shift that would soon see libraries become the responsibility of the neighbourhoods department, not the leisure and culture department.
This really hit home the idea that libraries and the role they play as community hubs is becoming the responsibility of the neighbourhoods they inhabit, so their ability to support learning and entertainment deserves designers who constantly provoke action, thinking and creativity. Libraries must also meet the individual needs of each community and go further to understand what those are.
Libraries can connect to their neighbourhood by opening up and getting more people involved. We don’t know about a big society but this isn’t a service that needs be run only by the council.
St Pauls Learning & Family Centre
So on Saturday, March 19th 2011 at St Pauls Learning & Family Centre in Bristol we will hold a fun, free, constructive, hands-on day where people from the area, members of the council, staff and all of the relevant stakeholders can talk to each other and designers. Libraries are a service for everyone and team activity like this facilitates community collaboration.
During a structured Ideas Workshop actual Service Design methodologies will be taught by university lecturers and professionals who will act as guides, putting people on one, of many possible paths to a solution. Reaching out to the people who will use the service to help you design it has become the only way to make sure it is sustainable and desirable.
For more information please visit the project website at www.ourlocallibrary.comwhere you can get involved & where there is plenty still to come...
Research
The research phase is of equal importance to the success of the project as the workshop and over the next two months we will be gaining a richer insight into what it’s like to live in St Pauls, be an existing user (or customer) of the Learning & Family Centre and to be a local who has never stepped foot inside the building.
Peoples’ stories & journeys through the current service and through their community need to be uncovered.
This is something we specialise in and involves lots of time spent with people, including videos, audio, diaries, photographs interviews and observations, in order to create a holistic picture of exactly what people do, need and want (and not just what they say they want). We will study how people interact with the current services on offer through the centre and their experiences to understand all of the issues and future demands of service users.
All of our findings will then be considered, wrapped up and communicated clearly back to those present on the day. The research will also be used to inspire ideas outside of the workshop and published through the site.
St Paul’s needs are unique to the area and its people making the library services very relevant to their locations. The success of the day and ultimately the benefit of the ideas generated lie in our ability to explore the very varied groups of people that use the library. Social inclusion is vital, and as the service is for everyone all current and potential user groups need to be considered and involved. We don’t want to be stuck designing only for those present on the day, or put another way, just a snippet of society.
The public sector is very complex and vastly interconnected, with certain services being referred to as ‘slow moving monsters’. Innovation and smart thinking now is more crucial than ever and more people need to be involved through activity like this.
We hope the process of working out what people need and who can make it happen for them, e.g. designers, members of the councils, people from the community etc. and inviting them to collaborate for a day in a fun, creative event will give members of the community the help & support to actively manage the services they need and want in the future.
This is not about intellectual property; it is about open collaboration, good ideas and getting all of the people who can make them a reality together in one room. We really hope you can join us either on the 19th or before!
For more information please visit the project website at www.ourlocallibrary.com where there is plenty still to come...
We know the website is lacking the attention we are desperate to give it, and our blog has been quiet, but it is for the best possible reason; we have been extremely busy working on some immensely exciting projects for some incredible clients. All of which will be up online when finished or when it is appropriate for us to put there.
There are obvious reasons why the Product Design section of our site will probably remain quiet for a little while longer; confidentiality agreements. The work done here; the Feasibility Reports and User Studies through to the final prototypes and all of the design work in-between is extremely important to the success of our client’s products and will not be published by us until it is appropriate to do so.
We are very excited about the month ahead and very soon hope to be embarking on a project that will involve communities throughout Bristol and as many designers as we can squeeze into one room...Mucho más muy pronto!
Until then we are going to run our monthly ‘Photos of the Month’ post. Yes, what a cliché, but we have some beautiful photographs of our goings-on that we want to share – in one way to prove our activity and in another to show you the fantastic Bristol businesses that have enlisted The Ideas Monster’s design services.
The Ideas Monster team! (Except me of course, somebody had to take the photo). Heidi, Duncan (nice Superman curl!) and Dean outside Rosemarino on their grand opening. Graphics and signage were done by us too!
Here’s George Pickup taking a photo for Dorkbot to work his magic on & draw a portrait, and that’s me (Chris Brooker) standing behind him not working as hard. Taken at our recent Designersblock exhibition: Bristol Air, from which two of our exhibitors have already had work commissioned. A full write up of the event will be coming soon.
One more from our exhibition at Designersblock, though there are so many stunning photos to chose from thanks to our installation artists Gemma & Tristin, this one shows Monster Duncan Iraci warming up Dorkbot and Neil Ferguson (Bristol Design Festival Director) enjoying the view...of Dorkbot obviously.
The Ideas Monster is currently developing a website for the sublime Hyde & Co bar.
And last but not least as we build their online store an image from inside the stunning Louche Furniture Boutique.
A group of designers brought together by the Bristol Design Festival team and The Ideas Monster give a taste of the emerging design scene in Bristol. Working 'way out' West of England provides the space and environment to experiment, create with a free spirit and a sense of purpose.
Bristol Air aims to highlight the work of individuals working in the area and the creative atmosphere of the city.
With Obama’s top domestic priority achieved the House of Representatives passed the biggest reform of health care in America for 40 years.
Service Design has only begun to scrape the surface of the public health service in the UK and the US system is an entirely different animal, with complex financial, political and social elements. But what lies at its core is health care and whether you bring service design methodologies to the existing (organically grown) system or start again from scratch everything else has the potential to align with the delivery and structure of a new health service.
From community health centres to hospitals if the health service is made sustainable and functions in such a capacity that it is equipped to serve the massive influx of people now granted access it will impact health insurers, Medicare and Medicaid, medical staff and training institutions, the private sector, pharmaceutical companies, public opinion, tax, the budget deficit, philanthropic organizations, social and economic development, and the health of 300 million people.
The current president has been the pioneer of transparent democracy and an opportunity has arisen to once again be at the forefront of innovation by discovering how best to provide the one fundamental need of all citizens, access to healthcare, with a transparent and open approach to rebuilding the health service from the ground up.
This is the most exceptional and exciting service design challenge facing the democratic western world. Existing public health services, the success stories and mistakes, can be identified. Only in this instance Service Design will be needed far beyond the realms of healthcare.
Mr Obama has said ‘that the public option was only a means to an end, and he remained open to other ideas if they had the same effect’. His outlined, more detailed blueprint for healthcare overhaul is barely the beginning.
Set against the backdrop of Hyde & Co’s faultless 1920’s decor designers from across Bristol once again got together to talk about the thing they love the most and do what they enjoy almost as much, drink the sublime cocktails of Bristol’s new speakeasy.
It was a pleasure spending an evening with you all again, and as one design industry mogul said ‘Bristol is an extremely exciting place to be at the moment’.
This month we were joined by James Koch who has contributed some truly stunning photographs of the evening. To see more of his extraordinary photography visit him at http://dontforgetthesun.wordpress.com/ Seeing Bristol through his eyes is an experience I would recommend to anyone.
Let’s hope he can join us next time.
If you were able to make it please get in touch and tell us what you thought, did you like the change of venue? How was your cocktail? Do you have any thoughts for next time or about the future of the event in general?
And once again I would like to extend an open invitation to all designers, artists, musicians, engineers, photographers, students & lecturers or indeed anyone who thinks they could benefit from the fine services of these good people. The next First Friday of the Month is the 2nd April, and as soon as we are sure of the next venue we will post it on our Twitter page and send out the invites.
As The Ideas Monster grows not only have we had the privilege of working with some of the best young, up-and-coming designers out there but also some of the finest, established designers & artists currently practicing.
Rob Carr is an illustrator/animator currently living & working in Bristol who unsurprisingly has been snapped up by Aardman Animations.
Our further developed brand identity is on the way thanks to his truly beautiful imagination and subsequent animations.
We thought it would be great to show you his work in progress. Every member of The Ideas Monster needs their alter ego depicted by Rob, if only we could steal that much of his time.
Well it’s the morning after another fantastic First Friday of the Month: Bristol’s monthly get together of passionate young, and some slightly older, designers. A big thank you to everyone who made it to The Lansdown last night, it was great to see you all.
As usual a fantastic range of students, lecturers and practicing professionals from all corners of the design industry were able to be there and it was really fascinating hearing about everybody’s work.
We are looking forward to seeing you all again, same time and place in March (Friday the 5th), if not before.
Hello! We’re really glad to have finally found the time to start throwing ideas, inspirations, observations, musings, scribbles and basically anything we think needs to be shared with more brains than our own, at our blog.
Please get in touch with your thoughts as without your opinions and feedback the whole exercise would be pretty much pointless!
For the first blog post, as we wrap other future posts into sexy digestible packages ready to be thrown at the internet, we'll start with something fun and, as all the best things are, visually stimulating.
The beautiful city of Valencia is heavily influenced by design but has been kept very understated by its subtle and creative use.
At the IVAM, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art http://www.ivam.es/ we recently stumbled across a design exhibition showing the work produced by various design agencies purely for the city of Valencia, which we thought was a brilliant idea and in the warm sunshine something we would recommend to anyone.
This was a design exhibition that gave you a real feel for the creative possibilities in an energetic city.
Subscribe
