MSc Interaction Design memoir by Chike Oriaku

January 26, 2008

Week 14

Filed under: Services — chiko @ 11:34 pm

CMT: 21st Jan ‘08

Paola hosted today’s session with the topic on Services

What is a service?

In Principles of Marketing, Philip Kotler defines a service as ‘any activity or benefit that one party can give to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything. Its production may or may not be tied to a physical product.’
http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/About-Design/Design-Disciplines/Service-design-by-Bill-Hollins/

“This unparalleled segment growth is changing the way companies organize themselves, creating a ripple effect in industries and universities that are closely tied to these organizations. For instance, historically, most scientific research has been geared to supporting and assisting manufacturing, which was once a dominant force in the world economy. Now that economies are shifting, industrial and academic research facilities need to apply more scientific rigor to the practices of services, such as finding better ways to use mathematical optimization to increase productivity and efficiency on demand.

Unfortunately, this shift to focusing on services has created a skills gap, especially in the area of high value services, which requires people who are knowledgeable about business and information technology, as well as the human factors that go into a successful services operation. Many leading universities have begun exploring and investing in this area, working in tandem with thought leaders in the business world.”
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/471/glushko.html

The quality of service is Intangible and down to individual person supplying it;

* It can not be stored

* It losses value once the service is over

* A service is experienced rather than manipulated

We also talked about Design as being integration between two brotherly expertise skills knowledge acquisition and the society request for change.

Designs are solutions to problems!

So what is the problem?

Who formulates the problems?

 

PDE: 25th Jan’08

Today’s tutorials was supervised by Bob and Andy; they suggested/ advised on ways to foster an efficient and up to date progression in our individual projects. All the group members present at the session listened to the advice given to each member in order to derive as much ideas as the individual the advice is being directed to.

 

January 18, 2008

Week 13

Filed under: Ethics, Project presentation — chiko @ 6:21 pm
 CMT: 14 Jan ‘08

This is the first week of the new semester, though Dr Paola Amaldi-Trillo was supposed to start this semester with us as the main tutor for the above module, I suppose she is still on her sabbatical. That simply means we still have Dr Fields for the week, I am quite sure to most of my team mates, It does not make much difference if it is Bob or Paola.

The topic for today is supposed to be ‘Ethics and Interaction Design’

However, the session did not hold. In it, we were meant to raise some practical issues that have bearing to several aspects of Interaction Design, and also discuss some of the ethical and moral problems that may arise in the practice of Interaction Design, some of the guidelines that can help to alleviate or avoid difficulties.

The following reading materials were recommended in order to understand more and share some ethical problems or dilemmas that we have faced or are aware of:

Chauncey E. Wilson (2007) Ethical dilemmas redux. Interactions.
Volume 14, Issue 4 (July + August 2007). Pages: 50 – 51.
(Available from the ACM Digital Library)

Wendy E. Mackay (1995) Ethics, lies and videotape…
Proceedings of CHI’95: Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems. Pages: 138 – 145.
(Available from the ACM Digital Library)

Toni Robertson (2006) Ethical issues in interaction design. Ethics
and Information Technology.
Volume 8 , Issue 2 (June 2006), Pages: 49 – 59
( from http://www.springerlink.com/ or http://research.it.uts.edu.au/
idwop/downloads/RobertsonEthics&IT.pdf)

PDE: 18th Jan ‘08

Today, we started as usual with a little bit of informal discussions at beginning of the session, after which we moved on to the issue of the day, which are presentations on individual draft projects. David started with his Lead users’ idea, and then Halil came up with the Augmented Reality Paradigm, Dikshit showed us his Augmented Reality from the Architectural perspective, Finally Dean discussed about a product like the GPS navigational systems free for kids entering the zoo, though it is an existing product, he talked about additional features to the hand-held systems.

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