Service Design as Entertainment

2006-05-07T04:14:00.000-07:00

2006-05-04T04:20:00.000-07:00

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called Bag it or Flag it. Make your own badge here.

2006-04-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

A gift from Google! Witness Google Maps Italy!!!!

2006-04-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

[00] CU of small dog's rear end squatting
a woman's long shapely legs in the background, well-heeled foot tapping impatiently

[01] panning up, dog's rear goes out of screen, then "boing" or "popping" sound
woman goes "humph" with one hand on hip while the other one presses a button on the dog lead.

[02] computer display of poodar
flashing poo icon, poo-poo-ish beeping sounds.

[03] shallow DoF
shot from behind the scooter facing the bar, pull focus from scooter (the light from the computer display barely visible in the foreground) to bar where the owner of the scooter who is standing. his head turns to the camera/sound of the alert.

[04] tight on the eyes and slowly panning down
close up of our lorenzo lamas look-a-like, his greasy black hair and coarse 12 o'clock shadow whispers "machiiiiiiisssssmo" softly in your ear.

[05] continue panning down, slowing to stop on strong jawline/sensual lips
with a slight, manly grunt of annoyance he downs his expresso

[06] CU on helmet as hand sweeps in
grabs his motorcycle helmet and

[07] pull out from MS to WS
runs out the door.

[intercut black]

[08] very wide angle
vespa whipping down the street, camera tailing behind, passes a bus shelter with an ipod advert displayed,

[09] camera slows to keep advert in screen while vespa grows smaller in the distance
the dancer's black silhouette breaks into movement, unpaused by the jet stream of the passing motorist.

: -- -- -- -- -- -- :

wide shot
a group of kids gathered in a circle on the sidewalk

low shot tilted up at the children's faces inside the circle
the lens of a camphone fuzzily juts into view, Red LED turns Green accompanied by a "snap" sound

CU on phone screen
photo loads onto screen, an address is typed into a textbox below the photo

Menu Pops Up
[Send Now] [Add Tags]
Clicks [Add Tags]
Selects [New/Tiny]

a story which weaves the 4 actors together in the magnificent pootopia dance

2006-02-27T08:09:00.000-08:00

Wooo! My presentation is up, as well as audience feedback. It would be iPod Video friendly had Youtube not wrapped it up in flash, but oh well... there are ways around that.

Enjoy!

2006-02-26T05:16:00.000-08:00

Had a stellar time presenting this time around, came up second to last on the second day so I knew I needed to do something to wake the audience up.

Started off with the "More Poop Your House - No Grazie!" slide and then I struck with the iPood advert. Very simple, very effective. Two 30-second tracks overlayed on the same slide, one with music, the other with my vocal poodar performance building up to a climactic "Watch Out! You're going to step in it!!!"

One of the best comments I got after the presentation was from Mellis, who said something like, "Now I get it. If the service was as entertaining as your presentation, that's Service Design as Entertainment. The presentation was the embodiment of the idea." I knew that I had got my message out after Danny Stillion kept coming up with poo puns long after the presentation.

What can I say? Poop is sticky. ;p

I'll post an update when the video of the presentation gets youtubed... tried it once, but got garbled in the transmission.

2006-02-16T02:16:00.000-08:00

Still working on both character design and story. Here are the seeds of the bad guys of Pooptopia. Take one part Joker, two parts Toxic Avenger, sprinkle with Iron Man for the nanite age, and you begin to get an idea of what happens when a Pittsburg Pirates/Steelers fan teaching in Korea falls afoul of some industrial accident near a nano-robotics research lab in the outskirts of Seoul. Pair this steely poo-pirate with a military-grade Poomba (semi-autonomous waste removal swarmrobot) gone bad, and you get Captain Dong-chim* and the Nemse** Machine.

* Dong-Chim (똥침; poop needle) is an attack, which i think is unique to korean children, and often takes places when someone is bending over to drink from a water facet.

** Nemse (냄새; stink), i.e. a stinky, poop-powered robot.

2006-02-09T05:12:00.000-08:00

Service Design as Entertainment
Case Study: Pooptopia LBS

MISSION
Why are you doing this project?
Poop is very natural. Poop is also kind of funny and gross. Poop is a big problem in Milan in certain areas, but not in other areas. I am curious as to why this is so. Via Watt is the perfect laboratory to investigate the problem because Via Watt is a "Pooptopia".

What is the problem you are trying to address?
Some dog owners do not clean up their dog's poop and when other dog owners follow suit the problem snowballs and everyone suffers.

What is your overall goal?
To provide dog owners with an easy way to take responsibility for the problem.

At the end of your thesis you will be happy if…
It is safe to walk down Via Watt while staring at the clouds in the sky.

CONTEXT
Who are you designing for?
Dog owners, poo-haters, and poo-hunters or in the language of the service: Pooptopians, Poogilates, and Poonies.

Who will benefit of your new design?
Anyone who has treaded and dreaded poo-littered city streets.

What is the added value you want to bring to people everyday life?
Community, cleanliness, and joy.

CONCEPT
What is your design domain?
Poop.

Is it a new product? Is it a new service?
Pooptopia LBS is a pet waste removal service for city neighborhoods. It utilizes location-based technology to locate, monitor, and respond to problem areas. The service incorporates stakeholder action into the solution by empowering dog owners, poo-haters, and poo-hunters to easily mark the location of pet waste for pick-up by the Pooptopia service or by city-employed sanitation workers.

What happens in each scenario?
POOPTOPIAN Scenario:
Pæris Hiltøn takes her poochie for a walk in her chic urban neighborhood. Poochie poo-poos and Pæris goes, “Like… ewww. Mommy will call the nice Pootector-man to take care of babies’ business. Mm-Kay?” Pæris flicks open her fabulous jewel-encrusted Vir2 phone, launches the Poodar application with one softkey click, then hits a second key to record a pootag sending GPS coordinates to Pooptopia’s server and then continues on her walk, gloves unsoiled. Seconds later a new blip appears on Poodar screens and Pootectors in the vicinity are alerted to location of Poochie’s mess.

POOGILANTE Scenario:
On her way home from the market, Signora Pelle wheels her cart into a fresh pile of dog poo. Infuriated by the indignity of the situation, she takes out her mobile to document the uncharted poo and fires off pre-formatted SMS to local city officials stating “No shit is good shit. Enough with irresponsible dog owners!” with photo and GPS coordinates attached. The picture is then uploaded to the Pooptopia website where other angry Poogilantes gather to vent and crook fingers at the filthy pictures and lament over falling real estate value of their neighborhood on Pooptopia’s message boards. From the comfort of her apartment, Signora Pelle pecks on her keyboard, “Let’s show them we mean business!” She organizes a flashmob of Poogilantes and descend into the heart of their Pooptopian neighborhood to poolog en masse. Nearby at a city substation, a small squad of sanitation workers wheel out on specially modified segways and head off to the new, large blip on their Poodar PDA screen.

POONIE Scenario:
Hannah Teresa Maria Lisa walks home from school everyday. She is a Junior Pootector, a volunteer Poonie and poo-hunter extraordinaire. Her HorseFly phone allows her to call the police, her mom, her best friend and poolog. Everyday she keeps her eyes peeled for dog poop a carefully catalogues anything she finds. She also helps by marking anything she finds as “big poo”, or “little poo.” She tries hard to be the first pootagger because she gets the most pooints for “new poo”. Hannah Teresa Maria Lisa is one of Pooptopia’s finest Pootectors-in-Training.

What are the touch-points?
SOFTWARE
Poodar powered by M.P.A.A.S. (Mobile Poo Awareness & Avoidance System) a mobile phone application for geotagging poop and GeoRSS for iPod.
The Pooptopia website.
Daily Pootistics and Zen koans from the Prophet of Pooptopia.

PLACES
Petshops
Animal Registration Office

WORKERS
Poojockey w/ lacross-polo style extended pooper scooper, rides a Pooter scooter and wears an augmented-reality helmet with Poodar on the visor’s H.U.D.
City Sanitation-worker w/ precision spray and claw for grabbing, rides Segway SHT.

HARDWARE
Honda Pooter - A zippy hybrid scooter with spacious storage compartments
Segway SHT - a specially modified segway to allow for ease of poop scooping and monitoring of Poodar.
iRobot Poomba - semi-autonomous swarm robots for waste removal deployed in urban environments (think Roomba 4x4 multiplied by 1,000).
Cingular HorseFly - Country cousin to the Firefly.

Why does the final user like it?
Dog owners have someone else to do their dirty work and something to talk about, poo-haters have a vehicle to take constructive action, and poo-hunters gain status and respect in the community.

What is the very new value you are bringing to the people?
A monk once asked Ummon, "What is the Buddha?"
Ummon answered thusly: "A dried shit-stick!"
- Yunmen Wenyan, zen koan

(Captain Dongchim and the Nemse Machine will be appearing in the next post.... I promise!)

2006-02-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

Had a lovely walk with Heather and Leo this morning. The muse of Pooptopia visited me while I was enjoying a cappucco in the cafe next to Heather's flat. In the foamy swirl of my cup I received this cryptic message.

The Great Prophet of Pooptopia said:
Seek Shit and You Shall Find It.

After observing two sizable dog communities around parks, and monitoring the local parkless (non) community, I realized that citizens of Pooptopia (Pooptopians) may need more than a poop-scooping service for city sidewalks. And conversely, Puptopians may not even want some else to scoop their dog's poo. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves and have the motivation, provided they see other dog owners doing the same.

So, while some may want a scooping service and some may not, all dog owners - be they Pooptopians or Puptopians - need ice-breakers, fodder for conversation. Dogs are social animals and require the same of their owners, and what do Pooptopians talk about dogs exchange olfactory namecards?

Perhaps dog owners could receive a daily quote from the Great Prophet of Pooptopia delivered via SMS; food for thought, wise words from a sage, or pithy one-liners about poo from a graduate student in Interaction Design ;-). That along with local neighborhood Pootistics, a daily report of choice facts, which could alert them perhaps if their Puptopian neighborhood was on the verge of being assimilated into Pooptopia's odiferous realm.

Dog owners aren't the only people affected by the battle between Pootopian and Puptopian neighborhoods. Other stakeholders would be the poo-haters (who may also be dog-haters just looking for an excuse). We shall dub them Poogilantes. Picture Clint Eastwood disguised as Italian lady wearing an immense fur coat and a scowl, armed with a shopping bag on wheels and a Poodar-equipped mobile phone. Then there are Junior Pootectors a.k.a. the Poonies, brave and reckless bands of youth recruited from the neighborhoods of Pootopias and Puptopias. An inquisitive bunch, they have a natural fascination with anything body fuction related and dog poo is always good for a giggle. They pootag for fun and glory. They pootag to defeat Captain Dongchim and the Nemse Machine (more on that neferious duo later).

Pooptopia LBS Values for Stakeholders rundown:
For dog owners. Portrait of a Pooptopian: Whether on not they choose to scoop, at least they have something to talk about.

For poo-haters: Portrait of a Poogilante: A cranky poo (and possibly dog) hater who points out poo in a furious attempt to oust all dogs and dog owners from their neighborhood. Pootagging gives them proof of the problem and fuel for their anti-merde politicking.

For poo-lovers: Portrait of a Pootector: A young, enthusiastic squad of poo-hunters. Their mission: Seek and destroy poo. Their ranks swell with every passing day with the fresh-faced youth of Pootopia's Police Squad. Armed with Pootector Kit: For now a disposable camera and neighborhood map to Poolog. Pooflags with Semacode on toothpicks to Pootag. This kit is to be handed out to volunteers at local church.... Come se dice "User Research Probe"?

A bit confused by all these filthy terminology? Check out my previous Pooptopian post which describes the environment in which Pooptopia LBS was born.

In the next Pootopian post I will introduce Pooptopia's nemesi:

Captain Dongchim (똥침/Poop-needle) and the Nemse (냄새/Stink) Machine!

2006-01-29T02:53:00.000-08:00

Why Pooptopia? A view into my design process.

Problem:
The sidewalks of via Watt are littered with dog poo. The neighborhood is what I have termed a "Pooptopia." Heaven if you like dog poo, but hell if you don't. This is a problem for me because my wife fears walking down the street to my school. This is also a problem for other people as well. Some of the poo has been flattened and smeared by unwary walkers. I happened to observe one unlucky lady wearing lovely boots as she stepped in poo across the street. We live in Milan and there are lots of fashionable people wearing nice, expensive shoes. I'm sure the poor girl was horrified to be scraping the bottom of her boots in the dirt and bushes.

Observation:
Around the big park near my apartment the sidewalks are clean. The park is huge by local standards and it has a sizable dog run, a fenced-in area for dogs to run free. This is a "Puptopia." Heaven for dogs, dog owners, and people just out for a walk. Me and a friend interviewed several dog owners enjoying the park with their dogs. They felt it was their responsibility to pick up after their dog. They all carried plastic baggies with them, made sure their dog only went in the grass or in the dog run.

This was also clearly a community. We were among friends and neighbors. They knew each other's dogs by name. Most of them take their dogs out 5 times a day, so they probably saw each other quite regularly. The dog owners had a lot of time to chat among themselves while their puppies played in the dog run. We observed something very special. As we were talking with two ladies, a third woman on a bicycle with dog on a leash and little girl riding in a child seat behind her, paused briefly to hand over the dog's leash to one of the ladies we had been talking to and then cycling away. Some time later she returned on her bicycle, alone. She must have dropped her daughter off at school. I realized that this was a daily ritual for both her and her friends. No words needed to be exchanged, everything was already understood between them. They had a strong community here and I think the park had a big role in this. It reminded me of the talk Enzio Manzini's gave to our class last year about the Commons, areas shared by the community. Poop-free sidewalks are just one beneficial side-effect of the Commons. I know you, you know me. I clean up after my dog, you clean up after yours. I look after your best interests, you look after mine. It's so simple.

Hypothesis:
Via Watt is a mixed commercial-residential area. No grand parks or grassy sidewalks. Just auto-shops, furniture makers, and hardware stores along with a couple pizzerias and kebab joints to feed to local labor force. Domus Academy and Interaction-Ivrea just moved into the neighborhood which signals that perhaps neighborhood is verging towards industrial-chic but it's not quite there yet. It also means the neighborhood has a strong flux of transient visitors, busy during weekday working hours, empty on weekends and evenings. Via Watt does have some residents, and obviously a number of them have dogs judging from the evidence. But I would guess there is no sense of community. Dog owners do not congregate in the street. They pass each other on the sidewalk, walking in opposite directions, meeting rarely. No one is looking out for anyone else, and if you're not going to pick up you're dog's shit, why should I?

And that, my friends, is why the people of Watt and Watt-like neighborhoods across the globe need M.P.A.A.S., the Mobile Poo Awareness & Avoidance System brought to you by turd-herders of Pooptopia LBS (Location-based service). Part of Service Design As Entertainment.

View the Flickr set for this project.

This post is dedicated to Neil Churcher for always asking WHY and was motivated by reading this post by Julian Bleecker. Pooptopia owes a large intellectual debt to Enzio Manzini and Jane Jacob's wonderful book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

2006-01-28T08:55:00.000-08:00

What's your favorite color? This weekend I am working on some fun designs for Pooptopia, uploaded and geotagged my poologging from earlier this week as well as pix from a survey of dog owners. Check out the Flickr set. More juicy bits on their way!

2006-01-23T06:45:00.000-08:00

A new home for my thesis: Service Design as Entertainment [SD:E], Entertainment as Service Design [E:SD]. Previously hosted at http://people.interaction-ivrea.it/a.amstrong/thesis/

To recap, SD:E asks what can service design learn from entertainment? By way of adopting entertainment-like qualities such as storyline, production value, and narrative, I believe the daily interactions with have with services can not only serve our needs but also enrich our lives in both playful and poetic ways. My goal is to design a service which is so fun, so enjoyable to use that people will be drawn to using it in the same way people seek out cultural experiences. In this regard, I am developing Pooptopia LBS (don't laugh, poo is serious business in Milan), a location-based service in development with Victor Szilagyi. E-mail me if you want to be notified when we reach an alpha build of the service.

E:SD asks: How can service design save entertainment? This is a very broad and questionable question so I will be more specific. I am focued on the field of gaming because A) it's my second love (she is my first) and B) we're at a very critical stage in the development of a new medium with all the hype surrounding next-gen consoles, pervasive and casual gaming. Beyond the hype, I think there is also hope for experimental and independant game developers, but in my opinion, the financial viability of projects is the biggest issue (this is something Greg Costikyan is tackling head on in the PC market). Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a great illustration of a new game genre struggling to be self-sustainable. 4orty2wo Entertainment has done such amazing work under the guise of engagement advertising or buzz creation. One could even say "The Beast", ILOVESBEES, and Last Call Poker were superior cultural offerings than the products they were marketing: the A.I. movie, Halo, and Gun... clearly with Gun, less so with Halo, but regardless of whether you prefer X to Z, it is a whole lot easier to sell tickets to a movie than to an ARG.

Which leads us to E:SD, how can service design save the entertainers? I am looking at games built with new economic models in mind, designing games as services rather than boxes of software (see Lost Garden), and forging partnerships with commercial stakeholders instead of traditional in-game advertising.

E:SD is comprised of four projects which illustrate my approach with four different commercial partners. It the beginning there was Piedimonsterz helping McDonald's tighten and tone their image.

This summer Art Center Nabi heard my proposal for Rumble of the Future, a locative media interactive narrative embeded in the commecial fabric of the Myungdong area of Seoul, played out through a series of semacode-trigged MMSs.

In our recent Applied Dream's workshop, Chia-Ying Lee and I proposed Urban Brand Warfare, a game for shopper when they're not shopping, to France Telecom. Urban Brand Warfare is a city-scale turf war fought by consumers representing the brands they represent played on the infrastucture of the mobile phone cell network. Tribalism and graffiti were major influences. Urban Brand Warfare is under NDA until May 2006.

Finally, the project currently under development which I hope to be demoing at the IDII 2006 End of Year Show, Gladiator Daycare: Adventures in RFID Retail. Taking lessons from Paco Underhill's Call of the Mall, it's game for mall-rats, bored hubbies and tag-along kids which takes RFID tags in the retail environment and uses them as in-game tokens.

Alejandro and I are hoping to show an exhibition-quality Piedimonsterz installation at the Salone this year. We just need sturdier insole-inputs. I will be working with a yet-to-be-confirmed programmer on prototyping Gladiator Daycare on a PDA with an RFID reader using flash to simulate a Gameboy DS-like experience. 'Rumble' is on the back burner with a few ideas for a Milano/Duomo/Stranieri story on simmer.

In other collaborations, David A. Mellis and I have been bouncing around ideas for a Teaching Turing make-over called Free Turing (a.k.a. Alan, a Rat, a Cat, and a Dog), which takes the 'teaching turing machines through a series of puzzle-challenges' concept one step further by setting it in the context of Alan Turing's later life when he was forced into an insane asylum by his own government for "treatment" for homosexuality and which ultimately lead to his tragic demise. We don't know yet if it will tie into Dave's thesis, Understanding Code, yet but it _is_ somewhat related. Anyways, we love the project and think a lot of other people will too (not just closet cryptographers!).

And now, I've *really* got to read the Diamond Age. *^^*

When does Engagement Advertising become Invasive Advertising?

2005-12-01T22:08:00.000-08:00

A very interesting article appeared today on Gamasutra about In-Game Advertising. They have a number of people industry responding to this seemingly inevitable and for many an unwelcome trend.

I feel like Young Skywalker treading the divide between the light and the dark side, the force being Games. What the light and dark sides represent is still up for debate. Is it Fun versus Profit? Are fun and profit mutually exclusive? No, I don’t think so… not at all… so, is it the Gamers versus the Advertisers? Possibly, yes…

Someone needs to stand between the marketers and the gamers in order to mediate a fair exchange. One key issue both sides need to negotiate is when does engagement advertising become invasive advertising? Central to this matter is respect, openess, and dialogue between gamers and advertisers. For the gamer, there is quite a bit to fear in terms of loss of privacy, and for advertisers quite a lot of detailed knowledge to gain about their audience. For example, what might the US Army be gaining from monitoring players in America’s Army? They don’t just want to know who you are (name/age/sex), the want to know what kind of person you are. Are you a team player, a gung-ho commando, or a coward? Here’s some revealing insight into what advertisers have in-store for gamers in the one-to-one marketing future from Fuel Games:

Behavioural research and analytics can be built into existing online games, and games can be built with the sole intention of extracting data for insight into consumer perceptions of brands, psychographic segmentation, behavioural analysis and more.

Will players tolerate this kind of monitoring… or will they even realize it is being conducted, perhaps hidden under the guise of something like Microsoft’s TrueSkill player matching for Xbox Live? Such practices could backfire on game developers and advertiser’s faces with consequences more severe than legal action: rejection by the consumers (read: boycotting). This is Eric Braxton, also from the Gamasutra article:

But in the end, business models and placement tactics don’t matter if the audience isn’t receptive. As a gamer, the very concept of in-game advertising makes my skin crawl, and every molecule in my body revolt. I hate it when I see it in films and on television, and I’m not looking forward to its ubiquity in games. For years now, it seemed like games and books were the only media where it didn’t seem like some nickel-slick marketer wasn’t hiding around a corner trying to sell me this, that, or whatever. Looks like my library card will be getting more use.

Brian Robbins at Fuel Industries, one of those “nickel-slick marketers”, hits on one of the very values that Chia-Ying and I were targeting with Urban Brand Warfare (under NDA till May ‘07), but may be missing the larger picture… more on that later. Also from the Gamasutra article:

At the same time, we are seeing brands that are finally starting to realize that the best way to reach consumers is to create advertainment that people actually want to see and interact with. The best examples of this cause consumers to actively discuss, promote and spread the message to their friends.

The best examples of engagement advertising or “advertainment”, in my opinion, are the games being done by 4orty2wo Entertainment, who are not only adverse to marketing, they’re “marketing-phobic. ” The follow quote is from one of my favorite interviews of two 4orty2wo Entertainment’s captains, Elan Lee and Sean Stewart by Jim Munroe. They are talking about the ILOVEBEES A.R.G. for Halo.

You never have to buy a product, you were never encouraged to buy a product, there was never a sell, all of it in fact…and we tell this up front to the client, what we will do if you have an interesting world we’ll tell an interesting story and we’ll let people engage in that and that’s cool but we are never going to put up an ad that says, “buy an Xbox!” you know? - Sean Stewart

Compare this view, which I think is respectful of the audience, with Fuel Industries, who appear not only in bed with King Brand, they’re lighting the post-coital cigarette. Not to take things completely out of context, you can look at how they invented Desktop Games for yourself, but this gives you the general spirit of the operation:

“You’ve single-handedly destroyed the productivity of America!” the Creative Director at one of our client agencies yelled - then laughed, what he was surely thinking was, “Now I can get consumers to willingly put logos on their desktop - and leave them there.” We had just showed him two of our latest creation, a pair of addictive Desktop Games built for Best Buy’s new customer-centric web magazines.

Is this what advergaming and in-game advertising can deliver to corporations? And not only the desktops of gamers, but also their personality profiles, wants and desires? If gone unchecked by gamers and advocates for gamers, this invasion will erode the relationship between consumers and brands, gamers and game developers because respect, openess, and dialogue are all two-way streets.

2005-11-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

I’m in the middle of a two week project for France Telecom, prototyping the future as we so love to do. It’s under NDA so I can’t say much other than “Hushpuppies!”

p.s. Gucci is a virus.

2005-10-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

If you curious to see where I my mind is, what I am reading and pulling ideas from, you can download the PDF of my background chapter.

2005-10-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

Hoping to upload some highlights from the presentation and discussion and transcribe the presentation to text. Until then, you can download the powerpoint presentation file and glean what you can from my notes.