OVERVIEW
Products, Services, Experiences
Physical products and digital services are more and more integrated. Most offerings in many consumer industries leverage the combination of the two. In the next years, we can expect that more industries will integrate products and services further into a seamless, unified offering.
The trend toward everything-as-a-service should not be taken as an alternative to physical products, but as an integration of products and services into larger systems, that provide an integrated user experience by diverse means, material or immaterial, supported by a common back-end, a complex system of technology enablers that act as the glue between the two.
Examples of these integrated product-service experiences are used by millions of consumers every day: the Apple or Google ecosystems, for example, integrate devices, apps, and services to deliver music and imaging experiences, Uber delivers a physical mobility experience via existing ‘hardware’ (cars) integrated with their digital system (apps for users and drivers, back-end supply-demand coordination), most Banks integrated their physical branches with their digital apps and web sites, to deliver a seamless user experience in financial services, etc.
In this scenario, the key added value for consumers is not much the quality of a specific product, or the efficiency of a specific service, but the quality of the USER EXPERIENCE, delivered across multiple touch points, physical or digital, enabled by a combination of products and services.
The discipline of Industrial Design, traditionally focused on creating beautiful, functional products, has already extended its field of action to the digital domain, evolving into Interaction Design to give shape to digital interactions. Its next step of evolution will be to embrace fully the integration of products and services, becoming a discipline to shape pleasurable, efficient, valuable User Experiences across multiple touch points, material and immaterial.
Business, Technology, and Experience Design
In creating valuable User Experiences, the Design discipline is not alone. The typical multi-disciplinary team tasked to conceive and develop integrated product/services must include the perspectives of Business, Technology, and Design.
Whether in small start-ups or in consolidated large corporations, integrating creativity from the three disciplines requires the right methods, the right organizational strategy, the right methods and processes, and a common mindset.
The goal of this class is to help Business students to recognize the value of the User Experience, to understand these multi-disciplinary processes, and to get acquainted with the User Experience Design discipline.
Designing INTELLIGENT Product-Services Systems
An additional challenge, but also an exciting evolution, comes from the introduction of AI capabilities in these integrated product/service offerings. It is difficult, in this period, to distinguish between the generic hype of the AI buzzword and the precise role that AI can have in creating better User Experiences.
On the one hand, there is the danger of including AI capabilities just for the sake of technology. On the other hand, there is the risk of refusing to integrate AI on generic ethical grounds, or simply because it’s difficult to recognize the actual utility of some AI functionalities.
This class will apply a human-driven approach, where the experience of the user is the main goal, and technologies are applied when and how they provide a tangible, ethical benefit.
Think Experiences, not Products
To conceive future consumer offerings in the new context, the first step is to start with Human Experiences, not Product or Service Categories. This class will start analyzing archetypical areas of experience, for example the experience of ‘work’, or ‘mobility’, or ‘health’, of ‘entertainment’, and of ‘self-care.’
This analysis will lead to creating Experience Models, descriptions of current sequence of actions the user performs, and the current solutions that enable these experiences. For example, we’ll model the ‘entertainment, music’ experience defining how a product/service ecosystem like Apple’s enables such an experience. Or, in another example, how the combination of Tesla and Uber enables the experience of ‘mobility’.
Conceiving Future Experiences
From there, we’ll move to a series of pragmatic, hands-on exercises to create future scenarios, to imagine how innovative product/service systems, leveraging emerging technologies, can enable future experiences, more efficient, valuable, and pleasurable.
This process will be structured in creative team sessions, where each team will be assigned a topic, and the final deliverable will be a storyboard of ‘a-day-in-the-life’ of a person, describing how a certain experience may be delivered in the future. The timeframe of these future scenarios will be 2 to 5 years.
This process will replicate methods and collaborations typical to innovation teams in large corporations, start-ups, and creative labs. The visions of the future generated by this exercise will replicate scenario-making techniques that companies typically use to assess the introduction of new technologies and solutions to the market.
In this simulation of creative teams, the Business discipline will be represented by students, the Experience Design discipline will be represented by faculty, and the Technology discipline will be represented by a technology roadmap, surveying upcoming technologies.
