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March was just that—a veritable trek to and from the far corners of the design world. The beginning of the month saw a series on ethnographic research from Jan Chipchase, Cara Silver and Mark Rolston of frog alongside our coverage of the International Home + Housewares Show in Chicago. We had guest contributions from not one but two Dons: Professor Norman revisited design thinking, while Mr. Lehman took on Crowd Supply, a new product-design-centric crowdfunding platform.

So too did the month finish strong, with an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at IDEO's 24-hour global Make-a-Thon "Brand New IDEO." And in case you missed it, Farrell Calabrese of Eastman Chemical provided a comprehensive look at the development of the Hydropack, our History of Braun Design continues with a chronology of timepieces, and Tennyson Pinheiro of live|work kicked off our forthcoming mini-series on Service Design this week. As always, stay tuned for more...

Flotspotting

Gabriele Meldaikyte, London, England

Scott Alberstein, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Andreas Bhend, Baden, Switzerland

Aaron Hughes, Salt Lake City, Utah

Felix Heinrich, Nürnberg, Germany

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April Newsletter here

Whether you're using a frying pan, a television remote control or a circular saw, you are at the mercy of whatever ergonomics the manufacturer designed—or didn't design—into the thing. Badly designed plastic molded handles, like you'd find in a cheap pair of scissors, are often the worst; the parting line is usually in the perfect place to bite into your skin every time you squeeze it.

But if you have an object with removeable handles, well, then you can get your hack on. YouTube user Pocket83 figured out an ingenious way to get rid of the chintzy knobs on his drill press and step it up to a more ergonomic solution:

Via Toolmonger

It seems like just yesterday I was commenting on the seasonal influx of urban cyclists riding both for business and for pleasure. Oh wait, it was just yesterday that I mused on the topic du jour (or of the week, as it were), and apparently I'm not the only one: local framebuilder Thomas Callahan is stepping up to the task of supplying savvy Brooklynites with handcrafted bicycles at a reasonable price.

Photo by Michael Rubenstein

I've known Callahan of Horse Cycles for a couple years now, ever since he hosted the afterparty for the first annual New Amsterdam Bicycle Show; his booth at last year's show was a standout (no word on whether the show is returning this year). I've made a point of peeking into his shop in South Williamsburg from time to time since then, and it seems like he's always juggling a constellation of new projects alongside his bread and butter of building beautiful bicycles.

For the past few decades, a custom bicycle was the sort of luxury that only a select subset of cyclists would even consider, and most modern-day commuters are still content to stick with off-the-shelf offerings from industry giants (no pun intended). But with a growing market for discerning riders looking to upgrade to something a little nicer, Callahan hopes to meet them halfway with a line of Made-in-Brooklyn production bicycles. Where Detroit's Shinola has the deep-ish pockets to put some marketing muscle behind their launch, Callahan's turned to good, old-fashioned crowdsourcing to launch the Urban Tour Project:

We had the chance to interview the sometime artist and jack-of-all-trades on the occasion of the Kickstarter campaign:

Core77: What inspired you to launch the Urban Tour project? I imagine you've seen increased demand for touring/townie bicycles?

Thomas Callahan: Yes, I have seen an increase in the demand for touring bikes and townies—or just a bike that is versatile. More people are riding more of the year. They're looking for something they can run fenders on and racks, both for touring or just the commute into the city. The train ride into the city from Brooklyn is getting crazy and I think people realize they can actually enjoy their morning commute on a bicycle and often reduce their commute time [in the process].

Also, a lot of people want a single bike that they can commute and also tour on. Obviously, people log more miles on the commuting side, but to have something that can handle the occasional tour is great. The bike is set up specifically for this—the geometry is a little more snappy that your average touring frame to give you the performance you need in an urban environment.

It seems like just yesterday I was commenting on the seasonal influx of urban cyclists riding both for business and for pleasure. Oh wait, it was just yesterday that I mused on the topic du jour (or of the week, as it were), and apparently I'm not the only one: local framebuilder Thomas Callahan is stepping up to the task of supplying Brooklynites with handcrafted bicycles.

Photo by Michael Rubenstein

I've known Callahan of Horse Cycles for a couple years now, ever since he hosted the afterparty for the first annual New Amsterdam Bicycle Show; his booth at last year's show was a standout (no word on whether the show is returning this year). I've made a point of peeking into his shop in South Williamsburg from time to time since then, and it seems like he's always juggling a constellation of new projects alongside his bread and butter of building beautiful bicycles.

For the past few decades, a custom bicycle was the sort of luxury that only a select subset of cyclists would even consider, and most modern-day commuters are still content to stick with off-the-shelf offerings from industry giants (no pun intended). But with a growing market for discerning riders looking to upgrade to something a little nicer, Callahan hopes to meet them halfway with a line of Made-in-Brooklyn production bicycles. Where Detroit's Shinola has the deep-ish pockets to put some marketing muscle behind their launch, Callahan's turned to good, old-fashioned crowdsourcing to launch the Urban Tour Project:

We had the chance to interview the sometime artist and jack-of-all-trades on the occasion of the Kickstarter campaign:

Core77: What inspired you to launch the Urban Tour project? I imagine you've seen increased demand for touring/townie bicycles?

Thomas Callahan: Yes, I have seen an increase in the demand for touring bikes and townies—or just a bike that is versatile. More people are riding more of the year. They're looking for something they can run fenders on and racks, both for touring or just the commute into the city. The train ride into the city from Brooklyn is getting crazy and I think people realize they can actually enjoy their morning commute on a bicycle and often reduce their commute time [in the process].

Also, a lot of people want a single bike that they can commute and also tour on. Obviously, people log more miles on the commuting side, but to have something that can handle the occasional tour is great. The bike is set up specifically for this—the geometry is a little more snappy that your average touring frame to give you the performance you need in an urban environment.

Well folks, every time you bite into a Gummy Bear, that there is what you're crushing and grinding up with your teeth. I hope you're happy.

And maybe you'll think twice about letting your child toss their toys about the room so casually, once you consider the fragility of those toys' innards.

These hand-sculpted objects are the work of artist Jason Freeny, who graduated from Pratt in Industrial Design. On his Facebook page he's even got some process shots:

"Believe it or not, a synthetic paintbrush proves to be one of the best sculpting tools."

I just came across shots of this 130-square-foot apartment in Paris. The fact that the tiny space is split-level could've been a big disadvantage, but the unknown designer turned it into a plus with their handling of the couch-bed situation.

As with a PATH Architecture project we looked at earlier, the bed serves as a couch during the day by concealing half of it, but at night it is pulled out to reveal its full width.

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This excerpt from Chapter 2 of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation explains many of the differences between designing for services versus designing products and the nature of services themselves. We wrote this book because we wanted to capture both the philosophy and thinking of service design and connect them with its practical aspects, based on our experience with developing, doing, selling and teaching service design over several years.

When we formerly worked as interaction and product designers, we realized that what we were often being asked to design was just one part of a larger, more complex service. No matter how well we did our job, if another link in the chain was broken, the entire experience was broken from the customer's perspective. We believe service design offers a way of thinking about these problems as well as clear tools and methods that can help designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, managers, and administrators do something about it.

We explain service design in the second chapter, rather than the first, because we needed to have an end-to-end case study to refer back to throughout the book. Service design really involves constantly zooming in and out from detail to big picture and back again. An example used in the book is of an electricity company experiencing a high volume of call-centre calls because people didn't understand their electricity bills. The solution is not more call centre staff, but to redesign the bill. Small problems can have a big effect on the overall service. Design carried out in silos missed opportunities.

Conversely, the service and business proposition needs to ripple through every single touchpoint in the service ecosystem. Without the context of an entire service to refer to, we ran the risk of falling into the same trap that clients and service users often face, which focusing on the parts at the expense of the whole.

With all that in mind, we hope you enjoy this chapter excerpt. Feedback and commentary are always very welcome.

Like most modern design disciplines, service design can be traced back to the tradition of industrial design, a field defined during the 1920s by a close-knit community of American designers that included Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes and Henry Dreyfuss. In Europe, the Bauhaus was central to the birth of industrial design.

What all of these designers had in common was a drive to use new industrial technology to improve people's standard of living. During and after World War I, people were horrified to see the devastation caused by the industrialization of warfare. There was also a great need to restore and improve the material standard of living in Europe and the United States.

On an ideological level, the first generation of industrial designers strove to turn industrialization into a force for good. They focused their talents on figuring out how to use industrial technology to satisfy the fundamental human needs of the day. They explored how industry could create products in more efficient ways, what would make them more useful for people, and how products could contribute to optimism about the future. They created well-designed furniture that was inexpensive enough for the middle class to buy to modernize their homes, and white goods that enabled women to escape some of the drudgery of housework, freeing them to take jobs outside of the home. Cars and trains enabled people to expand their range of travel for work and pleasure.

In the 20th century, the design profession made a huge contribution to the improvement of the standard of living in the developed world. Today, however, this standard of living has reached its natural plateau. We are saturated with material wealth, and our consumption of products is threatening our very existence rather than being a resource for good living.

On the ideological level, our fundamental human needs have also changed. The great challenges facing developed societies today are about sustaining good health, reducing energy and resource consumption, and developing leaner transportation solutions and more resilient financial systems. The 1920s generation of industrial designers strove to humanize the technology of their day and meet the fundamental material needs of their generation. Service design grows out of a digitally native generation professionally bred on network thinking. Our focus has moved from efficient production to lean consumption, and the value set has moved from standard of living to quality of life.

Why Do Services Need Designing?

As designers, when we build services based on genuine insight into the people who will use them, we can be confident that we will deliver real value. When we make smart use of networks of technology and people, we can simplify complex services and make them more powerful for the customer.

When we build resilience into the design, services will adapt better to change and perform longer for the user. When we apply design consistency to all elements of a service, the human experience will be fulfilling and satisfying. When we measure service performance in the right way, we can prove that service design results in more effective employment of resources—human, capital and natural.

It would appear easy to study how people experience a service, determine which parts of the delivery are not joined up, and make them all perform well together. In reality, some of the best organizations in the world struggle mightily to design good service experiences.

To explain why companies find it so difficult to design services well, we need to study the nature of services and the way they are delivered.

How Services Differ from Products

The challenge we found when we moved our attention from designing products to designing services was that services are entirely different animals than products. Applying the same mindset to designing a service as to the design of a product can lead to customer-hostile rather than user-friendly results. Products are discrete objects and, because of this, the companies that make, market and sell products tend to be separated into departments that specialize in one function and have a vertical chain of command—they operate in silos.

Figure 1 - Where is the customer in this picture? Staff working in silos tend to focus on the efficiency of their step in the value chain rather than the quality of the complete customer experience.

It's interesting to see that certain design world dynamics can scale up and down. Even the lone, unknown freelance designer will recognize the following situation: The client says they want a bold, new redesign, and they hire you based on your book. So you give them a bold, new redesign. With every new meeting they have you tone the design down more and more, and then you realize that "bold, new redesign" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone.

Apparently that dynamic is happening on a larger scale with Facebook West, the forthcoming Frank-Gehry-designed HQ. While the Menlo Park City Council recently approved the 433,555-square-foot structure, Mercury News reports that the Council's approval meeting also contained this tidbit:

[Gehry's] creative partner, Craig Webb, told the city council that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other company officials asked that the design for the Menlo Park building be low key. As a result, some of the earlier ideas, such as one that envisioned the building's ends flaring out like butterfly wings, were dropped, Webb said.

"They felt some of those things were too flashy and not in keeping with the kind of the culture of Facebook, so they asked us to make it more anonymous," Webb said. "Frank (Gehry) was quite willing to tone down some of the expression of architecture in the building."

One significant design feature unchanged from what we described back in August is that the entire structure will be one huge room. That provides design challenges of its own, and the Silicon Valley Biz Blog, which also sat in on the Council meeting, describes the solution:

It might be one giant room, but architects are sensitive to a potential pitfall with this approach: creating a vast sea that lacks a sense of place. So designers are placing services - from mother's rooms to game zones - at strategic locations to break up the space. Still, it should be possible for a Facebooker in the center of the space to have a line of sight from one side of the building to the other.

Lastly, it appears the building will be covered in a rooftop park complete with trees. Wired snagged these shots from the Menlo Park City Council:

Reminds us a little of that camouflaged World War II factory in California.

A research report on the dynamics of crowd-sourcing music at the frog SXSW Interactive Opening Party, by Bonnie Reese and Mike Herdzina

At frog, we often find ourselves conducting research in surprising places all over the world. Those of you familiar with our recent trip to Afghanistan will know that we conduct field research everywhere from private homes and businesses, to civic and social institutions, to very public spaces. When we're in the field, we like to create "pop-up" studios to facilitate rapid synthesis, ideation, and prototyping. Last month in Austin, we created a unique pop-up studio very close to home, at the frog SXSW Interactive Opening Party.

For thousands of SXSW attendees, the frog party is the traditional kickoff for an intensely social and inspirational week at the conference. It's their chance to blow off steam with friends and colleagues, and to get the creative juices flowing for the week ahead. By now people have come to expect that the frog event is not just an ordinary party, but a kind of social experiment, and a place to casually explore the meaning of technology in our lives. This year our theme was "The Other Singularity," or what happens to social life when we embed massive computing power in unexpected places, from coffee table books to porta potties.

I've been going to the frog party for many years and have enjoyed the playful and provocative technology experiences we create for our guests. In the run up to 2013, I realized we had a rich opportunity to gather thoughts and feedback about applications of this new technology with an enthusiastic and tech-savvy crowd. The inspiration for the research focus sprung from the Crowd Sourced DJ, which used TouchTunes smart jukeboxes (designed by frog and the TouchTunes team) and the TouchTunes mobile app to allow party guests to create and curate the party playlist in real time.

As we saw with Conquest Vehicles, armored vehicles with windows do not come cheap. That's why if you and six of your squadmates are sitting in the back of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle with the door closed, your only view is of armor plating. And the lack of windows has a potentially deleterious effect beyond promoting motion sickness: You have no idea what you're about to step into when the ramp drops open and you're meant to deploy.

That's why the U.S. Army's TARDEC (Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center) put a bunch of ID students from the Transportation Design program at Detroit's College for Creative Studies in the same room with experienced Army officers and soldiers for a brainstorming session. One result is the Virtual Window concept, whereby a super-durable 46-inch flatscreen is mounted to the interior of the rear ramp; it's basically a back-up camera with a big-ass screen strong enough for soldiers to stomp over while they pile outside. "The video feed from the camera appears on the display, which gives soldiers the ability to see outside the vehicle with the ramp closed," explains TARDEC engineer Andrew Kerbrat. "This visual situational awareness could be a game-changer in how the Soldier proceeds out of the vehicle."

Of interest is that this particular "Innovations Solutions Training Event," as it was called, wasn't spread over a semester but was instead crammed into just three days. By all accounts the CCS students were up to the task:

[Warrant Officer] Charles Fannin commented on the design session's aggressive agenda. "I thought, 'Wow, how can we talk about ideas and solutions and have them drawn up or visualized in such a short amount of time?' [But] It was fascinating. As we were talking, things were being drawn up instantly with concepts and designs. I'm just in awe of what the students were capable of doing."

CCS Transportation Design Associate Professor Thomas Roney said that kind of collaboration is essential to the process. "It gets people who maybe aren't used to being together all in the same room bouncing ideas off each other. You get some better ideas out than you probably would have without that happening," Roney noted.

TARDEC engineers will review about 140 sketches to identify potential ideas that could move forward.

While the format of the highly-compressed brainstorming session was new, it isn't the first time TARDEC and CCS have collaborated; at least one student, in fact, got a job out of it. James Scott was a CCS student back in 2010 who participated in an earlier team-up, and he's now been hired as an industrial designer on TARDEC's Advanced Concepts team. (He's the guy who did the rendering seen above.) And as a former design student who's presumably sat in on his share of brutal design crits, he knows the math: "At the end of the day, 80 percent of the ideas are unfeasible," he says, "but perhaps 20 percent have nuggets of innovation that could be further investigated."

There is at least one thing I'd like to see design schools develop as a result of collaborations like these: It ought to be integrated into crit sessions that if you turn in a crappy rendering, all of the other students do push-ups.

Hard to believe it's been nearly two years since we saw that video of Steve Jobs pitching Apple's Norman-Foster-designed "spaceship" HQ to the Cupertino City Council. Jobs, sadly, passed away just months later. But Jobs' influence is still very much ingrained in the ongoing design process of the building. That is why the building will likely be magnificent. It is also why the timetable has been pushed back to 2016, and why the cost estimate has now risen to nearly $5 billion. (For scale, the new World Trade Center in NYC rings in at $3.9 billion.)

We know Apple's got curved glass down, though it isn't cheap to produce. We know the building's plans call for it to sustainably generate its own electricity, as many of their facilities now do, and that that isn't cheap either. But as Businessweek reports,

The true expense of the campus lies not in green tech, though, as much as the materials--as well as what product designers call "fit and finish." As with Apple's products, Jobs wanted no seam, gap, or paintbrush stroke showing; every wall, floor, and even ceiling is to be polished to a supernatural smoothness. All of the interior wood was to be harvested from a specific species of maple, and only the finer-quality "heartwood" at the center of the trees would be used, says one person briefed on the plan last year.

That's not the crazy part, though. This is: "Jobs insisted that the tiny gaps where walls and other surfaces come together be no more than 1/32 of an inch across, vs. the typical 1/8 inch in most U.S. construction." Anyone who's ever built anything or installed anything using conventional power tools knows that's insanely difficult. It's easy for even an inexperienced craftsperson to take 1/8-inch off of something, as that's the width of a sawblade. The skilled among you can get things down to 1/16, even by eyeballing. But I don't know anyone who can consistently hit 1/32. It's not just twice as hard as getting something down to 1/16, it is an order of magnitude more difficult, and essentially demands less humans and more CNC.

If that didn't get your attention, maybe this will:

Jobs even wanted the ceilings to be polished concrete. Contractors would typically erect molds with crude scaffolds to pour the cement in place, but that leaves unsightly ruts where the scaffolding puts extra pressure on the surfaces. According to two people who've seen the plans, Apple will instead cast the ceilings in molds on the floor and lift them into place, a far more expensive approach that left one person involved in the project speechless.

I should point out that I don't think these demands are crazy in a pejorative way; if anyone can pull this off, it's Apple. Shareholders are complaining about the price of construction, but you don't build something like this purely to increase the bottom line. Jobs said it best during his pitch to the Council: "We have a shot at building the best office building in the world. I really do think that architecture students will come here to see it."

When it comes to blog submissions, bike-related projects are probably second to only mobile device accessories here, and a fair share of these ever-trending products happen to be Kickstarter projects. The BikeSpike is easily one of the more worthwhile ones we've seen lately, and with less than 24 hours to raise the last $10K of their $150,000 funding goal, we'll keep it short and sweet: "The BikeSpike is backed by the world's smallest GPS chipset with a built-in antenna, an on-board accelerometer, and a connection to a global cellular network." The cheeky spot illustrates its anti-theft functionality:

The reference to the Allstate commercials is duly noted, and if the pricing seems a little steep, I suppose you should think of it as an insurance policy: at $7/month, it comes in at less than an AppleCare protection plan... assuming you value your bicycle as much as your laptop or phone. (Although my renter's insurance covers my bike and laptop from theft for about $13/month, the $500 deductible means the bike should be worth substantially more than that for it to be worth it.)

What are the possibilities when a 140-year-old brand starts acting like a startup? Mark van Iterson, Heineken's Global Head of Design, gave us a sneak peek of The Magazzini, a pop-up experience exploring design and nightlife culture staged during this year's Milan design week. "Beer is emotion," van Iterson shares, and The Magazzini is an embodiment of Heineken's commitment to design—a playground for innovative ideas in nightlife.

Open from 2PM–2AM daily, The Magazzini will host capsule exhibitions from London-based Designersblock x Arts Thread and Amsterdam-based Tuttobene, which is celebrating 10 years in Milan. Daily programming from Pecha Kucha and Cool Hunting featuring Yves Behar, Alex Mustonen (Snarkitecture) and Luca Nichetto will include beer breaks, of course, along will special workshops from new media designer Joshua Davis and "vectorfunk" artist Matt W. Moore.

The brand is even experimenting with "beer cocktails" using fresh ingredients. Try a Heineken on tap infused with a kick of fresh red chills, the cooling properties of muddled mint or the herbal brightness of lemongrass at their center bar.

The Museum of Modern Art and open hardware startup littleBits are pleased to unveil a new collaboration, on display in the windows of MoMA Design Store locations in Midtown and Soho as of today, April 9, 2013. Developed in conjunction with brooklyn design studio Labour, the "4’-tall kinetic sculptures [are] made of wood, cardboard and acrylic, [brought to life] with 'Bits' measuring less than 1 inch square."

Although littleBits have been billed as "LEGO for the iPad generation," founder Ayah Bdeir notes in her TED Talk (embedded below) that the transistor has been around since 1947—predating the the iPad by over six decades. Rather, the modular bits comprise a full ecosystem of input/output functionality, such that littleBits cannot be classified strictly as a construction toy or an electronic one. Bdeir elaborates:

The idea behind littleBits is that electronics should be like any other material, paper, cardboard, screws and wood. You should be able to pick up 'light,' 'sound,' 'sensing,' etc., and embed it into your creative process just like you do foam and glue. We sit at the border between electronics, design, craft, art and mechanical engineering, and we are constantly negotiating those boundaries. I believe the most interesting things happen at the intersection of disciplines and the borders need to become more porous for us to see the most incredible uses of electronics in the world. littleBits is a library. We now have three kits and over 35 Bits and are working on the next 30, so this is literally just the beginning.

We had the chance to catch up with Bdeir, an interactive artist and engineer by training, about the past, present and future of littleBits.

Core77: I understand it's been roughly a year and a half since you originally launched littleBits. Have you been surprised by the response? What achievement or milestone are you most proud of thus far?

Ayah Bdeir: The response has been incredible. When I first started the company in September 2011, I knew that we already had fans who were waiting for the product, but I had no idea the response would be what it was. We sold the first products on our site on December 20th of that year and we sold out within 3 weeks of starting. [In 2012, we grew over] a series of events: we won best of toyfair, I gave a talk on TED that got a great response, we had a documentary on CNN and at every juncture, demand shot up. It was really incredible to see people from all over the world, parents, teachers, kids, designers, artists, hackers getting excited about littleBits for different reasons.

I think my most proud milestone is that despite all I heard about the toy industry being competitive, jaded and without mercy, we won 14 toy awards in less than eight months (including Dr Toy 10 Best Educational Products, Academic's Choice Brain Toy, etc)—in some cases, we bested some of the most popular toy companies in the world.

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in Atlanta, Georgia

There's a reason why leading companies turn to THRIVE. They know they're getting expertise that will strengthen their brands, improve their market share and bring their customer experiences to the next level.

If you want to inspire your peers and develop truly innovative industrial designs in a growing environment, apply now for this Senior Industrial Designer role with THRIVE.

The team at THRIVE can't wait to see you create products that are authentic to a client's brand, and connect emotionally with consumers. They're eager to watch you actively mentor your peers and galvanize the THRIVE team into something greater than the sum of its parts.

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The following is an exclusive excerpt from Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, a new book by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason. Rosenfeld Media has kindly granted us permission to share Chapter 2 - The Nature of Service Design, in two parts. See the first half, as well as an introductory note, here.

The Service Economy

In developed nations, around 75% of the economy is in the service sector, and this is where most new jobs are created. In Germany, known for its export prowess, the industrial industries dropped 140,000 jobs in 2010, while the service sector added 330,000 jobs, and private nursing services generate more revenue than the entire German automobile industry.¹ To an increasing degree, we also see that the design of services is becoming a key competitive advantage. Physical elements and technology can easily be copied, but service experiences are rooted in company culture and are much harder to replicate. People choose to use the services that they feel give them the best experience for their money, whether they fly low-cost airlines or spend their money on a first-class experience

Just as industrial design fueled the introduction of new products to the masses in the industrial economy, good service design is key to the successful introduction of new technologies. Design of new models each year became the recipe for maintaining the success of established products. In the service economy, services can be redesigned on a continuing basis to keep a competitive edge in the market.

Some of the greatest opportunities are found where a business model can be changed from a product model to a service model. A case in point is car sharing, where the business model has changed from selling the car as a product to offering access to the service of mobility.

Core Service Values

One way to understand services better—and what makes them different from products—is to examine what it is that people get from services. There are many breakdowns of the characteristics of services, some of which we will look at later in the measurement chapter. We have been developing a simple way to understand the generic types of value that services deliver to customers by cataloguing every service we have become aware of and then grouping them in relation to three core values: care, access, and response (Figure 7). Most services provide customers with at least one of these or, often, a mix of all three.

Figure 7 - Core service offerings can be grouped into three primary spheres: care, response and access.

1.) Services That Care for People or Things

Healthcare is the most obvious case of a service focused on care, but many maintenance services also have care as the core value. A famous example of a care service is the Rolls Royce aviation engine service that monitors aircraft engines in flight and has spare parts ready to be fitted as needed when a plane lands, anywhere in the world.²

Care for an object—a car, an air-conditioning system, a wool coat—is provided by auto mechanics, HVAC technicians, or dry cleaners. Care for a person is provided by a wide range of services, from nurseries to nursing homes. Accountants, lawyers, and therapists provide care for money, freedom and happiness.

2.) Services That Provide Access to People or Things

Many services enable people to use something, or a part of something, temporarily. A railway service provides a seat on a train for a specific journey. A school might offer a child a place in a classroom from the age of 5 to 11. A cinema provides access to a giant screen, a comfy seat, and 90-plus minutes of entertainment. Generally, the services for which access is the primary value are services that give people access to large, complex, or expensive things that they could not obtain on their own.

Other kinds of access services are those that give access to infrastructure over many years. Utilities, such as water, gas, and electricity, are ubiquitous examples in the developed world. The Internet is, of course, a relatively new infrastructure that enables a whole new generation of services that provides access to information, digital media, and technology on a shared basis. Spotify provides access to a huge music library. Google provides access to an enormous database of searches. Facebook provides access to billions of personal pages. In this sense, we can view the Internet as a kind of metaservice, because it enables the provision of many other subservices, which is why so many people insist that no single entity "owns" it. These services provide individuals with access to large infrastructures that are used in conjunction with many other people. They don't end up owning anything that they can take away and store or give to someone else, apart from the experience they had.

These services are often a fundamental part of people's lives that are typically noticed only when they are disrupted, such as when the daily commuter train is canceled, or when schools are closed due to heavy snow. People expect the infrastructure to always be there for them. As individuals, we understand that we all have our own experiences of the specific access we have to this infrastructure—this is the service layer that enables us to access our bit of the larger whole.

3.) Services That Provide a Response from People or Things

The third category is services that respond to people's (often unforeseen) needs. These services are usually a mix of people and things that are able to assist us: an ambulance rushing to an accident, a teacher helping a child with a math problem, or a store assistant finding a customer a pair of jeans with the right fit. Sometimes these "response" services are anticipated and people buy the right to them in advance through insurance policies, social welfare, or simply by their choice of brand experience. In many respects, response is the default understanding of what service is— think of a waiter responding to a request for a glass of water, for example.

Service is someone doing what he or she has been asked to do. In this sense, response services are fundamentally different from products in that they are not predesigned but created in the moment in reaction to a request. The three core service values overlap in many instances. An insurance service offers both access to a financial-risk-offsetting infrastructure and a response to a specific issue when a client calls with a claim. A healthcare service provides care on a personal level, but also access to a hospital facility if necessary. It will also transport a patient there in an ambulance if necessary. It is not so much that any one service fits only in one category, but more that the service has different core values at different times.

Given my proclivity for anagrams, I couldn't resist the congruence of a certain superstar designer's surname and the slick art/design/fashion editorial platform that recently took a tour of his London home.

A space-age aesthetic dominates at casa Newson, an unlikely look for a period building but one entirely reflective of the superstar designer's streamlined visual language. The futuristic interior gives way to mock-Victorian details such as a wood-paneled library, one of several flourishes authored by Newson's wife, fashion stylist Charlotte Stockdale.

Of course, Marc Newson has turned up on Nowness several times before—we posted the beautiful manufacturing video of the Ikepod hourglass—his suffice it to say that the high production value does justice to his immaculate, movie-set-like abode.

In Australian-born Newson's most celebrated work—cabins for Qantas Airways and the Ford O21C concept car, for example—his finely honed eye for materiality reigns supreme; here that is reflected in the marble that lines his bathroom, the massive wall of river rocks from Nova Scotia (a "big deal" to achieve, he confesses) and the composite linen that forms his giant dining table. His passion for metal is betrayed by a small display of unusual knives in the library: "I trained as a jeweler and a silversmith," he explains. "I love the way metal is worked, and certain techniques and processes are best illustrated in objects like knives, which are, essentially, tools. They display an incredible level of ingenuity and skill." After Taschen's recent publication of his complete catalog of designs, "Marc Newson. Works," Newson's next projects will be a private jet interior for a member of the Qatar royal family and a fountain pen for Hermès. "What holds my attention is variety," says the consummate aesthete.

Indeed, Newson touches on several of these projects in the short promo video that Dezeen produced on the occasion of "Marc Newson. Works" last fall.

But if you have about an hour to spare, it's well worth revisiting the 2008 episode of BBC's "Imagine" that covers all things Newson. We posted the first of five parts with links to the rest, but the going really gets good in Part 2, which starts with a shop visit to Aston Martin, followed by colorful commentary from collector Adam Lindemann, and ends with Newson's take on rapid prototyping when Alan Yentob asks about the Stratasys Prodigy—a prosumer-level 3D-printer that dates back to 2000—in the studio. And to compare/contrast with the Nowness short, Newson actually conducts a short tour of his Paris home in the third part, in which he expresses his ambivalence towards the the prototype of his wooden chair design for Cappellini (which turns up again in the Nowness clip).

Our sister portfolio site Coroflot is pleased to announce a unique opportunity for footwear designers to develop their portfolios and get their foot in the door, so to speak. Once again, we are sponsoring five scholarships for PENSOLE's annual Future of Footwear Awards and Master Class, held in partnership with FN Platform at MAGIC and Zappos.com.

To hear PENSOLE founder D'Wayne Edwards tell it, "Our mission is to provide aspiring footwear designers a platform to create their own brand and become the future of the footwear industry. This year we are welcoming Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and Coroflot as scholarship partners to reach an even larger base of emerging talent."

Future of Footwear entrants are required to "submit an original shoe design drawn by hand and rendered in color, using a marker" on the Mesh01 platform by May 26. PENSOLE will announce the 20 winners live on Google+ the following week, each of whom will receive scholarships to experience PENSOLE's rigorous "learn by doing" curriculum, in which students are assigned projects in the following categories:

1. Athletic - Footwear designed to help perform a sport or activity better

2. Dress - Footwear designed to wear at formal events

3. Kids - Footwear designed for kids of all ages

4. Made in USA - Footwear designed for manufacture in the USA

5. Sustainable - Footwear designed with recyclable materials and more efficient manufacturing processes

Coroflot will award one scholarship in each of the five categories, as will our friends at IDSA; the last ten will be selected by PENSOLE. All students will have an additional merit-based opportunity to present samples of their work at a major tradeshow:

At the end of the third week of class, a panel of industry judges and the PENSOLE Google+ community will vote to select 10 semi-finalists who will have samples of their designs made and be awarded a trip to Las Vegas to have their designs on display at the PENSOLE booth at FN PLATFORM, August 19-21, 2013.