On April 1992, Mary Jo Bitner published, in the Journal of Marketing, an article entitled:
"Servicespaces: The impact of physical surroundings on Costumers and Employees"

This is one of the mandatory reading assignements of the Service Design course I'm attending now and I was positively surprised on 
how an article written 20 years ago is, nowadays, so actual.

Bottom line:
People perceive environments holistically.

My supervisor teased me to read this book, and I'm thankful for that! :)
So far it was really worth to do it.

Basically the book teach us how to use drawings to solve problems and explain our selves to others.

And yes, everyone can do it!
No advanced drawing/sketcking skills are required. 

You can find a glimpse of the book here, at Dan Roam's web site.

Enjoy your reading :)

June 2007.
Tim Brown, IDEO CEO, published an article called Design Thinking (Harvard Business Review), available here.

Here's what I found more relevant.

During my last supervising meeting, my superviser recommended me this article:

Service Design, It's All in the Brand

You can listen the complete article here, as a podcast.

The main question in this article is quite simple:

Can we use traditional requirements techniques to acquire service requirements?

Back in May 2008, Hugh Dubberly (Dubberly Design Office) and Shelley Evenson (Carnegie Mellon University),
published in the ACM Interactions Magazine, Volume 15, Issue 3, The Experience Cycle.
(The complete article can be found here, for free)

In this paper, both authors argue that the experience cycle is composed of 5 stages:

• Connect & attract
• Orient
• Interact
• Extend & retain
• Advocate

"The experience cycle model suggests experience has a fractal quality—that experience has a selfsimilar structure at different scales.

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
by Matt Might, Assistant Professor, University of Utah.

I found it simple, yet complete and to the point.

A Design Perspective on Information Technology

My background is in computer science and HCI. By reading this book I'm looking to further expand my design skills.

The book covers distinct subjects, such as:

• What kind of knowledge an aspiring designer needs
• the process of design
• the designer
• design methods and techniques
• the design product and its qualities
• conditions for interaction design.

by Jonas Löwgren and Erik Stolterman, MIT Press, March 2007, ISBN-13: 978-0-262-62209-7.

First post of this blog, to share of my Research Assistant experience.

There's a long way ahead...

Keep posted!