We’re living in a post-truth society. 

An age of fake news, increased online scams and anti-right tech founders spouting hate speech or bowing to alt-right state leaders. 

Trust matters right now when it comes to services and the organisations running them;

Trust you will not be scammed, that the service you’re interacting with is real, not fake 

Trust you will be treated with respect, and not duped or forced into doing something you don’t want to do

Trust that your data will be handled securely and fairly, and you will not  be targeted or at a disadvantage in future should the political and social landscape change

Trust that the company will work hard to make sure you’re not at risk of harm, or if you are when using their service, they will look after you 

Trust that, at the most basic level, the service whether paid for, or you are entitled to use will work

Closing a service

Recently I learned that my favourite bookmark service was closing, pocket.

It is/was so handy to save things to read later, with a browser plug-in and an easy to save feature embedded on my phone. I will miss it.

On closing their service, it feels like they thought about the process.

It was easy to understand what was going on and they produce simple guidance, they made a service to export my data and download it as a CSV that came directly to my email, and they gave me plenty of time to do this. (It’s still open until October)

How do you make the case for service design when there might be a million other competing priorities or term decisions needed to invest in improving something? The answer is often making a financial case for the work we’re doing. Meeting budget constraint with business case.

Since the dawn of the internet, amazon and cheap print, libraries have become a part of our civic infrastructure that we don't always quite know what to do with. No longer the primary source of books to the majority, they have become the overspill to services that we can't quite fit anywhere else.

We’re just back from a European trip talking at Service Design Network Global Conference and Servicios Digitales de Aragón’s Design and Citizenship conference.

Plugs on the west coast line have finally be installed. What can we learn about user needs from this?

Our first frontier, ‘The Robots are Coming’ looks at the rise of AI in service delivery and what that means for the future how we design and deliver services.