The second half of Service Design class is working with an actual client to design a service innovation for them. This semester, the client is in the Brookline neighborhood of Pittsburgh, which is about 20 minutes away (driving) from CMU on the south side. It’s important, when designing a service, to understand the space(s) you have to work with and just get a feel for the vibe of the place and the surrounding neighborhood. But a lot of our students don’t have cars and it’s a long way on public transportation. So…field trip! On a Big Yellow Bus!
I could not have been happier when the bus pulled up and it was a giant yellow schoolbus. “I’m in grad school riding a middle school bus,” one student noted.
One of the best things about working for a well-funded university ($3b endowment in 2023) is you can do this kind of stuff. And I firmly believe this stuff matters. At least in design classes.
As a side note, we got our class assignments for Spring Semester and I’m not teaching Service Design, which I’m a little sad about. It’s the class I teach where the material is the most baked (Interaction Design Fundamentals and Advanced Interaction Design are new classes, while Designing for AI changes frequently because it’s a fast-moving topic you have to stay on top of) and, after teaching it three times, I felt comfortable tweaking it and adding things and simply just teaching it. Apparently, the unofficial rule is that by the third time you teach a class with the same material you understand how it works, what the beats are, and how the assignments build, etc.
On the flip side, my Spring Semester schedule is fucking amazing. I’m only teaching two classes (Designing AI and Advanced IxD) and they are both on Tuesday/Thursday so I will have plenty of time to work on the book and potentially do some other outside projects as well. Compared to the wild ride that this semester has been teaching three different classes, it will be a welcome change. One where I can do more cool things like big yellow buses.
Oh fun! When the IA Institute and MAYA Design held an event in Pittsburgh in…I wanna say 2006? Peter Merholz arranged a tour of branches in the public library system. When it came to discussing transportation options, duck boats seemed a bit impractical. So we went with a Big Yellow Bus.
I love a field trip!