When you have some time, check out the website for the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative. This excerpt from their website sums things up:

Design serves to advance the goals of the United States’ economic competitiveness by saving time and money and simplifying the use, manufacturing, and maintenance of goods and services. It enhances democratic governance by improving the performance and delivery of government services. Thus, the American design communities offer ten design policy proposals for how we can partner with the government to help redesign America’s future.

1. Formalize an American Design Council to partner with the U.S. Government.
2. Set guidelines for legibility, literacy, and accessibility for all government communications.
3. Target 2030 for carbon neutral buildings.
4. Create an Assistant Secretary for Design and Innovation position within the Department of Commerce to promote design.
5. Expand national grants to support interdisciplinary community design assistance programs based on human-centered design principles.
6. Commission a report to measure and document design’s contribution to the U.s. economy.
7. Revive the Presidential Design Awards to be held every year and use triple bottom-line criteria (economic, social, and environmental benefi t) for evaluation.
8. Establish national grants for basic design research.
9. Modify the patent process to refl ect the types of intellectual property created by designers.
10. Encourage direct government investment in design innovation.

The report of their findings from the summit (which led to the ten design policy proposals above) can be found here: Report of the 2008 U.S. National Design Summit.

Read it over and if you agree, you can endorse the summary here.

This country is facing a number of very big problems right now, but we firmly believe that design thinking can help us (companies, cities, states, the U.S. government or non-profit organizations) sort things out, find innovative solutions and chart a path to better future. To the extent that Frontier can help make that happen with services (which now represent 75% of the U.S. economy) we are "all in."

Have the television and film industries been paying attention to the painful transition that the music industry has been going through over the past eight years? If they have been paying attention, they will realize a couple things:

1 – You can’t fight technology – There is no putting the "genie back in the bottle." No matter how hard you work to control something, there are legions of people out there who are working even harder (and for free and often with a vendetta) to undermine your control. The harder you squeeze, the harder they fight. And your hand just is not big enough to squish them all. (This applies not only to the music industry, but to dictatorial regimes as well.)

2 – You have to adapt – As much as we might like to go back to quieter, gentler times – that’s not going to happen. So if you can’t fight (see #1) then you have to adapt. Just now – after eight long, bloody years – is the music industry machine starting to adapt.

3 – Find what your customers value and provide it – It took years for the industry and many musicians to realize that there is a way to create value besides selling CDs. Live touring, merchandise, special access, works in progress, collaborations, and as-of-yet-to-be-invented models will drive value and as a result, money.  If you want to be an artist and be absolutely true to yourself, then by all means do that. But if you want to be an artist and make money from your art, then you have to create something that people value and are willing to pay for.
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Nordstrom learned long ago that you should never treat your customers like criminals. That’s why you can take as many items into a Nordstrom dressing room as you’d like. Unlike most retailers who limit you to three items and assume that everyone is out to steal, Nordstrom realizes that shoplifters represent a minuscule percentage of the people who are going into those dressing rooms.  Compare this to every other retailer, who makes trying on clothes a complete hassle by limiting you to three items, requiring you to find someone to unlock the door, etc.

At a recently opened store in Miami, Nordstrom introduced a new dressing room concept called "girlfriend dressing rooms" that have movable curtains to women to try on clothes together. Such an incredibly simple service design concept – and one that can only be realized by understanding what customers want and what they do naturally. For most women, shopping for clothes is a social activity and often a "team sport," and these new dressing rooms address that issue perfectly.

In his book,  "The Frozen Water Trade" the author Gavin Weightman tells the story of Fredic Tudor, a 19th century Bostonian who came up with the idea of shipping ice from his hometown of Boston to the Caribbean, South America and ultimately India. Of course, in the early 1800s his friends and neighbors thought he was insane. But Tudor persevered over the next few decades, through debtor’s prison, technical challenges, warm weather, pirates, crooked business partners and even yellow fever to create an entirely new industry and a great deal of personal wealth.

The lesson of this book is to look at those things we take for granted or consider by-products of something else, and to see how they could add value to others. Ultimately, Tudor was in the service business. Mother Nature manufactured his product without any capital or management required. He didn’t need to enhance or modify it in any way. He simply needed to harvest it, and find a way to keep the ice cold enough so that he could deliver it to warmer climates before it melted back into New England lake water.
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1 – Added a link in our Press section to an article that was written about Frontier Service Design in the local newspaper last week.

2 – Have added a list of our clients .

Last week at CES, I had an interesting conversation with the Business Development Director of Mindark , the Swedish firm responsible for development of the online virtual universe Entropia . Personally, I’m not a user of these games but I was intrigued by how this particular company differentiates itself, and how we as service designers could learn from it. (Their competitors, Second Life and World of Warcraft seem to get the most press.) According to Mindark, besides having much better graphics and gaming experiences (hunting exotic beasts, exploring unknown territory, battling enemies) their in-game currency (PED) is directly tied to the U.S. dollar in a ratio of 10 PED to 1 U.S. dollar. As a result you can tie your "real" bank account to the game and can move "real" money in and out of the universe.
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I read "Subject to Change" on the plane ride home from CES. It’s a good book, written by four smart guys affiliated with Adaptive Path , a user-experience firm based in San Francisco. As with all good books, I made a bunch of notes in the margins. But one line at the bottom of page 28 really struck me; "…it’s essential to recognize the traditional practice of brand for what it is – the impression a company tries to make about it’s personality." The key word there, of course is "tries ."

It then occurred to me that brand is to customer experience as perfume is to a woman. Both brand and perfume are meant to attract – but neither represent the real service experience being offered. Give me a great service experience and then I really don’t care about your brand or your perfume. But if you seduce me with your brand and then leave me dissatified – well, then you’ve done nothing more than trick me.

I was in the booth of one of the major electronics manufacturers, last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They had a darkened area where you could compare the HDTV sets from last year with this year’s latest models. Apparently the point of this was to show us how much better these models were. The only thing is – it wasn’t any better. Yes, I’m sure from an engineering perspective it was better. But to my human eyes I could tell no difference. (Keep in mind, I am an A/V geek at heart.) I asked some other people (fellow A/V geeks I am sure) standing nearby who were looking at the monitors, "Do you see any difference?" They shrugged their shoulders and gave out a simple, "Nope." It was then that I realized that we have reached the point of diminishing returns as it relates to home electronics. How much sharper can razor sharp be, before I can’t tell the difference? At what point do my ears no longer distinguish between awesome sound and "awesomer" sound? This is why I am excited about next-gen HDTV being able to connect to the Internet. Getting new, unique and different content while I relax on my couch in front of a big sharp screen matters to me. The arms race for technological domination in home theatre is over. Now the manufacturers need to look to value-added services that consumers want, need or dream about.

This Thursday we are on our way to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in support of our client, AnySource Media . They have what we believe to be a “game-changer” in the world of consumer electronics – they have developed a seamless platform for Internet-connected TV. In Las Vegas they (and their initial partners Funai, CinemaNow and ST MicroElectronics) will be demonstrating their Internet Video Navigator solution in their exhibit spaces. Essentially, they have developed the software that gets embedded into the silicon chips inside new HDTVs which enables you to plug your broadband connection directly into your TV, just as you would with any other media input. Using nothing but your standard remote, you use a simple up/down/left/right interface to navigate through virtually any “channel” of video from the Internet.

We are working with the team at AnySource Media to maximize the customer experience as well as to design a myriad of value-added services that this platform makes possible. AnySource Media is not only developing the embedded technology, but also pulling together the content providers (watch for their announcements soon) as well as the advertising platform that incorporates a wide variety of ad formats. There are a number of “connected TV” announcements this week at CES, but AnySource Media’s open approach is the only one that parallels the most successful business models on the Web today. (In fact, it’s very much like Apple’s wildly successful App Store).

If you are out in Las Vegas, get in touch!