A Sustainable Train of Thought

I’ve had the chance recently to see a lot of live music (or at least what constituted “a lot” for me) and on each occasion I’ve found myself really thinking hard about the experience. As the “Music and Memory”:http://courses.interaction-ivrea.it/memory/html/project2/proj2_1.html project demonstrated, music is more than just a sequence of noise. It can conjure emotions and memories and literally transport you to another place and time.

Most of my experience with music has been through records, tapes, CDs, and digital files (MP3, AAC, etc.). And the effect for me of conjuring the past through music has been that of a trigger: the same track brings back the same memories. In some ways it’s a very static effect, as if engaging one particular sense (hearing) in a particular way (a certain song) summons the bookmarked memory.

Live music is an entirely different experience.

The effect is that of the band creating a space outside of time, as though the music has imprinted in it some memory of its own, and for those five minutes the band can bring those memories back to life, can replace those five minutes in the present with five minutes from the past.

I suppose my fascination lies in the reality of simultaneous production and consumption and the effect that it produces. After the band is done with their set, you can’t point to anything in particular as being a result of their work. They work exclusively in the manipulation of time.

The effect is completely different from listening to canned music on a file. The band is there in front of you. There’s something to the immediacy and proximity that distinguishes it from recorded music, perhaps because it’s clearly other human beings who are creating it. It is more obviously being _produced_ rather than replayed. It is more obviously a _unique_ event rather than recorded.

You could say that musicians play music. But that’s like saying an architect draws. It misses the larger point and purpose of the event. That is to say, it’s not the event or the action itself, but the results it produces.

And of course I can’t help but see connections to service design. It’s the little things which construct the overall experience. But it’s also about creating a time out of place. It’s about creating memories and triggering those memories to produce a compounding effect: what one might call “the present plus“.

Like live music, services are produced and consumed simultaneously. Yet the experience is much more than the event itself. In some hokey way I suppose this is a reference to those “touches of home” which hotels and suchlike purport to provide. The fundamental flaw in such statements becomes clear: it’s about my home, not some generic home. As such, the experience tends to fall flat. If there were some way to tap into my reality, my experience, and my memories, services could produce effects which speak directly to me. They could draw upon my memories to augment their experiences, making them more personal and meaningful, and they could create experiences and produce memories from which they could draw upon in a future interaction. Successful service delivery is about making those connections.

Does a service need to tap into existing memories to successfully serve a customer? Not necessarily. A general archetype might be used at first, but the danger in those is that you can’t look too closely at them or they tend to fall apart. For example, walking into a hotel room at the Hyatt or the Hilton, thinking “now this is luxury” and then noticing the torn weather-stripping around the window and the scratches on the arm chair. The illusion is punctured.

Better is to create memories which reference that specific time and place. In other words: provide good service, create good memories. Those memories will be the foundation for future customer interactions. Clearly, the details need to be strong for the overall experience to prosper, but don’t get trapped by the thought that service exists only in objects, in the way the room looks or smells. Service is also the front-desk experience, the check-in at the airport, the smile in the voice of the customer-service representative.

Future experiences with that service will exist in the present plus: the current experience, plus the experiences of interactions past. How many times have you gone back to a store, to a restaurant, or to a hotel because the service was so good, the staff so friendly, or because the store-owner remembered your name?

People talk about “rich interactions”. I think of Present Plus as rich service, as a depth beyond the immediate interaction, that draws upon all past experiences in the process of fulfilling the present experience.

Memorable service. Memorable music.

I originally wrote this piece after watching Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and being struck by its positivity. In the course of the film, Dave Chappelle puts together a massive block party in Brooklyn. That’s the what. The why is unclear: perhaps because it sounded like a good idea. I tend to think it’s because he enjoys making other people happy, and because this was a way to give something back to people. I was particularly fascinated by the creation of something from nothing, that all this energy and hard work went into creating something so ephemeral, yet so lasting.

Then I got distracted by some other things and I forgot I’d written this. Forgotten, that is, until I read Fabio Sergio’s recent post “The product (is the system) is the culture of use”:http://www.freegorifero.com/weblog/2007_02_01_weblog_archive.html#925909581354161892, in which he talks about time and its role in cultural change and impact on design.

I distinctly remember at the end of our Service Design course at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, we had a wrap-up session, in which I commented on how I saw Services as the overarching connector between interactions. That is, services provide the larger context in which interactions exist. I also remember that comment receiving a cool reception at the time.

I’ll be curious to see how the discussion unfolds this time.