Jeremy Myerson
We now move on to a session called “What is the New Know-How in Service Design” and I think that through the presentations so far, you know, just beneath the skin, just beneath the surface is a whole kind of emerging narrative around the kind of services that we design and some sense that designers are moving away from designing physical artefacts to designing services and we’ve got three eminent speakers to form a panel and I’d like for them all to come up on the podium. Gillian Crampton-Smith, Chris Downs and Heather Martin and I will introduce you to each of them. What Gillian, Chris and Heather all share is an institution, the Interaction Design Institute at Ivrea in Italy. Gillian was the founder and before that she was the founder of the computer related design course at the Royal College of Art which is now called Design Interactions, headed by Tony Dunn, and Gillian has really been at the forefront of new forms of education in this area. Chris Downs was on the start up team at Ivrea and he then became a professor there and before he founded, he was the founding partner of a service innovation company Live Work which I’m sure many of you will have heard about. And our third panellist is Heather Martin. Heather was academic director former, I ran into Heather when she worked with Tim at Ideo. She became academic director at Ivrea and is now based in Copenhagen at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. I think one of the questions that we’re going to tackle is what’s the difference between interaction design and service design? So I hope that our panellists are going to enlighten us on that subject. So I will join the panel and I’m going to ask each of them just to make an opening statement to kick off. So Gillian would you like to go first?
Gillian Crampton-Smith
Okay, well I thought it would be useful just to say what I think interaction design is and what I think service design is. And then we are going to show some examples of services that we think will bring out some points that we want to make. So I think interaction design is the design of products, systems and services made possible by interactive technologies, that is computers, telecommunications, the internet, mobile phones, etc. So following on from the panel this morning, I think it’s very much rooted in a medium and I think the medium that we use is that of computation. So what we can do is limited by the constraints of the technology, but also builds on the potential of the technology.
And I think it involves three aspects and the first is conceptual side. What should be designed? And what should it do for people? And then the second aspect is the realisation and this I think is the aspect which is particularly where designers have a strong role to play. And it’s about how should the thing we’re designing do what we want it to do? What should it be like? So that’s the concretisation if you like of the concept. And then I think there’s a third aspect which is the implementation. How does it get into the world? How is it built, sold, maintained? And I think that designers of all kinds, from all kinds of disciplines have a strong role to play in the conceptual side and the richer the team the better the result. But after that I think everyone has their craft. So it might be the craft of the business model. It might be the craft of the graphics on the screen. It might be the craft of the software infrastructure. But you wouldn’t want your software infrastructure designed by the graphic designer, not by me. You wouldn’t want the business model made maybe by an engineer and so I think it’s important to distinguish the phases and the aspects of the design process when we’re talking about whether people have a role. Who owns it, etc, etc, etc? It’s different at the conceptual stage than it is at the implementation stage for instance. And designers, because they’re good at imagining and good at visualising, are particularly important at the concretisation stage, the realisation. What is this thing going to be like?
So service design is the design obviously of services and obviously there’s the conceptual side. What should it do for people and for whom and by whom? And then at the realisation, well what is it like when we access this system? What is our experience? And then implementation, how is it built? How is it maintained during its life and how are all the touch points, the physical ways that we perceive the service, how are they designed and made?
So I’m going to show a few images just of some services. And I want you to pick some good ones and some bad ones and you may be surprised but one of the best services I have experienced is the passport office in Victoria. Now do you associate the British government systems with wonderful service design? I certainly didn’t. But my whole process of getting a new passport was absolutely wonderful. All the information was on the website. I had an appointment when there were about 40 of us with the same appointment time. You turn up, there’s a row of desks and eight or so officers check your documents. So they check you’ve got the right stuff before you go in. So you’ve got your right documents and if your photo’s not right there’s a photo booth there, etc, etc. And then you go upstairs and you sit in comfortable chairs and you can see your number coming up and you wait in peace and then you see that your number’s rising to the top. When it does you go and see an agent and they very courteously do the documents and then you get your passport in a couple of hours.
It was really fantastic, it was really beautiful and I realised that one of the good things about a well designed service is that it just flows easily and you always know what’s happening and you know, you’re not surprised, you’re not anxious, you know when is it going to happen and I contrast that with Heather and ours experience in Italy where there’s a very, very different – 150 people turn up at 7.30 in the morning for the office to open at 8.30 etc, etc. So this is very, very well thought through.
So my next service, well it’s cheap, it’s cheerful, but it is really, really awful and I’m sure you’ve all experienced it. It’s just not organised properly and it’s not because it’s being done cheaply. It’s because nobody’s thinking about what we as the traveller need or would find convenient or comfortable. So this is usually what it’s like, a kind of great mass of people milling about for half an hour, three quarters of an hour on their feet waiting and they wait to go to the gate, they wait to go through the gate, they wait in the bus to go the aeroplane, etc. And I thought well maybe well it’s just because it’s cheap and yes it is really cheap. It’s Ryanair. But then if you look at EasyJet and you compare EasyJet it’s the same kind of thing. But it’s calm, it’s well organised. The touch points, if you like, the aeroplanes are nicely designed. The whole experience is far, far calmer. It’s better for the passengers and it must be a lot better for the people working in the company.
I wanted to use this example as an example of pure service and this is really ugly you have to admit. But is the most – it’s another very, very lovely service. If you go to a hotel in Milan and you want a taxi you go to the desk and you say “I’d like a taxi please” and the desk clerk presses a single button. That’s all he has to do, just press a button and then in 30 seconds a little ticket comes out of the machine and it says three minutes Torino 30 or Ancona 22. So it’s the number of the taxi and how long you’ve got to wait and it’s not about the touch points really. It’s just about the service that if you’re a foreigner when you ask the desk clerk for a taxi you don’t know who’s going to come. Is it the right taxi? When will it come? You can’t ask because you don’t have the right language. This takes all the anxiety out of the whole system and so I think that’s as clear as near a kind of pure service and an enjoyment of the way the service works as I’ve ever experienced. So now Heather what about yours?
Heather Martin
How do I follow that? I didn’t put a huge amount of thought into the ones that I’m going to show you. But I picked this first one because it’s the Danish postal service. Now I’ve lived in Denmark the last year and I’d say I’ve lived in quite a few cities, San Francisco, New York, Milan, Amsterdam and I have never experienced such good public services as in Denmark. Obviously we pay very high tax, in fact I pay 60 per cent tax there. But I have to say that the postal service is not only highly efficient, which you should expect from the public service, but they have actually gone a little bit further in what they’re trying to deliver and the reason I’m using the post office as an example is that there’s another service running in the library system inside Denmark that is working alongside the postal service and they’re both public services. But here you can use, when you go into a public library in Denmark and you’re searching for a book online and they don’t have it in the library, you can actually demand it. It gets transferred from another library anywhere within the country of Denmark and within two days they guarantee that the book will arrive in the library for you and it all runs through the postal service in Denmark, and what I like, the reason I showed this as an example is I think I’m very much into the idea of service design. I mean I’m originally a product designer so I’m used to designing artefacts and all the rest of it in my past. I like the methodology behind service design, the fact that we can reduce artefacts as a sustainability aspect to it where maybe we can reduce the amount of waste we produce in the world. But here you’ve got two services that don’t really have many after effects. They don’t necessarily have huge amounts of technology behind them but they’re piggy-backing off the benefits of each other. But the other reason I wanted to show this slide was also to say that I believe services are almost like living organisms. That, you know, you end up designing them, you nurture them for a while but they carry on living for years and years and I think often designers who get involved in designing services forget that five years down the line those things actually still exist and it’s very hard to predict also how every day people might behave with these services. So for instance, I can imagine some people in the very outback of Denmark being quite pissed off after a while if all their library books from their local library are going to the city of Copenhagen because that’s where they think all the intellectuals sit. So there’s also social aspects to these services that designers, they don’t sometimes necessarily think about. So anyway that was my first example.
The second example is, I’m almost kind embarrassed to put it up because it’s so obvious. It’s the Apple iPod and iTunes of course the back end and to me I can’t really think of a better service being delivered through such well thought out touch points. I’m not saying that I think, you know, the designers who design this, you know, I’m not trying to encourage design stars, that’s not what I’m interested in, these superstar designers. But the reason I bring this up as a designer, I really appreciate the level and the subtlety of the experience that’s been going on here and the way that they thought through all the back end logistics, all the payment system, all the iTunes libraries, everything is so seamless but the number of times I’ve heard people open up an iPod box, plug it into their computer and be purely shocked that it works. And to me all technology and all service and all devices that we use should be of this level so I put it in there really as a reminder to myself as a designer. And of course the iTunes is the key behind it.
And this is my last image is actually my mobile phone that I use now and I put it in there because we decided as an office that all eight of us would have exactly the same phone, a Sony Ericsson, and we signed up to service because it allowed us to talk for free between us and we thought great, so that’s free service, we’ll sign up for that. And we all had to change our existing phones and pick up and use this phone so we all had to change our behaviour, change the way we understood our interfaces. And in fact what we didn’t really realise that even though the service sounds so attractive again human behaviour is very strange. So we didn’t realise that of course we work with each other all day, every day and by the time it does come to the evening time maybe when you need to call someone from work, the last thing you actually want to do is speak to that person. So we ended up texting each other all the time which costs huge amounts of money because you could’ve talked for free but human behaviour’s so strange and it’s only afterwards that we were like “so hang on, so we learnt how to use new interfaces, we’ve bought these crappy phones and we’ve signed into a service now that we actually can’t get out of very easily” which is even worse. So to me this is like a typical example of, you know, everyone talks about redesigning public services, huge big systems and all the rest of it but every day we still have this and how many service contracts have you been tied up in and how many objects can you not really use properly to get the services come through properly. So I still think we have a huge amount of work to do, even just these small areas and I wish, I hope that designers and people working in service design don’t forget that we live with this every day.
Chris Downs
Thanks Heather. When Kevin invited me to come to the conference, he said that I’d be on a panel which I was really happy about because you don’t have to prepare for a panel you just take questions and think them through on the fly. But then I got an e-mail from my old professor Gillian saying that she expected me to bring some slides of good and bad examples of service design to talk about the difference between interaction design and service design and to talk about future skills. Now in my career I’ve learnt one thing and that’s you do what your professor asks you to do. But I’ve also – I know that the way I tend to design, whenever I get a chance to do it, is to leave things only until it is impossibly too late to start, when I know that there is absolutely no point in beginning the process. That’s when I start my design process. So really I am making this up as I go along and I’m sure it’s a high risk strategy that I’m sure is going to fall flat. But great service design example, I pulled this off Flickr this morning. It’s a photograph of an Addison Lee taxi driver. Addison Lee’s a big taxi firm in London and I had to use them for the first time a couple of months ago and it’s just a taxi company. And it’s interesting that Gillian had a taxi example as well. But they just get the basics right. You phone them up, you tell them where you want to go, they confirm the booking, then they send you a text message half an hour before to say the car’s on it’s way with the registration plate of the car and the name of the driver and then you meet the driver and they’re always lovely and they know exactly where they’ve got to go and it’s all paid for, credit card in advance. It’s just nothing exciting, it just works really well. So well that people put photographs of the taxi driver that took them to a party on the web. That’s just a nice service experience that obviously delights people.
This is an example that we know from the Baltic. This is from a piece of work that some of my team did with the Baltic front line staff. This is a good piece of service design in practice I think. We were giving design tools and skills to service providers, to front line staff, we’ve been teaching them how to draw. We’ve been teaching them how to prototype and we’ve been teaching them how to do user insights and one of the front line staff’s insights is that visitors to the Baltic don’t really like this big “Pay Us £3” sign when everyone knows it’s free. The staff don’t like it either, it makes them feel really cheap and it makes them feel like they’re lying and it has quite a big impact on their daily lives at work. But they’ve never had the tools or, I guess, the know how that they can change their own service environment. So they just took a giant piece of paper and blanked out that front face, the “Pay Us £3” although it’s free, and instead on the back wrote “Did you love us? If so it’d be nice to have £3”. Sounds a really quick service prototype that totally transformed the mood of the staff and the visitors.
This is a photograph that my wife took on a train coming back from Penzance to London. So this is a five hour train journey with a two year old child. This is the only toilet on that train that had baby changing facilities and First are transforming travel, that’s great news and this facility is unavailable for use. When the guard came round my wife asked him who we should complain to about this. We weren’t making a complaint to him, we were just asking what the correct channel was and he used that as an opportunity to start an almighty argument. Which ended in him giving us spurious facts such as the reason the new carriages don’t have tables in them any more, they’re all air line is because no-one wants to write anymore they just want to travel. I challenged him on that and I asked him where he got that information and I said “if we put it to a poll in that overcrowded carriage that day I’m certain most people would like a table”. To which he replied “no sir, most people would rather sit than stand”. So it turned from us wanting to make a complaint in a very measured manner, not even complaining to him but asking him what the proper channel was. It turned into an opportunity for him to start a fight. Now that’s not necessarily his fault. I think this is an issue where a touch point in a service actually has an impact on the front line staff and the way they interact with the customers.
I was also asked to talk about skills and I’ve got lots to say about skills. But I really think we’re probably the wrong generation to talk about skills because we’re kind of classically designed trained and we’re trying to pull ourselves out of this thing, this illness we all have, as designers, this control freakery that possesses us all. We all want to control everything we design. But there’s a generation beneath us who have relinquished that control and have swapped it for responsibility. So this is someone that really should be talking about this. This is one of my design heroes. It’s not Tessa Jowell. It’s Debs Becko and I’m sorry Debs, I know you’re in the audience I saw you earlier and I hope this isn’t embarrassing you. But Debs has come out of creative education with a set of skills but more important than her skills is her passion. She wanted to change the way information was shared inside NHS hospitals and she’s gone about doing that in a really phenomenal way.
And this is another of my design heroes, this is Ian Crawford and the thing that I love about Ian is he was a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, a real design talent. He won one of the first service design awards set up by the RSA. I bumped into him recently in our office. I thought he was here for an interview but he was actually there just to put some shelves up. Ian has got a job with a shelving company called Vitsoe and he is someone that measures up the space and puts up the shelves. He’s deliberately gone to work there because he thinks, as a designer, he can have a greater impact by working in a business that can employ his design skills in a kind of non-design business than he would have if he went to work for a design consulting firm and Ian has got the ear of the MD of this shelving company and is managing to transform that company. The MD called me up a couple of weeks later and said that Ian has managed to convince him that although they make shelves they are actually a service business and are adjusting their strategy accordingly. I think that’s it.
Jeremy Myerson
Thank you very much. Thank you for our panel. At a risk of being provocative, what I was seeing there was not so much good and bad services but good and bad experiences. I know people who commute almost to France by Ryanair and have terrible experiences on EasyJet. Things get lost in the Danish post as I know. What’s the difference? I mean surely it comes down to your experience and obviously you’re designing the experience. So what’s the difference between service design and experience design?
Chris Downs
I’ve been asked that recently and I’m not sure there is. I’m not sure there is much of a difference but if you go and look for experienced design companies you end up with people that make events and exhibitions and kind of trade show things, kind of one-off brand experiences. They’re not actually changing the way an organisation delivers its service on an ongoing basis to its customers, changing the operations. It’s much more a kind of single one off event. So when we named our business as a service design company, we decided we had to differentiate ourselves from that so we didn’t look like we’d just made big trade shows.
Gillian Crampton-Smith
But there are two aspects aren’t there? There’s doing the right thing. You know, what is the right thing? I want to get from Italy to here and so Ryanair does that on the whole, pretty well. It’s usually on time and that’s fine. It’s just the process is so extremely inconvenient and unpleasant and so it is partly inconvenience, it’s party an aesthetic one that is kind of worst than it could be and you can see it’s worse than it could be. So I think the experience of accessing a service is obviously very important and one of the things, somebody said earlier, about simplifying life, Nigel I think. That we have so much hitting us that if we have, I mean in my view, if we have a service that is calm, peaceful, does everything without us getting anxious or angry then it improves our life a lot.
Jeremy Myerson
Okay, thank you. So members of the audience, comments, feedback, questions? Bad experiences, good services, Kevin?
Kevin McCullagh
Yeah I was just taking in mind the distinction you make and I’m still trying to get my head round it.
Gillian Crampton-Smith
Okay, which one?
Kevin McCullagh
And it’s, I guess, there’s things between interaction design and service design and I think, if I understand correctly, you’re saying there’s certain components of services aren’t interaction design services.
Gillian Crampton-Smith
Well I think the services that we have now and the way that we have them really very complex services could not be possible without information technology. Kind of, I don’t know, billing systems. I once talked to someone from Cable & Wireless and they said “our competitive advantage is we have a very sophisticated billing system”. Now that’s not what you think of as a competitive advantage for a company. So I think, of course, there have always been services, we were talking about this earlier that prostitution was probably the first. But now they are more complex and this is made possible by new digital technologies and so many of the things that we interact with are or need to be interaction designed.
Heather Martin
I’ve also had discussions with people, designers in the past, about what is interaction design? How far does it go? Is a door handle interaction design? It’s got no technology in it but I still interact with it and it made me move and I read what the object’s meant to be doing and how to behave and so I always say that interaction design usually involves technology or something digital somewhere and usually a microchip. When I think of service design, I don’t necessarily think there has to be technology involved and I seem to remember some projects in the past where you can actually deliver a service entirely on paper through the post where there’s no technology involved. Or it might be something where there’s not affectively interaction involved where you’re interfacing between a human and a machine and you need an interface and therefore you need an interaction designer to be involved usually. So I think service design definitely has elements of interaction design but it’s not necessary I would say, to have that in service design.
Gillian Crampton-Smith
I think a big aspect is the … sorry go ahead.
Jeremy Myerson
Yeah.
Kevin McCullagh
Can I just ask my question?
Jeremy Myerson
Alright, okay.
Kevin McCullagh
And it’s just basically to say that, you know, if there’s a technology element to some services, so if you’re talking about service design, what are designers from traditional design backgrounds, what types of service touch points are their best iteratives? You talked about business models, you’ve talked about training HR. Would one way to think about it be to focus on typical types of touch points that designers are from, the kind of backgrounds that are in this kind of swim right now, usually focused on, which you talk about, other touch points and you think actually people from other disciplines…
Chris Downs
Do you want me to answer that?
Jeremy Myerson
Somebody interact please!
Chris Downs
It’s just it was so directed to Gillian… we all tend to do that. There are two types of design happening inside Live Work, for example, and I think it’s very much the kind of conversation Tim was having this morning when he talked about design thinking as something that might be slightly different than design. So, at Work we have… service design is the umbrella term for the practice that describes the relationship between us and our clients. Within that we deliver interaction design touch points, graphic design communications touch points, as well blue prints and operational models, which we can do because we employ operations guys, management consultants, as well as graphic communications designers and interaction designers. So, service design is a multi-disciplinary practice, it’s bringing together a group of people that are applying, I think probably what Tim was describing as design thinking, as the umbrella process, practice, point of view that brings all of these people together in a slightly different way than might have been previously configured.
Gillian Crampton-Smith
Heather was saying that in Denmark they talk about concept thinking… was it?
Heather Martin
Thinking…? Concept makers, I think they’re called.
Gillian Crampton-Smith
For that first conceptual phase.
Jeremy Myerson
Question there? If you let us know who you are and where you are from?
Audience member 1
Michael Schwarz from Amsterdam. I’d like to invite the panel to, I think we all share this… to be a little bit more sophisticated in the words we choose and also the questions we ask. I think what is service design, I don’t think we’re going to solve that today, or even next week or next month but I think it would be more interesting to ask what is good service design even though we know service design is a vague concept, I mean, to take the point Gillian made in relation to EasyJet and Ryanair, well it’s so peaceful and a number of those kind of words, then it’s really about the qualities that you attach to services and when you say this is good service design. So I think in my terms it would be things that make a service meaningful which isn’t a thing that’s the same to all people, but it shifts from a functionary thing… this is a service you want to deliver to some level because you can say well I’ve already agreed the service is the limit, but how it’s the limit makes the difference to whether you think it’s good or bad. So, I think… I believe we need to think a little bit more about beyond function and how we can find the right words for that. I agree with Chris when we say it’s experience that’s so related to events and entertainment and so on. We really have to be a little bit more sophisticated in the qualities of service design, if we want to talk about that meaningfully.
Gillian Crampton-Smith
I think there is the functional side and I think there is the aesthetic side and it’s not necessarily what it looks like but as an aesthetic of…
Heather Martin
Behaviour?
Gillian Crampton-Smith
…use. So the way I move through the space, for instance, or the way I’m corralled waiting for my gate, there is an aesthetic to that as well as the aesthetic to the orange posters.
Audience member 1
Sure, but I use the word meaningful exactly for the reason that, I mean, aesthetics may link to it but lots of things have made things meaningful, so it’s a meaningful experience that is well beyond the aesthetic and some have absolutely nothing to do with this.
Gillian Crampton-Smith
I’d just like to pick up on that. Everything has an aesthetic whether you attend to it or not.
Chris Downs
I think this is a really important question. Do you mind if I attend to it? Because what is good service design is something I genuinely believe we should talk about that, what is service design is tiring and if anyone wants to know come and spend six months with us in our office and you’ll find out. But to measure what is good service design, we measure it internally in a few different ways. Firstly, a lot of design ends up as projects, you do projects with clients and if a service design project ends as a project, for us it was a failure. It was only really… it’s only really successful if it became a service or it turned into something that changed a service. So, having real world impact that’s one way of measuring it. Then it has to balance the relationship between the service provider and the service participant. It has to be an efficient and effective way of delivering the service, it also has to be very useful, usable, like classic design stuff for the end-user but matching that again with management consultant-speak around efficiency and effectiveness. It has to balance the relationship and then, James, I hope you’ve left already, for us it also has to be socially, environmentally and economically beneficial so we have a triple bottom line way of assessing the quality of our service. So I think there are lots of ways of measuring it, it’s very important to measure it and that is a conversation we should all be having.
Jeremy Myerson
OK. Question there.
Audience member 2
You already answered my question, it was about how do you think these new way of designing creates a new ‘Back to the future’ in terms of… is like a new product that you doing, what do you think is the impact in the future? In terms of…?
Heather Martin
Sorry, I thought you were directing it at him so I wasn’t really listening…
Jeremy Myerson
All questions are directed at all of you.
Audience member 2
He just spoke about the ecological impact…
Heather Martin
Sorry, I just don’t get the question. Can you tell me…
Gillian Crampton-Smith
Well, one of the things I think that Live Work has always stood for is the idea of shifting pleasure, status, the cultural enjoyment of what we do and what we have, from what we have to what we do and the experiences that we have and I think that’s an important aspect, that where the service that you enjoy could give you as much pleasure as the things you buy and so that you could buy less and experience more.
Chris Downs
And I think the biggest impact we could possibly have is… almost everything we do, the way we think, the way we learn, the way we talk, is routed in manufacturing, production mindset. And if we shift the way we think, away from product to service, it changes an awful lot of things. So, you don’t talk about consumers and consumption anymore if you think about service, you start to think about participants so there’s already inherently less waste in that thought. You stop thinking about ownership, you start thinking about shared use, you stop thinking piling things high and flogging them cheap and running away, you start thinking about building long-term relationships with customers. And it’s insane that financial services companies sell us mortgage products, what’s going on there? And why do they wonder why there’s so much churn in that market? So I think, for me, the big possibility for thinking about service design is going beyond just making services really and nice and enjoyable but actually really doing… having some fundamental shifts in the way that we actually interact with the world.
Jeremy Myerson
Last question is from Andrea.
Andrea Siodmok
Andrea from the Design Council. I think the point I want to make, really, is that services are obviously not new, so I don’t think it’s a new thing and companies are incredibly good at doing services, Virgin do a great service in Upper Class and a pretty good service in Economy…
Chris Downs
I wouldn’t know…!
Andrea Siodmok
… but they are very different services. So I think companies are pretty good at doing that. The difference being that designers may not have called it that in the past and actually the tools which we use now are not necessarily the tools we used in the past. The British Standard on Service Design, which I think is an evolving definition or should be, talks about the fact that services result in intangibles. So, I think the difference between service design and experience design is that services plus products plus communications equals experience design. So I actually think they are completely incompatible. But I do think it is a new area for design practice and so I think that the focus is not about definitions but about approaches, techniques towards the methods.
Jeremy Myerson
OK. Do you agree… or not?
Chris Downs
Yes, I completely agree with Andrea. It would be nice to show examples but we’re not allowed to promote our business today.
Heather Martin
One thing I just want to check, Andrea, because you mentioned it yesterday when we were talking in Newcastle. The talk about service design is usually comes out as intangible and I'm not sure whether I agree with that, actually. Intangible in what sense, are you talking about?
Andrea Siodmok
That’s the current British Standard definition, developed by designers in collaboration with people like Chris as well. So, if that is wrong, if it doesn’t result… if we’re not saying service is… only resulting in intangibles, then we need to go back the definitions as well and help develop those.
Jeremy Myerson
Well, at the risk of… I think we’re beginning to sound like 15th century theologians arguing over miniscule points of meaning in the Old Testament. But I will conclude by just introducing my own… it’s not my definition, it was written by a man called Thomas Pine in a very good paper in the Harvard Business Review called The Experience Economy and he used the analogy of baking a cake. He said in the agrarian economy, you baked your own cake with a recipe that your grandmother gave you; in the industrial economy you baked a cake but you used industrial components that you went out and bought, the ingredients, the Betty Crocker pack. In the service economy you didn’t bake the cake at all, you went to M&S and just bought the birthday cake and in the experience economy you don’t bake the cake at all, you don’t even buy the cake, you take all the kids to McDonalds and McDonalds throw a party for you on their premises and they throw the cake in for free. And so that’s the difference between agrarian, industrial, service and experience. Discuss over tea! Can I thank you very much indeed to our panel for helping us sort this out.