Then next stop on my Danish Design education tour was the University of Aalborg with whom Swinburne has an official relationship. My visit was focused on the Service Design course in the School of Architecture and Design. The course is led by Nicola Morelli. Nicola and I go way back to the 2006 Wonderground Conference in Lisbon. He is one of the most informed and articulate proponents of service design.
Anyone who reads my blog knows of my skepticism of service design. Not so much with the idea that designers should be involved with the design of service systems as well as objects, but with the underlying conceit that they are better at it than anyone else, especially someone with an MBA. I just find this pose very disrespectful and naive of the fact that you can have the most brilliantly designed service concept, but without a feasible business plan, it doesn't mean anything. And I have yet to meet a designer who can produce a better business plan than someone with an MBA.:)
But in this case I suspended my skepticism because we have courses in Service Design at Swin and so I want to find partners to boost our capabilities in this area. I am glad I did because what I experienced was amazing.
I had the pleasure of attending the half-day final presentations of the one of the Service Design course student teams. The project was to design services that enable multidisciplinary collaboration within the design school. The students did not give a boring Powerpoint presentation, but rather the students acted out both the challenges of collaboration and their service solutions with lo to mid-fidelity prototypes as props (i.e. a set of collaboration skill posters, a collaboration website which allows people to book a physical play room, and a set of collaboration games in boxes and with instructions that teams can use to work through collaboration issues). It was a brilliant performance followed up with a more formal presentation of the team's reflective learnings from the process. It seems that the biggest challenge in creating Schon's reflective practitioners is getting them to reflect during the process, not just afterwards.
The students then left the room and were brought in one-by-one to answer questions in front of the review panel of Nicola; Marianne Stokholm, who is one of the most brilliant women I've met, and Sven Nielsen. This part was a bit rocky because of the different styles of questioning used by the panel, but it was an interesting process to observe. When the individual interviews were done, the entire team was brought in and told what their group grade would be.
I was really impressed by the systemic thinking of the student team who weaved together solutions based on an understanding of what the core product was (i.e. to build greater collaborative capacity within the students who will get jobs in collaborative environments), the markets (ex. design schools although they missed the opportunity to expand it to other collaborative environments), the technology (i.e. both low tech and high tech, both tangible and virtual), and the organization (i.e. how all this relates to the objectives of the University, Danish education policy, and how you engage both students and faculty in collaboration). I was impressed by the faculty members on their ability to set up evaluative criteria around such complex projects and be fair in those evaluations.
Nicola and I both discussed the desire to have more exchanges between the two universities, perhaps, during their four-week mini projects. The best area for exchange will be doctoral students as an opportunity for shared research but also teaching opportunities. Again, I look forward to future collaborations.
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