Social solutions for MS sufferers

IHT's Alice Rawsthorn has written about Live|Work's recent work with the NHS.

"The result shows how the young, increasingly fashionable discipline of service design can work in practice by tackling a serious social problem."

"Service design is one of the new disciplines that are redefining design by taking it into the realm of what's called "user experience." This is business school gobbledygook for ensuring that services (everything from online bank accounts to airline booking systems) can be used easily and efficiently. The service designer literally designs every aspect of the customer's experience by applying the type of thinking that designers use intuitively in conventional projects, such as analyzing problems and inventing unexpectedly effective solutions. Often they do this in collaboration with other specialists, like anthropologists and economists. Good service design schemes are so intelligently planned and executed that we barely need to think about whether we're using them correctly. The bad ones (and, sadly, we've all suffered from them) are confusing, inefficient and infuriating. How often have you been flummoxed by an impenetrable online booking system or call center?"

"Not so long ago the public sector officials would have scoffed at the suggestion that designers could do more than fuss over glossy brochures, but that's changing. There is now a growing realization that many public services are no longer fit for purpose and a willingness to experiment with new approaches when reinventing them - including service design."