BACKGROUND
I have been a trained classical pianist for 17 years. Music has always been a big part of my life, so it was natural for me to somehow incorporate it into my Masters thesis. After some service design work that I did in my first year of graduate school as well as the work I did with IBM Reserach for an internship, I began to see interesting parallels between the two fields... so much so that I decided to focus my thesis paper on this topic.
THE PAPER
So, what can services learn from classical music?
In my Masters thesis paper, I discuss the growing field of service design, and parallel it to the well established field of classical music. I argue that services can be thought of as performances, and if so, then many aspects from classical music could be used to provide applicable approaches to service design. The topics that are paralleled in the paper are the following: how services can be thought of as performances, how the roles inherent to music find similarities to roles defined in service design, and how music notation systems are essential in connecting different music roles together and why service design should adopt a notation system of its own.
I presented at the Design and Emotion 2008 conference in Hong Kong.
PROCESS
collection of process documentation (click on image to see full size)
PRESENTATIONS