First Published in UX MAG on April 8, 2016 http://bit.ly/1SsOlS0

In a world where almost everything is digitized, services can now be understood as concepts with infinite potential to grow and transform. What was once unimaginable now lies within the expected.

And because concepts have the multi-dimensional flexibility for infinite semantic relationships, powerful service partnerships are beginning to emerge that are able to better respond to changes in customer needs, desires and expectations. The delightful ‘Of course!’ moment often reveals itself through these service combinations, giving new meaning to the services that we use.

‘BISOCIATION’

The term ‘bisociation’, first coined by Arthur Koestler, entered the design world in 1984 as Victor Papanek borrowed the concept and applied it to address sustainable design challenges. He used it as part of his design practice, as both a method to create innovative and sustainable products by bridging disparate (local) materials together as well as a problem-solving and ideation tool.

Think of ‘bisociation’ as when your kitchen runs scarce on ingredients and you begin to experiment with what you have in order to create new food combinations. Sometimes the combination upsets you, other times it’s not ideal but you put up with it anyway, and on some occasions the combination is so ideal that you now have to have these ingredients together.

Similarly, service ‘bisociations’ across industry types play a pioneering role in redefining the core values of services, causing an instant shift in mindset and in so doing, fostering new customer demands, different modes of doing and thinking, and growing expectations for future services.

SERVICE MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

When Facebook began its plethora of platform and service acquisitions – from the popular photo app Instagram and the facial recognition platform Face.com in 2012, to the mobile instant messaging app ‘WhatsApp’ and the Finnish fitness tracking app ‘Moves’ in 2014 – it sought to add valued features to its service offerings. These combinations have enhanced Facebook’s facial recognition capabilities, enabled the pictorial documentation of Instagram users’ lives to blend with their existing Facebook timelines, and extending its reach into the healthcare industry by adding tracking capabilities to its toolkit. Through combinations, Facebook is able to grasp what encapsulates the elements of an individual’s self-curated profile. These kinds of ‘bisociations’ have enabled Facebook to cater to the multi-faceted needs of its customer base.

Travel booking services, too, are increasingly partnering with trusted rating systems, such as TripAdvisor, to increase reliability in their service offering and provide best-in-class recommendations. In fact, a few of these travel agencies have gone a step further to craft itineraries that include restaurant reservations. For example, Priceline acquired the restaurant booking service OpenTable in 2014. This bisociation blended two business ideas together to expand their business area to also include restaurant bookings from a worldwide trusted inventory.

SERVICE & PROJECT PARTNERSHIPS

The ‘Of course’ moment of service partnerships goes something like this: Of course, I should be able to listen to my Spotify playlist while riding in the back of an Uber; and Of course, I should be able to split my Uber fare with a friend with a single tap. Through service partnerships, Uber is disrupting customer expectations. For instance, Uber partnered with Zomato (the restaurant booking app) to cater to its Indian market, by allowing Zomato users to book a ride as they book a table at a local restaurant. By combining actions to respond to an anticipated need (getting a ride to the restaurant), the two companies made it convenient for diners to plan their evening and get there on time.

In healthcare technology, the ‘bisociation’ of services has proven to have a particularly positive impact on patients’ daily lives. Fjord Accenture Interactive formed a proof-of-concept that wearable technology can help people manage difficult health conditions, such as ALS, using brain commands to interact with display interfaces, and communicate with others. Similarly, Emotiv partnered with Philips to look into the future of healthcare for ALS patients. Brain commands are connected to available products and services in the patient’s environment such as: light switches, TV controls, email, and medical help. Service combinations of this nature are proving that digital services can genuinely improve and affect the quality of our lives.

SERVICE INTEGRATION ECONOMY

Creating ‘synergies’ between services is part of a growing trend at Fjord called ‘atomization’, where businesses and organizations are beginning to open up their API(s) and allowing services to share data across industries to inform more reliable offerings and exceed customer expectations. The trend is a response to the increasingly liquid expectations of consumers, where products and services are expected to blend with the digital service landscape they operate in and complement consumers’ complex and evolving needs.

Service ‘bisociations’ are becoming essential ingredients to our ways of living and making sense of our digital environments. Combined, services can create powerful new meaning and value. And as services take on multi-faceted characteristics, they now require a more sophisticated language to express all that they can offer.

Of course!

[T]here are unique features of individual perception that have important implications for the design of information. […] designers must search for some areas of commonality.”  (Whitehouse, 1999:103)

Oliver Sacks’ accounts of visually impaired patients demonstrate the nature of perceptual experience as essentially idiosyncratic. This “perceptual fingerprint” is identified as the difference between seeing and understanding, between vision and cognition. Roger Whitehouse categorizes perceptual processes as follows: sensory mechanisms which are defined by individual sensory receptive capabilities (i.e., retinal and eardrum functions); cognitive processing of sensory inputs which depends on individual neural wiring; and ascribed meaning to perceived sensory inputs which results from individual experience and cultural background.

As babies, we leave a womb where we receive little sensory stimulation and, with all our sensory input devices in full working order, emerge into an explosion of light, color, sound, smell, noise, movement, touch–sensations that have absolutely no meaning for us.” (Whitehouse, 1999:108)

Because we possess the ability to adapt and change in accordance to changed environments, we are in a position to perfect our physical and mental competencies. This is due in part to the fact that behavioral interventions are also metaphysical; they affect specific areas of the brain and produce physical changes. In fact, the neuroscientist Micheal Merzenich (2004) described the brain’s evolution as twofold: in childhood, the brain learns to adapt to its environment as it absorbs information directly. He calls this the ‘critical period.’ In the second period, the ‘adult plasticity,’ the brain is able not only to adapt, but also to control its behavior and change at will. The brain is then a volitional entity. By presenting the areas of the brain in the form of a geographical map, he demonstrated how the brain remodels itself in ways that are skill-specific (such as posture, movement, etc.). This also confirms Sacks’ (2009) hypothesis that there may be specific fractions in the brain responsible for specific sensorial activities such as pattern recognition. Sacks’ findings showed that patients under certain medical conditions had experienced geometrical, musical, mobile and psychotic hallucinations involving all their senses in coherent ways. Hence, every brain has its idiosyncratic geography. Merzenich noted that “the embodiment of You” is the greatest determinant of how one’s brain might look. Physical change that occurs in your performance with the world, then, occurs as well in the physical configuration and remodeling of your brain structure.

The contextual scale of information matters; that is, to design at the human scale with considerations for accessibility, readability, and reachability, that correspond to user-centric demographic and psychographic requirements. To design for user-centric perceptual processing is to coherently integrate a belief system. Whitehouse explains how belief may contribute to the ways in which information is assimilated and interpreted, thus affecting the understanding of what one sees.

Shifts in perception are borne out of our ability to adapt, learn, and change unique perceptual beliefs. Change abounds when new skills are achieved and hidden skills are discovered in the course of adapting to contextual circumstances whereby newly-made associations and patterns are established in the mental realm and henceforth shed light onto and transform every preconception and belief one might have had –often referred to as “paradigm shifts”: when one’s whole world is reconsidered and tailored again to fit a new reality. To understand and respond to users’ unique perceptual belief, design needs to shift priorities to meet user-centric design goals that allow for the generation of friction-free solutions that facilitate behavioral, sensorial, and cognitive information consumption.

To achieve effectiveness and efficiency, the design process involves: preliminary user research and observation, defining the problem that requires a design intervention, providing multiple solutions or proposals that address the problem in question, usability testing protocols (determining number of participants, duration of test, types of tests, collect responses, debriefing with users), redesigning according to test results or user responses, etc. Designing for usability methodologies lead to a comprehensive, effective and efficient design solution that responds to users’ perceptual processing needs and expectations.

By simple testing and observation, […] we became aware of some of the practical implications of individual perceptual differences. Most importantly, we began to understand how easy it is to disenfranchise individuals simply by not perceiving and correctly interpreting the most basic facts about their needs.” (Whitehouse, 1999:128)

Whitehouse encourages designers to actively include user cognitive differences by engaging in “the extraordinary value of” user research and usability testing to understanding users’ needs as well as cognitive and cultural requirements.

source:

Merzenich, Micheal. “Exploring the Rewiring of the Brain.” Filmed February 2004.
Source: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain.html
(Access Date: December 3, 2009)

Sacks, Oliver. “Hallucinations.” The Robert B. Silvers Lecture, The New York Public Library.
Date: September 21, 2009. Source: http://www.nypl.org (Access Date: December 3, 2009)

Whitehouse, Roger. “The Uniqueness of Individual Perception” Information Design. Jacobson, Robert (Ed.). MIT Press, Massachussets: 1999, pp. 103-129