PD Newsletter #107: What Nigerian cash machines tell us about the value of service design

Internet era ways of working

💳 What do Nigerian ATMs tell us about the hidden value of service design?
PD’s Praise Olutuase explores the trade-off between failure modes which optimise for lost cash versus lost cards, and how you can unlock value through service design even within regulatory and cultural constraints.

🙅‍♀️ On the subject, Simon Morgan-Wilson explains why service design is not UX design on a bigger scale: because the user interacts with only a fraction of the entire service. “UX work treats the visible bit as the thing. Service design treats the visible bit as a symptom, and the rest as the territory of intervention.”

🇸🇪 How IKEA is using AI to reshape employee roles, rather than eliminate them. While deploying an AI chatbot for more than half of its customer conversations, the organisation has re-skilled parts of its customer service staff to respond to the need - identified through user research - for advisory interior design support.

🗑️ Do design hand-offs belong in the bin? Shaun Bent argues they are a waterfall-era relic that treats design and engineering as separate problems. He advocates instead for a parallel approach where both disciplines are “working simultaneously, sharing back and forth, continuously.”

Technology in focus

🚀 How ChatGPT shaped the US-China generative AI race - a research article from Jinghan Zeng. Hard to miss the irony in the US government anxiety about the security threat of TikTok being mirrored by China’s fears about ChatGPT. 

🔮 Very good stuff in Benedict Evans’ latest AI eats the world - with a healthy reminder of the ‘radical uncertainty’ we’re up against: “For every new platform, we forget how many ideas failed and how unclear everything was.”

⚓️ Stefaan G. Verhulst on why data centres need a social license to operate. “The digital economy may run on data, but it is anchored in place. And in those places, acceptance cannot be assumed.”

🔓 Does Mythos mean you need to shut down your Open Source repositories? Terence Eden explains why the answer is no. And where code has been paid for by public money, it should certainly be open, as this letter - in response to the NHS decision to close many of its open source repositories - spells out.

🕸️ “What stood out was not the technology, but the dense web of people working around it.” Rest of World spotlights stories from the developing world where AI is being deployed for social impact - from agricultural companion FarmerChat, to post-surgery assistant, CataractBot.

💧 The UK’s  regulated water sector faces a defining moment of change. What can it learn from the story of government IT reform and GDS? A lot, argues PD’s David Blamire-Brown.