I was asked (indirectly) what was I optimistic about this year. The answer to that: I am optimistic about applied intelligence on service models, or better, service design being a major player these days.
I heard about services the first time in 1999, on one of the simplest presentations I’ve ever seen. Simple because it was mostly data, and hard concepts explained from the data, and mostly because understanding services (those days) was a very hard thing to do. It was given by someone that knows a lot about services, someone that lectures everywhere in the world, sort of a scientist and a genius. His name is Ezio Manzini. I was blown away. I paid a lot of attention. I couldn’t figure it out. Then I worked for some years on service design, and I felt that was the most difficult thing to design: a service.
It took almost 7 years for the world (and myself) to understand it. And now we’re very close to really harnessing its power, or at least we know there’s power in it. Distributed systems, social collaboration, interaction and support, community-driven models, pay-as-you-use, sustainability, are some of its advantages, and getting you exactly what you need without caring on how to do so is kind of the main goal.
Today I saw a presentation that made me feel optimistic again, or better: made me feel like there’s something that has to do with what I feel optimistic about. Still can’t put my finger on it. Instead I’ll share it with you:
In the meanwhile, I’ll keep thinking on that tickling I feel about this year to come.
