Doc Or Die

This past week my UC Berkeley School of Information colleague (and Dean) AnnaLee Saxenian and I did a phone interview with Jon Udell for his "IT Conversations" podcast series. We mostly talked about the new Information and Services Design program. In particular, we discussed the papers and presentations that our graduate students gave at the March 2 Symposium that marked the "birthday party" for the ISD program.

(Jon, like you, is one of the millions of people who avidly read my blog, and that’s how he learned about this…)

I just listened to the podcast, and it is remarkable how much interesting discussion is crammed into a half-hour interview. Jon really did his homework watching the webcast of the Symposium in preparing for our interview because he specifically commented about a half dozen or so of the 11 presentations, and we talked quite a bit about these:

Elizabeth Goodman, "Destination Services: Tourist Media and Networked Places"

Saud Al Shamsi, "Service Quality in the Physical and Virtual Marketplace"

Andrea Moed, "Generative Logging: Product Information Histories as Drivers of Service Ecologies"

Lindsay Tabas, "Developing a New Services Design Methodology"

Listening to the podcast reminded ne how unique our school is, and how personally and professionally enriching it has been the last year or so working with Anno and others to develop our new course on the Information and Services Economy (which I sometimes describe as "from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to web services"), putting on a weekly Service Science lecture series (for which Jon Udell is an upcoming speaker on May 1), and getting this new ISD program off the ground.

We’ve got a great "intellectual mash-up" going on with "service science" here at UC Berkeley, and if I weren’t already part of it, listening to this podcast would make me want to join it.

-Bob Glushko