Some Great Resources for Project 3 and Service Design

After several days of not reading my Google Reader feed, I finally got around to catching up on some of my usability & UX news.

First off, for project 3 on encouraging people to go for walks, you may find Social by Social (a practical guide to using technologies for social impact) helpful, at least if you find that the lack of physical exercise, like walking, is essentially a social problem and not about the individual. I discovered this site from Experientia's blog. I, admittedly, have a bias in looking at things to see the social--even in creativity--but I haven't actually looked at the issue of why people walk (or don't) so I can't say whether or not this is a viable solution path (only your data can tell you that).

Also, and I wish I had known about this site earlier (so I could pass it on earlier) is this new site on Service Design tools, which goes over various ways of communicating service design to clients (so a lot of what the last and current service design project deliverables covered).

Also, in case there are still any lingering doubts of the benefits for design-oriented folks to know about implementation, I recommend reading this blog post about a designer now wearing more of a devloper hat ("programming for non-programmers", mostly, but the reflections are still very relevant).

Hope you all find some of this useful.