Ryan Buell – Harvard Business Review
This is a useful summary of the limitations of automation in service design. Only humans can be genuinely emotional, humans are still preferred to resolve problems, and automation doesn’t always stop human work, it can just shift it from provider to customer. So far, so good. But this has the feel of an article which could have been written almost at any time in the last decade or more and it does not touch at all on whether these attributes are absolute, situational or (for example) generational. People who design services are always at risk of over-representing their personal preferences, which are often to automate and streamline. Conversely though, there is no doubt that what it widely seen as normal changes over time and there is no very obvious reason to think that the balance of preferences has become more stable than it was in the past.