Reshaping the Future : Friendly Design of Self-Service to Come

Frank McFadden looked approvingly around Room 208 at the Art Center College of Design. It had the air of an energetic Expo 2000. Under the bank of overhead florescent lights, students were putting final touches on a variety of high-tech displays lining the large room.

It was their color-friendly preview of the future featuring: a blue and lavender “Post-Haste” mail box providing 24-hour mail service, no stamps or ZIP codes needed; an orange- and blue-striped Union 76 gasoline pump, which also checks oil levels; a “Pikatoon” streamlined juke box with a dazzling rainbow selection of compact discs that lets customers create their own music collection on CD (compact disc) or DAT (digital audio tape).

“The products in this room will change peoples’ attitudes about how they buy things in the future,” said McFadden, a senior industrial designer with NCR Corp., a leading manufacturer of automatic teller machines.

Though the products he was looking at were only facades--no music came from the juke box, no gasoline from the pump and no letters from the postal box--McFadden and his colleagues from NCR in Dayton, Ohio, who were here recently reviewing the displays, were pleased.

The full-scale models, complete with diagrams, procedural sketches, picture boards and transaction flow charts, met a major test: They were all self-service devices, expanding on the idea of the automatic teller machine.

The projects were a term’s work for 27 Art Center students in advanced product design or product graphics. Their assignment last fall asked them to take a futuristic look at new uses for self-service terminals.

No one was predicting an overnight revolution. McFadden noted it took about 15 years for the automatic teller to pave the way.

And “now that people are understanding what the concept is about--a new level of convenience and availability in dealing with one’s money--we foresee dramatic growth for the whole notion of self-service,” he said. The technology, essentially a personal computer tied to a data base and video imagery, has “become cheaper and far more available, so it’s easier to customize.”

The Art Center projects did show leaps in creativity from today’s favored automatic teller machine banking function of dispensing $20 bills. The student research had focused on recreation and entertainment, consolidating services that could be called up with the wave of a single plastic access card. There were, for instance, self-service terminals to:

- Offer hotel guests tourist information and reservation service for local restaurants, theaters, baby-sitting services, car rental and sight-seeing tours.

- Give another push to the pace in a fast-food restaurant by letting customers order and pay for meals in one transaction.

- Let skiers rent equipment, buy lift tickets and pay for food and lodging with one card.

- Provide an international and multilingual travel and reservation network with options for plane, bus, train and boat schedules, printing out tickets and a small map of the destination area.

“It was almost a totally blue-sky type of project,” class instructor Jeff Hands said. “We looked at cultural changes in market trends, then brain-stormed to define the purpose and function of self-service devices. We also looked at high volume applications and targeted possible consumers.”

Cultural changes, for many student designers, meant anticipating a global society whose decision-makers travel widely, need instant access to information and don’t have a minute to waste. Ian McColl and James Hamilton, having learned that stock brokerages increasingly are becoming like banks (“for instance, offering certificates of deposit,”) designed a self-service stock market terminal for airports or hotels “where people who can’t get to phones can call up their own accounts, buy and sell stocks, and access interest rates in markets around the world on a 24-hour basis.”

They designed their two-panel terminal in somber metallic gray and brown wood, “a tactile environment to give the user a secure ‘board room’ feeling.”

‘Automated Media Center’

Daniel Packman’s project was a self-service newsstand, an “automated media center” dispensing newspapers and magazines, because, he explained, “we live in a time when people demand information immediately, and the newsstand seems to be a dying breed in Southern California.” Other projects indicated deeper philosophical statements. Derrick Watson, who sees the industrial designer’s role as protecting the consumer from engineers who “just dump the technology on us,” designed a 24-hour automated recycling center because he “wanted to do something that would prove beneficial toward society.”

Watson, 31, describes himself as a futurist, but “not the kind who concentrates on outer space or colonizing the moon,” he said. “I have the idea we can make it work on this planet.”

To provide incentives for recycling, he designed BEN (Better Environment Now) for a supermarket parking lot. It would consolidate recycling of paper, glass, cans and plastic, because, as he noted, “Now nothing is integrated--some companies have curbside pickup, some have bins, some have limited hours.”

Not only would customers’ filled plastic recycling baskets automatically be retracted into BEN’s dump and returned empty, then they also would get to choose a payment of print-out supermarket coupons, or a receipt for donations to a favorite charity.

‘Good Use’ of Resources

“I like the idea of making good use of our resources,” Watson said. “I’ve done a little research and it’s amazing the effect recycling can have--even 5% would make a big difference. This is all technology that is already available.”

The more obvious emphasis of the future automatic teller machine is not in saving the environment, but, as the name implies, in bringing together customer and purchase.

The Art Center projects, which fulfilled class credit for students, were dismantled shortly after inspection, and will not be developed by NCR but “they may be pointers to the future,” McFadden said. He predicts a “major expansion in all kinds of retailing, in the airline industry, in travel,” but not overnight. “I think the evolution will be slow and steady.”

That’s the consensus of specialists who track technology’s long-term impact: While banks’ experience with automatic teller machines has been closely watched by all service fields, nothing radical is just around the corner.

The evolution will continue. “I think it’s the kind of area that will take 20 years to become an overnight success,” said Paul Saffo, a staff member at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park.

Not Total Acceptance

Although there are no solid statistics available, banks have not enjoyed total acceptance of automatic tellers, he said. “About half their customers eagerly adopted these things, then they just hit a wall, somewhere around 50%. “In other words, the population has sorted out into those who like all the benefits of self-service and others who won’t use it, no matter what.”

Saffo, a specialist in tracking the long-term impact of technology, predicts that banks will keep working to lure customers to the self-service “electric trough” and other service industries will follow because of two driving forces: the cost of hiring tellers, and the shrinking labor pool. “It really is hard to find people who are friendly, smiling, cooperative and stable and also can add and subtract,” he said. “People aren’t kidding about basic skills being in demand in this country right now.”

Labor costs are only one factor shaping the future of self-service. Kare Anderson, a San Franciscan with her own consulting firm in interactive technologies, hopes to focus work on a more positive success formula: Find out what people want, then provide it.

“Automatic tellers seem to have plateaued out, but I see an optimistic future for other technologies,” she said.

Some Notable Failures

The notable failures in technology-driven experiments, she said, have occurred when corporations focused on a technology, rather than a human need.

“If you provide a technology that makes it easy for people to get what they want, when they want it, they will leap at it,” she said, citing voice mail--the high-tech, versatile phone answering- and messaging-system being adopted by companies nationwide. It has succeeded, she said, because “it’s technologically friendly and it’s something people want. Anderson mentioned several projects now being tested around the country that meet her dual requirements. They sounded very much like the Art Center student projects.

Introduced at 7-Eleven

One, introduced in a number of Dallas 7-Eleven stores, is Ticket-Quik, offering tickets, at the touch of a video screen, to a full menu of plays, concerts, sporting events. “You buy the ticket, it’s printed out and it is charged to your credit card.” A second is a gift kiosk, which the Host Co. has stationed in major airports nationwide. The traveler steps up to a video monitor picturing gifts ranging from Champagne to flowers and perfume, calls up a 10-second commercial on a gift, then can pick up a phone and order it delivered from a central shipping office. “It’s like a mail-order catalogue, but very fast and easy.”

She foresees a bright future for such self-service retailing. “Looking ahead, at the technologies of telecommunications, the computer, television, the shopping center, cable TV, we have all sorts of possibilities. I believe a lot of these projects will work when bright people concentrate on the values and life style of the customer.”