Carnegie Mellon Start-Up In the Pink

The Pink* guys are at one of their typical “offices” – Voluto, the hip new coffee shop on Penn Avenue – where the two of them comfortably pound out the day’s work on their laptops, surrounded by cups of espresso and iPhones.

At first glance, they appear to be your average twenty-somethings perusing Facebook and Twitter as they sip double shots. But this duo is  eight months into running a service design consultancy that has already completed a large project for GlaxoSmithKline’s Influenza Marketing Team. Both graduates of Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction masters program—with a strong focus in design approaches and strategies—Steve Selzer and Elliott Williams started Pink* in the summer of 2008.

“Designing services is a different approach to thinking about problem solving,” explains Selzer. “It’s very closely linked to designing for the human experience and the interactions we have with people and technology across time.”

Both Selzer and Williams first encountered the notion of service design in a class with Associate Professor Shelley Evenson of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design. “I never thought service design could mean rearranging furniture in a waiting room,” says Selzer. But the holistic and practical nature of the field attracted them both. With Evenson signed on as strategic advisor, and support from local Pittsburgh start-ups like Fit Associates, Pink* was formed.

“Pittsburgh is a great place for a start-up because of its low overhead,” says Williams. “And there’s a lot of support out there from other small companies that have gone through the same experience.”

Today, Selzer and Williams are knee-deep in a new project: bringing their design approach to Mobile Doctors Network (MDNet), a service platform being built by non-profit Africa Aid for supporting communication between doctors working in rural Africa.

“MDnet is not just about putting a phone in a doctor’s hand,” explains Selzer. “It’s about connecting them to each other and creating a sense of community. When there is one doctor per every 50,000 people, it is crucial that they can consult with each other quickly and easily.”

Can I Be of Service?
Selzer and Williams are big advocates for these types of services, whether they are for doctors in Africa or pharmaceutical companies and their products, as was the case with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

“The GSK Influenza Team realized that right now they’re selling flu shots and nothing else,” says Williams. “In order to set themselves apart from the competition, they wanted to sell a service as well.”

GSK brought Pink* on board to show them how that service might look. Keeping in mind GSK’s goal of increasing rates of immunization, Selzer and Williams charted the typical process of getting a flu shot.

“In mapping the experience, we found that people did not associate getting a flu shot with their daily lives,” explains Williams. “No one connected the flu shot with other steps they take toward healthy living.”

Selzer and Williams soon realized that the service in questions needed to consider the decision-making process as well as the experience of receiving the shot.

Connecting the Dots
Their solution? Ginger, a service that helps people take care of their family, manage their health, and reach their personal goals by connecting a healthy lifestyle with the actions they must take to achieve it. In essence, Ginger helps makes health a priority without the burden of micromanaging.

“Ginger is something like a car maintenance checklist, but for your body,” says Selzer. “You can create new ‘projects,’ such as an upcoming trip or a new baby, and generate to-do lists that are integrated with your health records and insurance benefits.” In this way, the flu shot becomes part of a larger health plan. Ginger also provides incentives for positive health choices, and serves as a communication platform between the user and his or her doctors.

Selzer and Williams pitched this solution to the Influenza Team, who are now advocates for Pink* and their service design approach. Due to the current economic situation, GSK hasn’t yet moved forward with the concept, but Selzer and Williams are glad they got the chance to show GSK what they can do.

“In some ways we’re not just a start-up but we’re also making an argument for an emerging design discipline,” explains Selzer. “We often find ourselves in the really interesting position of spending a lot of time and energy educating people about service design, which could turn out to be how we become successful. But it could also be a barrier to success--educating so much on the front end means less time spent on projects.”

But the more they talk about it, the better it gets, and right now it’s all about hitting the pavement. “There are certainly projects we’d like to tackle but those are further down the road,” says Selzer. “We have to build a portfolio first.”

And what's with that name on that portfolio: Pink*?

“Pink* is about evocativeness,” says Williams. While you can't pin it down, he explains, at the same time it makes it necessary to explain to people.

“The ambiguity of our name is a really powerful thing,” says Selzer. “Defining it for people is what we do—we take ambiguous things and make them understandable.”

Selzer and Williams know it takes time for a name like Pink* to come into its own, just as it takes time for a start-up to find its niche. To that end, Pink* is currently undergoing a little reworking, in part to make the concept more apparent and approachable.

“It would be great if some day people said ‘you need to make it more Pink*’” jokes Selzer. Williams chimes in, “can you add a little more Pink* to that?”

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Julina Coupland, who lives in Point Breeze, graduated this past week from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design with a Masters of Design in Communication Planning and Information Design. This is her first article for Pop City, and the beginning of what she hopes will be a very fun writing career.   

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Top picture: Elliot Williams (left) and Steve Seltzer (right)
Photographs copyright Brian Cohen