To explain her field of study, Miso Kim tells a story about a bad service encounter.
A few years ago, Kim and some friends purchased tickets to see a movie inside a New York museum and were then ushered into a small room with no seating.
“Then a preview of a movie with the same title as the one we were supposed to see started to play on these small screens,” she recalled. “The movie continued to play and we were just standing there waiting, not knowing what to do next. Everyone was quite confused, and then people started saying, ‘Well maybe this is it, this is the movie we were supposed to watch.’ We had no idea where to go or what to do next.”
Eventually an employee entered the room and opened a camouflaged door on a wall, revealing a beautiful theater that screened a “wonderful” movie, Kim said. But this was after a handful of people, frustrated by the lack of information, left the waiting room altogether.
“The room was nice, the carpet was clean, the screens were clear—the physical objects in the room were nicely designed, but there was something missing from the whole experience, from a service design perspective,” Kim said.
When people tell these stories about having a bad service experience, it’s almost like they’re indignant, like they take it personally.
—Miso Kim, assistant professor in the_College of Arts, Media and Design
Kim, who earned her doctorate in design from Carnegie Mellon University and has worked in Cisco Systems in the Silicon Valley, joins Northeastern this year as an assistant professor of experience design in the College of Arts, Media and Design.
Read the entire story at new @ Northeastern.
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University