Emily’s Empathy Cards, bring a rare confidence and warmth to this situation. They are not the whimsical, or even meaningless ‘get well soon’ cards. But portray real feelings and some frustrations that are felt by the patient when dealing with close ones at this stage. They bridge the gap of not knowing what to say, when words are so hard to find. They are a great example of dealing with fatality of life.

A hospital is often a very frightening place for anyone, but particularly young people. The  medicalisation of every issue often overlooks the issue of death. Instead the medical system applies its enormous arsenal to all situations. This arsenal lacks the poignance that is required when all that can be done, has been done.
The ‘End of Life Room’ at Great Ormond Street captures the need of reflection and grief well by decorating it with illustrations from Quentin Blake and removing a great deal of the technology and medical instruments common in hospitals. Well done Great Ormond Street and Jenny and Michael Walker who helped establish the room.

Such a tiny fraction of items on earth get to leave it. So it's refreshing that the ones who do, have a spectacular and well thought through ending.

Few products, services or digital services have there end designed, let alone in the detail that is required for any space program.

These versions of endings from @duncangeere at How We Get To Next are good inspiration for us all to think more about long term design or how to design endings.

Telling people about the end of their life can be one of the most difficult things for medical staff to do. Surprisingly, these skills have only really been taught to medical students during the last couple of decades. 

The 3 techniques provide interesting perspectives for designing the end of service or product relationships - setting the right environment, gauging what the user knows of the situation, providing lots of opportunity for questions - are just some examples of good practice in closure experiences. 

Three versions of death by Atul Gawande in his excellent and insightful book Being Mortal.

In the last few years, complaints to the UK Financial Ombudsman have increased fourfold. In 2009 they considered 127,000 cases, and in 2014 this leapt to 512,000. It’s saddening to think that we have so many un-resolved issues between consumers and the financial services industry. The sales culture they have bred emphasises the on-boarding of users over the closure experience of a service – the ultimate delivery of the service.

I was flattered to be asked to speak at Glug recently. Its a great event, hosted in a nightclub in Shoreditch, London, with a smart savvy crowd from the digital/start-up community.  Below is the SlideShare of the deck I showed at the event:

The simplest type of waste is the visible kind. It is easy to identify rubbish on the streets, or fly tipping on a country road, but as we engage in progressively more complex systems - mechanical, chemical, digital, we experience increasingly more complex forms of waste that are harder to identify.

With the first week of the year being one of the busiest for divorce lawyers its a good time to reflect on reasons why people end their marriages and what we can learn for designing closure experiences.

Listed below are 6 reasons people end their relationships according to Daphne Rose Kingma a relationship councillor.  Lots of parallels for us to consider in the breakdown of service relationships or creating closure experiences.

We have created a poster showing the variety of customer experience processes and how each of them end. From the marketing guru Philip Kotler to Colin Shaw and John Ivens' Great Customer Experiences, and Ron Zemke's Service Recovery. Contrasting these we show Daphne Rose Kingma's stages of people's love lives falling apart. Together they show opportunity areas for closure experiences to be created for customers.

Pensions are having to evolve with working practices. 80 years ago people would have a job for life. That job providing a pension that would grow as you aged. As few people moved jobs, tracking people would only need to be done by the employer.