From arts marketing to service design

I'm scratching my head at the moment over a new methodology that will be a key tool for our work at Flow Associates. We hope this will help our clients (museums, arts and science organisations etc) understand their users in ways that are more about needs than niches. It's motivated by my belief that cultural sector programming and marketing are too narrowly based on a notion of 'audiences for arts', which doesn't really take into account the full range of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations that people have. The Flow approach is informed by the emerging practice of service design, which in turn has been informed by systems thinking. We hope to be testing this new model with user research we're doing for the West Midlands Museums Hub, in their development of an offer of Black Country Collections.