The water filled box above your toilet finds it's name from the French cisterne, meaning "underground reservoir for water". This is taken from the Latin root 'cista' meaning 'chest' (box), but it's fluid filled connotations also lead to the word 'cyst'.
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who you gonna call?
In 1993, the British Conservative government, led by John Major, enacted the British Coal and British Rail (Transfer Proposals) Act (c3). The operations of the British Railways Board were broken up and sold off. This is now referred to as the privatisation of British Rail. Don't worry, this has nothing to do with politics, it's simply an illustration. When you take a trip on a British train today, you no longer interact with a single company. The ticketing is run by ATOC, commonly referred to as 'National Rail'. The tracks and stations are maintained and owned by Network Rail. The trains are run by a variety of train operating companies (TOC's), but the trains themselves are owned by one of three rolling stock leasing companies (ROSCO's). The on-board catering is run by various independant contractors, namely 'rail gourmet'... but you get the picture.
Where is this going? Well, when a single experience is managed across a variety of providers, the neccessity for a well meshed system becomes paramount. When it comes to customer service, history tells us that complex systems such as this have generally negative effects on customer service and satisfaction. The difficulty in isolating who is at fault is partenered with the propensity of the providers to push the problem over the fence, leading to a disappointing customer experience.
Again, where is this going? Well, I think we're heading the same way in many aspects of digital design. Picture this: you're running tweetdeck on your android phone which crashes, causing some permanent problem. Who you gonna call? Google? HTC? Tweetdeck? Twitter? Vodafone? Carphone warehouse? The cellular network?
As we move towards a world driven by aggregation and API's the room for customer isolation increases. When things break, or cause problems, we need to ensure people know why. Tweetdeck is pretty good at letting me know that it's 'not their fault' when twitter pulls out the fail whale, but this becomes more difficult by an order of magnitude when services become layered within services, like a matroyshka doll. Targeting user anger is tricky, and in some of the ethnography sessions I've been involved with show that users typically aim their frustrations at the incorrect source.
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