This week I got together with Bob Glushko and AnnaLee Saxenian to discuss their new program in services design at UC Berkeley's school of information. I had earlier interviewed Bob Glushko about the book he co-authored, with Tim McGrath, on document engineering. Now a professor in the school of information at Berkeley, Bob headed up Commerce One's XML architecture and technical standards activities from 1999 to 2002, and is now a member of the OASIS board.

AnnaLee Saxenian is the dean of Berkeley's school of information. Her 1996 book, "Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128", is the classic and often-cited study of how gregarious engineers in the Valley created social capital that produced a competitive advantage for the region. In 1996 she followed that with "The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy."

To commemorate the announcement of their new program, Information and Service Design, a symposium was held in early March. Graduate students gave presentations based on papers they'd written, and in preparation for this podcast I watched more of the videos of those presentations than I had planned to. These are mostly older students who have returned to school with a combination of work experience and an appreciation for the contemporary digital lifestyle. Now they're learning how to apply those perspectives to the new interdisciplinary science of service design. You can see, in those videos, that they're having fun learning about this stuff. And you can hear, in this podcast, that Bob Glushko and AnnaLee Saxenian are having fun figuring out how to teach it.