At the 2009 Service Design Network Conference in Madeira, STBY and Spur presented a paper together with Reach client T-Mobile on in particular how our use of video made our design research ‘stick’ throughout the process. In the paper we discuss the problem of the lost shoes. At the start of concept development processes we often do some kind of ethnographic research to be able to step into the shoes of the people we design for. But when the process develops, these shoes don’t fit anymore or get lost. We wondered: How can we keep walking in the shoes of our users throughout the entire design process?

Short video films recorded by the participants in our initial research proved to be an answer that not only worked surprisingly well to keep stories from the people we designed for at the centre of the design process and even the business case we had to develop, but these films were also very inspiring for the whole team. The paper explains how we benefitted from the films in detail.

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Most people have fully integrated their mobiles in their everyday life nowadays and would have a hard time imagining how to organize their social circles without it. Yet, it is not the mobile that sets the norm for how social life is organized, it’s still people who do that. Therefore companies like T-Mobile can learn a lot from how people actually organize their social life a broad sense (as opposed to how people use their phones) when they want to develop new concepts for mobile internet. Spur and STBY did fieldwork in Berlin and Tokyo and worked with a T-Mobile team to set up the research and organize the workshops that used the results to create insights and ideas.

We worked extensively with video in this project, using the small and easy to operate Flip Video which we gave to participants to film moments in their life for us. In the picture you see Bas Raijmakers transferring the clips one participant made onto his computer, to discuss them during the home visit. To prepare, participants had received the Flip camera and a set of nicely designed instructions a few weeks before. They each made some 30-40 clips for us. We edited those clips into short films of 1-3 minutes each.

Later in the insights and ideas workshops we used the short films in two different ways: as inspiration for creating the insights and ideas. And later, once we had developed these in more detail we used the films to back them up, as evidence. Because we used a video diary approach, the films became often very personal and intimate which was great for the topic we wanted to explore: how do people organize their social life. From this research resulted almost 30 detailed ideas for new services which are currently further developed by T-Mobile.

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When traveling from Paris to the Alps by highspeed train this winter we found this sticker above our seats.

It looked like a shy mobile phone to me at first, but it’s true meaning became clear when I needed to visit the toilets later on and came across the yellow sticker.

It was above a cosy bench in the corridor between carriages. A special corner for making calls! So this is how to do it:

The only tricky bit is that your cosy bench is doubling as a baby change unit. I’m not sure the babies will stand in line until you finish your call. If not, close your nose!

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