Reach recently completed a project for Cisco, in which several Reach partners compiled a report detailing the benefits of cross-cultural research. Cisco wanted to know exactly what they stood to gain from developing their own cross-cultural research program, and asked Reach to provide a general introduction to the field. They also asked for a number of compelling case studies detailing the problems and opportunities encountered by companies already conducting cross-cultural research, and for each of these to be related to specific area’s of Cisco’s business.

Reach’s report drew on the personal experience of several partners, providing in-depth analysis of programs undertaken by HP, Philips, General Electric, and Nokia. These projects covered territories from North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, with each case study focusing on specific aspects relatable to Cisco’s operations. Liaising with members of Cisco’s User Experience Team allowed Reach were able to tailor the report around their specific needs, with the final presentation being made in the form of a compelling Powerpoint presentation that could be presented and circulated internally.

Related posts:

1. How sticky research drives service design At the 2009 Service Design Network Conference in Madeira, STBY...

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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IDSL – Nicolas Gaudron and Virginia Cruz (principals) – Paris (FR)

IDSL is a product and service design consultancy based in Paris, specialised in interaction design,
Human Computer Interaction (HCI), a consultancy on innovation and emerging technologies.

IDSL applies a people-centred design thinking process to a variety of projects ranging from experience design, innovation strategy, R&D projects, services and social innovation. Clients they have worked for range from large corporations to public research labs, like Essilor, IBM, the LIG (Laboratory of Informatics in Grenoble (FR)), Orange, Renault, Sony CSL.

Nicolas Gaudron (left on the photo) founded IDSL in 2007. He has worked for IDEO in Palo Alto
(California), for INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control)
where he has worked on the “Interliving” European research project of the Disappearing
Computer IST programme. He has then joined Renault ”Prospective & Concept Cars” design
studio where he has contributed to the development of the Human-Machine Interaction group.
He holds a Master of Arts from the Royal College of Art in London.

Virginia Cruz (right) joined IDSL as an interaction designer in 2008. After working for Electrolux
in Sweden, Sony R&D in Paris, Virginia worked for Orange/France Telecom as an interaction
designer for four years, first at the Smart Objects and New Interfaces Lab in Grenoble (FR), then
at the ExploCentre Innovation Centre in Paris. She has also contributed to the Eternal Gandhi
Multimedia Museum project in New Delhi. She holds Engineering degrees from Ecole
Polytechnique (FR) and Ecole des Mines des Paris (FR) and a Master of Arts from the Royal
College of Art in London (UK).

For more information see www.id-sl.com

Contact Nicolas Gaudron
contact@id-sl.com
+33 6 67 83 78 67
Skype: IDSL

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Yes, an old original iPhone car charger and…what’s this? The iPhone 3Gs cannot take the same charging accessories as the iPhone original!? So..basically the introduction of something new forces something old to be tossed out? Maybe there’s something that can be done with the old charger, but, I mean…really? Is this “Good Design” or adhering to those Green sensibilities that Apple is so often associated?

Think not.

Epic Fail. Epic, epic fail. I’m slack jawed. Shocking.

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Intrigued to see this promo by mobile telco Orange to bring mobile phone chargers that you pump by hand into concert venues for the summer. There’s an angle here about sustainability but I was most excited to see that the service providers are really thinking about the needs clearly, the idea that summer festivals bring groups of people together to interact and text, send pictures, and so on, and that when you’re in an environment like that, there’s no access to power. It may simply be a promotion but it’s a powerful acknowledgement of need and ties nicely to some of what we’re uncovering in our current Charging Up research project, especially as we begin to focus on key needs and heading into ideation.

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All Reach partners participate in a global study on how people use electricity and think about energy use, with a focus on charging devices. This study takes place in 8 countries: USA, Brazil, The Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Hungary, India, China and Japan. The study is ongoing and will include more countries later on, but most field work has been done and we are now creating the insights. Later, we will also develop some opportunities and ideas for several industries.

We are currently working with an energy supplier, but other companies and organizations can make use of the materials to develop concepts too. The results are due in July and will be available as a short visual presentation from this website. If you would like to know more because you think the results can be interesting for your company too, please email or call the Reach contact in your country or if there isn’t any contact Bas Raijmakers in London.

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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.

Related posts:

1. How sticky research drives service design At the 2009 Service Design Network Conference in Madeira, STBY...

The device could help speed the spread of the so-called “smart grid,” a network of sensors and controls that could reduce energy consumption, enable the large-scale use of renewable energy, and save consumers money. Smart-grid projects will receive billions of dollars in funding under the stimulus bill signed into law in February. Tendril’s device could be used by utilities to introduce variable-pricing schemes that discourage the use of electricity during times of peak demand, reducing the need for the most expensive and most polluting power plants. Eventually it could be used to help the electricity grid accommodate more electricity from variable sources of renewable electricity, such as wind and solar. Read more..

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A recent column of Graeme Philipson on energy consumption in the IT industry raised a lot of interest. It said that this year might be the year of green IT – the year corporate computer users become aware not only of the energy consumption of their IT function, but of the important role IT has to play in reducing the carbon footprint of the whole organisation. Read more..

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Experiential Design Lab (xdlab) – Giovanni Cannata (principal) – New Delhi ( IN) and Milan (IT)

Experiential Design Lab is a New Delhi based innovative design consultancy, specialised on full service experiential design for retail, events, products and services for companies in the digital industry. Experiential Design Lab focuses in its work on human experiences – starting from the individual’s or group’s needs, perceptions, desires and feelings – and works with companies as consultants, to develop strategies, services and products, always with an eye on user experience.

Giovanni Cannata is one of the founders and directors of Experiential Design Lab. He is also partner and co-founder of Interaction Design lab, an established Italian interaction design company with offices in Milan and Turin, where he collaborated to the start-up process and led a series of projects. The company has been awarded with the Imprese Creative first prize from Camera di Commercio di Milano in 2007 and it has been in Index 2007 for the prestigious Compasso D’Oro award.

Giovanni Cannata received an MA in Industrial Design at Milan’s Polytechnic, studying also at Konstfack University (Stockholm, Sweden) and at Hochschule für Gestaltung of Schwäbisch Gmünd (Germany). His academic experience includes collaborations with Philips Design (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) and STEIM (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) at music devices development and innovation. He graduated with an MA in interaction design at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Italy) in 2005. Giovanni progressed to working at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea’s project department (e1) project leading Genova Festival della Scienza 2005 edition, Interactive Furniture Workshop (Switzerland), and collaborated for Next 2004 and 2005.

For more information see www.experiential-lab.com

Contact Giovanni Cannata
giovanni@experiential-lab.com
+ 39 3492333179 (Italy)
+91 9873782892 (India)
Skype: sirhamilton

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Fuelfor – Lekshmy Parameswaran and Laszlo Herczeg (principals) – Barcelona (ES) and Budapest

Fuelfor is an innovation design consultancy specialised in health care. Founded in June 2008 by Lekshmy Parameswaran and László Herczegh, the company is based in Barcelona and serves global clients in the private and public sectors.
Fuelfor offers clients a 360° perspective on health to identify viable new opportunities for growth and translate them into tangible health care solutions and strategies that improve the health care experience.
With a strong belief that research-driven design and multi-disciplinary collaboration are essential for innovation in healthcare, fuelfor provides innovation consulting, design research and experience design services.
Clients include: hospitals, regional and national healthcare systems, healthcare policy makers, pharmacy chains, medical device manufacturers, psycho-social services, patient organisations.

Lekshmy is an innovation design consultant whose specialist skills include: strategic thinking and facilitation to help clients define and implement successful innovation strategies, and delivering compelling qualitative research to make sure these strategies align with people’s needs. Prior to founding fuelfor, Lekshmy enjoyed a 10-year career at Philips Design in London, New York and Eindhoven. As Innovation Director of the global healthcare team she created and led programs to generate and translate insights into new value propositions for Philips Healthcare supporting their Care Cycle strategy and Ambient Experience business. She learnt how to use design to shape and embed an innovation process and mindset within a leading global healthcare business.She holds a Master of Engineering degree from Cambridge University and a Master of Arts from the Royal College of Art in London.

László is an experience design consultant whose specialist skills include: translating human insights into design solutions and strategies that apply product, service, interaction or spatial design, and defining design qualities that powerfully communicate the human and business value of new propositions.
Prior to founding fuelfor, László spent 8 years as a senior design consultant in the global healthcare team of Philips Design. He led several award-winning innovation projects and developed concepts including Ambient Experience, a paradigm-shifting contribution to the healthcare industry that won an IDSA gold award in 2005. A key learning from this project was how to overcome the challenges in bringing an innovation design concept from vision to business reality. He holds a Master of Arts degree from the Academy of Arts and Design in Budapest, including study at the University of Arts and Design in Helsinki.

For more information see www.fuelfor.net

Contact Lekshmy Parameswaran
lekshmy.parameswaran@fuelfor.net
+34672252681
Skype: fuelfor

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STBY – Geke van Dijk and Bas Raijmakers (principals) – London (UK) / Amsterdam (NL)

STBY (Standby) is specialized in consumer research during the early stages of innovative service design projects, when designers, engineers and marketeers need to discover what matters to the people they are developing new products and services for.

STBY offers a wide range of research activities that contribute to this multi-disciplinary, exploratory process of consumer centered-innovation. Some examples of these services: qualitative consumer research, ethnographic studies, Lead User research, Open Innovation workshops, youth studies.

STBY is based in London and Amsterdam, and was founded in 2002 by Geke van Dijk and Bas Raijmakers. Previous to their involvement in STBY, Geke and Bas both worked as managers and user experience consultants in the internet industry. They founded and successfully developed the first usability company in The Netherlands, ACS-i media research & projects (1993-2000), which was acquired by Lost Boys.

In 2007 they both completed a Phd research in London. Bas in Design Interactions (RCA) and Geke in Human-Computer Interactions (OU). Their work for STBY greatly benefits from this research.

Some of the clients they have worked for: Reed Elsevier, Philips Design, BBC, HP Labs, Intel, France Telecom, KLM and ING Bank.

For more information see www.stby.eu

Contact Bas Raijmakers
bas@stby.eu
+44 7787334123 (UK)
+31 6 5515 7794 (NL)
Skype: basraij

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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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The Italian region of Cuneo is transforming its health system and wanted to identify propositions for sustainable innovation based on local needs and harnessing local resources.

Fuelfor created an active collaboration between Ezio Manzini and the Politecnico di Milano, Bruce Mau Design Chicago and local healthcare stakeholders to address issues around Obesity, Rehabilitation and Access to Care.

Applying an innovation framework that connected health care experiences at the individual, community, facility and urban level, fuelfor led a team of 30 international designers through a 6-day innovation workshop; using collaborative research to understand the health issues of local people from city to home, design thinking to identify innovation hot spots, and design skills to communicate compelling future propositions.

Our work provided the client with a new way to explore issues from a human level and apply local resources sustainably. The resulting eight sustainable health care propositions collectively offered systemic change, and revealed an unforeseen opportunity for the client to transform their local health care brand.

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Belkin was preparing to develop the second version of its mobile audio recording product, Tune Studio. Portigal Consulting interviewed recording engineers, teachers, students, podcasters and musicians in their studios, classrooms and homes.

Our work identified the critical tension between the semantics of gear and the need for creativity, and we worked with Belkin to translate our insights into product implications, including features, design, and product semantics. Belkin recently launched their Podcast Studio, informed by insights uncovered through out research.

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Nokia wanted to gain insights into what women want from mobile phones and find design directions for phones with a female perspective. With the Nokia Insight & Innovation Tokyo team we devised ‘collaborative innovation’ processes that started with internal “share and discover” workshops in 4 countries, and then continued with consumer insights intervention with consumers in Bangkok, including “homework’ exercises, home interviews, and co-creation workshops.

Bespoke tools were used to elicit insights and directions on both motivations and materials and shapes. The team supplemented this process with ad-hoc street interviews and Nokia internal expert interviews.
The results were presented in an internal sharing tool presenting bite size videos, slideshows, photos, where the audience in Nokia can see and hear first hand what women want. There are also executive summaries in form of PowerPoints. Workshops communicated the 5 key themes and design directions further internally and have resulted in successful product improvements.

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Reed Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers on the planet, engaged STBY for an open innovation project, to explore new opportunities for their business based on current customer practices. Working across multiple countries (UK and Netherlands), we focused on lead users who we identified through a process of snowballing.

We conducted fieldwork and followed-up with meetings for the identification of opportunities (insight creation) and a co-creation workshop (idea generation). The results have been used to inform the vision and strategy for a new portfolio of services targeting a specific market segment. The concepts that came out of the workshops are currently being prototyped.

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antropologerne.com – Rikke Ulk (principal) – Copenhagen (DK)

antropologerne.com is a consultancy company holding competencies within qualitative, ethnographic and design based research and communication. We produce insights on people and praxis, attitudes, circumstances and undiscovered possibilities. We work in the tradition of applied anthropology with participant‐observation and praxis/context‐analysis. We present our results in ways that will directly qualify, inspire and change innovation and service design projects. We use digital‐ and workshop based methods along with vivid photo and video material to co‐create and anchor insights with users and clients during the course of a project. 

Our clients are design companies, public and regional administrations, hospitals and universities, national and international corporations, initiatives and companies covering areas such as medical devices, nutrition, consume, care, communication, HR/city/brand‐development. 

Rikke Ulk (left), chief anthropologist, founded antroplogerne.com in 2003. She is a Danish Anthropologist M.A. from the Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen (2002), with experiences from studies in Brazil and The States. Rikke is specialized in clubbing and socialization, negotiation of values, style, ideal‐real and in how people stage and create personal and professional identity in urban cultural setting. Rikke is dedicated into bringing people together and closer to core issues and new possibilities. She brings new tools, working concepts and mindset mapping into consulting.

Susanne Rud (right), anthropologist, has been working at antrhopologerne.com since late 2007. She is a Danish anthropologist M.A. from the Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen (2006), with experiences from studies in Miami (US) Madrid (ES) and Mérida (Venezuela). Susanne studied issues of media and migration with a close look at ethnic TV and radio producers in Miami. Susanne also bears experiences from working as a promotion manager with creative PR and marketing at a record company. 

For more information see www.antropologerne.com

Contact Rikke Ulk
ru@antropologerne.com
+45 28 11 20 10
Skype: rikkeulk

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Portigal Consulting – Steve Portigal (principal) – Pacifica, CA (US)

Portigal Consulting was founded in 2001 by Steve Portigal. We are a boutique agency, based in the coastal community of Pacifica, CA, 15 minutes from San Francisco, and 30 minutes from much of Silicon Valley.
Portigal Consulting brings together user research, design and business strategy to help innovative companies discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers.
We work with organizations to help them introduce or expand their customer-centric design and development processes, including training and facilitation.
Our clients come from a range of industries and include both B2B and B2C. Recent clients include: Avaya, Belkin, Bosch, Chevron, France Telecom-Orange, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Nestle, SC Johnson, Shure, Sony, and WNBA.

Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting. His specialty is to transfer insights into specific business actions. In the past 15 years Steve has conducted hundreds of interviews with families, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, radiologists, and many others. Steve is also an accomplished public speaker, writer, and has taught Design Research at the California College of Art.

Dan Soltzberg brings a background in design, anthropology and communications to his work as a researcher and consultant. Dan’s ability to go deep in his investigations, to clearly articulate patterns, and to create concepts makes his findings and recommendations accessible and actionable. His experience facilitating cross-functional and cross-cultural teams in problem-solving and solution-generating situations supports a focus on creating ideas and tools that live on within project teams, and continue creating value as projects move forward.

For more information see www.portigal.com

Contact Steve Portigal
steve@portigal.com
+1 415 385 4171
Skype: steveportigal

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