Related posts:

1. Be Water My Friend ...
2. Global Stories Local Flavours ...

Related posts:

1. Defining the global by uncovering the local How can holistic global insights be developed from connected local...
2. How can local insights affect strategic shifts in global organisations? How can insights affect meaningful change? Even the most resonant...
3. Be Water My Friend ...

Related posts:

1. Global Stories Local Flavours ...
2. Many Instruments One Melody ...

Quicksand is a multi-disciplinary innovation consultancy that partners with organizations to think about the future of human experiences, seeking inspiration from the every- day lives of people.

The diverse team brings expertise in design, research, business and technology forming the basis for multi-disciplinary approaches to innovation and design thinking. Quicksand represents the Indian face of a global movement on design thinking— a new approach to create solutions that are sensitive to the end user while driving business and social impact. This is made possible through their expertise in learning from the field— distilling meaning from the lives of people, communities and cultures – and sifting this knowledge through the lens of business, technology and design. Clients that they have worked with include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Cisco, Google, Samsung, Path, UNDP, Coca Cola, IDEO etc.

Ayush Chauhan co-founded Quicksand in 2005. Ayush received his engineering and business degrees from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and did a brief stint in brand & product management in the corporate sector before starting his journey as an entrepreneur. He has since led the studio on projects with global corporations & foundations on subjects as varied as water and sanitation, technology convergence, internet, education and healthcare. Ayush was nominated by the Asia Society as part of Asia’s Young Leaders Summit in Kuala Lumpur in 2009. He has been invited by the Gates Foundation to be on the jury for Grand Challenges Exploration, a platform to foster innovation in global health and development and currently serves on the board of Design Impact, a US based non-profit that works closely with the design and social sector to incubate and implement new, life-improving solutions.

No related posts.

How can holistic global insights be developed from connected local studies? This was the question addressed by STBY (UK & NL) at GOOD’11, via a series of recent case studies all somehow based upon this principle. Analysing this issue via case studies will allowed STBY to present a client-side perspective, looking at those issues organisations face when attempting to learn from local consumer behaviour (and the local culture influencing it).

Their experience managing such projects via the Reach network meanwhile allowed them to discuss in detail the ‘network company’ model. This has proven capable of developing high-quality, cost-effective results in a manner far more agile than the traditional model of global research (i.e. that employed by multinational firms with various local offices). They be demonstrated how projects can be intimately tailored around specific circumstances, and how making use of local expertise means the nuance of local insights is never lost in translation.

As well as going into nuts-and-bolts detail about the processes such work involves, STBY’s talk also took a step back to look at some wider issues. What exactly is ‘local’? And how can both contextual (external factors influencing behaviour) and cultural (internal factors driving routines and preferences) insights be identified, presented, and leveraged into meaningful opportunities?

These questions are at the heart of any successful global project; examining them via real-world examples showed how theory can be put into practice.

Related posts:

1. How can local insights affect strategic shifts in global organisations? How can insights affect meaningful change? Even the most resonant...
2. The power of one vs the power of many: Energy Awareness models across the globe GOOD’11 provided several real-world accounts of what it actually means...
3. Global Stories Local Flavours ...

GOOD’11 was all about what can happen when design and research come together – but what about when this means people, and not just disciplines? Lekshmy Parameswaran and László Herczegh are co-founders of fuelfor, a design consultancy specialised in healthcare innovation. They are a Designer Researcher and Researcher Designer respectively; the challenges and joys of bringing these disciplines together lie at the core of their daily professional practice – and they have both the smiles and the scars to prove it…

At GOOD’11 they be provided a personal and professional account of combining these distinct viewpoints, whilst looking at the fundamental principles that underpin different disciplines and backgrounds working together: What does it mean to be a Designer Researcher and Researcher Designer? What are the innate strengths and weaknesses of each discipline? How can they complement each other to enrich the innovation process? Does learning how to innovate really mean learning how to collaborate?

Health care innovation involves tackling complex problems, and multi-disciplinary collaboration thus becomes an essential tool. With over two decades of experience between them working in the healthcare field, fuelfor have found that when design facilitates research (and vice versa) the results for innovation can be far greater than the sum of these parts. Drawing on selected healthcare product and service innovation case studies fuelfor illustrated a set of key working principles they believe can lead to a successful ‘marriage’ of design and research for innovation.

No related posts.

Design research is centered upon the creation of resonant, engaging insights, but even the most successful projects have to tackle an all-too-familiar problem: how to implement the opportunities they’ve inspired within seemingly rigid organisational structures? This is the issue that was tackled by Dan Szuc (Apogee, China), who looked at how design research can help break down the organisational ‘silos’ that can develop over time and isolate internal teams.

In the this article, he gives an in-depth account of how collaborative workshops – when effectively designed and facilitated – can play a key role in this process. It’s a practical guide borne out of real-world experience, and addresses some of the most common issues design researchers can face during the crucial – but often painstaking – implementation phase, and is a great introduction to some of the wider themes that will be examined at GOOD’11.

Dan’s lectured about usability, user-centered design and user experience in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, the US, New Zealand and Japan. He also co-wrote ‘The Usability Kit’ – an implementation guide providing best practices and guidelines for usability teams – and holds a BS in Information Management from Melbourne University in Australia.

No related posts.

How do you design the future models for energy consumption? Smart grid is a huge topic, the upcoming of micro-producers a tendency. The energy providers want to enforce sustainable energy and concurrently they talk about ‘peak shaving’ – peak-shaving meaning a new collaborative way to re-distribute our collective energy consumption with the two-fold outcome: More consumption of wind energy at night and less collective cost with regards to upgrading the distribution-grid leading our energy out in the homes.

One method to design this future model for energy consumption is to design services and setups which encourage involvement. This is the approach taken by antropologerne.com in an ongoing project focusing on electricity consumption. Working from the premise that visibility, materiality and interaction in electricity consumption can encourage consumers to flexibility and to take a greater interest in their energy use, this study revolved around two key themes: the potential impact of home automation technology, and the role of community platforms and collaborative portals.

Exploring the gadget/home automation and the community platform approach provides insights, results and hopefully a new, useful perspective upon people’s attitudes and motivations when it comes to energy consumption.

antropologerne.com came to GOOD’11 to speak about this project in detail, placing it within the context of their previous work in this area. Having recently conducted a major anthropological study into electric car use, they have a wealth of experience from which to draw conclusions about how design research can help foster long-term community involvement in sustainability and re-framing energy usage projects.

Related posts:

1. The power of one vs the power of many: Energy Awareness models across the globe GOOD’11 provided several real-world accounts of what it actually means...

GOOD’11 provided several real-world accounts of what it actually means for research projects to take on a ‘global’ focus. One area in which such projects have flourished in recent years has been Energy Awareness, and this was the topic addressed by Indri Tulusan and Fumiko Ichikawa of Spur.

Their presentation will answered two key questions:

Why is learning about others important when local problems present large enough challenges on their own?

And:

Why conduct in-depth research providing detailed accounts of a single person, when the overarching problem facing them is so huge?

Indri and Fumiko will be addressed these questions via a series of real-world case studies drawn from their many years of experience working in this area. The projects they presented went into detail about how energy awareness projects can maintain an effective global focus without losing the rich detail of resonant local insights. They looked at how projects concerning solar power and ownership models can benefit from community involvement at both global and local levels, and applied these principles to a number of real-world challenges, such as the current power plant situation in Japan.

Related posts:

1. Community involvement in sustainable energy use How do you design the future models for energy consumption?...
2. Programme GOOD’11 Programme 9.30am: Registration Opens 10.00am: Presentations – How can Research...
3. Defining the global by uncovering the local How can holistic global insights be developed from connected local...

What role can Design Research play when tackling social issues? Increasingly well-established when it comes to product and service innovation, the principles upon which the approach is based are equally applicable to the challenges faced in a variety of social work. Minds & makers (Ger), addressed this topic at GOOD’11, providing an in-depth account via their analysis of the ‘workstreet’ project.

Workstreet is a project designed around street children in Cologne. By ethnographically exploring their everyday life, a range of opportunities to improve their living conditions could be developed from the ground-up, tackling issues such as outreach and inclusion at the earliest possible stages of the design process.

Minds & makers are currently working with a social institution in Cologne to test this approach out in the field, and will be presented some of their findings at GOOD in September. They went into detail about the issues faced in such work, providing insights on how to engage a difficult target group, and how involving local stakeholders in innovative ways can drive such projects forward.

Related posts:

1. Defining the global by uncovering the local How can holistic global insights be developed from connected local...

How can insights affect meaningful change? Even the most resonant of local insights can quickly disappear within the bureaucracy of a global organisation – even one that’s open to new thoughts and ideas. Feel the Future (Brazil) came to GOOD’11 to present their thoughts on this issue, reflecting upon their own experiences helping companies enter – and indeed learn from – the Brazilian market.

Having worked with major multinationals such as HSBC and Electrolux, Feel the Future have a great deal of experience working with global companies who have used local teams to come up with solutions that subsequently influence the entire organisation. They used their time at GOOD to go through this process in detail, explaining how local feedback can maintain global implications.

Related posts:

1. Defining the global by uncovering the local How can holistic global insights be developed from connected local...
2. Programme GOOD’11 Programme 9.30am: Registration Opens 10.00am: Presentations – How can Research...
3. Designing for Good: Thinking big by starting local What role can Design Research play when tackling social issues?...

IDSL (Fr) came to GOOD’11 to talk about collaboration. Their argument is that there is one vital ingredient without which designers can never truly reach the people their designing for – empathy. It’s via resonant, intimate, and emotional insights that designers can really connect with people’s lives – but even when these are available, designers still need the right tools in order to use them effectively.

IDSL’s presentation took an in-depth look at the different methods available for taking designers into the world they’re designing for. These tools are all designed to help those participating in a project or workshop move beyond technicalities; thinking in terms of emotion, rather than technology, is often the most effective way to create an empathic link with the world outside.

The tools they showcased revolve around a key notion; creating a space that’s playful and open enough to inspire real creativity, whilst remaining structured and focus enough to generate coherent, focused results.

No related posts.

Spur, Singapore

Spur’s Indri Tulusan is also now based in Singapore. She holds a Medical Science, Design products BA Hons + MA(RCA), and has previously worked at Nokia, where she was responsible for setting up and conducting exploratory design research in Japan, China, India and Ghana. She also designed and facilitated co-creation processes to successfully inform and inspire design teams, business and marketing divisions. Prior to moving to Japan she was based in London for 10 years. Here she was the co-founder and creative director of the user research and service design consultancy TEKO, who successfully created future services and products by placing new technologies in the right social contexts.

Spur offers a wide range of innovation activities; whether working within mobile, health or communication industries their process usually starts from involving the consumer creatively to discover opportunities, then taking these into product and service ideas and strategies.

Contact Indri Tulusan
indri.tulusan@gmail.com
Skype: indritulusan

No related posts.

Do different people in different companies have the same conversations? That’s what Reach recently tried to determine in a major project conducted for Nokia. Three network partners, Apogee, Fuelfor and STBY, worked together to design a global study analysing how the cultures people live in can influence the type of language they use.

Working on such a broad topic was a challenge in itself – as indeed was conducting a simultaneous study in 3 separate timezones – and required a great deal of planning and preparation. One of the benefits of the network however is the experience each company has in working with each other; regular, close and open collaborations mean projects like this often feel like working as a single entity.

Each company maintained their own clear areas of responsibility however. Amongst these, the first step was to create a matrix of existing knowledge, developing a framework of relevant issues from a wide range of literature (in 3 different languages no less). After coming together to refine and synthesise this data, it could then be further focused on the topic at hand via a series of in-depth expert interviews. We spoke to a range of leading academics, journalists, and designers from right across the world, and the insights we gained allowed us to build an analytical framework that refined a hugely complex issue into a series of testable hypotheses.

Once developed, we then applied this framework to a series of in-depth ethnographic immersions. Going out into the field in London, Barcelona, and Shanghai, each company conducted a series of intensive interviews with a wide range of different people. This generated an incredibly rich amount of data, which our framework helped shape into a workable format for a collaborative workshop held with Nokia and all the partners in London.

This complex, multi-phase project proved how design research techniques can be applied to even the most complicated, abstract issues. It also proved how the network-company approach adopted by Reach can allow such projects to maintain a global focus, incorporating cross-cultural differences (and universal similarities) into the earliest possible stages of a design process.

Related posts:

1. Defining the global by uncovering the local How can holistic global insights be developed from connected local...

Daniela Hammel, Jan Schröder, Martin Beyerle (principals) – Cologne (GER)

minds & makers is a dynamic and interdisciplinary team of Service Designers with comprehensive experience in the fields of service innovation, human centred design, qualitative research and strategic marketing.
minds & makers’ approach is based on the integrated methods of Service Design and Design Thinking and their work spans accross the whole process: from identification of the right questions, the exploration of the user’s needs, the development of solutions to the implementation of ideas into practice. minds & makers design not just novel and future oriented service concepts, but also test their acceptability and suitability for daily use by prototyping ideas in real life scenarios.

minds & makers is based in Cologne, Germany and was founded in 2009 by Daniela Hammel (Dipl. Des.) and Martin Beyerle (MDes., Dipl-Kfm.). In May 2010 Jan Schröder (Dipl. Des.) joined minds & makers as equal partner. Depending on the project context minds & makers are additionally supported by a network of precious freelancers and experienced experts from a variety of disciplines.

Martin graduated in 2005 in Business Studies from the University of Mannheim. He then studied Humanitarian and Sustainable Design at Design Academy Eindhoven, where Martin in 2007 also graduated with a Master in Design. He worked as project lead for the Service Design Research Center at Köln International School of Design, before he founded in 2009 minds & makers together with Daniela.

Daniela graduated in 2006 with a Diploma in Service Design from Köln International School of Design. She worked as project lead for the Service Design Research Center at Köln International School of Design before she went to London to work for Participle, an agency specialized in Social Innovation. In 2009 Daniela then founded minds & makers together with Martin.

Jan graduated in 2008 with a Diploma in Product and Service Design from Köln International School of Design. He worked as a freelance project lead for the Service Design Research Center at Köln International School of Design and then worked as User Experience Manager in the Concept Development Team of Vodafone. Jan joined the minds & makers team as an equal partner in May 2010.

Some clients from the private, public and social sectors they have worked for:
Aktion Mensch, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Telekom, Design Council (GB), Siemens Health Insurance, Swindon Borough Council (GB), Swisscom (CH), Vodafone…

For more information see www.minds-makers.com

Contact Daniela Hammel
dh@minds-makers.com
+49 163 431 86 15
Skype: madameela

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.

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.

Related posts:

1. Design and Research: a love story   GOOD’11 was all about what can happen when design...

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

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.