Reach Global Design Research Network

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.

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.