Reach Global Design Research Network

Death and dying is a taboo subject in many countries around the world, and hospices have a negative perception in most societies. fuelfor gave a rich insight into their project journey, sharing stories from initial insights research with three local hospices and a funeral home in Singapore. This work helped to rethink the current experience of end-of-life care for patients, families and professional care teams and propose a future vision for inpatient hospices.

To tackle such a delicate but universal topic, fuelfor were particularly sensitive in their approach, developing special methods and techniques to conduct design research and work with terminally ill patients and their families. The project also drew on the inspiring experience of learning from care teams and capturing the life that exists around death.

Their talk captures the story of ‘The Future Hospice’ project which has helped re-think the end of life care experiences. Layered with deep insights and emotions around death, dying & life, the talk expressed how fuelfor captured the joys and the dark moments that exist in hospices. These included stories of how they used translators to overcome cultural barriers or that they had to recruit patients very late in order to be sure who might survive and to speak to the team.

The Future Hospice project pushed both the organisation and the research team to rethink the end of life care experience and address the taboos in society about death and dying, it forcing them to stretch and challenge design research methods and tools for social change and innovation.

You can read more about the project here: http://www.fuelfor.net/fuelfor/Hospitable_Hospice/

With the world becoming increasingly digital nowadays, Slava Kozlov, Summ()n (Russia/The Netherlands) discussed the issue of how this relates to empathy, compassion in the digital space. His talk opened up new fields like ‘Digital Empathy’, highlighting the capacity to translate tools and principles of design research into new digital realms.

People increasingly live in a hybrid world where a lot of activities happen, or mediated by digital media: the internet, social web, mobile apps, virtual worlds, smart environments are wrapping almost all our activities – even our traditional ‘off-line’, ‘real’ practice can not be understood properly without considering the digital layers. In this space, what does it mean to have ‘contextual presence’, or ‘empathic communication’ or ‘co-research/co-design’ with people in these digital reals?

Slava’s talk focussed on the underlying principles of design research in this new hybrid reality rather than just mention specific tools for ‘online research’. He shared case studies underlined some of the key new challenges in the space and nuggets of inspiration on how Summ()n has been responding to these.

How to facilitate a cross-culture collaboration, with participants from around the world? This was the question addressed by STBY’s Geke (UK/NL) and Quicksand’s Ayush (India), who currently are working together on project for International Development and Social Impact for the ‘Global South’.

Commissioned by Nesta and the Rockefeller Foundation, STBY & Quicksand took a co-design & co-develop approach to bring together the most effective solutions and tools in an inspiring and accessible way with the aim to support practitioners in developing, implementing and scaling their ideas.

Having worked together on several occasions, the two partners had a comfortable synergy as they gave their talk together. But how to develop a toolkit for social innovation for an audience that does not tend to identify themselves with words like design thinking, innovation? Geke & Ayush’s talk gave an insight to some of the deeper issues and  challenges that they perceived, as well as looked into some of the ways in which they worked through those challenges.

The widespread sense of pressure we experience due to financial crisis often results in an inability to radically improve products, services or societies. These qualities can be regained if using ethnographic methods and emphatic prototype testing. Infact, not only regained, what other values can be created for organisations using such tools?

When ethnographic praxis is applied inventively, it implies three stress reduction elements: Detoxification on a personal, social and an organizational level; Influence due to its design based methods and co-creation; Positive thinking enforced by positive ’doing’, translating thinking into tangible manifestations and solutions.

Simply put, getting people to be heard, getting them involved and together imagining possible futures, that fear of change can be converted into an enthusiasm for making the combined vision real.

Change is closely related to learning. There are many ways to learn, but playing and experimenting are two of the most powerful learning methodologies. Based on the 360 project that was conducted in collaboration with the Swindon Borough Council, UK, minds & makers from Germany, showed how such interventions help participants reflect their behaviors, routines and knowledge. This is a powerful tool to disclose compelling insights and stimulate behavioural change.

Breaking boundaries in organisations can be challenging especially when there are many different departments. minds & makers went into detail about how they can approach such issues and how to encourage a target audience using innovative ways to help move projects forward. Connecting to other people helped promote the project accessibly.

To set up a research that is about exploring how an organization could change, a starting point could to be make the participants pensive and let them take the researchers on a learning journey, that is mind shifting and encouraging.

Transitioning to something new is hard work because you don’t always know what you are transitioning to. Sometimes, it could be that the skills are not always in place to make the new a reality. However, in most cases, its just that the pathway to ‘new’ is fraught with previously unthought of challenges. The danger here could be that you keep trying the same old trusty ways to solve these challenges and end up going more in circles than towards a new pathway.

Dan and Jo’s heartfelt talk urged organisations to have deeper conversations and open up silos to look beyond domains and learn from across disciplines, cultures and values. This requires people, planning, emotions, time and a laser focus on longer-term good.

Apogee shared their practice framework elements and the influences towards where they considered where both people and communities need to transition to in order to encourage a new world and move from the legacy and rot of industrial age thinking.

Unfortunately, due to technical glitches, Dan & Jo’s talk did not get recorded. However, do read more about what they spoke on their blog here:

transitioning to a new practice framework & holistic thinking – Daniel Szuc & Josephine Wong (Apogee, Hong Kong) v1

IDSL (France) is an innovation consultancy and a design company specialised in designing interaction. With the theme of “changing perspectives on empathy and participation”, Virginia Cruz, IDSL spoke about the collaboration of designers and ethnographers to help SNCF (French railway company) create an affordable highly qualitative bus travel service.

The main question Virginia explored how design research enables organisations to better involved people to improve their service? With bigger organisations there are larger gaps between decision makers and the end-users.

One way to address this gap, is to involve different people involved in different roles, levels and departments in improving the company’s services. For this study, the entire group undertook long haul bus journeys to experience the emotional and often less visible aspects of a journey.

IDSL’s work that shows the answer does not line to the end-users it also can be within the people of organisation.