Reach Global Design Research Network

Based in Pittsburgh, and founded in 2005, Fit combines a deep capability in ethnographic research, comfort with systems problems, a history in product and interaction design, and a determination to do what it takes to establish the conditions for positive change.

Fit has established long-term relationships with corporate and institutional clients aiming to make a viable, sustainable difference for people and society. Fit’s client history includes many long-term relationships that span multiple projects and far-reaching goals, with a client list that includes Philips Home Healthcare Solutions, Nissan, Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Comcast, SAP, Microsoft, Seagate, as well as a number of startup firms.

With strong skills as designer, researcher and educator, Marc has found a way to combine his passions for ethnographic methods, language, systems thinking, and people in Fit Associates. Prior to founding Fit Associates, Marc served as Chief Experience Officer of the pace-setting user experience consultancy HannaHodge, where he was responsible for the firm’s user-centered process, team culture, and research initiatives. He was a Director of User Experience at Cambridge Technology Partners. Prior to that he was a consultant with seeSpace, VP of Design for Digital Knowledge Assets, and a Senior Architect in the Advanced Technologies Group at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). Marc has an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Linguistics, and completed requirements for a Master’s in Computational Linguistics at New York University.

Marc frequently speaks and conducts hands-on workshops in industry and academic settings around the world. He currently serves on the advisory Rosenfeld Media, and the IxDA Interaction Awards. And he is a founding faculty member of the groundbreaking Masters in Design for Social Innovation program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Hannah’s work blends business, design, community and the arts. This blend developed through eight years experience in community leadership in South Africa, ten years of design leadership (including partnership in a firm), and consulting experience in the U.S., Europe and Africa. Hannah has taught internationally, at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, the University of Pretoria, and Cedim in Mexico. She holds degrees in Fine Arts and Interior Design, and a Master of Design Methods from the Institute of Design at IIT.

For more information see their website

Contact Marc
marc@fitassociates.com

Contact Hannah
hannah@fitassociates.com

With the theme of connectivity, Reach explored different perceptions of the camera and tablet, as well as PC, Games Console, MP3 player, and of course smartphone. Together these form what is known as an ecosystem of devices.

Perceptions are influenced by mental models people have developed to manage their relationships with the devices they own. To uncover the underlying behavioural routines by which people integrate such devices into their lives, we need to understand what influences their choice of the right tool for the job. This is an area of research that involves multiple phases, working across a number of time zones. However, the strong professional relationships within the Reach network ensure regular, close and open collaboration.

For many people functionalities are replicated across several of the devices they own; choosing which of these to use to accomplish a given task therefore is a complex process that involves various emotional and behavioural factors. Making sure all of these devices work together happily meanwhile is another challenge – especially when managing how content flows across them.

Smart devices

This project aimed at understanding smartphone behaviours and practices in China and the United States. There was special emphasis relating to still image and video capture, usage of multiple devices across personal ecosystems, and the different contexts that influence usage of (and activities with) the multiple devices people use in their daily lives.

Fieldwork was conducted in China and USA by Apogee and STBY, in the form of in-depth video interviews on location, which resulted in design documentaries. This approach allows culturally-specific local influences to be preserved and examined within the films, whilst also ensuring the consistency of data needed for meaningful cross-regional analysis.

The research informed specific lines of enquiry that had been developed in previous projects with the client, and helped to broaden the existing base of knowledge.

Secure mobile access with Biometrics

Precise Biometrics has been making secure access systems for decades, and specialise in fingerprint recognition. They wanted to explore potential consumer good markets for their new product: Secure mobile access for iPhone and iPad, using biometric technology in the form of a built-in fingerprint sensor.

Antropologerne, in collaboration with Apogee, conducted user studies and visited 10 different users in Asia (Hong Kong) and Scandinavia (Sweden & Denmark). We generated insight on the role that mobile devices play in the everyday life of the people and the need for secure access to content on these. We tested and gave feedback on the packaging, hardware and software of the new product. We helped set the direction for further product development, delivering four Innovation Vectors and we defined key barriers as well as future scenarios for potential new areas of business.

Feminine inspiration for mobile phone design

Nokia wanted to gain insights into what women want from mobile phones and find design directions for phones with a female perspective. Indri Tulusan and Fumiko Ichikawa from Reach partner Spur worked with the Nokia Insight & Innovation Tokyo team and 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.

The following projects are global studies focussing on people’s contextual usage of mobile devices, with a perspective to identify needs and preferences that could be satisfied by future designs and concepts.

Most people have fully integrated their mobiles into their everyday lives, 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. The research analyses how the environment someone is in affects their perception of the device they are using. We looked at how people adapt their behaviours and routines around the specific challenges of the contextual environment they inhabit – whether a smartphone is too expensive for the street or too rude for a dinner table, or if a tablet is too big to use on a bus. And why? A smart device can be an invisible helping-hand in one instance, and burden or source of stress in another. It also covers those moments where a device is integrated into an environment well enough to assist or delight someone in their daily life.

These projects posed the challenge of combining a global focus with the specific peculiarities of local environments. By adopting a flexible, iterative approach to research, Reach partners tailored the process for their individual cultures, allowing researchers to get an in-depth look at cultural differences and similarities around mobility.

Low cost smartphone usage in emerging markets

STBY and Quicksand conducted a research project on the usages of the new generation of low cost smartphones. The study was based in India and the analysis was conducted in London in close collaboration with the two REACH partners and the client team.

Initial analysis of the fieldwork in a workshop with the client team identified new insights into emerging behaviours of consumers in connection to low cost smartphones usage, some of which were relatable to previous insights from studies in other markets, such as China, Russia and Europe. The insights were then synthesised into an illustrated report to communicate the main findings to a wider range of internal stakeholders, accompanied with initial recommendations for design.

Smartphones UX study

This project aimed at understanding smartphone behaviours and practices in China, India and UK. There was special emphasis relating to still image and video capture, usage of multiple devices across personal ecosystems, and the different contexts that influence usage of (and activities with) the multiple devices people use.

Fieldwork was conducted in the form of in-depth video interviews on location, which resulted in design documentaries. Reach partners STBY, Quicksand and Apogee worked in close collaboration with the client team. This approach allows culturally-specific local influences to be preserved and examined within the films, whilst also ensuring the consistency of data needed for meaningful cross-regional analysis.

The research informed specific lines of enquiry that had been developed in previous projects with the client, and helped to broaden the existing base of knowledge.

Mobile phone concepts

In the context of developing a strategy for a potential new product family of mobile phones for the European market, Nokia wanted a better understanding of unmet consumer needs. The new mobile phone product family would have to offer a competitive advantage in a market that is becoming increasingly saturated with tablets and smart phones. Reach carried out consumer research in the UK, Spain, Russia—with STBY, fuelfor, and Summ()n.

The approach adopted was to conduct “User Experience Labs”, exploratory interactive sessions where the participants are invited to actively engage and to give personal feedback on the topics and materials presented to them. In addition to general findings, the group sessions allowed for a comparative analysis between markets focused on identifying differences, as well as commonalities. This highlighted which responses seemed to be due to locally specific socio-cultural factors. These labs also provided the opportunity to identify the most interesting candidates for ethnographic interviews.

After the series of User Experience Labs a second round of in-depth ethnographic immersions with of the some participants followed. This allowed the team to develop a deeper understanding of the accounts elicited during the group sessions. These immersions also generated a set of new design documentaries about everyday experiences around the usage of mobile phones. The study helped Nokia define the key features that resonated most with consumers, and to evaluate the potential of the anticipated new concept.

Cross-cultural Research for Cisco

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.

Mobile internet concepts

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, London 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, which we edited 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.

The Reach Network works with clients to develop a better understanding of opportunities for new concepts and value propositions, based on the technology platforms in their portfolio, and to develop new service offerings to augment and enhance the consumer experience. Together with our clients, we generated insights as to how companies can better integrate their products and services into the contemporary lifestyles of consumers. Depending on the culture, different tools and methods are employed and the research process is designed with partners who are embedded in the culture of study.

A service design approach is a very useful framework that looks at the constellation of products and services on offer, analyses them individually, and how they relate to each other, to identify what is working and what are the opportunities for improvement. Reach helps clients identify with their consumers, and empathise with their routines, preferences, motivations and concerns.

Volkswagen Mobility Services

Volkswagen was interested in enhancing their customer experience, and identifying opportunities for new value propositions. The purpose of this study was to explore and inspire the development of a new service offering around paying at gas stations, based on the technology platform of an existing product.

For this project STBY worked with minds & makers. Together, they interviewed a set of German consumers to learn about their behaviours and attitudes around payments and billing with respect to products and services around cars and mobility. These interviews were analysed and transformed into easy to present personal profiles, combined with customer insights and opportunity areas.

Open Innovation for Reed Elsevier

Throughout the concept development process the perspective of users/consumers is a leading element in selecting and elaborating on ideas for potential innovations. Services can be seen as a journey or a series of critical encounters between a customer and a service provider that take place over time and across channels. Service design focuses on integrating the organisation of service elements around the user experience and combining distributed organisational resources to create an optimal service offering.

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.

Practices and motivations relating to energy use have become more and more important in people’s lives for many reasons, ranging from finances to the environment. At the same time, we use more and more devices that need to be powered and we often become quite personally attached to them. This complex hodgepodge of issues plays out in very different ways in the personal lives and attitudes of people around the world.

The aim of design research projects in this area is to develop concepts for consumer products and services with a longer term goal of understanding consumers’ practices and motives around sustainable life. Research focusses on analysing how people around the world cope with mundane daily activities associated with their devices. And, how they think about related bigger issues, such as energy usage and the consumption of natural resources.

Maintaining the global focus while being open to cross-cultural differences requires a great deal of planning and the networked collaboration model adopted by Reach ensures a balanced approach.

Green Living study

This project was a collaboration across Japan, UK and US, with a focus on people’s attitudes towards ‘green’ living. Reach partner STBY collaborated with Portigal Consulting for the fieldwork in California. The aim of the research was to generate materials that would inspire concept development for Panasonic’s US consumers. It was also necessary to communicate observations in a strong, empathic way, thus the approach Reach employed was to create short films on location, where participants interacted with probes that served as stimuli for conversations.

The results of the fieldwork were analyzed and mapped onto a framework that described the process of behavior change that people go through when trying to live a more green life. This detailed framework became valuable because it could also accommodate concepts that were in development; thus making a connection between the concepts and people’s everyday struggles with ‘going green.’

In this case, design research was instrumental in performing two roles: First it played a generative role, in inspiring and enriching concepts, and helping to develop ideas out of contextual knowledge gained from people in the videos. Secondly, it was validating, research served as the evidential foundation upon which new concepts could be compared and measured.

Charging Up around the globe

The entire network of Reach partners participated in a global study on how people use electricity and think about energy use, with a focus on charging devices. This study took place in 8 countries: USA, Brazil, The Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Hungary, India, China and Japan. The data repository for this study may even include more countries later on. With so much fieldwork being done already, we have created a long list of the insights, pointing towards opportunity areas and ideas for several industries.

During this project we worked with energy supplier EDF. Other companies and organizations have later also benefited from the research materials and consumer insights. Please contact us if you’d like to know more.

Language and culture affect the way people communicate with each other, and the devices they use can enable (or hinder) these interactions. The following projects studied languages from both a cultural and a functional point of view, exploring how language is used in different contexts and social groups, as well as the impact of digital writing, interfaces and mobility on language use.

These studies illustrate the application of design research techniques to complex, abstract issues, and the strengths of the networked company approach in dealing with the intricacies of cross-cultural research.

The negotiation of language in everyday communication is complex – affected by the mode used to communicate (such as SMS, email or facebook for written language) as well as the code used (accent, tone, slang or humour for instance). Furthermore, language norms are culturally mediated rather than universal and can be further influenced by demographic and other sub-cultures.

Emerging technologies and digital channels for communication add another layer of complexity to language practices, which intersects with cultural norms to create new patterns of use. It is necessary to explore the peculiarities of each language type, so as to identify opportunities for products that can facilitate communication as well as delight the user.

Our objective was to explore and understand the norms, formal and informal structures, usage patterns, and relationships of language and expression in interpersonal communication from a cultural point of view.

Global Language & Culture study

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 that involved synchronised studies in China, Spain and UK. 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.

The success of the first phase of the study resulted in the addition of two more phases of study. Phase 2 studied Russian and Arabic, with partners in Russia and Egypt. A similar framework was adapted to the constraints of these non-latin languages. 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.

Transliterations

]As the variety of written language people use is exploding, a second study for Nokia relating to communication examined how particularly non-latin languages were supported by existing digital writing tools.

The aim of this project was to develop an understanding of transliteration in the wider context of digital written communication, such as text input on mobile devices. Transliteration exists in a multilingual environment where people switch between different languages depending on various factors. It was necessary to explore particularities per language type (since needs can be very different in different languages and cultures).

STBY conducted a pilot study in London to examine some of the themes emerging from this research out in the field. This allowed for the prototyping of several different tools and methods ahead of the main fieldwork in India, in collaboration with Quicksand. By providing some preliminary results, both the scripts and the probes for the Indian fieldwork could be targeted towards those areas deemed most relevant to the overall aims of the study. findings from the fieldwork were documented within an analytical framework developed out of the desk research, pilot immersions, and expert interviews.

This project looked at transliteration in Indic languages—Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. A follow-up project may look at transliteration in Arabic.

Summ( )n – Slava Kozlov and Katerina Khomenchuk (principals)

Summ(  )n is a research consultancy that helps clients to innovate, develop new products and services, and new organizational skills and practices. We conduct in-depth, collaborative studies of people’s behaviour and activities, of their use (and abuse) of products, of their motivations and dreams (but also concerns and fears). We use a wide range of qualitative research tools, both online and offline, with the aim to involve people as partners in our studies (co-research).  We also help our clients to imagine and explore possible futures, by experiencing and ‘playing’ with these futures, by probing them in realistic yet risk-free environments. We employ ‘serious games’ and methods of gamification to better prepare our clients and partners for the new emerging realities and ultimately facilitate their transformation towards turbulent tomorrows.

Among our clients are both large international corporations (Nokia and Philips) as well as SMEs like Itella or InterDirect, as well as educational institutions and cultural organizations; a significant part of our projects are conducted in Russia. Summ()n is a people research partner of the European Council of the Internet of Things, a renowned think-tank that paves the way of this emerging socio-technological phenomena.

Prior to establishing Summ()n, Slava Kozlov spent ten years with Philips Design in Eindhoven, with its Department of Strategic Innovation, and was involved in numerous research and design projects for various Philips divisions as well as external companies and organizations.  He has two degrees, in Clinical Psychology and Sociology (specialization Social Studies of Societies in Transition). He was an intern of the Open Media Research Institution in Prague and has a life-long interest in abstract photography.

Katerina Khomenchuk is a Social Psychologist by training (degree from the Moscow State University), and lately studied Human-Computer Interaction in Tilburg University. She was a research coordinator for multiple social studies conducted in Russia and Central Asia, including by Burson-Marsteller, US AID and UNDP, and numerous international corporations and organizations. Her personal research interests related to cross-cultural and gender differences in the use of technologies and mediated communication.

Between them, Katerina and Slava have 27 years of hands-up research experience, of them a third in Russia and Kazakhstan, the country of origin of the Summ()n’s principals.

Contact Slava Kozlov
slava.kozlov@summn.com
+31 06 4823 0589
Skype: centralasian

Summ( )n – Slava Kozlov and Katerina Khomenchuk (principals)

Summ(  )n is a research consultancy that helps clients to innovate, develop new products and services, and new organizational skills and practices. We conduct in-depth, collaborative studies of people’s behaviour and activities, of their use (and abuse) of products, of their motivations and dreams (but also concerns and fears). We use a wide range of qualitative research tools, both online and offline, with the aim to involve people as partners in our studies (co-research).  We also help our clients to imagine and explore possible futures, by experiencing and ‘playing’ with these futures, by probing them in realistic yet risk-free environments. We employ ‘serious games’ and methods of gamification to better prepare our clients and partners for the new emerging realities and ultimately facilitate their transformation towards turbulent tomorrows.

Among our clients are both large international corporations (Nokia and Philips) as well as SMEs like Itella or InterDirect, as well as educational institutions and cultural organizations; a significant part of our projects are conducted in Russia. Summ()n is a people research partner of the European Council of the Internet of Things, a renowned think-tank that paves the way of this emerging socio-technological phenomena.

Prior to establishing Summ()n, Slava Kozlov spent ten years with Philips Design in Eindhoven, with its Department of Strategic Innovation, and was involved in numerous research and design projects for various Philips divisions as well as external companies and organizations.  He has two degrees, in Clinical Psychology and Sociology (specialization Social Studies of Societies in Transition). He was an intern of the Open Media Research Institution in Prague and has a life-long interest in abstract photography.

Katerina Khomenchuk is a Social Psychologist by training (degree from the Moscow State University), and lately studied Human-Computer Interaction in Tilburg University. She was a research coordinator for multiple social studies conducted in Russia and Central Asia, including by Burson-Marsteller, US AID and UNDP, and numerous international corporations and organizations. Her personal research interests related to cross-cultural and gender differences in the use of technologies and mediated communication.

Between them, Katerina and Slava have 27 years of hands-up research experience, of them a third in Russia and Kazakhstan, the country of origin of the Summ()n’s principals.

Contact Slava Kozlov
slava.kozlov@summn.com
+31 06 4823 0589
Skype: centralasian

Often Innovation can feel like a magical process. To someone working everyday surrounded the complex challenges of sectors like international development, these processes feel even further away. This isn’t because because practitioners aren’t aware – but more because practitioners are usually both time-poor and action-oriented – without having the time to sift through an ocean of tools and methods to find the ones they need. Most practitioners find the overly designed toolkits inaccessible and would rather have tools to trigger and support their work so that they can customise them to their needs. This is was where the two Reach partners, STBY and Quicksand teamed up and co-designed and developed the DIY Toolkit.

The DIY (Development Impact and You) toolkit has been made in close collaboration between STBY, Quicksand as well as Nesta, who initiated, and the Rockefeller Foundation, who supported the project. It has been specially designed for development practitioners to invent, adopt or adapt ideas that can deliver better results. The toolkit features 30 innovation tools freely available on a website, and is contextualised with real-life case studies, demonstrating how these tools have been used to support practitioners in their work. The launch of this site will be followed by a book as well as multi-media video tutorials for each tool.

The overall development of the toolkit was divided in 3 key phases, with the toolkit becoming more and more concrete as it evolved iteratively through each phase. A co-design process in the 1st phase, resulted in an early prototype toolkit version. This built upon the foundation of Nesta’s previous work on innovation, making it more fit for purpose.

The second key phase of user testing, saw the enhanced prototype of the toolkit given to practitioners and organisations around the globe in various fields (education, health, financial inclusion, microfinance, rights & advocacy etc.) and locations across the Global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America). While some of these participants were researched more closely through in-depth conversations in their use of the toolkit, including frequent checkins and guidance, we also invited for a more open round of remote testing on the use of the toolkit with a much wider audience via a bespoke online platform. The process validated and refined our early prototype.

The final stage of the project was making sense of all this feedback and analysing it to further refine and deliver the toolkit. Though, the DIY Toolkit has been launched, the aim is to continue collecting and sharing stories of use by the practitioners.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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