Our creative research projects connect service providers with the lives and experiences of their customers. This helps our clients to innovate their service offering, making it more valuable for both their customers and business. Our projects generate rich and visually illustrated research materials that bring real people into the heart of design and innovation processes.
Bespoke methodology for each project
We design a bespoke project for each situation and environment we’re asked to research. We use a wide range of tools that allow us to consistently deliver intimate and resonant insights. We might use film, making a series of short documentaries that explore and document the lives and interests of particular people. We might use a series of in-depth interviews as the basis for developing personas, clustering together the themes we uncover into easily recognisable groups. Or we might run a user-lab or workshop, inviting people to attend our studio in order to explore new service concepts via a range of interactive exercises.
What we don’t do is reduce people’s lives down to surveys or questionnaires. We prefer to deliver materials that are engaging, and present insights into people’s everyday lives that truly get to the heart of what defines an experience. We don’t think traditional market-research is capable of doing this, nor do we believe that research should take place in isolation of the overall design and implementation process.
Guidance on how to implement the insights and ideas
In fact, our projects often involve providing guidance to service providers and design teams who want to use the results to inform and inspire their innovation processes. We’ve established long-term relationships with a number of clients, and we’ve helped some of them reorientate their research activities around the service design principles we incorporate into our work. These partnerships have in many instances extended over multiple projects; we don’t just deliver results, we build relationships and provide expertise and support in the long-term.
We aim to deliver a holistic solution that generates insights, provokes innovation, and assists implementation. Each of these stages is crucial in ensuring that services are connected with the lives of the people using them.
Still not sure what we do? Try downloading one of the following articles:
Service Design – Visualising Future Solutions tells you a bit more about the field of service design,
Design Research – Inspiring Research with the Principles of Design explains a bit more about the design research methodologies we use in our work.