Our Indian Reach partner, Quicksand, had some exciting news this week: the launch of their 2012 UnBox Fellowships.

UnBox is a festival celebrating interdisciplinary processes and experiences that shape contemporary thought and action. UnBox invites participants from all walks of life— practitioners, students, educators and institutions, who are redefining professional, social and cultural engagement in their contexts. Together, new forms and experiences emerge to challenge traditional notions of work, play and discourse. In 2012, the UnBox Festival will be held from Feb 2-5 in New Delhi.

UnBox Fellowships provide an opportunity for chosen fellows to travel and work across a diverse selection of projects hosted in different parts of India. Anchored and led by domain experts, selected projects for 2012 include understanding sustainable lifestyles in Auroville, collaborating with craft groups in Rajasthan, sourcing fashion inspirations in the local textile traditions of Kutcch and several other projects, each of which are at various intersections of design, development, technology and entrepreneurship.

It really is a fantastic opportunity. You can find out more by visiting the fellowship site – and don’t forget to let us know if you decide to take the plunge!

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The proposed program looks to be an interesting mix of theory and ‘real-world’ practice, and we’re really curious as to how popular the course wil prove to be. The deadline for applications isn’t until February 2012 if you’re interested in signing up, and you can find more details on the RCA website by clicking here.

Don’t forget to let us know how you get on if you decide to take the plunge!

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First of, videos of the keynote presentations can now be watched online. These videos also cover some of the smaller parallel sessions, and are definitely worth a look.

The above link also leads to a series of interviews with both speakers and attendees, and are a great commentary on the themes that were addressed.

There are also a series of photographs documenting the event available, that can be used as long as the photographers are credited. Anyone interested just drop us a line at mail@stby.eu and we can put you in touch.

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These are a couple of the questions at the heart of two ambitious programmes in The Netherlands aimed at exploring this new role designers can play in product-service innovation. STBY have been involved in both, working with both the ‘Creative Industries Scientific Programme’ (CRISP) and ‘Innovation In Design – Service Design in practice’ at various points over the last year.

Now we’re involved with bringing the two programmes together as part of a unique symposium during Dutch Design Week. This event, to be held on October 26th in Eindhoven, is intended to be a joint review of designers’ role in product-service innovation. It’s an opportunity to critically reflect on current practice, research and training in order to explore various directions for further improvement.

Our Strategy Director, Geke van Dijk, has joined the programming board of the symposium, and is also the chair of Service Design Network Netherlands – one of several organisations that are helping make this event a reality. Also involved are the Design Academy Eindhoven, where our Creative Director, Bas Raijmakers, is currently Associate Professor of Strategic Design.

We’re really excited to be involved in such an ambitious event, and are hopeful that the symposium will help open this discussion up to a wider community of designers and innovators. Two international keynote speakers will touch on the global context of product-service innovation, and this will be followed by three parallel interactive sessions on science, industry and education.

Registration is open now at www.designasservice.nl, costing just €35 (including an informal networking lunch). Everyone interested and working in the field is welcome – we hope to see some of you there!

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Massive thanks to all of you who in some way contributed to making The Great Outdoors of Design, our first conference with the Reach network, such a resounding success. A really diverse crowd made it down to Richmix on Friday 26 September in order to collaboratively explore some of the issues we deal with day-to-day when practicing global design research. The feedback we’ve had so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and it was great for us to be able to take a step back and reflect with some like-minds on the kind of work that we do.

The presentations put on by the speakers were all even better than we expected meanwhile, and it was fantastic to finally sit down with (nearly!) all of the partners in the Reach network in the same room. More and more of our projects are starting to take on a global focus via our work with Reach, and with each successful project we complete it seems like our collaborations become even stronger.
We’re still collecting together all of the materials from the event to share with those of you who couldn’t make it down on the day; keep following us on Twitter at @STBY and we’ll let you know as soon as these are available!

And we’ll keep you updated on the rumours about GOOD’12 – maybe we can all head to Hong Kong next time…

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With a month to go before our first conference ‘The Great Outdoors of Design’ gets underway, the full list of topics we’ll be looking at has now been finalised. Our intention with this event has always been to aim for a more intimate and collaborative atmosphere than is found at many conferences; we really want to explore these issues in conjunction with our attendees – not just stand there on the stage talking about them.

All of the topics are collected around two main themes, both of which we think are right at the heart of Design Research:

How can Research and Design be brought closer together?

and

How can global and local insights and opportunities be combined?

These are two questions which we’re constantly addressing with our work here at STBY, and our Reach partners will all be presenting their own perspectives on what these questions actually mean in reality. We wanted to organise a conference that looked at these questions from the point of real-world practice, not just abstract theory – and we’re excited about finally getting the chance to do so!

You can download a copy of the programme by clicking here. Tickets for GOOD’11 are on sale now at our Eventbrite Site.

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These are exciting times here at STBY, as today we can announce that come Friday September 23rd we’ll be hosting our first conference with Reach, the global network of design research companies of which STBY are a co-founder.

Held in conjunction with the London Design Festival,”The Great Outdoors of Design” (or ‘GOOD’, as we increasingly like to call it) will be a behind-the-scenes look at a range of cross-cultural research projects that embody design principles.

What happens when innovative design is combined with groundbreaking research?

The event will be an interactive experience where those attending will be able to collaboratively explore the benefits design research can deliver to product and service operation. The Reach partners will be jetting in from across the world meanwhile to share their experiences on two key themes:

Firstly, we’ll be looking at how design and research can be brought closer together. This will cover issues like organisational management, data visualisations, and how the two disciplines can each be used to facilitate the other.

The second theme builds on this in order to explore what actually happens “when global meets local”. Reach partners from as far afield as Brazil, China, and Japan will be sharing their insights into issues such as how specific local circumstances can affect global strategic shifts.

The emphasis throughout however will be placed upon interaction, with all those attending given a chance to share their own thoughts and participate in collaborative explorations of the issues addressed.

Tickets for the event are strictly limited, but can be ordered now via our Eventbrite Site. There’ll be lots more GOOD news coming over the next few weeks, and the best way to keep updated with this is to follow us on Twitter at @stby.

Looking forward to seeing you all in September!

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STBY are now finally on Twitter! We’ve been on there for a while now as individuals (@hellobas and @hellogeke have been having some interesting adventures with squirrels recently), but we thought it was high-time we joined in as a company as well. From now on, our Twitter feed will be a great place to keep up with the latest news on our projects and events. As we get ready to officially announce the not-so-super-secret event that we’re hosting as part of London Design Festival, Twitter will be the best way to keep updated with all things STBY (and some things squirrel).

Follow us now at @stby!

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On 16 June at the Q Festival, organised by the Association of Qualitative Research (AQR), Geke van Dijk will present a talk, together with Marianne Guldbrandsen from the Design Council, and Kat Gough from Nokia. The tilte of the talk is ‘Design Research: The most creative in the industry?’

The Q Festival is advertised as the ‘Glastonbury of Qual…’, a festival of thought, surprise, provocation and illumination, so that is very promising.

See this link for more information on the Q Festival and on AQR

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One of the parties we really enjoy working with in The Netherlands is LBi Lost Boys. Following up on the successful and pleasant collaboration for the development of the national innovation programme ‘Creatie van Waarde’, and the support for the new Amsterdam School for Creative Leadership THNK, we are currently teaming up more proactively for various clients.

The synergy between our Design Research expertise and Lost Boys’ creative and strategy teams is high. This really shows the added value we can create together for our clients.

At the Creative Company Conference in Haarlem on 7 June, Ruurd Priester, Strategy Director of LBi Lost Boys, announced our collaboration as one of their strategic partnerships.  In this day and age of networked collaboration we feel that we are learly not just doing the talk, but also walking the walk.

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