How do we do this? By designing 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.

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.

1. Personas to inform and inspire service innovation In a follow-up project to the early explorations in 2009,...
2. Service Experience Lab Immerse yourself in the service experiences of your customers and...
3. Innovation Lecture 2009 On 8 December Geke was one of the round-table moderators...

Our studios in central London and central Amsterdam are perfectly situated to host these Service Experience Labs. In London we are close to Liverpool Street station, so easy to reach. And in the immediate surrounding of both an upmarket business environment and a buzzing creative area. In Amsterdam we are at Vijzelstraat in the canal area,easy to reach from Centraal Station, with many buzzing streets and venues around. In particular for consumer related services this gives plenty of opportunities for service safaris with telling real-life service experiences! Of course we can also talk to and work with your customers in our studios or at your location.

The Service Experience Labs are very suitable for teams that wish to familiarise themselves with the service design approach of engaging with customers in an early stage of innovation projects. In a full-day programme we facilitate an exploration of the essential stages of immersion, insight creation and idea generation. The programme will be customised to fit the objectives and prior knowledge of your team members.

1. Service Experience Lab on mobile internet Together with the Creation Centre of T-Labs (part of Deutsche...
2. Design Research for Service Innovation Our creative research projects connect service providers with the lives...
3. Workshop at Creative Company Conference STBY will facilitate a workshop at the upcoming Creative Company...

Being known as a world-class specialist in Design Research (short for ‘design-led customer research’), many of our clients have asked us to deliver this kind of research on an international scale. Rather than developing this as an in-house service, we have initiated a global network with other specialists in design research around the world. These are small companies like STBY with a proven track record and working with highly senior staff. This way we can garantee a very high quality of local data collection and collaborative insight generation. In our experience this is far better way of conducting international research than travelling to the international sites ourselves and make do with interviews through local translators and freelance researchers.

The international network we have set up is called ‘REACH – the global design research network’. The network currently consists of 9 members companies, covering 11 countries around the world. We epect the network to further expand over the coming years. See the Reach website for all the details: www.globaldesignresearch.com

The Design Research we do through the network can be described as a combination of two approaches:

Understanding people’s practices to drive innovation
Understanding the people and situations you design for is crucial for successful innovation. These insights only come from spending time with your customers, and developing empathic conversations with them. When presented in an inspiring, visual way such insights are a strong driver of innovation.

Bringing design skills into customer research
Design skills such as generating, modeling and prototyping new ideas are crucial for successful innovation. If these skills are already used in immersive field work and insight creation, the resulting innovative ideas are rooted strongly in the markets your company innovates for.

1. Reach: Global Design Research Network Reach is an network of highly skilled and experienced companies...
2. Design research in Brazil Geke and Bas are now almost a week in Brazil,...
3. Global Innovation Group For clients who are looking for full service innovation projects,...

Learn from the leading edge of your customers where the most interesting opportunities to improve your service offering are. More and more companies ackowledge that the customer is becoming the dominant reference point for strategy and innovation. Where better to start than with the innovators among your customers? Based on ethnographic methodologies such as contextual inquiry we visit lead users at their work or their homes to find out what their needs are, and possibly what suggestions they might have for solutions to meet these needs.

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Open innovation is an approach that welcomes the perspective of customers into the innovation process. The exchange of experiences with customers in co-creation workshops can be a very effective source of inspiration for your innovation team. In order to succeed, the interaction between the innovation team and the customers needs to be carefully guided. As The Innovation Partners, STBY (together with Radarstation and EDG) offers a highly skilled and experienced to team for this.

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In-depth studies that reveal how people use media and technology in their daily lives. The objective for these studies is to explore consumer needs and responses to concepts for new interactive services. The results are used as input during the early stages of the development process of these services. For each project we select the most suitable research method, such as interviews, focus groups, observation, diary study, probe study or documentary.

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By spending time and interacting with potential users of new interactive services, we learn a lot about their habits, preferences, needs and concerns. This knowledge can be crucial for the successful development of innovative concepts for interactive services. Ethnographic studies offer rich data that allow empathic understanding of real-life consumer experiences. Contributing from the perspective of the consumer, our research is complementary to the perspectives of the design, enginering and marketing experts who are collaborating in concept and development teams.

1. Service Experience Lab Immerse yourself in the service experiences of your customers and...
2. Service Design workshop in Cambridge Geke participated in a workshop on Service Design at the...
3. Services to support complex decision making In collaboration with Broca & Wernicke, STBY investigated the complex...

STBY has developed a unique method to explore and communicate the elusive, inconsistent fabric of everyday life by using video and engaging in a dialogue with the participants in a research. Design documentaries investigate the opposites, paradoxes and ambiguities that are part of everyday life. They inform and inspire concept developers by offering rich insights into the often messy routines of consumers. We have found that this can be far more effective than the clean and simplified consumer profiles based on marketing statistics that are so often the basis for design briefs.

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Well-designed, surprising and playful materials can prompt participants to report in more lively and surprising ways than during interviews or focus groups, where they only sit and talk about their experiences. Probe studies provide participants with research materials they actively use for a certain period, and that trigger the recording of experiences during this use (e.g. notes, drawings, photos or audio recordings). For probe studies close collabaration between researchers and designers is crucial. This is an excellent method to actively involve members of design teams in the early explorations of a concept development process.

Diaries offer an excellent opportunity to document activities and experiences that take place on unpredictable moments or in private circumstances. In these situations direct observation is not a feasible option. As the research participants are asked to record their activities and reflections in a diary as soon as possible after they occur, the diaries provide reliable data with minimal intrusion. To optimally engage participants in the process of diary keeping, we have found that an ongoing contact with the researcher and an appealing design of the diaries are of crucial importance.

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Successful interactive services are based on scenarios that go beyond just pushing new technology. The process to develop these scenarios needs to be imaginative and well out of the ordinary to generate interesting, innovative and surprising concepts. The concepts then need to be thoroughly reviewed from a multiplicity of perspectives. The reviewing process may be light at first, but must advance as the scenarios get refined. Our scenario & persona development workshops facilitate this creative and multi-disciplinary process, in order to produce scenarios and personas that successfully combine realism and adventurousness.

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