At the WDCD Live 2016 event in Amsterdam on 30 June and 1 July 2016, Marie de Vos and Geke van Dijk of STBY gave a presentation of STBY’s work as research partner of the Refugee Challenge, helping designers arrive at relevant, viable and effective solutions. The video of Geke and Marie’s presentation is now also online on Vimeo.…

The STBY London team had the fortunate opportunity of attending Nesta’s Futurefest 2016. The packed schedule was overwhelming and we left in a state of dizzied inspiration. A few things emerged from the fog of weekend memory, the most noteworthy of which was a debate on the future of dining out. This is a thought on where we are now and where we might be heading in light of this thought-provoking discussion.

On food designers, futurologists and the rising polymaths of the culinary world  

The panel alone is worthy of mention in its own right. The session was chaired by Food Futurologist, Dr. Morgaine Gaye, whose work centres around the future of food/beauty/smell from both a cultural, evolutionary and societal perspective. She was joined by Marije Vogelzang, a Dutch “eating designer”. In contrast to the work of “food designers”, Marije’s focus is around the verb ‘to eat’…

The 9th Service Design Global Conference entitled ‘Business as Unusual’ will take place in Amsterdam on 27 – 28 October 2016 and will include a presentation and masterclass from STBY, co-organizer of the conference. In her presentation ‘Moving Targets‘, Geke van Dijk will be sharing principles of agile collaboration with interdisciplinary teams in large organisations, derived from several years collaboration on projects with Google. She’ll focus on approaches that enable research to create deep insights upon which to ground decisions, while keeping up with the speed and dynamism of agile development of new service propositions in these kinds of large organisations.

Sam Miller and Astrid Lubsen will conduct a master class on visual design research, a topic about which STBY recently published the book Viewfinders. Participants in Untapped visual…

Sometimes, service providers and end-users are one and the same. In a city that is bankrupt, has a lot of vacant space in decay, very limited local fresh food, and massive unemployment rates, limited government initiatives are just not enough. Proactive citizens take matters into their own hands. Here’s what happened in Detroit.

In the last decades, Detroit has seen a large deindustrialization and depopulation, resulting in a barren city landscape. One of the ways the government combatted this was by starting the Farm A Lot program. Originating in the mid-seventies and ending in 2002, the Farm A Lot program offered free seeds and tilling assistance to residents with the goal of cleaning up the city and helping struggling Detroiters help themselves.

With Farm A Lot, the government supported citizens of Detroit to use and maintain the vacant lots and produce fresh food for a relatively low …

A favourite photographer of mine, Martin Parr, recently spent two years as photographer in residence for the City of London Corporation, which is the municipal governing body of the City of London. It’s an area of London that many consider the historic centre of the city, where much of the UK’s financial industry is situated.

An exhibition of Parr’s photographs during this residency named Unseen City was recently held at Guildhall Art Gallery, which houses the official art collection of the City of London. As a design researcher particularly interested in using photography and film, I found myself at the exhibit thinking about what it might mean to view these photographs in the context of design research. I’ve often found Parr’s work to go beyond mere ‘snapshots’ – his images often, if not always, function as social and cultural commentary. With images like Imperial War Museum …