STBY » Geke van Dijk

Design Research talk at Q Festival

Geke — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 08:41:41 +0000

What makes Design Research different from most traditional qualitative research? What are the most important characteristics in terms of focus, process, materials and output?

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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Say yes to the mess!

Geke — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:51:22 +0000

For ‘The week of Service Design’ on Molblog, the online platform of the Dutch Marketing Magazine, Geke van Dijk was invited to contribute an article to illustrate the benefits of design research for service innovation. ‘Say yes to the mess’ discusses how empathic research into everyday life generates insights that illuminate and explain the often eclectic series of touchpoints between consumers and organisations. These insights show how consumers make their own choices on what service to use, where, when, how and from who. From the perspective of an individual service provider these choices may seem elusive at times, but from the perspective of the consumer they often make perfect sense, as they are rooted in specific situations and circumstances. (PDF, 479 Kb – Only in Dutch)

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Say yes to the mess!

Geke — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 15:03:08 +0000

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Customer Talk article on Service Design

Geke — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:09:15 +0000

One of the editors of the online community for customer-focused businesses and innovative marketing has written an introduction on Service Design, based on interviews with Geke van Dijk from STBY and Arne Oosterom from DesignThinkers.

The article is Dutch, like the rest of the online content for this platform. It describes how services design offers an holistic approach to the innovation of services, working from the perspective of the customers. This approach can help to bridge the gap in the trust between organisations and their external stakeholders that has risen over the years due to relentless inside-out and push-oriented marketing and sales.

The article was written by Anne van den Berg. The PDF you can download through this link is a simple capture of the web page (so please ignore the surrounding and now redundant navigation items).

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FD picking up on Service Design

Geke — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:38:33 +0000

One of the major Dutch newspapers, Het Financieele Dagblad (translated as the Financial Daily Newspaper), has published an article describing the upcoming field of Service Design. The editor, Jan Smit, interviewed a lot of different people, among whom Geke van Dijk from STBY, to familiarise himself with the field.

Based on all the information he encountered, he has written a useful review of the field as well as the rationale for companies to adopt a service design approach in their daily business and strategy development.

The article is in Dutch. You can read a scan you can download through this link.

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Video installations on socio-techno styles

Geke — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:34:44 +0000

Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London, is hosting an exhibition of video installations on Belonging & Belongings. In December Bas and Geke coached an intensive programme with 25 students MA Graphic Design Communications exploring how people express their identities through their physical and virtual possessions. The exhibition opens on 8 February 2011 and runs until the end of this week.

The student project was part of the ongoing Belonging & Belongings collaboration between STBY and the Critical Design Lab in Kyoto, Japan. Belonging & Belongings is an international and interdisciplinary design research programme, exploring the interrelationship between technology, society and sartorial appearances.

For the exhibition 25 MA Graphic Design Communication students of Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, worked on a two week project in December 2010. Five groups of students made a video installation to express the insights they created from their own fieldwork on the Belonging & Belongings topic. In particular they were interested to find out how people enjoy and struggle with the differences they can create between their online and offline identities.

The results are exciting, not only because great insights were created, but also because the stories of these insights are told in new and inspiring ways. This was possible because the students realised they were not mere data-collectors. In stead, they took up the challenge to tell stories. This is important, because even if design research results in great insights, its value will still be low unless these insights are communicated in a compelling way.

Doing design research includes collecting data, and analysing and reflecting on what you have collected. It then results in insights and ultimately knowledge. This however does not mean that the data and the analysis and reflections should remain separate. What the most projects presented here have succeeded in, is using the data to tell engaging stories about the insights and knowledge they have created.

This is the second Belonging and Belongings project of STBY with Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. The first project in 2009 focused on the magazine as a medium to communicate design research, resulting in 250 printed magazines. The current project explores video installations as a way to communicate design research. With special thanks to Tracey Waller, Course Director MA Graphic Design Communication.

The design research programme of Belonging & Belongings was conceived by three scholars from different backgrounds:

Dr. Geke van Dijk – Strategy Director at STBY London/Amsterdam – specialised in cultural studies and multi-channel social research.

Dr. Daijiro Mizuno – Lecturer and Researcher at Critical Design Lab in Kyoto – specialised in fashion design as a social object and investigates how designers/wearers dress, behave and create their own multiple identities.

Dr. Bas Raijmakers – Creative Director at STBY London/Amsterdam and research fellow at Design Academy Eindhoven – specialised in using documentary film as an analytical and practical means to conduct ethnographic research.

The inclusion of such mixed disciplines in a design research project provokes new approaches to the ways we can understand the complexity of people’s identity in contemporary culture.

For more information on Belonging & Belongings see the project blog.

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Design ethnography: Taking inspiration from everyday life

Geke — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:33:31 +0000

For the book This is Service Design Thinking, recently published by BIS Publishers, Geke van Dijk contributed a chapter on design ethnography, in addition to the toolbox STBY edited for the book. Design Ethnography aims to understand the future users of a design, such as a certain service. It is a structured process for going into depth on the everyday lifes and experiences of the people a design is for. The aim is to enable the design team to identify with these people; to build up an empathic understanding of their practices and routines, and what they care about. This allows the team to work from the perspective of these users on new designs for relevant slices of their daily lives. Designers use this understanding to work on idea generation, concepts development and implementations. (PDF, 111 kb)

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No inter-disciplinary without disciplines

Geke — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:01:07 +0000

Based on their keynote presentation at the service design conference in Berlin in November 2010, Geke van Dijk and Marianne Guldbrandsen wrote a paper for the latest edition of Touchpoint, the magazine of the international Service Design Network. The paper discusses situations wherein service designers work for client organisations that are relatively new to service design. These clients often have difficulties to see the value of incorporating a service design approach to their organisation and customer relations. They need more than just ‘a nice service design show case projectʼ. They rather need a more long-term process for change, and they have quite a journey to make in this sense. These journeys may well involve the engagement of various agencies who each work on different aspects of this journey. This poses an interesting and challenging opportunity for collaboration between agencies across different roles and different stages. This article describes the learnings from such a multi-agent project for a client that was new to service design. (PDF, 1.1 Mb)

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Presentation at Service Innovation conference

Geke — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 16:12:15 +0000

On 2 November Geke van Dijk will be co-presenting with Walter Bakker from DUO at the annual Service Innovation conference in Almere (The Netherlands). Based on two case studies for DUO/IB-Groep, they will discuss how a service design approach informed the innovation process for multi-channel financial and information services to students and their parents. This presentation is part of a session dedicated to the role of customer experiences in the overall service innovation process.

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STBY at the 2010 Service Design Conference, Berlin

Luke — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:34:24 +0000

STBY are heading to Germany this October for the annual conference of the Service Design Network. The conference brings together service companies, public services, universities and Service Design agencies from right across the world. This year’s festival will be held in Berlin on the 13th and 14th of October.

Aimed at people both applying service design principles in the innovation of services, as well as those wanting to learn more about the field, the conference will involve presentations by a number of international experts. One of these will be STBY’s own Geke van Dijk. In collaboration with Marianne Guldbrandsen from the UK Design Council, as well as long-term STBY associates Radarstation and IDEO, Geke will be delivering a keynote speech at the event: “No interdisciplinarity without disciplines”.

Fellow STBY co-founder Bas Raijmakers will also be at the conference, running a workshop on the ‘design documentaries’ format he developed. This will be run in conjunction with a partner from the Reach network, Brazil’s Feel the Future.

The conference is a great way to learn more about how service design is being used ‘out in the wild’. If you happen to see Geke or Bas during the course of the 2 days, make sure you stop them to say hi!

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