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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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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Do different people in different companies have the same conversations? Is the language people use influenced by context, culture, technology – or even all three? That’s what STBY have recently been trying to determine in a major project conducted for Nokia. Working with our Chinese and Spanish partners from the Reach Network, we designed a study that analysed how the cultures people live in can influence the type of language they use.

Working on such a broad topic was a challenge in itself – as indeed was conducting a simultaneous study in 3 separate timezones – but one of the benefits of the Reach Network is how quickly these projects can be up-and- running; both planning and preparations benefit greatly from the network company approach.

The first step in this case was to create a matrix of existing knowledge, developing a framework of relevant issues from a wide range of literature (in 3 different languages no less). This was then further focused on the topic at hand via a series of in-depth expert interviews. We spoke to a range of leading academics, journalists, and designers in order to build our own analytical framework that was capable of refining a hugely complex issue into a series of hypotheses. These initially helped shaped an interview script, before they were subsequently used as a ‘lens’ to provide differing perspectives on the research data gathered.

Once developed, we then applied this framework to a series of in-depth ethnographic immersions. Going out into the field in London, Barcelona, and Shanghai, we conducted a series of intensive interviews with a wide range of different people. This generated an incredibly rich amount of data, which our framework helped shape into a workable format; namely, a series of wall-sized ‘conversation maps’ that were used for a collaborative workshop in London. These maps allowed all the partners to work with Nokia on the data that had been gathered, displaying a series of conversations organised around the insights that emerged when the framework was applied.

This complex, multi-phase project proved how design research techniques can be applied to all kinds of issues, from concrete to abstract, helping in this instance to maintain a grip on the broad topic of communication. It also proved how the network-company approach adopted by Reach can allow such projects to maintain a global focus, incorporating cross-cultural differences (and universal similarities) into the earliest possible stages of a design process.

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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.

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Brazil seems to be at a tipping point regarding the role design plays in society and the economy. There is a real understanding that it makes a lot of sense to bring different disciplines, such as business people, engineers, marketers, social researchers, architecture and all kinds of designers, together to spur innovation. But at the same time there is not a real understanding nor practical experience of how they would collaborate and make innovation happen. This is where Design Thinking and Service Design come in, and companies like Feel The Future can make a real difference by simply doing these things with brave clients who want to experiment with new ways of working. Good luck to them!

Tonight we will be speaking at N2010 in Curitiba where 5000 (!) design students from all over Brazil have gathered to workshop, discuss and celebrate design as a tool to move their society and economy forward. This is an impressive initiative from students themselves, that we would love to see happen in Europe too. Super-friendly as the Brazilians we meet are, they immediately offered to help if Europeans would take such an initiative. Any students who want to take them up on that offer?

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As partners in the Reach network we do have regular contact by email and skype about proposals and projects, but nothing beats a good old face to face meeting to go into depth on fresh ideas and lateral thoughts. Thanks for coming by guys!

1. Global Design Research Being known as a world-class specialist in Design Research, many...

The members of the Global Design Research Network are all highly skilled and experienced design researchers. They are all familiar with both creative processes and ethnographic research. So far we have members in the following countries: Brazil, United States, Japan, India, Italy, Spain, France, United Kingdom, The Netherlands. Other areas that will soon be included as well are China, Russia, Australia, and Africa (we know, the last is not a country, but a continent, sorry!)

We are currently setting up an online platform where we can safely share materials between us. And also an online presence to communicate our network to anyone who is interested. This site will have links to all the members so you can easily find out about our portfolios.

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