EPIC company visits in Copenhagen

I visited Antropogerne.com and ReD during the EPIC company visits. There were a total of about 8 companies participating in this. Great to see Copenhagen has this many entrepreneurs in some sort of design ethnography.

Antropogerne.com (a five people company) is a good example of anthropologists doing more than field work alone. Their insight creation, for instance for the case-study on diabetes they showed, is set up as a co-creative process with both client and (here) diabetes patients involved. One of the results was a series of eight persons, almost half of their participants. Rikke Ulk of Anthropogerne.com explicitly denounced personas because they felt these do not show enough the specific details of everyday lives of people. I hear this more and more, and as a result the persona method seems to fall apart without entirely disappearing. Rather it fragments and people start to build new methods with the pieces. We did so too at STBY for instance, for our Heartlands project in Cornwall, UK.

ReD associates is a company of about 55 people, now 3 years old. Ethnograpic research is a key part of their offering but in fact deliver complete innovation processes to their clients. So also many business consultants work at ReD. The roles are not that strictly defined however I got the impression. Project teams are usualy small (3 people) and they call in  individual experts from the company temporarily. At ReD associates the disciplines are as much mixed as I expected them to be in the future scenarions that were played our earlier that afternoon at EPIC. Perhaps it is the smaller innovation companies that can look further ahead into the future than the tech giants? ReD also have an office in Hamburg, but I wonder if it can be as nice as their Copenhagen headquarter because that was amazing (see picture, at the end of their lovely party..).