You gotta know the rules in order to break them

Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam is hosting a series of evenings wherein presentations and discussions are organised around the topic: “Skills for the next economy”. After ‘tinkering’ and ‘cherry picking’, the latest evening was about “the hackers’ reflex’. What can we learn from the hacker movement? And how can we become more hacker-minded ourselves?

While hacking might, for some people, still evoke negative reactions, hacking in itself is actually a very constructive activity. Hacking in the broadest sense is about ‘finding applications that are not intended by the creator of the product’. As such it can be applied to domains other than computing alone. It’s a mindset, wherein existing products, services or even business models are redesigned to serve other purposes or serve current goals even better. This ‘hacking mindset’ is very much in line with our approach at …

Posted on Author STBY

What STBY can learn from the Eames studio

Visiting the Eames exhibition at the Barbican in London gave some nice inspiration for STBY work. We can learn from the Eames studio, for our efforts to communicate knowledge that we created in our design research. Interestingly enough, much of the work of the Eames studio was commissioned by large companies, in particular IBM in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. The position of IBM then was not very different from the position of STBY’s larger digital technology-driven clients now. IBM realised that computers were making many things possible in society and business that were still unimaginable for most people. If you make these ‘mysterious’ computers, how do you explain to their future users the possibilities and consequences? Same issue exists for several of STBY’s clients in the digital age: if people do not know or understand what is…

Posted on Author STBY

Designing ‘collaborative encounters’

STBY hosted a second edition of the book club, featuring Ezio Manzini’s ‘Design, When Everybody Designs’. In this book the author captures 30 years of experience in design for social innovation. In the session we discussed learnings from the book, and how we could apply these in our own work. Each of us happened to be exploring the strategic role of design in their own practice, and we all agreed that the book really helps to explain our work. One participant even declared that this book helped him to finally understand how his education relates to his current profession!

Manzini describes design as a mix of three human capabilities: critical thinking, creativity and practical sense, and he distinguishes between diffuse and expert (professional) designers. Professional designers can drive social innovation by designing so-called ‘collaborative encounters’. The book…

Posted on Author STBY

Design tools for design thinking

STBY has been involved in the creation of toolkits for several clients, in sectors from education to international development to design. Recently we have finished a toolkit on innovation in emerging markets, and we are facilitating the development of an exciting design thinking toolkit for the care sector. Why are toolkits so popular? 

Clients consider tools and toolkits effective ways to capture the knowledge and skills of experts in a format that can easily be shared. Toolkits promise to make a complex process accessible to novice practicioners. However, a design thinking toolkit does not automatically make everyone a design thinker. 

With just a hammer and a saw you can’t build a house straight away, you need to learn how to use each device individually, and you can only get started if you have wood and nails. It really helps if a ‘master’ explains you the tips and…

Posted on Author STBY

Thinking about Things

Every January, we’re flooded with trend lists and predictions. This year, we learn that the Internet of Things will take off. Again.

The Internet of Things has had a firm position in these top 10 ‘promising-things-listings’ for many years now. So why is it still ‘almost’ taking off? Why is it important for service designers and design researchers to keep an eye on developments within this field?

Small, cheap, digital sensor technology has been around for a while, and seems that it’s ready to scale up. Recently, KPN introduced LoRa, providing a network for IoT applications. So there are products, and there is an infrastructure. What else is needed for the Internet of Things to develop further?

An obvious observation is that the IoT is about services, not devices. Having cool sensors that communicate with each other in a network is one thing. But many people do not understand ‘connected…

Posted on Author STBY

Design & The City workshop: The experience of cyclists when bicycle parking in smart cities

We will set up a workshop at the conference of Design & the City on 22 april 2016, about bicycle parking in smart cities.

Using insights from previous design research on bicycle parking around train stations, you will immerse yourself in the experiences of cyclists, and based on their needs we will co-create ideas for better and smarter bicycle parking solutions in the city. Our approach is based on design research and service design: in the workshop you will get a chance to learn about these powerful approaches to convert insights around people’s everyday experiences into ideas for high impact innovations. You can find more information on the website of Design & The City. The workshop will last for half a day.

Want to join us?

Prospective participants can apply for this workshop until the 1st of March via ingrid@stby.eu. We invite people with different backgrounds…

Posted on Author STBY

Ingredients for innovation

How can you translate the unpredictable, abstract and complex attributes of a innovation process into tools and guidelines, in such a way that entrepreneurs in emerging markets can use them to create new products and services?

Over the past months STBY worked with the Inclusive Business Accelerator on a toolkit for Inclusive Innovation in Base of the Pyramid markets. The Inclusive Business Accelerator (IBA) is a partnership between several NGOs, such as BoPInc, SNV and VC4Africa.

There is no recipe for innovation, but there are certain ingredients that can help make your activities more effective. The Inclusive Innovation toolkit captures the experience, insights and methods of practitioners in emerging markets. It contains tools for market assessment, human centered design, rapid prototyping and crowd-funding, that can be used as ingredients for innovation processes.…

Posted on Author Bas Raijmakers

Service Design Work Out: ‘Are We Worth It?’

As one of the active core members of the Service Design Network Netherlands, STBY is co-organing and hosting the next Service Design Work Out session on Monday 26 October 2015 in Amsterdam. This is an invitation to the wider network to come and join us. It is a free event, but there are limited places available, so do register by email in advance!

‘Are we worth it?’
A couple of years ago the rumour around Service Design was mostly coming from the avant garde in the creative industry. Since then it has gained a lot of more traction in ‘bigger industry’ and academia.

One of the often heard claims is that the design-driven and human-centered approach in Service Design adds a new influx to traditional modes of innovation. However, these claims are mostly coming from the people doing Service Design themselves, so what’s the evidence for this claim to fame?…

Posted on Author Geke

STBY nominated for the SDN Service Design Award 2015

We’re delighted to be nominated for the SDN Service Design Award 2015 with our Dynamic Travel Information on Train Platforms, which we developed with EdenSpiekermann, NS (the main train operator) and Prorail (the rail infrastructure company). The judging and announcement will take place at the Service Design Global Conference in New York on 3 October 2015.

The project has already won several prizes, such as The Innovation Manager (TIM) Awards for most innovative company, the Rotterdam Design Public Prize (decided by public vote), and the prestigious DA&D Black Pencil Award for technological innovation.

See our project page with further information about this collaboration.…

Posted on Author STBY