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Here are some of the key concepts, methods and tools Supplejack uses. First, some basic definitions. What is an offering?An offering is whatever your organisation offers. An offering delivers benefits to your organisation's users. A combined product and service offering is called a 'product-service system' (or PSS). In general, offerings are provided in return for revenue, but some components may be free or at different rates. What is design thinking?Design thinking is the core design discipline. According to design theorist Herbert Simon, it is practical, creative thinking that addresses an opportunity or resolves a problem. It works towards new or improved future benefits for users. Design thinking is systemic. It considers how an improved offering needs to work in its context. As Simon notes, its focus is the future. Design thinking is oriented to having solutions work into the future, be it an immediate or extended future. For example, product design tends to focus on an immediate future using a short-term design process, while design of social change looks to a remote future and uses an ongoing design process. The best design thinking is also collaborative. It draws in the views of key stakeholders (including potential users) to develop the most robust offering. Different stakeholders can contribute different insights to strengthen and simplify the offering. Design research is also systemic, future-oriented and collaborative because its core discipline is design thinking. What is design research?Design research is research carried out to support design projects - such as design of products, services and brands. The term 'design' covers creating, developing, innovating and commercialising new offerings, or improving and evolving existing ones. Supplejack's design research prioritises what offerings mean to people. That is, people gain most when they find offerings meaningful in themselves and when these help them create meaning in their lives. The simplest, smartest way to explore meanings is to focus on how people want to experience the offering. Experiences are where meanings come to life and make a difference for people - in their lives and futures. Design research covers helps you answer five main questions:
You can download a brief presentation (PDF) on design research here. To set up a design research project, it helps to understand what to focus on. Most projects start with the brief, so let's start there too. How do you develop a design research brief?The first step in setting up a design research project is to consider the brief you provide for the design researcher. A good briefing process... How do we respond to your brief?Supplejack can select from a range of tools to help its clients. The choice of a specific tool always depends on what you need. This means each time we apply a tool for you, we are asking three questions,
Below are the common design research approaches, each with the direct gains it offers. Common design research methods
The methods are easily scaled to your needs.
What can you expect of good design research?Design research is usually carried out in the context of a design project to support the work of other design team members. So it pays to plan reporting and delivery...
What is service design?Service design creates higher value customer experiences by establishing desired outcomes, then designing a service, with its offerings and touchpoints (the points at which you deliver value), to deliver these. Service design starts by researching and identifying the experiences and outcomes customers desire, then working out how best to deliver these. This can mean looking at the business as a whole and how it can profitably generate the best value for customers and their communities. Service design and sustainability are closely connected because they start with desired outcomes and evolve services to meet these. A key difference is that sustainability includes environmental as well as social and economic outcomes. Service design is an emerging discipline worldwide. It is growing rapidly in Europe with great effects. Service design was originally implicit in marketing and management. In recent decades the service sector has grown in size and value globally – about 70% by numbers and by GDP in New Zealand. As a result, there is a great need for a discipline dedicated to developing better services. Services these days rely on a mix of products and services (called product-service systems). Their complexity and rate of change require much more powerful ways to respond to market challenges and manage innovation than in the past. Sustainability has also driven services to look for new design principles, methods and tools. Service design first appeared as a formal discipline in 1991 at the Koln International School of Design. The first professional body, the Service Design Network, was launched in 2004 to create an international network for Service Design academics, professionals and consultancies. Since the late 1990s, service design has been extensively used in the public sector in the UK and Europe, and particularly in the health, finance, hospitality and NGO sectors. You can download a brief presentation (PDF) on service design here. Some useful links are: What is collaboration or 'co-design'?Supplejack prefers to build strategic conversations between you, your development team, your business partners and your customers. This approach is the basis for a range of disciplines including co-creative, co-design, participatory and generative design research. Conventional research tends to create 'silos' of expert knowledge and 'serial learning' as each stakeholder in your success re-interprets research learnings according to their expertise. For example, in a conventional development project consumers talk to researchers, who then talk to marketers or designers, who then talk to internal specialists, and so on. Co-design in design research helps stakeholders have strategic conversations with each other. These help your stakeholders learn together more quickly, and so they can start the development project from a common understanding. Ongoing learning, strategy and design conversations help keep the project on track in a cost-effective manner. They also help make your development projects much more productive, in knowledge, in skills, in results for your organisation and in impacts for your stakeholders - especially your customers. |
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