Brands give guidance to innovation if they are rooted in a thorough understanding of the stakeholders of that brand. That’s why I’m more and more involved in researching these stakeholders in a way that leads to actionable, inspiring and authentic insights. In effect, this comes down to digging deep into the lives of both people inside the company working with the brand (designers, developers, marketeers, researchers, engineers) and people outside the company deriving value from the products and services the company/brand brings forth.
Contextmapping, as a designerly approach to research, leading to data that is richly visual and inspiring, suits our approach very well. Last week we attended the PhD defense of Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, the first PhD in this field. The day after, we attended a symposium on contextmapping with speakers Liz Sanders of Maketools, Jacob Buur of Spire, Denmark, Froukje and 10 recently graduated students who apply contextmapping in practice (one of which was my colleague Christa van Gessel).
One very specific way in which we apply contextmapping is through the use of an online research environment, called 7daysinmylife.com, which we developed for this specific purpose.
The environment allows users to keep an online diary of their daily activities over the course of 7 days, evolving around themes and questions set up to suit the specific research purpose. The environment also allows the research team (often designers and marketeers) to follow the diaries and comment on images and texts. We have succesfully applied the tool in projects for Mexx, Fatboy, Nlisis and Etna. We’ve been amazed with how inspiring and activating these diaries are. These diaries also provide the research team with a shared and lively set of data to work with, leading to a shared vision that really triggers the team’s creativity. They form a very solid foundation for workshops, persona development, house visits and focus groups. We are now licencing 7days out to the Australian service design firm Proto Partners. We’re open for more licencees.
We have a brochure available for download here. It tells you about the vision behind the research tool and how we apply it. We’re still working on a demo. Drop us a line if you’re interested.
addendum:
we have found a second licencee in Tennyson Pinheiro of the Brazilian service innovation company Design Loyalty. (http://www.designloyalty.com.br/)
We are now working with two great partners from opposing ends of the planet and the first projects are taking off!
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Very interested – may have a project starting early 2010 where I could really use something like this. Please email me if this is a possibility.