Our creative research projects connect organisations with the lives and experiences of their customers. This helps our clients to innovate their service offering, making it more valuable for both their customers and their business. Our projects generate rich, visually illustrated and engaging materials, that bring real people into the heart of service innovation processes.
Customised approach
We use a bespoke methodology for each topic and context we’re asked to explore. Together with the client team, we make a considered choice out of a wide range of tools and methods we have available. This allows us to consistently deliver intimate and resonant insights. We might use film, making a series of short documentaries that explore and document particular practices and interests of people. We might conduct a probe study, or a series of in-depth interviews, as a basis for developing personas that illustrate conspicuous customer segments or behaviours. Or we might organise co-creation workshops, inviting a mix of customers and clients to attend our studio to explore new service concepts via a range of interactive exercises.
In contrast to traditional market-research, our work usually evolves around a deep dive into better understanding certain needs and behaviours, rather than a broad sweep of market-wide percentages and statistics. But we do sometimes combine our in-depth qualitative research with more quantitative surveys. The materials from the ethnographic field research present rich insights into people’s everyday lives, and thereby get to the heart of what defines their service experience. For some projects it is important to back this up with quantitative validation. We are capable of combining both whenever relevant.
Empowering Innovation Teams
Our projects often involve intense collaborations with service providers and design teams who are keen to use the design research outcomes to inform and inspire their innovation processes. As many of our clients work with agile development processes, we are used to being very flexible in our approach. We are regularly involved in both the early stages of scoping strategic opportunities, and the later stages of testing and iterating prototypes. We have established long-term relationships with a number of clients, and we’ve even helped some of them reorientate their research activities and R&D around the service design principles we incorporate into our work. These partnerships have in many instances extended over multiple projects. We don’t just deliver project-based results, we invest in building stable relationships and to provide our expertise and support whenever and however needed.
We aim to deliver an agile and people-centred way of working, that generates insights, provokes innovation, and assists implementation. Each stage in this process is crucial in ensuring that services are truly connected with the lives of the people using them.
