Hasta La Ideas

By Roberto Veronese, Creative Director, frog San Francisco

The use of digital banking and electronic payments is expanding in many countries, as consumers embrace technology that facilitates financial services. Yet in Russia, people still cling to cash for most of their financial needs. In fact, more than 90 percent of all commodity purchases are in cash, according to the Bank of Russia, and the country loses over one percent of its annual GDP due to the huge amount of cash circulating and its maintenance costs. This poses a challenge to financial institutions, like Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, which is eager to transition customers to digital services. Sberbank asked frog to envision product and service concepts that could effectively support that transition.

We began our work with extensive qualitative research in the field, investigating the deeply personal reasons why cash remains so popular among customers in Moscow. “I cannot go around without cash,” a young, wealthy and tech savvy Muscovite told us, while shopping at GUM, the city’s main department store. This was a typical response, even for younger Russians who are regularly online. More than half the population uses the Internet at least once a week, and appreciates the convenience of new digital tools to browse for information and media content. Yet in some cases these technologically sophisticated consumers refuse to open a bank account, preferring instead to pay their bills with cash at ubiquitous payments kiosks, despite the high commission applied to these transactions.

We found a number of reasons for this reluctance to adopt digital banking and electronic-payment services. Foremost is the fact that only a small number of merchants accept credit card payments, due to charges of up to 4 percent on the seller’s side and widespread tax evasion. Meanwhile, salaries are still largely paid with cash, despite the introduction of “salary cards” issued by a bank chosen by the employer. This is the main type of card issued in Russia, which on payday contributes to an extremely high volume of cash withdrawals that are usually not transferred to bank accounts.

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It’s hard to describe a word with more words—and generally ineffective. We’ve all been tongue-twisted at some point, searching for just the right word to describe something or other. Unofficial Report, a group of young designers on a mission to create a library of text imagery, has caught on to that with their “Unofficial Report” of the London Design Festival. Created by two researchers from Fabrica, the Italian communications research center, the organization is working to involve more than just the event itself in their reviews.

The group attends creative functions around the world and compiles reactions, graphics, quotes and physical things (like business cards) to create an exhibit that dives into the event and the environment around it. It’s done differently for each experience. So far, they’ve recorded responses from London Design Festival, Art Basel and Milano Design Week.

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At various points when I was growing up, I recall teachers or other authority figures facilitating group discussions with the use of an ad hoc talking stick—a communal object that grants the bearer permission to speak. The concept itself (per the Wikipedia article linked above) originates in aboriginal culture, where it may be used democratically or as a symbol of authority, but they generally serve the purpose of designating a speaker in tribal ‘council circle’ settings. Thus, the concept has been adapted for a wide variety of contemporary settings, from primary school to corporate committees, making it an ideal starting point for the Smart Interaction Lab‘s recent prototyping session at the Barcelona Mini Maker Faire.

How can interactive objects encourage inspiration and dialog during brainstorming sessions?

Ideation sessions are part of everyday life at Smart Design, informing all the work we do. When reflecting upon these sessions, we developed the concept behind our Maker Faire project. We worked together as a team of multidisciplinary researchers and designers to explore how we can improve people’s experiences of the ideation process through tangible interaction. Our solution was TOTEM—a family of three unique objects that help people get inspired and stay engaged in creative conversations and debates in order to generate new ideas. It is composed of a stack of three separate but complementary objects: Bat&oacuten, Echo and Alterego.

Echo & Alterego

First up is Smart Design’s take on the talking stick: “Batón” looks something like an hourglass-shaped bone and is designed to vibrate after a certain amount of time, indicating that the speaker’s turn is up and he or she must pass it on to someone else. “This tool allows everyone present in a discussion to be heard and it forces the most dominant speakers to be more concise, but also those that may be more shy to speak up.”

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Imagine, if you will, a design exercise in which the primary constraint is simply to answer a brief with ideas that have never been dreamt of. The themes range from Global Warming to Time, and are selected based on passion as much as relevance and timeliness, and as such, design teams are expected to come up with ideas that meet those criteria as well.

These are the guiding principles behind IDEO’s “Designs On—,” an ongoing internal project that has taken off since IDEO Associate Partner and Industrial Design Director Blaise Bertrand introduced it in 2008. The global design consultancy has just launched a dedicated microsite for the fifth annual edition, which tackles the seemingly mundane (or otherwise overdone) issue of Packaging. And while the topic is ostensibly more pragmatic than past themes such as Food and Birth (as well as the two mentioned above), it’s not so much a departure from the spirit of the platform as it is an affirmation of its breadth.

The idea of “Designs On—,” according to Bertrand, is to “let designers pick a personal perspective” on the topic at hand. The goal is “to push the edge of a particular content area [as well as] to constantly question our assumptions about design.” IDEO employees organize themselves into teams as they see fit, developing, iterating and ulimately packaging their ideas over the course of four to five months.

“The ‘Expired‘ concept is one of my favorites,” says Bertrand. “It feels natural—to take a simple analogy of a banana, [which has] a very powerful emotional aspect.”

Bertrand excitedly noted that “Biomimicry is a growing domain.”

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By Susan Dray

As field researchers, we face a dilemma. Our roles require us to interpret our findings carefully and to be perceived as competent and professional. Yet everyone who has done fieldwork for very long has been in those situations—sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, sometimes heartwarming—where things didn’t go as planned and when even the best prepared of us has had to modify an approach or change a particular visit to “pull it out of the fire” from time to time. Yet it can be hard to share these experiences with our wider professional community in order both to find their meaning and to learn from them. There was never a forum for us to share our experiences and to learn from them.

Until now. A little over a year ago, esteemed colleague, friend, consultant and author Steve Portigal began an experiment. He solicited and posted “war stories” from field researchers around the world. He says that he didn’t really know what would come of this, but the result has been a fascinating set of cautionary tales and hilarious, tender, interesting stories from the field told by and for an international audience of fieldwork professionals. As Steve introduced it:

We love stories, and in our work as ethnographers, we love war stories about fieldwork. These experiences—the crazy household, the dog that does his business on your shoes, the GPS failure—are inevitable and are often (at least in hindsight) hilarious. Exchanging these stories is a way of socializing our technique and creating learning opportunities for both tellers and listeners.

Based on his own experience conducting field research over the years, Steve is well aware that Murphy’s Law is alive and well when researchers go into the field. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and even if you have brought multiple spares, extra batteries, cameras, etc., there’s always something else to test your flexibility.

The themes of the 50+ stories currently available vary widely. This growing collection has great examples for those teach or who are learning how to do ethnographic research, as well as those of us who do or have done it. There are many lessons in them. Here are some of my biggest takeaways:

What really happens in the field?

Because roles in many firms are siloed, not all designers get to experience participating in a full-blown ethnographic study, up close and personal with a trained user researcher, this means that they may not see how it evolves over time. They may have a chance to do one or two visits, but that’s typically not enough to get anything other than a superficial sense of the overall process, specifically the dynamic challenge of gathering all of the information a team needs. Because of this, some designers don’t see the value of having a user researcher leading the effort of getting the vast amount of data that ethnographic studies inevitably generate. These war stories can give a flavor of how this happens over time and can help designers understand better what they can get from a good user researcher from time in the field.

Seemingly ubiquitous problems include but are by no means limited to: pungent pet smells, recruiting nightmares, inclement weather, and unsavory neighborhoods in which researchers find themselves, often at odd hours of the night. Many of these are hilarious. Some are poignant. All recount familiar circumstances that I suspect seasoned field researchers will recognize.

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