Category Archives: Research

Please steal this idea

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Do you ever have a variety of disparate deadlines and you would like to keep track of them in a very visual way?
Quite often academics have this problem in that there are a number of possible conferences or journal issues that have deadlines not only for submission of your paper, but if accepted you then have a deadline on “camera ready” editions of your work, a deadline for registration, and of course the conference itself.
What if you could see how many days you had left in a countdown kind of style until the deadlines of these various conferences?
This could be a customized webpage or a “widget” associated with igoogle, yahoo, google toolbar, or something native to your OS. Though you could of course enter in your own deadlines, you could however search for conferences and other things by keyword or tags assigned to them as others upload their due dates. One could also create lists of conferences and journals and you could import a list wholesale.
I imagine there are a number of ways this could be used, but this is the one I can think of most readily.
Who wants to make this one? Go ahead and steal it, attribution would be nice, but hey, in this game execution counts for a lot more than the idea.

Innovation Methods

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I have begun my PhD journey into the world of innovation methods.  I have been thinking about what I think innovation is.  My first working definition is the creation of a new experience.  I should first qualify that I am using the word experience as a port-manteau kind of catch-all term that envelopes everything from products or artifacts, to systems, or services to something that can only be described as an experience such as cirque de soleil or Disneyland (for one take on types of innovation see doblin’s ten types).  When I say new I mean some facet of it is new, it may only be the packaging, or branding, or it may be a feature, or it may be the way it is marketed or a combination of some of these or other things I haven’t mentioned but are equally applicable.

Methods are activities, processes, or tools used while innovating. I haven’t worked on a good working definition for methods, and am open to suggestions of course.

One of the first challenges of my project is that innovation happens all over an organization, and Philips is certainly no exception to this.  There are people in traditional R&D functions (like where I am in Philips Research) and people in various business units (or sectors as we like to call them at Philips) as well as people in strategy, marketing, marketing intelligence, and design.  Just getting a handle on what all these various departments are doing is a massive undertaking, so I’ve begun interviews all over Philips to start understanding what is happening and to digest this information.  At the same time I am trying to make sure that my present work adds some value to my department before I am ready to start producing some kind of intervention into a process with a new process or training or whatever it is I will choose to do.

Of course the other thing that is constantly on my mind is that this is not just about Philips, but rather any organization, so I am working on reaching out to other organizations to see how they are doing this and how it works for them.  I certainly will need help to do this, so anyone reading this, if you work in an organization and would be willing to talk to me about innovation methods, please contact me.

The last thing of course is targeting my findings for publication in various places.  Of course various design-oriented venues come pretty high on my list, I’ve considered some communications venues (as communication between parts of an organization are so important in innovation), and I’m still actively looking for other high quality venues for either journal articles or or conference presentations (and certainly for the next 2 years or so doctoral consotiums or other similar venues where the feedback and interaction is high would make a lot of sense).  Again I welcome any all all suggestions for these.

The big move, working at Philips, and CHI

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So it’s been a long while since I’ve taken the time to blog.  I never thought it would let it go this long, but here we are with a big several-month-long gap in blogging.  Essentially the 3 big things that have and are happening are what are in the title, the move, working at Philips, and working on CHI2010-2011.

I blogged previously about being the preferred candidate, and when I was later offered the position outright I accepted.  Then, even after buying tickets and scheduling movers we got the news that my visa/work permit had not come through.  This was in late April with a May 15th starting date.  It threw us back into limbo while Philips tried to work things out.  After much travail we were able to get everything worked out by Late June, so we chose August 1st as a start date.  So we flew out on July 29th and stayed in a temporary apartment for a few weeks while we found a house.  There was much hullabaloo about finding the right place, and then our stuff was stuck in customs forcing us to stay in the apartment longer, but in the end we’re finally settled in more or less.

Working at Philips has been an interesting experience.  Some of the bigger challenges are involved with the fact that I started on Aug 1.  For those who are not familiar with how much of western Europe works late July and August are the vacation (though they are more like to say holiday) period.  My supervisor here was gone for the entire month plus some, my line manager here also gone for most of the month.  As I walked down the hall of my floor in building 34 on the beautiful high tech campus I saw many of them empty each day.  I’ve never worked at one of the really large corporations or one that has been around for decades upon decades.  While I’m sure they’re not all like this, it’s pretty crazy how much bureaucracy there is.  In many ways one part of the company has no idea what another part is doing.  A very funny thing happened where I corresponded with the human resources department.  As a series of people from different departments came and went from vacation,  and changes in job function a huge misunderstanding came about.  A concerned HR supervisor type person asked me for a meeting over in the building not too far from mine.  After a few minutes of chit-chat he came down to the question, and in a matter of perhaps 15 seconds the whole thing was cleared up and we both laughed.  We both kept on laughing as we thanked each other for a fun and easy meeting, and we did it again via email.  Almost all these kinds of incidents have happy endings, like when I called the IT helpdesk “engineer” who insisted that the exchange server name I needed to set up mail on my ipod touch didn’t need a top level domain (tld) in order for it to work.  Of course that is true on a local network, but I would certainly be taking my handy portable device many places, and even on campus the wireless is outside of the intranet here so yah nice.  He insisted that the iphone was not supported so there was little he could do but he pointed me to a site that was designed to help Windoze mobile users set up their phones after 10 mins on the phone.  Within a minute I found the super secret information I needed (www.mail.philips com, shockingly difficult stuff) and it worked perfectly.  So yes it all does work in the end, but I ask at what cost?  I guess that is part of my research, which I will certainly blog more about in the future.

CHI, the premiere venue for those working and researching the topic of Human Computer Interaction is a fun dynamic conference.  One visit in 2006 to the annual conference in San Jose and I was hooked.  Now I’ve been asked to help organize the student volunteers for the conference in 2010-2011  (Incidentally you can now register for the lottery for 2010).  It’s been a blast to be on the organizing committees for these two conferences and get a peak at the tremendous amount of work that it takes to pull a conference like this together.  Of course with all that organizing I have perhaps let my own preparation for my submissions suffer a little, but hopefully I’ll still have something to present.

So these are the three things that have been taking my time lately, keeping me away from blogging, but I am sure to be more prolific in the near future.

Being a preferred candidate

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Here’s the position I just got notice that I’m the preferred candidate for: (complete details on the entire project here)

Description: In recent years, the paradigm for industrial research and innovation has shifted from a ‘technology push’ model towards a ‘user centred’ model so that industrial research and innovation is now more than ever focusing on application development that addresses end-user needs. Although techniques such as Contextual Design also aim towards a contextualized understanding of user needs, they do not meet the current needs of the industry, i.e., limited focus on a specific class of products, and limited understanding of user needs. What is needed is a better understanding of the contextual settings in which innovation occurs. By positioning user insights between problem states and desired states, consumer insights are formulated and further exploited for creating innovations by means of techniques such as a value propositions. This project will develop methods to enhance the market relevance of existing user centred creative processes, as these apply to industrial research by steering user centred innovation practices with marketing data. The proposed method will be refined through its application in creative problem-solving practices within Philips Research.

Outcomes: Methodology development, towards an integrated approach for a user insight driven creative process, will focus on: (i) ethnographic methods for collecting rich contextual data from which user insights can be derived; (ii) techniques for translating user insights into consumer insights that can be validated in terms of their market relevance; (iii) methods for deploying consumer insights into the creative phase of formulating innovative propositions.

In more simple terms it is this: today companies realize that technology alone cannot be the driver in creating and innovating on products or services, we need a user-centered perspective.  What makes this project fairly unique is that they want to fuse user-centered design methods to create a concept, and then use marketing research and business ideas to validate that concept.

In the simplest terms we want to let all the qualitative goodness of design driven research and add in quantitative marketing data and business values.

So what does it mean that I’m the preferred candidate?

It means that the project head and local committee have given me the thumbs up, and that the head of the overall proect committee have to say yes as well, but it would be fairly unlikely that they wouldn’t have the same decision as the people who are heading the project, interviewed me, and will be working with me directly.  We are VERY excited about the prospect of it, and as long as the final offer comes back close to the numbers  they gave me initally with some decent benefits (which is likely given the difference of health coverage in the EU) then we will undoubtedly say yes.

They initially wanted an April 1 start date, but of course I’m planning on attending CHI in Boston so it will have to be after that. We are thinking of having me go directly after CHI and getting things all set up and then Vanessa and the boys following after the school year ends and Vanessa has her performance with Indy Opera in late May.

Some thoughts on the research

Of course it’s interesting that design and user research is positioned between problem states and solutions.  Of course that is a huge step forward from letting design and user research just be a final step, but as per some of the conversations over at NextD that I’ve been participating in, it seems that design is moving and changing and moving even farther upstream towards the problem framing stage.  My thought however is that even when design moves farther upstream and it’s not as if we should then let technology or engineering be the driver from there on out.

The two things I am very excited about are these: adding in some vast amounts of marketing data, and the fact that I’ll be workign directly at Phillips research.  I won’t be simply coming up with some theoretical business process, but starting with what is currently going on at the User Reseach group at Phillips and then moving forward, putting the methods and theories directly into practice.

Does Design Thinking=Market Research?

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While reading a fine article over at BrandWeek I noticed this:

Similarly,  Tim Leberecht, vp of marketing and communications at Frog Design, San Francisco, said he believed there was nothing new about DT. “Doing in-depth research, that’s what marketers have done for decades,” he said. Leberecht conceded that having customers along for the ride during the creative process  is new, but is more the result of the craze over crowdsourcing than for DT, per se.

DT in this context is Design Thinking of course.  This is an interesting concept.  Predictably I don’t have enough time to go back and do the historical research and say whether he Tim is right or not, I don’t think, however that what he refers to as having customers along for the the ride is as trivial a difference as he seems to think.  He attributes this to the craze over crowdsourcing.  I assume he means that this is a fad, just one that will go away like any other fad.

I do not think that the human-centered ethos that design thinking brings with it is a mere triviality.  I think it is important, and will in fact prove to be the key differentiator in terms of results and value both economic and human.

Economic value: Market research HAS been around for ages and best practices are widely available and are usually instituted leaving little differentiation.  DT can differentiate an organization that uses it internally by creating a better working environment, and can differentiate products and services by creating things that fit with human needs and that are beautiful.

Human Value: Market research is oriented towards seeing a hole in a marketplace, see where opportunity is, and to use the most common parlance “make people want to buy stuff” perhaps stuff they don’t even really need.  Design Thinking on the other hand is steeped in a human-centered ethos that creates stuff that fits a need, and in my opinion, fits the needs of humanity/society.  Many designers are creating products, services, and accompanying systems that are green or sustainable (no I’m not going to unpack that loaded term) so that while they make things that are great for individuals, they are also making things that are good for everyone too.  This is a great example of a human value that DT can bring to the marketplace, not because it’s popular, but because it’s the right thing to do and people want to do, they just don’t have good ways to do it.

OK so maybe I got a little bit on my soap box, but I think my point came through.