able to interrupt and force their
opinions into discussions tak-
ing place in the studio.
Remote collaboration. We noted
that the richer the technologies we gave the remote team,
the more they could effectively
communicate their ideas (as
long as the technologies worked
in close to real time). At its
most technologically mature,
our remote team used a set
of tools comprising a shared
online digital whiteboard
(Twiddla), Skype, an IM application, and webcams. However,
bandwidth issues meant that
this combination was very slow.
Furthermore, these tools were
difficult to set up and recover
when they failed. In later sessions, we chose to drop the
whiteboard to free up bandwidth for the other tools.
We also found that remote
workers could contribute
only at the speed of their
personal technologies. Our
remote participants were dis-
tributed throughout Europe,
and bandwidth and service
levels varied. We discovered
that in a remote distributed
team, progress takes place
at the speed of the techno-
logically weakest member.
earlier phases of design as pre-
session work for the group.
The design activities of interest to us were those usually
undertaken before and during
concept development. We gave
downstream activities such as
detailed functional and visual
design to a team of professional
designers who worked with us
to create prototypes of selected
co-design outputs.
As we shifted the focus of
each studio session further
downstream toward concept
visualization and communication, we found the output to
be more useful and actionable
and to require less effort from
our professional design team to
turn into prototypes.
However, as we progressed
through the sessions, our core
team of collaborators also
became more competent. It is
difficult to clearly disassoci-
ate which of these two factors
(competency or design activity)
contributed more to the better
outcomes—we suspect both
were important.
cerning team and session organization reflect variants of best
practice in workshop design,
they are particularly pertinent
to co-design with customers.
The lessons we learned about
designing with non-designers,
managing remote co-design
teams, and about the co-design
sweet spot weren’t anticipated
and we believe haven’t been
reported elsewhere. These will
be of real practical value to us
in planning future co-design.
From a wider perspective, the
accelerated approach we have
described compliments Web-centric businesses and may
well provide a useful model for
bigger companies who want to
inject fresh, grassroots, small-company thinking into their
innovation processes. But to do
so, this inspiration feed must
merge with the company’s
innovation processes—which in
itself can be a challenge given
the source of that inspiration
can feel like it comes literally
out of the blue for those inside
the organization.
…about the co-design sweet spot
We were interested to know
whether certain design activi-
ties lent themselves more read-
ily to co-design than others.
So, in each session we system-
atically moved our co-design
window from ideation through
to design communication (e.g.,
storyboard).
We achieved this by setting
up an online environment for
generating and sharing ideas,
and designating earlier and
what did we take away?
We found that the concept
of a co-design incubator as
a means to fast-track or hothouse ideation to a point where
concepts can be handed over to
a professional design team can
work. We haven’t addressed the
quality or the specific outcome
of the sessions in this piece.
However, we believe the concepts we generated are probably better nuanced, fresher, and
more relevant and certainly
developed more rapidly than
would have been possible using
an in-house team.
We believe that while the
lessons we have reported con-
About the Author
Mark Hicks is an experi-
ence design professional
who has been immersed in
digital product design for
over 20 years. A BPS char-
tered psychologist, he has divided his time
fairly equally between the performance crit-
ical human factors fields and the online and
mobile experience design world. Intrigued
by the way people, business and technolo-
gy fit together he enjoys unravelling com-
plexity For the past 10 years Hicks has
focused on digital product design and
strategy with large corporates, SME’s and
agencies. He is currently working as a
design expert with Vodafone’ s Internet
Services division in London.
May + June 2010
doi: 10.1145/1744161.1744171
© 2010 ACM 1072-5220/10/0500 $10.00