Interactions - May/June 2010

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.