The recent "Nokia Open Studio: Engaging Communities" published by Younghee Jung and Jan Chipchase is worth to read for various reasons. The obvious one is to know more about open studio/innovation and how they conducted research along this line. Their case study shows how the purpose is not to generate ideas of services but instead, to "generate inspirational and cross-referential material about the role of future technologies in participant’s lives by giving residents the opportunity to articulate their needs and aspirations, and present these in the context of their everyday life". Another reason to read it carefully is more general and concerns the underlying issues regarding UX research in a company such as Nokia (an issue I already described here). Some snippets from the document:
"The decision of what to research is decided on an approximately 6-12 month’s basis with some themes drawn from corporate strategy, guided by a consumer insights team that highlights trends of interest, and based on team member’s instinct of what will have the most impact within the corporation. The style of research could even be described as migratory in the sense that the team is drawn to where the resources - research topics of interest, and the means to carry out that research are richest. A major challenge of any kind of corporate field research is finding the right balance between field work and maintaining relevance within the corporate structure, which can involve anything from the face to face sharing of the results to hands on application of what was learned into the design process. The challenge boils down to: how to efficiently and meaningfully gather credible and interesting data, within a relatively short period of time in the field (which for us equates to about two weeks) from a research location anywhere on the planet?"
Why do I blog this some interesting material about the link between UX and design... some interesting reflections that can be useful to rethink my presentation about how field research can inform design.
The document is an interesting use case that shows the different issues related to this sort of approach.