Brands give guidance to innovation if they are rooted in a thorough understanding of the stakeholders of that brand. That’s why I’m more and more involved in researching these stakeholders in a way that leads to actionable, inspiring and authentic insights. In effect, this comes down to digging deep into the lives of both people inside the company working with the brand (designers, developers, marketeers, researchers, engineers) and people outside the company deriving value from the products and services the company/brand brings forth.
Contextmapping, as a designerly approach to research, leading to data that is richly visual and inspiring, suits our approach very well. Last week we attended the PhD defense of Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, the first PhD in this field. The day after, we attended a symposium on contextmapping with speakers Liz Sanders of Maketools, Jacob Buur of Spire, Denmark, Froukje and 10 recently graduated students who apply contextmapping in practice (one of which was my colleague Christa van Gessel).
One very specific way in which we apply contextmapping is through the use of an online research environment, called 7daysinmylife.com, which we developed for this specific purpose.
The environment allows users to keep an online diary of their daily
activities over the course of 7 days, evolving around themes and
questions set up to suit the specific research purpose. The environment
also allows the research team (often designers and marketeers) to
follow the diaries and comment on images and texts. We have succesfully
applied the tool in projects for Mexx, Fatboy, Nlisis and Etna. We’ve
been amazed with how inspiring and activating these diaries are.
These diaries also provide the research team with a shared and lively
set of data to work with, leading to a shared vision that really
triggers the team’s creativity.
Read More: brand driven innovation
Posted by: Andreea Hirica
Posted on: Contagious Ideas
