Jul 11th 2008 CATEGORY: Uncategorized
Quicksand works with clients through the following three phases of the design process:
- a rich understanding of the users, the context and the experience being delivered (DESIGN RESEARCH)
- converting these insights into concepts & prototypes that are detailed and designed for their short, medium and long term manifests (DESIGN BLUEPRINT)
- design delivery to bring the concept to life and into use (DESIGN DEVELOPMENT)
DESIGN RESEARCH
Opportunities for innovation lie within the everyday lives, aspirations & desires of people. Design research empowers understanding of potential & existing consumers with evocative, contextual information from the field. Our multi-disciplinary team collates & transforms the information into rich media documents (through film, photography & print), drawing patterns and relevant insights to fuel brand, service & product innovations.
Design research works through a variety of tools and methodologies some of which are summarized below (click for an enlarged view)
DESIGN BLUEPRINT
There is often a big gap between the needs of designers and the approach taken by market researchers on design related issues. Traditionally designers have struggled with texture-less research data while research teams often lack the skills to convert insights from field into tangible & intelligible design directions that can guide product, service and brand development.
Almost all innovations happen through a painstaking & deliberate process of converting design concepts into working models. This requires fostering new collaborations, changing internal systems and bringing new suppliers and vendors on board. What this necessitates is a coherent design vision that can be articulated to all project stakeholders and briefs them in ways relevant to their task.
The most significant contribution of our research efforts are experience blueprints which give details of the design vision, directions and depending on context, concept simulations that can become rich briefs for design development to start.
The context dictates the format that the experience blueprint takes:
- for service design, it is a collection of illustrated storyboards, service scenarios, paper prototypes, dramatizations, interaction concepts
- for spaces, it is a collection of spatial renderings and walk-throughs
- for products it takes the form of prototypes, visual renderings, usage scenarios
- for brands, it is a brand experience blueprint that details brand strategy, core values, user personas, and communication strategy
Here are a few case studies that illustrate this methodology and relevant outputs
Reliance: Experience Center
One World South Asia: Education Helpline
Coca-Cola: New Product Launch
DESIGN DEVELOPMENT
We realize that the conversion of concepts into tangible, real-life products and services is often the only test of a successful design intervention. Our role in this phase has largely two manifests:
- Design delivery: this is mostly the case for brands and films where the skills and resources for actual design development are within the studio.
- Design custodians: interfacing with other stakeholders in a more specialised design discipline and partnering the development process. Examples of these are space, technology and product design projects.