Are We Asking Too Much?

We've found in several projects that this is a very difficult thing for clients to do, to hold back and to engage at the same time.

I wanted to start with a little image that has jumped to mind because earlier we were talking about eating animals and strange shop signs.

In the 1980s in Amsterdam a new kind of butcher was coming up and they all painted in their windows ‘Animal friendly butcher’. What they meant was that they got their meat from nearby and the cows were kind of stroked nicely before they were killed. As a marketing trick it only lasted for a little while.

What I wanted to talk about was whether we are sometimes asking too much from project owners, from the clients that we work with.

On the one hand we ask them to really give us space to do very new things and to hold back. On the other, we ask them to be involved and to engage with the kind of new ways we are introducing . We've found in several projects that this is a very difficult thing for clients to do, to hold back and to engage at the same time.

For instance in one project, where we worked with a water utility company here in England, the client really wanted to look at segmentation of their customers. We said, you have to create personas. They were thinking in numbers and postcodes and social economic characteristics of people, and we were thinking more in stories. It was really difficult for them to make that change. When we came up with stories about how people use water, and attitudes of people towards water, because that’s what we ended up with, they asked 'In which postcodes do these people with this attitude live?' They wanted to send their leaflets just to that postcode.

And another project we did with a Primary Care Organisation in the South of the Netherlands, near Eindhoven, we had to make the shift from technologypush to people pull. Eindhoven is the most wired area in the Netherlands and they recently built this great glass-fibre network, but they had no idea how to use it. We came up with suggestions for services, for people so that they could live longer in their own homes. This worked really well because this client turned out to have the empathy to really engage with people. We taught them to interview their customers and really engage with them.

So should we be asking for clients to hold back and engage at the same time? Perhaps we should change that and as designers and researchers, we should look at what the strengths of our clients are so that we can use that, and leverage that, in the projects that we do.

Senior Design Producer for Dott Cornwall, Bas co-founded design research company STBY (Standby) in London and Amsterdam with Dr. Geke van Dijk. STBY focuses on social research for design and innovation for clients in industry and the public sector, often as part of larger service design projects. Recently he worked on mobile phone service concepts, urban regeneration and health care. Bas has a background in cultural studies and the early days of the internet industry and has always been fascinated by how we appropriate media and technology in our everyday life. He holds a PhD in Design interactions from the Royal College of Art.