frogmob [Design Research] 1
Designing for an increasingly global marketplace requires deep cultural insights. Clients understand this need but often don t have the time or budget to finance the necessary field research. Yet without local stories and insights, many companies run the risk of designing generic products and services that converge on similar features and forms. We see this today in many consumer product categories, from cell phones to credit cards. How can the design industry help clients escape from their conventional thinking and generic assumptions? How can we capture a rich kaleidoscope of local experiences from around the globe to rapidly shift their thinking at the outset of a new project?
Real Time Crowdsourced Design Research frogmob is a public website and mobile app that taps a rich and active global network of designers, design students and enthusiasts to capture raw images, insights and stories from around the world. It plays a unique role in providing designers with the rich material to broaden the range of possibilities with clients early in the design process. And it achieves these goals in an innovative, rapid and cost-effective manner. Over the last 18 months we have harnessed the frogmob community to capture local stories from 53 countries with over 2800 images for a dozen clients. Pulling in usable insights from a geographically dispersed network of creatives and strategists. Supporting just the right level of crowd engagement enough to be meaningful, but not demand so much to frighten busy people away. Providing positive feedback loops that give the crowd a light sense of community which encourages them to partake in the next themed frogmob. Generating a rich set of perspectives that provoke clients to think differently about the human experience surrounding a product or service. 2
frogmob: Process Overview frogmob is a unique mechanism for bringing local knowledge to global companies and challenging stereotypes in the early stage of problem definition. End of Discover Phase 03. Aesthetic direction Where we don`t want to go End of Discover Phase 06. Appendix frog Think workshop Munich positive negative Alcatel-Lucent Metro Cell Base Station Local Experience 14. October 2011 23 Rapid Synthesis The Alcatel Lucent team joined frog in Munich for a single day frogthink workshop whe explored the boundries of the design from an aesthetic and practical perspective. In the ond half of the day, the team engaged in lateral thinking exercises to rapidly generate a range of design ideas for the Metro Cell Base Station design. Direct Application Alcatel-Lucent Metro Cell Base Station A frogmob is best activated in the early phases of a project to scan the cultural landscape and inspire new thinking. We work closely with clients and other partners to select topics that lend themselves to visual storytelling. Each frogmob culminates in a synthesis session with the client to look for patterns and identify opportunities that can serve as the jumping off point for new areas of inquiry. 14 Insights from frogmobs are applied directly to guide further research activities and the development of concepts to meet global and local needs. 3
Opening Up the Space of Possibilities In this example, images from the frogmob were synthesized and used as raw material for a collaborative work session with the client that generated a diverse set of concept sketches inspired by specific opportunities that our mob had captured. 4
frogmob: Insights frogmob allowed us to gain access to a whole range of ways people were using mobile phones that would have been almost impossible to observe using traditional methods of ethnography. In this example, we used frogmob to get a quick pulse of global mobile phone trends before conducting in-home interviews. As people have become more intimate with their devices, they are using them in dressing rooms, bathrooms, and other interstitial "private" spaces that in many cases would have been considered taboo. frogmob helped us to recalibrate our field research to ask more challenging questions to uncover the deeper reasons why those device usage behaviors were becoming so prevalent especially for toddlers and young children, who are encountering these devices for the first time.
Exploring the Boundaries of Data & Trust A frogmob supporting a World Economic Forum (WEF) research initiative on personal data resulted in a report that was presented at the 2011 WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The goal of this frogmob was to take dry principles around privacy and personal data that WEF had developed with Bain, their consulting partner, and place them in a human context. This additional layer of insight proved invaluable in engaging a broader set of WEF stakeholders from the Chief Legal Officer of Google and the Vice Chairman of the European Union to musician Peter Gabriel at Davos in 2011 in a meaningful discussion about the implications of data, identity and trust in people s daily lives from China to Zambia to Bangalore to Helsinki. 240 submissions 51 participants 74 cities 20 countries 3 weeks 6