Where it started

About a year and a half ago, I began reading "The Art of Innovation", by Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO. As a student at Hyper Island, offering a strategic focus on digital advertising, my mind slowly began drifting towards fascination by IDEO's 'human' and user-led projects - it was my first encounter with an innovation company. My contributions to the OpenIDEO platform began as a way to start learning and develop my passion for designing better solutions to social problems. This book, as well as attending a lecture by the great Bruce Mau in Stockholm, was my embarkation into a journey knowing that this was the kind of field I wanted to work in. I immediately began craving for the human insights and experiences of projects, those being values I cherish. At the Bruce Mau talk I was first introduced to the concept of ‘Experience Design’, enlightening me to the fact that our whole life is a designed experience, this is true from the transport routes we use to everyday objects like the envelope, which has already been designed for us. And the best thing of it all is that we are living in a revolution of possibility:

“When we don’t apply design to ecologies that support us, we fail” Bruce Mau.

He basically was saying that we have to create the future we want to live in. His wise words remain engraved in my head today.

The importance of prototyping

Chapter 6 of The Art of Innovation is called: "Prototyping is the Shorthand of Innovation". It makes clear that there is no substitute for building things enough to try them out. The aim is to make mistakes & discoveries before you have the answers. One of the examples used is that of Amazon, started by Jeff Bezos: after quitting his Wall Street job to pursue his imagined company, his aim was to get it functional and get it out in the world. Function preceded style and editorial content. The first Amazon.com was low on graphics and animation. It loaded fast and excelled at the basics - easy to find and buy books. Very much what Made by Many practices and preaches, as Tim mentions in this blog post, about the first version of Picle app:

"We deliberately built less, because the leaner you are the easier it is to change."

Prototyping at Made by Many

Well, it seems my day dreaming about IDEO-and-Bruce-Mau-ways-of- doing-things kind of turned into reality! I’ve felt that at Made by Many we work surprisingly similarly to what I've read about IDEO, however with a dedicated approach to Agile & Lean Startup principles: "work quickly, waste little, respond to change and release working software as often as possible". One major difference I notice here at MxM is that very often they share their iterative processes (successes & failures) of working with products and services very openly. Something I haven’t really come across from other service design companies. It really seems that MxM ‘walk the talk’. I'm quite certain this is a big factor that will continue accelerating my learning process here as an intern. 

Connecting the dots

Nonetheless, at this stage I find myself putting into perspective many things I read in The Art of Innovation, very happily, in the Service Design team at Made by Many. Quite early on, during my interview phase I emphasized that I really wanted a mentor during my internship here, as I feel this would be a great way to support my learning. My wish was kindly granted and Paul Sims who leads the Service Design practice at MxM has been closely following my journey since day 1. One of the first things I noticed and learned with Paul is how he so clearly and easily dissects a Service problem through the users eyes, simultaneously clearing the way for articulations of what the solutions could be - always using diagrams. We’ve been evaluating my process here with a bi-monthly feedback session - the first one was a couple weeks ago.

The first reflection session questions and a look back at my internship objectives set out in week 1.

I am working on interesting projects and hoping my analysis has a small influence on them. That's why I feel lucky: to have found a company that allows me to put to practice a lot of service and product design issues for the first time. It's been very interesting to connect the dots in  my journey  since I became passionate about innovation up until now - where I'm prototyping in real-life, with real innovation projects. 

One thing I am really curious to witness here at MxM is how ideation for new client projects occurs. All projects I’ve been thrown into have already been ‘idealized’ and their creative direction is pretty much defined. Ideation is a really fun but also challenging process, something we really get a lot of training at Hyper Island about. Therefore I’m incredibly interested in experiencing the purely creative stamina of the great minds here, as MxM focuses a lot on sharing their processes, like their iterations within agile methodology.

Made by Many's beautiful office entrance. And of course special mention of  Strategy Dog, our office dog who provides us with so much entertainment.

Working on Picle

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on designing user journeys for the future updates of Picle app. We’ve been working through small iterations and releasing a few updates every two weeks, based on feedback gathered from users. Although I have not accompanied the evolution of Picle from pre-launch to launch as a Minimum Viable Product, until today, it is still at a stage needing prioritizing and testing. I am particularly interested in asking/observing how current users use Picle and what they dislike about it, something I have started to do this week. How could we make the experience of the 50,000 + users of Picle better? That is really exciting I think, as there is so much room for imagination when using Picle, and that seems to be part of this journey: learning through the lens of the user.

The 'Picle app wall' in the office, where we initially began to map out the future road map for Picle.

One of my most important learnings when working on future user flows, has been that I sometimes over complicate the steps involved, instead of breaking the problem down into parts, and working to simplify as much as possible. I also need to keep the user  in mind more often when designing these user journeys.  The people I’ve been working with at Made by Many and in particular within the Picle team - Alex, Adam and Will - have been really great at helping me grasp this concept.