Industry Cases

We are excited to announce the following Industry Cases to be presented as part of the first Industry Day at PDC this year:

Mapping and Visualizing Service Provider and Client Interactions: The Case for Participation
Jeanette Blomberg, Melissa Cefkin and Yolanda Rankin
IBM Research
The interactions between service providers and their clients (touchpoints) define the service experience for clients and providers alike. In the context of IT outsourcing services, where one company contracts with another for IT services, these interactions are frequent and occur across an increasingly globally distributed delivery organization. The scope and complexity of these interactions provide a challenge for managing the service experience in that it is difficult for members of the delivery team to be aware of the wide range of interactions taking place with clients. This project is focused on designing ways to enable delivery teams to create awareness of their touchpoints with clients and to make changes to improve the overall client experience.

A Strategic Framework for Online Participation Design in Gov 2.0
Mark Elliot
Collabforge
A feedback loop of innovation in social processes and online tools has presented a new possibility, and in fact, a new reality: complex tasks such as writing an encyclopedia or a city plan are now being crowdsourced. The use of Web-based collaborative communities and tools can use labour, intelligence and interest to develop policy collaboratively, allowing the interests of the public to be better represented and engaged. However, while the tools for such work now exist, there is no developed body of knowledge on how to purposefully engineer such collaborative communities. What are the right processes to use and what are their differences? What online tools can best support these processes? How do we ensure that if we build it, they will come? If they do come, how do we ensure they achieve the right objectives? This presentation will showcase Collabforge’s development of such a body of knowledge – a strategic framework for participatory design, specifically with regard to the intersection of government and Web 2.0, increasingly referred to as Gov 2.0. The presentation will be supported by case studies including our work on Future Melbourne, the world’s first collaborative city plan, as well as EPA Victoria with whom we are developing an organisation wide Web 2.0 adoption and innovation framework. Key learnings from these projects will be covered with a focus on the ethical and practical needs for approaches to collaborative design. Specifically, the need for collaborative participation on part of agency staff and stakeholders in the design and development of Gov 2.0 projects and programs will be addressed.

Reduce your Footprint, Testing the Release early, release often mantra
David Gravina and Diana Mounter
Digital Eskimo
Our recent Reduce your Footprint project for three Sydney councils allowed us an opportunity to incorporate a number of different methods from our Considered Design toolkit into the one project. We employed mobile diaries, co-design workshops and an iterative approach to the design and development of the project’s web site resulting in a design that has benefited from a significant amount of user design, testing and feedback. We will share the lessons learnt from this unusual project.

Lifecycle Framework for Cross-Functional Participatory Design: Case study
Delia Grenville
Intel
Participatory design methods can be used to drive a powerful idea that will resonate throughout the organization or community to create change. In this case study, we learned that employing participatory design together with a process and communication framework 1) reduced decision making time and 2) the time needed to create a common understanding of future software architectural goals. We started the process by employing our understanding, derived from a rich body of consumer- centred research, of what consumers wanted in the future of the television experiences — in the living room, their homes, and beyond. Then, we incorporated our understanding of consumers’ needs with our desire to optimize our software architecture and technology integration engagements. Through a modified participatory approach, we created a rich foundation for future software development and the delivery of product experiences that would match consumer’s expectations and optimize our engagement with partners and stakeholders.

Capturing and Sharing Stories in Virtual and Interactive Web Environments:  A Cross-Organizational Case Study
Patricia Wall, Jonas Karlsson, Johannes Koomen, Tong Sun, Xerox, Eric Bier and Margaret Szymanski, Palo Alto Research Center
This case study describes the collaboration between Xerox Research and The Henry Ford Museum to explore ways to enable museum staff and visitors to interact with artifacts and each other in online environments. Building on the premise that stories are an integral part of the museum experience, the team developed prototype technologies, initially for use by the museum staff, to create stories around collection elements and enable story sharing and collaboration in 3D immersive environments. Ongoing feedback and evaluations by the museum staff guided prototype revisions. Suggestions by the museum staff for use of the prototypes in museum and educational contexts are also discussed.

See the details of the full Industry Day programme including Keynote & Service Design Panel.