Face to face on the front line

We’ve been out and about flexing our contextual research and journey mapping skills to bring to life the world of opportunities for our clients at the front line of services.

Paul has been riding with installation teams in Birmingham and London to uncover insights and opportunities to improve the joining experience for our media and communications client.

At the same time, Joe and Jonas have been applying similar techniques with Southwark Council, one of London’s 33 boroughs, and their Local Strategic Partners to develop a clearer understanding of the issues at the front line. They used these ‘stories’ to help the teams establish how to work together to develop better propositions and deliver better services.

We established scenarios and mapped the local services geographically, and used these to base the teams discussions in reality and to define an individual’s social and service-based landscape. These service and social network mapping tools enable us to understand and define the scale of a community, and the paths into that community which provides the first steps to understanding what most needs improving and how.

Geo-mapping in Southwark

These two projects add to the long list of projects where contextual research tools were critical to obtaining rich insight and inspiration to enable us, and our clients, to develop better services.

Using contextual research in service design helps us to cross the bridge between social science research and design research; producing tools which benefit our clients and helps us to solve the challenges of individuals and their communities.

There are many places where you can learn more about contextual research and ethnography tools. Take a look at Anthrodesign Yahoo Group Forum, and to see how we have used these tools on previous work please check out our projects.