Innovation through people-centred design – lessons from the USA
This very interesting Global Watch* mission report (which I just finished reading) summarises the results of an official UK field trip to the US to investigate the impact of people-centred research in the design process.
The authors were interested in the ways in which people-centred research becomes integrated into both the product design and development process as well as embedded within organisational culture and long-term strategic thinking.
They emphasise that people in their social context rather than task-centric users should be considered a fundamental source of product and service innovation.
The report, which dates from October 2004 and contains 76 pages, focuses mainly on new technology including computer hardware and software, mobile phones and technology services.
(* The UK government Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Global Watch Service is dedicated to helping UK businesses improve their competitiveness by identifying and accessing innovative technologies and practices from overseas and provides funds to assist small groups of technical experts from UK companies and academia to visit other countries for short, fact finding missions.)
Download report (pdf, 1.3 MB)
(via CPH127)
(a reflection on the report by David Hawdale in FormFunctionEmotion)
[…] When she was last year part of the DTI mission to the west coast of the US (see earlier post), she focussed on the integration of user research in the innovation and design process and looked at such companies as the BMW DesignWorks innovation group and Intel’s research in China. […]
[…] Mark had just sent quite an interesting list of links… somebody else might find it useful, as well: – creativity and innovation development in business schools – putting people first – innovation through people-centred design – lessons from the USA […]