Digital strategist

Competences:
 digital communication strategy, UX concepts

Job:
Development digital communication strategy: target groups, messages, channels, analytics
Development digital strategy: search engine marketing, social media marketing, online PR strategy
Development UX concepts: information architecture, conceptual screens and wireframes

Junior Copywriter – Content & Community manager

Competences: 
communicator, copywriter, community management

Job:
Long and web copy for blogs and social media
Content management: using CMS and social media, online PR
Community management: engaging the audience, responding to questions

Junior motion and graphic designer

Competences: graphic design, video shooting, motion design, postproduction

Job:

Video shooting, editing and post-production
Designing (info) graphs and presentations
Graphic production of screens, layouts, … (based on a design or brand book)

Send your resume, samples of work or portfolio (web or PDF) to info@beforethewave.co.

Group-centricity

Japanese people are group-centered as opposed to our self-centred western culture. This shows in almost everything, but very striking are the anti-smoking messages. While we get the message that smoking is bad for us “you’ll get cancer”, the Japanese are told that smoking is bad for other people “You carry a 700º fire at the height of a child’s face”.

Information, rules and efficiency

Walk around 10 minutes in the Tokyo metro and you’ll see that Japanese people like lots of information and clear instructions. There are plenty of lines, arrows and information on the ground, which shows you the most efficient way to go from point A to B. And the Japanese follow these instructions consciously. If not Shinjuku station wouldn’t be able to handle over 3,5 million people on an average weekday. That’s right, 3,5 million people. This is almost 1/3rd of the Belgian population. We Belgians don’t like to follow rules, and it shows: it takes us 4 hours to move 50.000 people on an average rock festival.

Uncharted territory for business model innovation

Japan is a country of engineers. Our jaw dropped, looking at the technical innovation, ranging from high-tech toilets, to ultra-fast ticket processing metro gates and gigantic underground flood prevention canals. But in terms of business model innovation or service innovation, Japan is an uncharted territory. We were invited by the Business Model Innovation Association (BMIA), to exchange ideas on innovation with Directors Taisei Miyake and Shin Yamamoto. While lots of innovators in the West, are pretty familiar with tools such as the Business Model Canvas, the BMIA plays a pioneering role in Japan.

The quintessential product designer still exists

While most product designers in Belgium are also designing brands, websites and services, in Japan the quintessential product designer still exists. We had the honour to be invited by Kasushige Miyake to his Tokyo based design studio. The studio designs products ranging from electronic devices to furniture for clients such as Muji, Yamaha and Mondo.
Miyake’s studio reflects the products they design: simple, aesthetic, honest in nature. The set-up was the archetypical product design studio: an office, a workshop with some essential tools to make foam models and a material and sample library.

Domestic robots

In Belgium, domestic robots are making their first appearances. In Japan robots seem to be all over, and not only in the infamous robot restaurant. We met Yasuko Akutsu, president of MT Health Care Design Research, a pioneer in emotional robots. Her team developed an award winning app for the Pepper Robot. This robot chats with dementing elderly to exercise their mind. But amazingly enough, we also saw a Pepper robot in a corner of a general store in Tokyo, helping people to get around.

When designing new solutions, there is a question that keeps popping up. How many ideas should we develop? How many should we have in the end? Well, we’re not going to put a number on it, but rather a general principle, called pinball or pachinko. To do this, let’s draw a comparison between pinball and pachinko.

If you’re a millennial, pinball was a coin-operated arcade game popular before the Internet. A player would get three balls to shoot through a course of bumpers, flashing lights and secret passages one by one. The idea was to try to keep the ball in play as long as possible and hit the right targets to get the highest score. A good pinball strategy requires you to carefully manipulate each one of the three balls.

For those of you who are Generation Xers or not fans of the Power Rangers, pachinko is a vertical Japanese gambling machine where a player shoots a bunch of balls simultaneously upward. They come down through a dense forest of pins and the player tries to capture the falling balls in certain locations to earn even more balls. Volume is the idea. The strategy is not to be careful – the more balls shot, the more chance of winning.

By applying this to creating Design Directions, we could say that pinball is more like a traditional stage-gate process, where the idea is to eliminate ideas as early as possible. Using this approach, you can be sure that scarce R&D resources can be aimed very efficiently at a few potential winners. And there is nothing wrong with this principle of efficiency in some cases.

But if you are truly looking for Radical Design, this is not the way to go. The approach is too cautious. To start, there are usually a predefined arbitrary number of ideas that get the green light, killing other perfectly good ideas. A second issue is that in order to pass to the next stage, the idea must have a proven potential for success. Most of the time, there just isn’t enough information to prove this. And thirdly, what if you invest everything in a single idea that proves to be fool’s gold?

“Ideas are hypotheses. They should not be killed unless proven wrong.”

A better match for Radical Design is the pachinko approach. We don’t want to kill ideas for efficiency’s sake. We only kill ideas if there is proof that they won’t work. All other ideas should be run through the iteration loop some more. Why? Because at the early stages, iteration is cheap. But let’s be realistic. It would be a daunting task to develop fifty Design Directions. If we have too many ideas, you are going to have to kill some, if not many. There are several approaches to consider before the bloodbath begins.

At Studio Peter Van Riet, we have had quite a few discussions about how to make the best decisions when it comes to downsizing ideas. A lot of times, we combine related Design Directions. We try to avoid arbitrary decisions based on personal preferences. You cannot kill an idea because you would never use a product or service yourself, or your wife would never buy it, or you don’t like the color scheme.

Design Directions don’t just pop up out of the blue. They have taken time and investment. They have grown from simple ideas with research, thought and discussion. So even if we have a hunch about a Design Directions, we always try to be aware of our individual biases and involve people with opposing views. It is better to err on the side of caution than leave a Design Direction with potential behind at this stage. So, when it doubt, select it.

Read more

This article is an excerpt from our book Create Meaningful Stuff. It deals with the question: how do we, as business leaders, entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, innovators and marketeers create products and services that add value to our lives, that are smart, sustainable and meaningful?
If you enjoyed reading this article, make sure to follow our blog or check out our book.

Question your beliefs

We heard this one from a friend in a bar. “If you wake up every morning and tell yourself that your life sucks and you have an ugly wife, your life will suck and you will have an ugly wife. If you tell yourself that your life is great and that you’re sleeping next to a beautiful woman, your life will be great and you will sleep next to a beautiful woman.” And that was after many beers, so it certainly must be the truth.

The moral of this story is that all of us, no matter how open-minded we may be, are bound by the assumptions and beliefs that we hold to be true. Typically, assumptions that brought us success in the past will limit us in the future, preventing us from reaching new goals when the game changes.

To illustrate this, let’s take a look at a boutique hotel where the owner recently invested in expensive customized beds and shiny rain showers hoping to attract a younger, trendier clientele willing to pay a bit more for luxury. What the owner didn’t take into account is that many Airbnb renters, who tend to be in this younger, trendier customer profile, don’t mind sleeping on plain-old IKEA beds in not so tidy rooms because they are looking for an authentic experience and a great deal. Were the expensive beds and rain showers really worth it? Probably not. Based on an industry assumption, this investment had very little impact on the hotel’s business.

There are many more examples of industries that consider certain beliefs to be facts until customers stop sharing those beliefs. So when you investigate possible future scenarios, get people in the room who don’t share your assumptions. This can be tough and it can get really personal. But being aware of your own assumptions gives you the option to change those assumptions as the game changes.

Live the future

By now, we realize that the road to Radical Design doesn’t start with randomly generating ideas, but it requires a time investment and a process that examines the future with an open mind, considers different views, and pools different expertise around the table. So, what’s next?

Well, with the right people around the table, you start discussing the trends and drivers that may impact your business. By asking “what if” questions, you start to recognize the most critical drivers and trends. But a strictly factual description of a trend is not an open canvas on which to sketch the future. Too much of an analytical approach reduces the subject at hand. It loses its personality. The end goal is to enrich it. You can only achieve a rich impression of a future vision by sketching it.

At Studio Peter Van Riet, we refer to this as a Future Sketch. A Future Sketch doesn’t have to be written down as a text. It may just as well be shaped as a scenario, a movie, a drawing… whatever sparks your imagination the most.

An example

According to the United Nations, by 2050 66 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. For one of our projects, we knew we needed to really understand what the impact of this statement would be. So we thought through all the related drivers and trends and started building scenarios based on the various links. A possible tangible future scenario may look like this:

It is 2025. Agriculture and manufacturing productivity have accelerated in the past decade. Fewer people are needed in rural areas and in areas with heavy industry. In addition, the average level of education has also increased. People have moved to cities to find jobs in the service industry.

Take Sylvia, for example. Sylvia got her master’s degree in social sciences three years ago, but after a six-month trip through Asia, she decided that she didn’t want to live the 9-to-5 lifestyle. Sylvia started her own knitting shop downtown. This is costing her a pretty penny since real estate prices have skyrocketed.

Sylvia has many plans, but buying her own apartment isn’t one of them. Why would she get herself tied up in a mortgage to buy a tiny apartment, while she has her own room in her parents’ comfortable home just outside of the city? Besides, this arrangement includes free meals and laundry once in a while. Sylvia isn’t an exception. Many of her friends still live at Hotel Mama, too.

Of course, Sylvia needs privacy. She’s not downstairs with her parents all the time. They installed a shower in her bedroom and her bedroom is also her living room. She often invites friends, watches shows, creates new knitting patterns, does her accounting, eats and sleeps in her 18m2 room.

Sylvia doesn’t own a car. It is just too expensive and besides her knitting shop is in a car-free zone. She has a subscription to a car sharing service. And, if need be, she can borrow her Dad’s car, when he can part from it (boys and their toys).

You see, by developing this statistic into a scenario, we learn that not only will more people live in cities, but that living spaces will also become smaller, cars will become less attractive, and people will increasingly share stuff. These types of stories make up a Future Sketch, which serves a framework for relevant future-proof ideas.

Read more

This article is an excerpt from our book Create Meaningful Stuff. It deals with the question: how do we, as business leaders, entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, innovators and marketeers create products and services that add value to our lives, that are smart, sustainable and meaningful?
If you enjoyed reading this article, make sure to follow our blog or check out our book.

A critical factor is that radical innovation should be future-oriented. Lots of innovative ideas bounce around a couple of years before they break through. Right now, mobile wallets are on the brink of an innovation revolution, but mobile payment systems have been around for almost a decade.

Crash your crystal ball

So, as innovators, we need to look five to ten years ahead. Since it is not possible to predict the future, this is where it gets tricky. Many companies rely on business forecasts based on the current market trends. To counter the unpredictable nature of the future, they make best, middle and worst-case scenarios. This kind of planning works well if the underlying business drivers remain the same.

“But the nature of disruption is that underlying drivers change.”

Suppose you work in the airline industry. Your main drivers will most probably include the average utilization rate of your planes, the average fares paid by passengers, gate and on-the-ground times, optimizing routes and hubs, and fuel prices. So your forecasts will take into account oil prices, growth of GDP (gross domestic product) and new routes, airports expansion, travel trends and innovation aimed at shortening on-the-ground time, increasing fares and increasing utilization rate.

Now suppose that the Hyperloop project from Elon Musk, the co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX, becomes reality. The Hyperloop project is a controversial concept for a high-speed transportation system where capsules would travel through reduced-pressure tubes at jet speed. Using small, lightweight capsules, the system will be solar-powered and it could become a serious competitor for short-haul flights. When you forecast based on what happens within the boundaries of your industry, you probably never would have seen this one coming.

There are many possible futures

So if we can’t predict the future and we can’t forecast the future, then how should we go about it? Well, there is a nuance here. Instead of predicting the future, we should prepare ourselves for the future.

“It’s not a matter of being right, but being ready.”

That means investigating a range of possible futures, understanding the relevant trends and asking those important “what if” questions.

There are two types of trends to take into account: trends with a high probability and trends that are highly uncertain. For the high probability trends, the “what if” questions mostly have to do with timing: what if it happens next year? Or what if it happens in ten years? This will give you a number of starting points for possible futures.

For the more complex or uncertain situations, we like to borrow from the scenario planning method. Scenario planning stems from military intelligence. Analysts would generate different simulations, based on known facts as well as uncertainties, to try to anticipate the next move of the enemy. Since the 1970s, scenario planning has been used in the world of business.

Scenario planning helps us break out of our bad habits. We tend to focus on what we know and think within our comfort zone. The goal of scenario planning is to become aware of the things we don’t know, but which may impact our business. This awareness should help us prepare for potential high-impact changes or events.

The method boils down to this: determine which drivers have high impact and high unpredictability. These are the drivers you should prepare for. Because you can’t predict which direction they will go, you develop various scenarios for extreme cases.

Let’s take the travel industry as an example. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a high-impact and uncertain driver. If people earn money, they will travel. When there is a recession, we see that travel is one of the first expenses to be cut. Another high-impact uncertainty might be customer preferences. Today, many customers seem to prefer authentic experiences to luxurious accommodation, but will this last?

Now, let’s take the two most impactful and uncertain drivers. Since we are uncertain about the direction a driver will go, we will need to polarize each driver to the extreme. For example, for GDP, this means economic crisis vs. prosperity. For customer preferences, this means accommodation centric vs. experience-centric. When we put these extremes in a 2 x 2 matrix, the resulting four quadrants will be the starting point for our scenarios.

Whether you go for full-blown scenario planning or a scaled-down approach, the important thing is to be aware of the causal relationship between your business and drivers beyond your current industry. By reading the trends, you can watch out for critical events that might lead to a possible future scenario.

In the next post we will continue with our Future Sketch method and see why we should bring opposing views to the table and how to make trends more tangible.

Read more

This article is an excerpt from our upcoming book Create Meaningful Stuff. It deals with the question: how do we, as business leaders, entrepreneurs, designers, engineers and marketers create products and services that add value to our lives, that are smart, sustainable and meaningful?
If you enjoyed reading this article, make sure you follow our blog for more excerpts or updates on our book.