Reboot Update: Dina Mehta is talking about how tools as blogs, skype and wiki’s can be used for collaboration and research. Her example is how people all over the world collaborated in relation to the Tsunami disaster using these tools and it is a pretty strong case!
Dina is a qualitative researcher and works with companies doing exploratory research and ethnographical studies. It is really interesting seeing how technology can make customer research quicker and cheaper. In additions the same platforms can be used for co-creation, involving the consumers in the development of products, services and messages. Dina stresses that it is an easy and cheap way to get input from all over the world without having to go there (even though that would be much nicer) - and my take is that it gives smaller design consultancies an opportunity to include research and analysis services in their portfolios.
An example from the danish design industry is Designit and their Bluesky Pilots using digital photos from around the world in their work.
Interesting indeed - especially if you follow that thought and apply the same tools inside a company. Then you could build a complete company based on a decentralized self-organizing system…has this been done before? Is their any examples of design consultancy firms completly decentralized?
Another angle that pops up when Dina is using the Tsunami example is that - and I guess this is the same mechanics that needs to be in place in a corporate setting - a sense of urgency (much like the feeling within the organization must be in order to accept that business can not go on as usual) must be established. The organization must give customers a true sense of urgency in order to be able to involve the customer in research and/or development on behalf of the organisation. Customer must feel motivated and have an incentive to help out. In a sense the leadership within the organisation must be spread outside the organisation…the company must lead/help the customers to lead/help the company…
I guess I’m rambling now but nevertheless; whats your view on customer research and customer collaborative development and potential tools for this?