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Index Presentation Beyond the experience Design Scenario Design Process Design Concepts Next Steps Contact

“For those who wonder which will be the next revolution, I would say that the revolution is now” Andoni Luis Aduriz Awarded Basque Cook

KALON: (n.) beauty that is more than skin-deep.

KALON is a greek noun that means beauty that is more than skin-deep, and this is one of the reasons everything started.

We are DOT. We enjoy going deep into people’s emotions to understand the complex to make it simple and enjoyable. We look for that beauty that moves you inside, that makes you part of something bigger‌ the one that goes beyond the skin to touch you.

KALON was born from a design reflection, enjoying the intagible but obsessed with the tangible. It was born from the desire to make impact in the society understanding what affects deeply the human life.

KALON is an experiment of people from different backgrounds and with different profiles with the willingness to design a product from the begining to the end, from the research to the market, from the unique user to mass customization.

This document is the memory of the process we have lived, the steps we have done and the goals we have achieved.

You have in your hands KALON Project experiment. Enjoy.

Everything starts from a DOT Everything starts from a DOT. The dot indicates the starting point.

And this point is DOT. DOT was born because we wanted to change our environment and and bring positive impact to the society. We take the responsibility to leave a better place for the future generations and honor the time and space we are living. In order to change things, we have to lead by example, be proactive and be active agents designing the upcoming future.

We were born in XX century but we live in the XXI century mental models.

We understand past mental models but we see the new reality and the need to change behavior to adapt to it.

DOT doesn’t want to accept what has been given to us, so we want to create with the key elements of the new era. Collaborative ways of working, in a network, globally and embracing real social problems.

DOT Grow: We create Learning Experiences to make you grow. Learning by Doing, Team-Entrepreneurship, Innovative Service Design and Global Mindset.

DOT Destroy and Create: Understanding the whole meaning of design in the company, we work on a system design where organization, strategy and product/service design merge. Going deep in people’s needs and creating opportunities to make people happy.

Products that DOT: Relationship between products and people are becoming more and more complex nowadays so this complexity doesn’t give space for the attitude transformation. We work on products that tackle people’s needs driven by the emotionality and with the aim of changing some behavior or feeling.

Start from the DOT: A deep understanding and a brave immersion of a situation you are passionate about. We start from a DOT to create new groundbreaking projects.

To foster this vision we have a R&D&P (Research, Development and Prototyping) working line.

DOT working lines

Book references: Experiemce Economy -B. Joseph Pine II & James H. GilmoreAdded references: Reflections by Aiur Retegi, Phd student in Experience Design

Beyond the experience Everyone seem to be concerned about what do the customers really value, why do they buy our products or services and what can we do to make them happy or attract new customers. Many theories and tools are designed day by day to find out which are the elements that make the companies special, and what can they do to increase this value proposition.

From the last decade many papers have been written going deep into Experience Economy, understanding how to design an experience and trying to visualize the key elements for a meaningful experience.

Pine and Gilmore reflect deeply into this topic in their book The Experience Economy, how the cultural and social trends are evolving into something more intangible not only according to the service but also taking into account the experience the user wants to live, the story the company wants to tell.

The last years some voices arise saying that the next step of the experience design is the transformation of the user. The willingness to change

our minds towards a more deep and meaningful experience seems to be the next step of the experience. According to this trend the user co-creates with the company, the experience is not fully designed so the user takes active part in the creation of the experience in order to be a multi focus creation. Additionally, in this multi transformational experience creation, the user-company relationship is even closer than in the previous stages, the information flux is constant from one side to the other and the emotions take crucial role on the stage. You might be wondering why do we position the emotion so in the center, so I would invite you to reflect if you would let yourself be transformed by someone you don’t trust.

In the already popular graphic they show the evolution from commodity to experience, going stage by stage through product and service. They conclude explaining how designing an experience for your customers can differentiate you from your competitors and offer a premium service.

The Experience Economy evolution by Pine and Gilmore. It shows how the business logic goes from the commodity to a product then a service and now the experience in order to create added value in companies. Nevertheless, some voices say that after the experience comes the transformation phase.

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From the whole bunch of buzzwords related to this topic there is one sentence from Hazzenzahl that could bring some light due to it’s simplicity, he says that Experience Design is about “ creating meaningful experiences through devices”. Well, I find this little conclusion as pretty significant, although it might sound common sense. However, the term meaningful experience has been described in many ways, all of them pretty vague and abstract from a practical perspective. An experience is a lapse of time that causes changes is the “user”/person, but what is meaningful and what is not? What is meaning?

According to wikipedia, Meaning may refer to: • Meaning (linguistics), meaning which is communicated through the use of language • Meaning (non-linguistic), extra-linguistic meaning (intentional communication without the use of language), and natural meaning, where no intentions are involved at all • Meaning (semiotics) has to do with the distribution of signs in sign relations • Meaning as a relationship between ontology and truth • Meaning as a reference or equivalence • Meaning (philosophy of language) • Meaning as values, a value system or as derived from value theory • Meaning (existential), as it is understood in contemporary existentialism • The meaning of life, a notion concerning the nature of human existence See also, Semantics for a general article on the study of meaning

Among them, the initial statement and discussion explained in Meaning (non-linguistic) seem to be the most interesting one: “The sense that sentient creatures have that the various objects of our universe are linked is commonly referred to as a person’s sense of “meaning”. This is the sense of meaning at work when asking a person when they leave a theater, “What did that movie mean to you?” In short, the word “meaning” can sometimes be used to describe the interpretations that people have of the world.”

Semantics is the study of meaning, which is a term related to association of things, how things make sense to an individual. A very important aspect of it lies on its subjectivity, since we are talking about a mental construction in the end, although the western society has been built around “universal meanings” or conventions, such as common sense or, in general, everything we call “objective” stuff.

Therefore, if meaning is a highly subjective construction, how can we even try to design something meaningful? Meaning lies on the beholder, but according to basic psychology, human beings share several universal psychological needs and shared knowledge-values-feelings… In the end, we all share, in a bigger or smaller extent, a way of making meaning of things. Of course, differences exist within the myriad of cultural, social and personal circumstances.

// BEYOND THE EXPERIENCE

What is meaning?

In their book Making meaning, Diller, Shedroff and Rhea identify 15 (and say there are of course more) different meanings which transcend cultural boundaries and they define them as “experiences with global appeal”: - Accomplishment - Beauty - Creation - Community - Duty - Enlightment - Freedom - Harmony - Justice - Oneness - Redemption - Security - Truth - Validation - Wonder As can be seen, these are all hardly quantifiable and totally intangible experiences, so how do we end up designing stuff that will enable them?

Although we are adressing some key points for meaningful experiences and if all of them are intangible what differs from individual experiences to the overall “Experience” concept, and then the debate question will arise: which one of the two should be addressed when “Designing for Experiencing”?

An experience is a change perceived by a subject in a certain lapse of time. It can be related to external triggers (people, objects, events or actions) or internal issues (dreams, thoughts…), and the consequence of having one is a change in one’s way of understanding things or the knowledge gained through that experience. This knowledge is also called “Experience”.

Making this distinction between the two is very important, since the connection between the two is not as straight-forward as it can seem. The memory we hold of a given experience changes over time and is very different from the experience itself.

As can be seen from the previous definitions, an Experience is in the end whatever a person perceives as a change, but when related to Design experience drifts a little bit towards a CAUSE of that experience. The cause can be an object, a service, an event, a space or whatever that can be designed and that a person can Experience.

In this point there’s a discussion among authors whether an Experience can be designed on the first place. Since an experience is something subjective, contextual and can’t happen the same way twice even to the same person, many authors say that it is impossible to Design Experiences and the only thing that can be done is to Design for Experiencing, which means to build a scaffold for the person to experience such a thing. This is an interesting point to discuss the utility of Experience Design, but in the end I think that this is more a semantic discussion that everybody should be aware of.

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If we talk about an experience that is linked to a product or a service, most likely the user will have several interactions (and therefore experiences) with it, which makes the whole Designing for Experience more complex. Obviously, it is difficult to design every single experience (even in the case of interactive systems between the user and the product/service/…), but maybe a general experience could be “designed”. However, even in this case, contextual factors will change and the experience will be evolving over time.

In this point, there are different viewpoints towards the question of designing for a single experience which is meaningful, or designing for the general experience (the so called user experience) that encompasses the overall collection of experiences.

Having reflected about experiencing, does it happen the same with the transformation? How can we design for transformation?

Kalon project is an exploratory time to research about how can be adressed the transformational design. Understanding the per se transformational scenario such as assisted reproduction we want to find out the core elements to design for it. As we have reflected so far, there is no point on designing just for a transformational stage forgetting about the previous ones. Thus, if we take the previous Pine and Gilmore graphic we propose a new understanding of the process that embraces the previous ones in order to make meaning and take everything as a whole and not a separate stages.

As we have explained before the intangible elements take a center stage so everything is more vague an abstract talking about the things we cannot touch. One of the biggest challenges of Kalon project is to design a product that embraces the intangible elements into a tangible object. New technology devices and opportunities bring new ways of designing products, so how can we design for a social impact and deep meaning?

That’s the big question we make to ourselves.

We see the transformation as a different products with services, providing an experience to the user that changes something into them.

// BEYOND THE EXPERIENCE

The team Collaborative Design It goes without saying that we live in a more and more connected world, where the networked realtionships became essential in this global reality.

We often say that the future will be collaborative or it won’t be, meaning that opening company boundaries will give nothing but good results and better understanding of the environment. We work hard to understand our environment and this project was not going to be the exception.

Although the first idea emerged from DOT we quickly realized that it was an open project to work on. As much we talked about the topic as much we understood the need to bring different perspectives to the project, new ways of understanding the reality, people from different backgrounds and disciplines.

The multidisciplinary team was a key point from the begining, nevertheless it wasn’t until we finished the previous research that we built the team.

Arteklab Interaction Arteklab Interaction leaded by the artist Jaime de los Rios, have as the main goal to create art through technology. These two electronic engeneers have deep knowledge of how the technology works as well as how people interact with it. Some years ago they created in collaboration with Jon Cuervas Open Arch project, that consisted of creating the future home designing the interaction the user has in their daily basis with technology at home.

The future will be collaborative or it won’t be.

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Dakit Design Product design oriented company working hard to design new products at the same time they teach the value of design to the society. Apart of many other products they designed the Orca bicycle for Orbea company that was used by Euskaltel Euskadi cyclist team in le Tour de France some years ago. Ainara and Oskar understand perfectly how product-service system design works and how it adds value to companies.

Romain Meunier French born and London based graphic and interactive designer and artist. Mixing high and low tech, his work sits in between a virtual realm and the physical world, bringing together data flows and human senses through a personal blend of humour, cultural references and social interaction.

His most recent works encourage a reflection on subjects relating to the evolution of haptic communication in Western societies, body perception, taboo around nudity and how playful circumstances can bring strangers together.

DOT DOT is by nature a multidisciplinary team that aims to make social impact through design. Understanding the global reality where East and West merge more and more, DOT wants to create a global platform mixing this two realities in order to have a better world. They have long experience collaborating with Mondragon Team Academy, the unit of innovation and entrepreneurship of Mondragon Unibertsitatea.

Is not only the complementary profiles that create Kalon team but also the future vision and the sensibility for emotions and design.

Multidisciplinar team

Design Scenario After many years working in design we reflected about the most common scenarios we worked in, the role design played there and how does it change before and after applying some design solutions. We had some clear conclusions and we ended up wondering what happen with the most struggling situations in human life such as death and birth that have been hardly ever a playground for design.

We realized that we could design for life understanding the beginning and the end of that, how the human being interacts with this two moments and how it affects our day by day.

We started going deep into death services, how are they designed, how users perceive them and we collected some data researching about people’s experiences with this kind of services. Not only in

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Western societies but also we looked to the East to have a wider view of what was going on and compare the two realities. As a main conclusion, we realized that many people have difficulties to talk about this kind of emotions but once they had the place and the situation to talk about they needed to share those experiences with others and reflect about them.

Reflecting about death, we came across with the modern perception of birth. How the social changes affect the decisions to have babies and the heritage we have from our parents related to this perception.

We started researching this topic too so we discovered that more and more people need to go to assisted reproduction clinics due to the gap our life has regarding our biology life and our culture/ social life. The human body is programmed to have babies at 25 but

we postpone this decision 5 to 10 years, or even more, so it’s almost compulsory to ask for help. Nevertheless, although is theoretically accepted many people have emotional problems in this treatments and this suffering affects directly the success of the process.

After the research we decided to define better this scenario so we could design something to improve this experience. We said before that this scenario is transformational per se, the users will go through a physical treatment and in case that the treatment ends successfully their life will

never be the same again, they will have a baby to take care of.

Hypothesis

After defining this scenario we have this hypothesis:

If we understand deeply the needs, aspirations and fears in this struggling moments of human life we could transfer this knowledge to other scenarios where the needs are not so deep but keep the same pattern.

// DESIGN SCENARIO

Process

Research

We interviewed different people that went through Assited Insemination treatment, different user profiles and diverse couples and people. In order to have a wider understanding of the situation we talked to clinics and some biologists that work day by day with the patients of these clinics.

Here some insights: “ I felt I was ill, I went to the clinic because I had something bad on me, I was not able to be mum naturally” “ This process is so uncertain that you do whatever you think it’s on your hands, even if it has no sense medically” “ The decision is mainly a female decision and there is a difference if it is a common project or individual project” “This process is couple ruining process, they suffer so much pressure” “ It’s much better if she is relaxed” “ She suffers all the process, he is not a crucial player and sometimes he doesn’t know how to help her” After doing the research, we did a deep reflection based on the Need Cards from Folkwang University of Arts.

The User Experience and ergonomics department Folwang University of Arts leaded by Marc Hassenzhal did a research in United States of America and in South Korea trying to understand which are the key elements for positive experiences. Any positive experience involves the fulfillment of psychological needs, such as the need for competence or relatedness.

In many cases, needs are fulfilled through activities, “enactments of daily life”, in which things play a crucial role. This creates an interesting opportunity for design. They end up in a conclusion of 6 basic needs that are fulfilled in positive experiences.

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Popularity Feeling that you are liked, respected and have influence over others rather than feeling like a person whose advice or opinions nobody is interested in.

Universal needs

Competence Feeling that you are very capable and effective in your actions rather than feeling incompetent or ineffective.

Autonomy Feeling like you are the cause of your own actions rather than feeling that external forces or pressures are the cause of your actions.

Security Feeling safe and in control of your life rather than feeling uncertain and threatened by your circumstances.

Stimulation Feeling that you get plenty of enjoyment and pleasure rather than feeling bored and under stimulated by life.

Relatedness Feeling that you have regular intimate contact with people who care about you rather than feeling lonely and uncared for.

Based on these 6 needs and the research we did we wanted to select which were lacking on Assisted Insemination process. Based on the collected data and quotes we choose Autonomy/competence as a complete lose over the process and of your body. Relatedness, the need to share with someone close the feelings and emotions. Security, the uncertainty of the process creates lack of security of what is going to happen. Finally we realized that there is no stimulation in the process, although you might think the baby is something the user is looking for this process has no sing of stimulation to the patient.

Once we selected the four/five needs we see the need to create different persona in order to have a general overview of the potential users we were designing for. We ended up with four different users:

// DESIGN PROCESS

1. Disney couple: This is a couple that loves each other, they are socially accepted and they have good position economically. They are in good conditions physically and emotionally.

2. The Rockstar mum: All she wants in life is to be a mum, this project is an individual project. She is in the center stage and her husband doesn’t take any decision.

3. Homosexual couple: They accept from the beginning that they have to go through this process if they want to have children. They have gone through social acceptance phase so this process doesn’t seem to be taboo for them.

4. Single mum: She takes the decision alone and she goes through the process without a couple. She is independent and with a big sense of autonomy.

Ideation Based on the needs we wanted to ideate different strategies people use to fulfill those needs we selected as the key ones. We forgot the design scenario for a moment and we ideate around the needs using different profiles (an old lady, Mary Poppins, Batman or a techy guy) to make the dynamic richer. We did the strategies and then we chose the most interesting ones to bring to our design scenario and create new solutions from them.

One of the most interesting points we visualized was the use of the senses in order to work on stimulation and relatedness. The use of different languages to create the experience of relatedness forgetting about the pure semantic.

// IDEATION

Concepts The senses were something we wanted to play with and apart from that we realized that we already have many objects in our homes or workplaces that many times we don’t use. Creating a new object to interact with was complicated, many questions arose by this time such as: how can we add the value to the object for the user to use it day by day if it is related with the emotional? In this product overcrowded scenarios how can we create the difference? In this reflections we realized that maybe was not necessary to create a product from the scratch but use the existing ones to make the difference.

Based on those reflections and the sense stimulation idea we generate the following concept to design for: A family of common use products that are connected to facilitate emotion sharing through different languages.

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Shower interactive pannel

Interactive Pillow

Next steps Now that the concept we want to prototype is clear we need to create the first phisical prototypes and test them with the first lead users. After the testing phase and if they work well we will define better the requirements of the product and analyze the business model.

At the same time of the prototyping we need to create the whole story of the transformation experience inside the Artificial Insemitantion treatment. As we said before, this experiences are not only based in the products but in the system that they are interacting with, so we also need to design the system based on the needs and aspirations we discovered in the research phase.

We cannot affirm if our hypothesis is true yet, but we receive very good feedback on the work we are doing.

For more information please contact us: Irune Gonzalez Cruz

DOT Design Director & Co-founder igonzalez@feeldot.com

Olatz Ibarretxe DOT Creative Director & Co-founder oibarretxe@feeldot.com

www.feeldot.com

// CONTACT