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CULTURAL CANVAS
A PROJECT ABOUT BUSINESS, INNOVATION & VALUES Gianluca Menini
2013 / 2014
TABLE OF CONTENT 1.
Aknowledgement
2.
Introduction
3.
Desk Research 2.1 Experience economy 2.2 Design Vs. Business 2.3 Empathy Vs. Business 2.4 Culture Vs. Business 2.5 Case Studies
4.
Insight / Opportunities 4.1 Stakeholders 4.2 Insight #1 4.3 Insight #2 4.4 Insight #3 4.5 Insight #4 4.6 Insight #5
5.
Concept Development 5.1 Prototyping & Testing 5.2 Prototyping & Testing 5.3 Methods Case Studies
6.
Cultural Canvas 6.1 What is Innovation? 6.2 Blueprint 6.3 User Journey 6.4 Website
7.
Values
8.
References
INTRODUCTION "In Italy, primary and secondary education have been sharply focused on the humanities, making culture an essential part of the personality of entrepreneurs. Management sciences, in contrast, have developed much more slowly than in other countries (almost none of these entrepreneurs had an MBA). These managers somehow did not come in contact with what prevented other executives from leveraging their cultural assets. This does not mean that these leaders did not fulfill their role as executives. Simply, their management practice was completely different from existing theories." Surely my native country influence the creation of this project. I've always been extremely fascinated about how culture can become a vehicle of both innovation and tradition at the same time. Scotland, like Italy, was and still is home of businesses, factories and manufacturers which carry a strong crafting and industrial knowledge. In the last two decades we have seen often companies loosing their capacity to link back what they do with who they are, but nowadays, in light of the contemporay economic situation, they have an historic opportunity to transform again the way they do things responding to a society that is calling the need of new values and meanings. Cultural Canvas it's a project that want to look how businesses can use positively this opportunity. Let's consider the economic situation a consequence more than a cause, so we can start to look again at jobs, systems and organizations in the same way we look at the activities and lives of people. A company knowledge it's not just about how well and efficiently it produces objects and services, it's part of an heritage as a culture.
EXPERIENCE ECONOMY To understand the current economic context, the so called “experience economy”, as the author and co-founder of Strategic Horizons consultancy Joe Pine calls it during his TED Talk conference back in 2004, first we have to go back to the beginning, when everything was based on commodities. Basically, the things that we grow, raise or pull out of the ground. We extracted them out of the ground to sell them on the open marketplace; commodities were the basis of the agrarian economy. A major change happened with the coming of the industrial revolution, where goods became the predominant economic offer, so people started to use commodities as raw materials to be able to make or manufacture these goods. At this point of the history, we moved from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy. What we saw next, over the last 50-60 years, was the commoditization of goods. Commoditized: basically when goods are treated like a commodity, where people don’t care about who makes them, how and where. The most important, valuable aspect is just one … the price. The antidote to commoditization is customization: Joe Pine suggests that customizing a good automatically turned it into a service, because it has done just for a particular person, it’s delivered on demand to that individual person. So recently we moved from an industrial economy to a service-based economy, but in the last 10-20 years services have started to become commoditized as well. In the Digital Era, even Internet is commoditizing goods as well as the multitude of services it can provide. The main question at this point is: what happens if we customize a service? To find an answers we have to force ourselves to consider new scenarios: it’s time to move to a new level of economic value, beyond the goods and the services, turning them into experiences. This is the reason why we’re shifting to an experience economy, where experiences are becoming the predominant economic offering. Consequently, it becomes important to consider the main characteristics which contribute to create, express and deliver an experience. In fact, there is a basic paradox: no one can have an inauthentic experience, but no businesses can provide one because they all produce man-made objects, and all the things which come along with them have something inauthentic. An experience happens inside of us; it’s people’s reaction to events that happened in front of them,
but we can just create more or less natural or artificial stimuli for these experiences since in any case they can’t be completely natural. However, everyone has a desire for the authentic, that’s why it’s becoming the new consumer sensibility: the buying criteria by which consumers are choosing who are they going to buy from, and what they’re going to buy. So, if authenticity is becoming the basis of the economy, we need to rethink about which is the new imperative that businesses should embrace to respond to the change, and match this imperative with the consumer sensibility. In the agrarian economy we were supplying commodities; in the industrial economy, it was about controlling costs; in the service economy it is about improving quality. Now, with the experience economy, it’s about rendering authenticity: people need to perceive offering as authentic. From a company perspective, there are then two dimensions of authenticity: the first one is about being true to itself, the second is about being what the company says it is to others.
Are the economic offering businesses provide true? And are businesses true to themselves? Are they what they say they are to others? These 3 essential questions become crucial nowadays for a business to succeed, and understanding its own story it’s essential for a firm to avoid to fall down on this points because of not being true to itself and thereby repudiating the knowledge which comes with it. A company must recognize where its heritage comes from and what it is, because what the business has done in the past limits what it can do in the future. If a company wants to reflect what it says it is, it has to provide places for people to experience it both inside and outside the firm; it’s not enough anymore to just advertise a brand or a status. Nowadays the great “E-volution” represents an immense commercial opportunity and an optimal source of great international visibility, every type of business can have finally the same kind of tools to be known and appreciated all over the world, through Internet and websites, delivering their popularity often limited by local boundaries without having to deal with unsustainable costs. However, while providing a significant opportunity for international demand linked to the strengths of
locally based and high-end brands, Internet it’s the place where being aware of how to use your own abilities and knowledge to make unique original products and deliver them as experiences becomes fundamental to remain competitive. Within the broad landscape such as the world wide web, individual business all over the world are displayed together and, although they make unique products and deliver customized services, they will always find other competitors that will create similar high valuable artifacts. What can make the difference in this new global market certainly can’t be found in the lowest price and neither solely in the production and quality excellence. It is about the cultural identity, the specific knowledge of the company and the people who leave their personal touch as an indelible signature of their work. In this multitude of products, culture is still the main ingredients that allows the creation of new radical forward-looking values to deliver.
DESIGN Vs. BUSINESS Design-thinking, and its creative approach to problems and opportunities, is gaining more and more attentions among businesses across every sector and market. Even if this momentum is probably at one of its highest peak nowadays, because of the need to constantly show tangible benefits as a result of every action and investments inside the companies (in financial outcomes or in terms of time and resources), most of the time even those places where there is a positive incentive to innovate and expand the horizons of the company’s attitudes and approaches, two mistakes frequently occur: companies tend to miss all the “intangible� part of their business, along with the potential opportunities hidden behind it, and they try to replicate design methods in a predictable way. There is a great buzz around all the popular theories of user-centered innovation: every company now gradually starts to see as a mandatory process the observation of customers behaviours to understand their needs. If the experience economy, people come first: how companies which claim their willingness to make and sell user-centered products can do it without having a working environment and an organization which is user-centered itself? Companies think about designers with the perspective of creating things which are stylish, and nowadays especially user-centered, in order to differentiate themselves. Indeed, design usually makes a difference, but as this approach will become more and more common among every type of company, it will start to loose its power to differentiate, not being distinctive anymore. In attempting to mimic the language of business, design seems to follow the pattern: designers should provide ways to explore of companies improving their capability to harness their precious asset and knowledge. Design research should provide methodologies and tools which transform processes into something which can be predictable. They should rather build variety, alternative which explore the "intangible" challenging the existing vision of the company. On this perspective the culture of the business becomes extremely relevant to evaluate the insights provided by design methods and processes, in order to create new meanings and, therefore, experiences. It is not about questioning the essential value of usercentered design, neither about styling and creativity, which are actually relevant for incremental innovation, but to provide tools to help companies identify and express different attitudes and skills.
EMPATHY Vs. BUSINESS In the experience economy, user-centered companies need to embrace empathy as the new paradigm around which to organize their business. When a firm develops an identity which is shared with the culture of its customer, that is aware of what’s going on in the society, it becomes able to see new opportunities faster. Since empathy brings courage and convictions, companies can ensure the quality of what they make and at the same time are more willing to take risks doing something new. Empathy blurs the line that there is in between inside and outside the company: rather than seeing themselves and their customers as separated entities, companies need to start to see themselves as part of the same community. Humans are a social, caring species. Our limbic brain, which helps us to form lasting emotional connections with other people, make us curious about the feelings of other people. The ability to empathize is what separates us from lower-order creatures. It allows us to communicate and collaborate with others, and it allows us to read between the lines to glean information that may not be explicitly stated. Most companies adopt an ethically neutral position just focused on self-preservation; in this way they lack any sense for the impact that their actions have on people, and this goes back to how they’re organized. Modern capitalism has systematically sought to suppress the need to connect with other people, but there are tangible costs in doing this and it’s not enough to produce user-centered objects or services. Companies tend to loose sight of the fact that their real business doesn’t exist on paper: “It’s not personal, it’s business”. But considering how much time job activities take up in people’s lives, companies should consider their business as something much more personal. In fact, in a lot of business environments the applause is often saved only for tangible business success: big customer wins, a great financial quarter, etc. But in a supposed design thinking culture, most people are motivated by whether they created something beautiful, stretched a boundary, broke a barrier, or learned something new. So there should be a balance between the two aspects, and companies should spend more time celebrating the content: celebrating the output of the collaboration of its employees as much or even more than the business success it ultimately drives.
Empathy comprehends how and why the values, norms, behaviours and aspirations can influence and shape a firm vision, and how these factors respond to changes that happen outside and inside the company. Ultimately, it's an ongoing and collaborative quest: every person inside a company has his own personal culture and his personal vision of the business, because every person relentlessly and often implicitly built it by simply being immersed in the company environment. Designers should provide processes and places for people to express and experience their own culture, their social explorations, experiments, and relationships in both private and corporate settings, instead of following the culturally neutral or even averse working environments that are usually created by the companies, and help them to pull a side of the business which is much more "human", and often just remains latent, but it's the most valuable asset a company can have to significantly connect its needs with its customers in a enduring, sustainable and fulfilling way. Companies which provide a shared, interactive and directly communicated human context, can create a positive impact of the decision processes because people involved in defining their experiences, shaping their knowledge, matching it with their behaviours and attitudes. It can make a major difference, because companies which systematically dull the potential resources hidden in the connection between people, look good on paper but ignore possible impacts of their actions. Especially in times where the economy creates unstable, hectic fast-changing situations, empathy is one competency that companies can’t afford not to develop. It has to be triggered by human contacts, and can help businesses to move more quickly, maybe even securing the future of their organizations, fueling their growth: innovation can start with empathy.
“Empathy is one competency that companies can’t afford not to develop. It can help them to move more quickly, make better decisions,it can even secure the future of their organization. All that innovation can start with empathy.”
DEV PATNAIK Founder and Principal - Jump Associates
CULTURE Vs. BUSINESS
just with making goods, or learning to make goods, but with ensuring that production, consumption, and exchange scale ever more meaningful peaks of prosperity.
"Many people argue we are living the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, but what if the downturn was actually a Great Transformation instead?”
Meaning Organizations, following Haque’s theory, consider valuable products or services only when they have a positive economic impact, so when their impact create authentic economic value, not value which is merely transferred from one to another.
As mightily as governments, central banks, and scholars have labored, a jobless, fruitless, and suspiciously meaningless recovery has begun. Perhaps that's because the recession wasn't truly a recession. The so called “noughties” (2000–2009) saw jobs and wealth creation, median wage growth, not just marginal, but nil or negative. Today long-term unemployment issues have exploded, and lot of jobs seem to be just vanished. On the other side big corporations are hoarding cash, investing in the global market meanwhile yesterday’s jobs are replaced at lower and lower cost. Also yesterday’s factories, fleets, brands, products or “outputs” will be replaced too. But a better and very different global economy made up of novel, more beneficial industries, more purposive types of organizations, and more passionate work will bring radically more fruitful approaches to commerce, trade, and exchange. We’re in the midst of a lengthy transition from a lackluster present, to an uncertain future. What we might call the age of wisdom is being painfully and noisily born? In this era, it’s the ability to make up for the shortcomings of the prior decades, the crashing economic engine that gave us plenty materially, but has left us spiritually, relationally, emotionally, and developmentally empty, that will make the difference. The age of wisdom is about attaining a more authentic prosperity, one that doesn’t just “grow,” but that sustainability nurtures the growth of people, communities, and society." To understand the necessity of this shift, again we have to look back to the history. First, there was what we might call the executing organization that capitalized on the industrial age factory; success was about churning out the most commodities. Then there was the so called “Learning Organization” (defined by the author and MIT lecturer Peter Senge); success was about integrating knowledge faster than rivals. However, seems that neither learning nor doing are sufficient for 21st-century prosperity. That’s why people like Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, founder of Bubble generation and writer for the Harvard Business Review declares we are entering a new phase, which he refers with the name of “Meaning Organization”. Meaning Organizations create micro- and macrostructures that fuel radically meaningful work, life, and play. They’re concerned first and foremost not
Questioning if solutions actually make people tangibly and authentically better off, it's important for companies to do because the industrial age created plenty of negative outcomes. We have enough Big Macs, SUVs and McMansions. Companies are "getting used" to think about how to be user-centered, but being a Meaning Organizations go further. It’s being outcomes-centric, seeking not merely to satisfy consumers, but to better both them and the people inside the company itself. Companies usually put financial interests first, but hopefully the user-centric approach will be the first step, leading to a shift in companies priorities. If people should be at the top of a business scale of priorities means putting people (and tomorrow’s generations) at first and consider them within the communities, the society and organization they live in. Means the company must understand the outcomes of a product, service, or of the business model on all. As designers we should provide the tool to trigger companies to go beyond the immediate profit, asking questions like what is the larger, more enduring conception of prosperity that an organization can contribute toward? How can companies adopt different parameters than just trying to perform over their competitors in terms of operational efficiency and customer services? Considering themselves as causes they have to question which effects they want to produce. On this perspective innovation means to embrace ethic, culture, values and integrity. Companies carry an embedded cultural value in their work, but this value is suspended on a productive, dialectical tension between an economic and a cultural view. This provides the context in which a more “cultural” work can takes place, even in businesses and companies which are not directly related with the “cultural industries”. Until now the economic value has become relatively dominant, and despite the current attention toward a more “creative” approach to economic logics and methods, it still appears to diminish other cultural and social values: we are still experiencing the kind of economist thinking that tends to manage creative processes and productions in an attempt to make them more efficient, but it does it in ways that increasingly undermine ethical and social conditions, more than building resources on people existences through their meaningful lives and ambitions.
Design should then continue to provide an indeterminate context for culture, in order to allow explorations of other alternative scenarios beyond those established and known, since this is not just only an utopic desire of our discipline, but it also gives us the best guarantee of future accumulation. Cultural value arises from the contexts of production where ideas, qualities, characters, content and form are significant because they shape the subsequent value generated in circulation and consumption; therefore companies workplaces are the significant primary source of cultural value. However the cultural value is generally identified in terms and shapes of objects, commodities, services, but lacks a work-focused or labour perspective: we see the value just when it has made concrete in objects. But in most of the cases the values of the “cultural artifact” produced is an outcome of the internal relationships between people and work processes. The ethical intentions and practices of workers are significant in the final evaluation of the integrity of the artifact: this ethical connection between the work and the object is significant because it can be related to the lived conditions and intentions of the people beyond it, and not just the artifact market price, or perceived aesthetic essence.
So designers who are promoting a “creative experience economy” divested of any sense of the necessary tensions between culture and economics are somehow missing the essential dynamic of the relationships between culture and economy, narrowing the potential debate about companies own values. On the top of these consideration, workplaces are the ground of the tension between cultural and economic value. The question of how to achieve new cultural values is often neglected in the design-thinking economy, where often there is instead an assumption that any kind of work is valuable. A more critical discourse around work within cultural policy making would begin to address the consequences of a “creative economy” instrumental-ism. Culture as we understand it today, exist inside the market system which grants it recognition and legitimacy. However, it should be use as a possibility to improve or transform the quality of the system where this culture takes place, so companies become the vanguard of this exploration, and the people behind the companies can actively bring their own values into the discussion.
“We should once again enhance and learn how to produce the skills and the culture of making artifacts, instead of only produce the object itself.” P. DAVERIO Art Critic
“Even the cut has a culture that can be transmitted.” A. GIROLAMI Owner - Due Ancore
CASE STUDIES There is one particular case study which triggered my research, orientating my attention on small businesses and how they can re-evaluate their asset within the context of a changing economic paradigm, using internal experiences as valuable vehicles of new opportunities. A company from Maniago, near Udine, in Italy, used its cultural background to completely transform the business and overcome a critical financial situation. "Due Ancore" (Two Anchors), and its owner Andrea Girolami, for years had produced butcher cleavers for a German multinational company that sold them under its own brand around the world. Then in 2010, in Stuttgart they decided that it was cheaper to purchase in China: from one day to another Due Ancore, founded in 1885 by the great-grandfather of Andrea, lost three-quarters of sales and it was on the verge of a shutdown. It was just a that point when Girolami re-thought the whole activity by designing a new line of knives, outsourcing at the same time the entire production. In Maniago there is in fact an entire district that for centuries has been working blades, carrying an immense heritage; there are about 80 workshops for the company to lean on. He invents a new brand, "Lamami", and a new idea of packaging, in the form of books made of recycled paper. The whole concept was not a simple stylistic choice, but it wants to convey the idea that "even the cut has a culture to be transmitted."
The company created different set of knifes, teaching the customers their specific uses in relation with food (eg. with cheese and fruits, lobster, bread and jam, etc). Today, two years after the official launch, Lamami product are on sale in some of the most important shops on the planet, from Galeries Lafayette to Harrods. And yet in the store of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The company has almost recovered entirely its turnover, and at the same time is also bringing benefits to an entire industrial district, changing a common mentality among businesses in the area which initially aw negatively the choice of not producing anymore internally, but to rely on others. Now the brand has gone from butchers fairs to Moma and other design museum exhibitions. A huge change, building from scratch a company that has always been a sub-contractor. Working to supply third-party companies, especially to produce for big brands, has been for long time the winning formula for many small businesses among different fields and markets. Today, however, this model is proving to be dangerous, especially if the bulk of the revenue comes from a single customer. Faced with the crisis in fact they can restructure, cut and maybe move abroad. A local industrial association from Treviso (Confartigianato), following the example of Andrea Girolami has started to study an exit strategy and together with local businesses, it's working to develop a more conscious approach teaching them how to differentiate their market by adding new values to their products, expanding the variety of orders and looking at opportunities abroad, in different context. This in order to offer them a chance to take a step up in the productive chain, which means starting to produce for their own brand; a step that still just few companies dare to try, because being able to make a product well it’s not enough in this cases. Since then other companies have followed the inspiring path of "Due Ancore" by launching new projects. A good example is "Let Producers De Brands": a project which bring together three spin-offs from third-party companies, in order to create products under their own brand. The artisans and manufacturers put their knowledge while the companies care about the design and the art direction-part. Theis partnership between factories has become really well structured: the firm "Caon", also near Udine, together with the company "Carraro Salzano", from Venice, has launched a line of wooden furniture after 60 years of working with metals. In this case Carraro uses Caon as a supplier for the wood parts, vice versa for those in metal . "It's like having another business inside the company" sums up one of its partners, Adriano Carraro.
How can small businesses identify experiences behind products they deliver?
STAKEHOLDERS I got in contact with Andrea, owner of Due Ancore, interviewing him to better understand the complexity of re-evaluating a business. After this first interview I decided to contact other businesses, both from Italy and Scotland, for two main reasons: - understanding the differences and similarities of two distinct and indipendent system, with their own economical, social and political situation; - collecting insights from a familliar and well known environment (italian), but balancing its influences on my approach with a more unknown reality (scottish), which give me at the same time the opportunity to work face to face to develop and test practically my design proposals. Thanks to these interviews and their availability in engaging with my project, discussing topics coming from my desk research, but also questioning their own assumptions, I got a deeper understanding of many of their business related issues, which helped me to link our discipline in a more direct way with their context. The 7 companies which collaborated with me providing an exstensive panoramic view over disparate aspects of their business are from heterogeneous backgrounds, and targeted toward completely different markets. To have a more proficient conversation with all of them, I decided to conduct an interative circle of questions-answers -questions. Instead of just speaking with each company representant just one time, I wanted to involve them through the different stages of the project. In some cases, I was particularly lucky I could speak also with different members of the same firm: it has revealed particularly useful in the later stages of the project to test my ideas through different perspective within the same organization. During the iteration process I started with more general questions and gradually refined my inquiries following the feedbacks that each company was providing, bringing the insights from one context to another. What started as just a iterative "circle", then became a way for me to map information, differencies and common problems. It was also particularly interesting to show them that they have in common much more issues and opportunities than what they tend to think when it comes of separate, individual business enviroments.
INSIGHTS “You need to spend time with your colleagues to teach them a lifestyle: to make use of our knowledge and our heritage, we have to create a tradition. It’s like passing down old know how and habits using new knowledge and new habits.” “The choice to produce locally brings many difficulties, but at the end is beneficial because we are coherent with ourselves and when you’re a small young business, reputation is everything. The development and the future of your company is based on your reputation.” “So it’s about trying to make that complication as simple as we can; the experience taught us that is also about designing for production, not just about the aesthetic and the functionality.” “Working in a factory it’s not very cool at the moment, not fashionable. Not many British kids want to work in a factory, so it’s important for me to reinvent what a factory can be… The space to look cool, a different working environment compared to big factories and I think that’s important.” “It’s also hard enough to find people to work here nowadays, so in ten years it’s gonna be nearly impossible. So for me it feels like is my responsibility to try train people and getting excited about it. If I can do it now I will have more people to employ in ten years time.” “People don’t dream about quality, if you want to sell stuff you’re trying to inspire people, make them inspired to something. People don’t go to bed at night thinking ‘this is such great quality, they think ‘this is gonna change my life, get me outside more or make more adventurous’.”
INSIGHTS “Efficiency for me it’s a smooth transition from sales to delivery. We need to be completely transparent with our suppliers and manufactures, in order to reduce production time. But it works well because we have a weight on each other sales turnover.”
“This transparency allow us to show also who makes the products, how and where, to our customer. The appeal of the making process is much more effective in this way, and there is a real connection from who is inside and who is outside the company.”
INSIGHTS “Culture is not easy neither to deliver nor to be perceived outside. So for products like ours, with a strong local connotation and characterization it becomes a limit!”
“Small companies like ours don’t have resources to do research in terms of trends, culture and product xplacement. We can’t even collect feedbacks from our buyers, because they just provide data about sales”
INSIGHTS “New employees usually struggle to become part of the team. It’s also difficult for external collaborators and generally for those who are not everyday in the office to be integrated, even if we have a open and equal enviroment. We don’t receive their feedbacks on this issue, neither we are used ask them about it.” “It’s already difficult to agree and take decision among the 4 of us (partners); we can’t start to take in consideration opinions or ambitions of everyone, their personal attitudes might be non-rational and are likely to be misleading.” “As every small business, we don’t have the resources to invest in machine and industrial productions, so we can describe ourselves as sort of craftmen of the LEDs.” “We costantly aim to create external networks of partners to optimize our capacities and offers (suppliers, contractors and manufacturers.) In this way we keep costs low and offer a flexibible, wider and higher quality service.” “The new company it’s too young, we don’t have a space and the capacity to take risks so we must lean on our previous resources and know how. There wouldn’t be the support and involvement of the partners and employees at this early stage.” “Small companies are obliged to offer a flexible and customized range of services, it gives them the opportunity to compete with bigger firms. The problem is that is more difficult for them to communicate and sell their services, and because businesses are always attracted first by financial aspects and volume of products, they just look small and with less capacities.”
INSIGHTS “The relationship between a small business and a manufacturer it’s really important. They have an integrated important role into the design. It’s like an architect and a structural engineer: the architect says ‘I want this building to look like this, and the engineer goes ‘yeah but it will fall down, so you have to change this and that to make the shape working well.”
“I think what manufacturers can do better with new customers is inviting them to the factory, to visit it speaking face to face, opening a dialogue for a different working relationship. Understating each other needs and practices.”
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
How can small businesses use experiences to make their knowledge asset visible and tangible?
?
After the collecting information from literature, case studies and all analysis of the insights from the interview, the initial idea of focusing just on small businesses turned out to be correct. It was a foundamental choice first because of the necessity of narrowing down the vast amount of material accumulated; second to give the project a more specific view adopting a lens to cut trasversally all the information helping me to connect the different resources, discarding redundant notions. Small companies represent moreover an ideal enviroment scenario to develop design proposals which can help them to re-evaluate their organization and what they can offer and express both in terms of final outcomes, but also in terms of internal improvements. Compared to big companies, which obviously carry more complexity and an “heavier” structure, these small firms have much more flexibility and rooms for changes. Bigger businesses usually rely on data, rational, objective and quantitative information which allow them to be efficiently organized, but at the same time when it come to make projections and forecasting their attention it’s focus just on evidences. On the other hand small firms base their “style” of choice in a different way: they are mostly consens and vision driven. This is a foundamental difference because their setting is based on agreements, cocreation, and qualitative notions which find their expression in principles, experiences and direct knowledge: things that usually happen beyond words. In this scenario the people working inside the company have the greater influence and impact on the actions of the company itself. These small realities have a larger space where to explore opportunies to improve because they can distinguish more clearly what they don’t have, what they don’t know, allowing them to see new things, opportunities and alternatives chances. Small businesses are much more deeply and directly linked with their traditions and their cultural and social enviroments, both professionally because of the quality of their management and organization, and personally because a staff of small numbers is likely to be more directly involved in every activity of the company. Being in contact with both young and old businesses, I experienced how a company which has relied on a strong heritage, specific knowledge and experience for long time or, on the opposite way, is new and unexperienced and because of it has to process the “old” know-how of external manufacturers in a new and untracked way, in both case they must work to make this knowledge cohesively accessible within and outside the business, so it doesn’t become a barrier to the progress, taking the form of a too much applied ‘institutional memory’.
WHAT IS INNOVATION? When this question is asked to companies and people in general, they always imagine about technological futuristic creations, but innvation it’s about change, trasformation, evolution. "Modification, mostly for the better, of the existing state of things; make changes in something established.” If for companies to innovate, improve their business, it's basically a process of creation and realization, then both these steps have a human connection at its center. Creation is the human connection between the company and the customers; realization between the company and the people who work inside the
LOCAL BOUNDARIES SOCIAL RESPONSABILITY SERVICE ORIENTED FLEXIBILITY EXTERNAL COLLABORATORS FOR OPTIMIZATION SHARED CONSENS AND VISION
INTERVIEWS
INSIGHTS
company. Due to the nature of my project, I was particolarly oriented towards the realization step. I considered to analyzed the insights in order to create a common identity for the firms interviewed; and this common identity is represented by 6 points, which contains most of the issues these companies share. I then defined 3 areas of opportunities that could turn these points to key elements around which to develop my methodology. Focusing on companies' emphatic side, I turned these areas into more specifically "human oriented" terms, and ultimately I developed 6 flexible categories which are their translation into people's practical daily routine.
Definition of skills and tasks
Ambitions
PEOPLE ATTITUDES
Values
Making
Staff consolidation
PEOPLE PURPOSES
Duties
External business relationships
PEOPLE ORGANIZATION
Habits
Training
OPPORTUNITIES
DESK RESEARCH
The first version methodology asked to the members of the company to define their own identity based on the defined categories (Habits, Creation, Ambitions, Training, Rituals, Values). They can write a particular issue related to their job or refer to the company as a whole. Then they have to note down the ideal identity, related to the same issue, for the future; again following the same categories. Once done, they need to think how they would change the current identity (selecting a specific category, eg. Habits), into the ideal one choosing one of the verbs in the category of the actions. These verbs represent people's intuitive respons to problems during their daily lives. As IDEO defined them, they represent "Thoughtless acts", and they should work to extrapolate the intangible attitudes
current IDENTITY
Intuitive actions
ideal IDENTITY
NOW
CHANGES
FUTURE
CONSEQUENCES choices IMPACT
right REWARD
EVALUATION
and experiences of the people which usually don't find a space to be expressed within a working environment. The identity of the company is the identity of the people who work in the firm. Once they become aware of their identity as a community, they can understand more effectively which are the changes they need to tackle in order to achieve the ideal identity (the aim) they depicted. If both identity and changes become visible and easily understandable for everyone; a company can also consider which are the consequences, the impact of these changes and ultimately, evaluate the reward they wanted to achieve. In case it turns to be the wrong one, they can iterate the process and test again theirs assumptions.
CHANGES
adapting?
HABITS
reacting?
CREATION
signaling?
AMBITIONS NOW
TRAINING RITUALS VALUES
FUTURE
conforming? exploiting? co-opting?
FUTURE
PROTOTYPING & TESTING I started to test the the first prototype and its content with some of the companies previously interviewed. It was almost an inverse process since I used the layout as a sort of engament tools, observing how people were interacting and modifying it. They provided different useful feedbacks, both about the categories (some were too abstract or misleading), and the verbs (some had a negative connotation or were not enough intuitive). They tried to apply the method to real issues experienced within the business and they appreciate the flexibility of the tools, as well the idea of the cubes. Moreover, the structure of Identities + changes + consequences and evaluation seemed to work well. The small cube with the intuitive actions was defined as essential, in fact they suggested that being "forced" to used all the actions instead of choosing one, opens much more alternatives and effectively helps to explore new perspective, bringing them on the table.
PROTOTYPING & TESTING I also wanted to test the Cultural Canvas in term of a service. That's why I contacted Fi Scott, founder and owner of Make-Works, to get her feedbacks. At the beginning I thought to link the methodology to their company, considering it as part of their platform since they are already working with creative professionals, businesses, industry and manufactures. So they represent a optimal resource in terms of a network with their digital directory. Lately, also after speaking with the Cultural Enterprise Office, I changed approach since Make-Works' target is about providing visibility to businesses which are not digitally evolved, mine was different. In any case Fi had a lot of good feedbacks thanks to her direct experience with many Scottish companies. Generally speaking, like some of the other stakeholders, she suggested to adopt even a simpler language and layout, because in most of the cases people inside companies are not familiar at all with design terminology and they might be quite reluctant to try new methods. If the "rules" are not extremely intuitive and easy to grasp, it would be more difficult to convince them and deliver the value of the tool, even if useful.
METHODS CASE STUDY Being aware of the several design methodologies already produced around these topics, I started to research them extensively both to see how I could improve mine and to avoid repeating things that have already been done. However, what I found was that almost all the creative methods that have been produced so far are first strongly service-driven, and second their target is oriented towards designers or generally people who are familiar with our terms, processes, and aims. On one side, there are methodologies like the famous “Method cards” from IDEO: a collection of 51 cards representing diverse ways that design teams can understand the people they are designing for. They are used to make a number of different methods accessible to all members of a design team, to explain how and when the methods are best used, and to demonstrate how they have been applied to real design projects. The deck is conceived as a design research tool for its staff and clients to evaluate and select the empathic research methods that best inform specific design initiatives. Another good example can be the AT-ONE, developed together by different stakeholders including the University of Aalborg (D), LIVEWORK (Uk), The Norwegian Design Council and other academic and industrial partners. It’s a book containing all the necessary information in order of being able to innovate services, and it includes a guide to planning and running the process, details about specific touchpoints (again in form of cards) and how to develop strong concepts based upon the key points: “Actors, Touch-points, Offering, Need and Experience.” Then there are other methods, which can take the form of digital interactions or real face-to-face playful activities like the methods the Stanford D.School shared as open resource on their website: a collection of methods for people new to design thinking to introduce them through their first few design cycles with practical engaging actions.
The particularity of the Cultural Canvas method is that sits in a different context, and with a different aim. It is not for designer and not even for companies, if the meaning is showing possible solutions and ways to generate new products and/or services. It is for people and their organizations, to provide an alternative resource to help them extrapolating their culture and knowledge and make it visible and tangible for everyone; something which happens much before of deciding which artefact to design. It also doesn’t speak the language and the terms commonly used among designers, which usually over-complicates notions and simple messages. It is not just about making them familiar with design thinking, service design or in general, creative processes. It is about them learning how to express their own identities following their own processes, but with the possibility of expanding the number of perspectives through the definition of hidden knowledge.
I decide to develop the Cultural Canvas to provide tools to help small businesses to deal with the three main areas of interest, elaborated from the insights, where most of their issues take place. - Integrating people in the team; - Skills and task definition and organization; - Communication between external partners. The name takes inspiration from a common management exercise used to unfold and discuss business plans and strategies; however the underlying idea is completely different. I wanted to adopt culture in the internal perspective of a small company, which means that before to think about deliver or selling added values to final
customers, regardless if in form of a product or service, companies should first create experiences for the people who work for them. Businesses should consider themselves more as communities than just workplaces: in a community there are much more layers of skills, attitudes and values that take part in the daily routine. That’s why my question, as designer, was about how I can help these firms to explore and pull out all the valuable information and principles which are not expressed through traditional channels, hiding insights and opportunities that can expand their knowledge. It’s about making the intangible, tangible. And to do this a company need to identify where the intangible relies. How can they become aware of it? Small companies have the advantage that they can easily involve all the people from different levels
VALUES
AMBITIONS synonyms: aspiration, intention, goal, aim, objective, purpose, intent, plan, desire, wish, design, target, dream.
synonyms: worth, usefuln importance, significance
Person's principl of what is import
Can be referred to both short and long term achievements. Both personal and professional goals, and their impact on the company. How aims have changed with the time working at the company; reasons, influences and how it affects the job.
“I would like the company to provide a foreign language course, to be able to keep up with the younger employees when trading with international markets”
MAKING
?
How values are customers. Do th
Company is ma the working env
“I like to work with loca helping the local econo
DUTIES
synonyms: creation, manufacture, production, building, assembly, putting together, fabrication, formation, development, generation.
synonyms: policy, schedul commitment, loyalty, faithf
Moments where the person takes an active role in producing objects and/or services.
Feedback on tas
How particular ta company.
Which spaces - tools are involved in the specific job/task. How external partners - third party are involved in the business?
Does the observa take too much tim
Moments where the person is allowed to create and organize indipendently tasks and resources, to best fullfil the job.
“When sewing fabric for handbags, I started to use a different kind of seam: I notice it's faster to produce them and it makes the bag shape more resistant”
“Collagues test our back a great team-working co
TRAINING
HABITS synonyms: convention, custom, routine, wont, pattern, norm, tradition, ritual, matter of course, rule, usage, peculiarity, singularity, propensity, disposition, predisposition.
synonyms: instruction, teac initiation, exercising, practic
Moments of free expression; enjoyable moments, relaxing, sharing activities during the daily practice.
Space/situations provide moment
S Spaces involved in the creation of a more familiar, pleasant and agreeable enviroment and/or particular task.
How the skills lea effect on the spe
How the attitude of the person can be connected with others; how they influence the work of a team.
Indipendent mom skills in order to g
“Collagues test our backpacks products in real situations going together trekking; a great team-working cohesion, and their experiences are shown on the website”
“Initially new employee receive the support of
and backgrounds within their environment, learning together how to make better judgements through collaborative insight gathering, sharing knowledge and hearing everyone’s viewpoint; having also the flexibility to adapt, once the future of new propositions unfolds. If skills held by individuals are identified, they can allow workload to be split amongst the team allowing projects or tasks to be done quicker and more efficiently than previously. Investiganting personal attitudes, approaches and identities can uncover human-driven resources, linked to a more emphatic and holistic business approach. Cultural Canvas becomes then a space for iteration which allow companies to do risk-free sperimentation without loosing too much time and moreover resources. A space removed from the specifics of the “day job”. At the same time it’s a toolkit which
works as a sort of common language that different personalities and business identities can speak in order to develop and express a common comprehension of their asset. Once a company can bring people up on values, meanings, ambitions and attitudes, the development of the business becomes effectively an integral part of everyone’s work within the company. Once new shared aims are created, the focus can be extended from the development of new products and services, to finding new markets. A that point it will be again a matter of iteration: new ideas for products and services will force to find new markets which will force to refine the cultural and organizational context of the company.
usefulness, advantage, benefit, gain, good, merit, helpfulness, avail, cance
inciples or standards of behavior and work; judgment mportant fo and/or the company.
s are expressed; inside the company and outside to the Do they have a positive impact?
is matching the person’s values? How this reflects in g enviroment, organization and other people.
PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL PARTICIPATION PEOPLE ATTITUDES
local suppliers, so we can provide higher quality materials, conomy and benefit people creating new job opportunities”
hedule, task, exercise, office, test, observation, responsibility, obligation, faithfulness, homage.
ADAPTING? REACTING?
on tasks and task organization.
ular tasks can affect other relevant activies of the
bservance of some policies, schedules or other activities uch time or resources? How it affects people involvement.
ACTIVITIES INVOLVING BUSINESS PEOPLE SKILLS
COLLABORATING?
, teaching, coaching, tuition, tutoring, guidance, education, orientation, practice.
ations where the company, or external collaborators oments for learning - updating - trainging its employees.
nt moments where the person can learn or train specific er to get better performances, more confidence, etc.
loyees were supported by a senior manager-tutor. Now they ort of various figures, in order to learn to be more dynamic”
INTEGRATING? UTILIZING?
backpacks products in real situations going together trekking; ng cohesion, and their experiences are shown on the website”
lls learned during the time spent in the company have an e specific job, organization of the company, collagues.
FOCUSING?
RESOURCES AND THEIR USE PEOPLE ORGANIZATION
The final prototype it's a tool kit made in whiteboard so people can easily esperiment on the surface, which is intentionally lefted quite empty, without using specific colour codes. People are encouraged to connect insights and observations by matching colours on the corners of the cubes and re-writing information on the different categories when necessary. The scheme of has been semplified using common terms. (Writing the current issue or observation and its ideal solution for the future; the the rest of the scheme - changes, consequences, evaluation - is the same). Internally in the packaging (as shown in the previous page), a glossary of terms with synonyms, practical examples, areas of interest, is linked with both the categories and the intuitive verbs in order to make the methodology more accesible.
BLUEPRINT The Cultural Canvas service. In order to raise the awarenes, the first phase is dedicated to presenting the methodology using different channels which can include: presentations at design and business conferences; business hubs; or enstablishing connections with external networks which might be interested in using the methodology such as Cultural Enterprise Office when supporting businesses; or linking my website or digital directories like Make-Works, to reach. 1. Delivering the experience of the workshop into companies (through one introductive presentation + one guided workshop); showing examples from previous case stuides an adapting the methodology to the context and need. [1 hour pres. / 2 hours workshop + 1 hour feedback] 2. The company, based on the results, can decide: - Just one workshop session; - Subscribe to the website and access online-mentoring (have a profile with costantly updated resources like samples of questions, examples and templates to test and visualize the company needs); - Have regular workshops; 3. In the last case it become a consultancy work: the aim will be to turn needs and values into actions (the methodology will be gradually updated and refined based on experiences and feedbacks)
4. Feedbacks at the same time will help to develop new resources for the website and the methodology.
USER JOURNEY
“If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.” HENRY FORD Founder - Ford Motor Company
VALUES Customer needs are always changing. How do companies stay relevant? Customer needs and expectations change on a daily basis. Nowadays, companies are constantly reminded that the way to stay relevant is being relentlessly customer-centric, listening to and anticipating what customers want. Designers help them to respond, adapt, and connect to emerging needs and behaviours by creating engaging and relevant brand experiences that are grounded in customer insights. The first problem is that if every company will become more and more user centred, and the entire economy it is gradually being shaped on these principles, will companies find this approach still as valuable and competitive as today? The other question is that all the assumptions on usercentred design work well when designers are dealing with big brands: big companies can easily hire consultancies that will do ethnographic researches, explore new trends, study product placement strategies, and above all be more and more user centred. However, small companies, or the other hand, not having the resources to do this, seem to be out of the game. Again, the decision of focusing on small businesses revealed to be a good choice: the Cultural Canvas works also as an opportunity for me, as a future professional designer out there, to approach a different potential context and market, which is very valuable especially considering the economic structure of countries like Italy and Scotland, based on a system of micro and small businesses.
REFERENCES BIBLIOGRAPHY Futuro Artigiano, Marsilio Editore[2012] - Stefano Micelli Design Driven Innovation, Harvard Business Press [2009] - Roberto Verganti Sketching User Experiences, Morgan Kaufmann [2007] - Bill Buxton On Design Leadership, University of Industrial Arts Helsinki, UIAH [1992] - Alberto Alessi & Co. Thoughtless Acts?, Chronicle Books [2005] - Jane Fulton Suri & IDEO Creating Cultures of Innovation: Scott & Fyfe, Schuh, Cairngorm Mountains - InDI, Institute of Design Innovation The Value of Design [2014] - Arts & Humanities Research Council & InDI
SITOGRAPHY http://www.artribune.com/2014/08/viaggio-tra-le-eccellenze-artigianali-ditaliaun-libro-e-due-mostre-per-il-progetto-imprese-storiche-di-thomas-quintavallefotografando-le-radici-del-made-in-italy/ http://www.madeinitalyfor.me/info/un-valore-aggiunto-allartigianato-la-creativita/ http://www.repubblica.it/economia/affari-e-finanza/2014/06/02/news/dalla_ macelleria_al_moma_quando_il_terzista_diventa_brand-87846757/ http://www.quaderniartigianato.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/58_Futuroartigiano-Costa.pdf http://culturalvalueproject.wordpress.com/category/categories/economic-benefitsand-creative-industries/ http://neurocapability.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/business-leaders-agree-empathyis-the-single-most-important-skill-in-business-today/ http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/ https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/designresources/wiki/de476/Project_Topic_ Wallet_GiftGiving_or_other.html http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-08-09/insights-from-thoughtless-acts http://www.wired.com/2014/03/experience-design-innovation-isnt-enough/
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3029279/a-work-of-design?utm_source=facebook https://www.eccellenzeindigitale.it/course http://www.pastificiodeicampi.it/artigianalita-tradizione-trasparenza-la-filosofia-peruna-pasta-di-qualita.html http://www.pagina99.it/news/economia/6545/micelli.html http://www.service-innovation.org/tab2/ http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/the-substance-of-things-not-seen/ innovation-starts-with-empathy.html http://www.altitudeinc.com/the-problem-with-design-thinking/ http://www.fastcodesign.com/3022209/9-ways-to-get-the-most-out-of-design-thinking http://method.com/ http://method.com/pdf/10x10/Method_10x10_Whats_So_Funny_About_Innovation. pdf http://www.linkiesta.it/intervista-micelli-futuro-artigianato http://www.unive.it/nqcontent.cfm?a_id=125583&pid=5590028 http://www.univiu.org/people/340-stefano-micelli
VIDEO: http://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_pine_on_what_consumers_want#t-2078 http://vimeo.com/99268646 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoAOzMTLP5s
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to express my deep gratitude to all the companies, the research participants and contacts who shared their time helping me to develop this exciting project. It wouldn’t have been possible without all their precious suggestions, opinions and experience. I would like to thank my tutor Stuart Bailey for his wisdom. His support encouraged and guided me to costantly evaluate my assumptions and ideas, looking at things in the right way. Thanks to all my professors: Elio, Irine, Ian, Gordon, and Emma and Brian from InDI, for sharing their advices, energy and commitment and pushing me to question what we do as designers. Thank you Alan Moore, Alec Farmer, Andrea Girolami, Davide Tiengo, Elena Zamolo, Fi Scott, John Flitcroft.