Embed an experience innovation studio in your organization
Enable continuous experience innovation
A powerful way to embed human-centered design within your company is to create a dedicated innovation studio where the core activities of experience design can take place, enabling and driving a continuous cycle of innovation.
Innovating experience is highly collaborative and requires the integration of multiple capabilities, people, and perspectives. The innovation studio is a working space, not an office space, a dedicated space that nurtures and provides a safe space for the creative thinking required to deliver new kinds of experiences that disrupt the current experience ecosystem.
It’s a place the enables and drives ongoing disruptive innovation within an organization and sparks creative and collaborative interactions. And it’s a place that unites the organization around a shared vision of where the company is now and where it wants, and needs, to be.
An innovation studio can be a large installation with multiple spaces, or it can be single space configured so that all of the core activities of experience innovation can take place. The studio works in a fundamentally different way than the rest of the company, so rip out the carpet, get rid of desks and conference tables, add a maker space, and get ready to reimagine how you create and deliver value.
The functions of an experience innovation studio
1 UNDERSTAND CUSTOMERS AND THEIR CURRENT EXPERIENCES
The innovation studio is a space to understand the reality of customers’ lives and the experiences they are having with your company. Bring customers into the studio and use a set of high-touch tools and activities to learn up close what they think, feel, and do. This intimate understanding provides a critical foundation to build new approaches and experiences from an outside-in perspective.
2 TELL HUMAN STORIES
Storytelling makes experiences tangible so leaders, and the company, understand and develop empathy for the people behind the metrics and data. Simulations and storytelling are experiences in themselves, and can include walkthroughs of the stages of a journey, digital storytelling projected onto large screens, interactions with props, and even actors portraying current and future-state experiences.
3 DESIGN NEW EXPERIENCES
The studio serves as a space to co-create preferred experiences directly with customers. Flexible studio space enables rapid configuration changes to hold ideation and co-design activities, role-playing, experience simulations, and service concept staging.
4 PROTOTYPE NEW EXPERIENCES
Experience prototypes are co-created, staged, and tested in the studio with customers and internal stakeholders to get real-time feedback and iterate rapidly to validated experience concepts. Experience prototypes range from lo-fi to hi-fi and can include paper and cardboard mockups, face-to-face simulations, immersive digital simulations, and 1:1 scale foamboard environments.