Weeknotes 1408 & 1409

Customer journey demo’s presentation
In week 1409 we had the pleasure of presenting our work in progress of the customer journey demos to our client for the first time and they liked it! In the weeks leading up to the presentation we made sure the development sprints always ended with the implemented services working across all the different touch points. This allowed us to evaluate the sprint results as real-life customer journeys and prioritise next steps on what mattered most for the journey. In future sprints it will help us in getting valuable feedback from clients and potential users. We can hand any sprint result over without much explanation for an impromptu evaluation or user test. When we presented the demo work in progress to our clients in the same manner, they could quickly provided feedback and grasp the scope of where we were and what still needed to be done. We all left the meeting with smiles on our faces and clear plans for the next weeks.

Automotive interactions, ethics and more
Like the previous weeks, automotive interactions occupied our minds at Hoog+Diep. We were approached by a potential client with a compelling car related customer experience challenge. A small alteration to our planning freed time to explore the challenge with rough sketching supported by preliminary research.
At the same time the interesting ‘ethical autonomous vehicles’ project by Matthieu Cherubini at the RCA relit some earlier conversation we have had at our studio. The ethics of autonomous vehicles is something we have been talking about ever since Google X employee and friend Rob Mariet visited the studio and we discussed Wouter’s “Ethical aspects of the product design process“. Matthieu’s “ethics as a commodified feature in autonomous vehicles” approach looks to us like the perfect starting point for exploring the future relationships between people and (autonomous) cars. Preferably in future mundane scenarios.

Noortje
Noortje Bosma sent us an intriguing email about her ideas for her graduation project, a few days later we had a nice conversation and now she’s working on it as our newest studio member. Welcome Noortje! She will tell you more about her project soon, but for now enjoy her wonderful illustration work: http://cargocollective.com/noortjebosma/

This happened Rotterdam #3
Pieter and his fellow Happeneers have announced a robot centric line up for This happened Rotterdam #3: An intimidating robot to run on, a cocktail robot that performs magic and the worlds first cow milking robot will be joined by an interactive Captain’s log made from paper and pixels. And while ‘The second machine age’ has started a lot of discussions last weeks by predicting a near future with robots, we at Hoog+Diep think there is also a lot to learn from our colleagues that have been building robot interactions for sometimes over 20 years. If you also want to get a glimpse of the future by talking to the makers come and join us on March 10th, 20:00 at WORM. http://www.thishappened.org/events/rotterdam-3-2

Hoog+Diep in 2018
While our calendar for the coming months is filling up nicely with design and design consultancy work, we are also taking time to look ahead to 2018. What will change, what will stay the same, where do we want to be in and what plans need to be crafted to get there. This means looking ahead to a world of increasingly smart products and the systems they are part of. More about this later…