Working on user experience at Idemolab
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A large part of my experience in Denmark has been my time at Idemolab, a design consultancy that is part of Delta, that is part of Force(bear with me :) ), a big engineering company in Denmark.
Delta has a specific status in Denmark, it is a Advanced Technology Group (GTS) which means that it can receive subsidies from the state for research projects, while remaining a private entity.It also cannot pay dividends to its shareholder. It’s a company with a strong engineering culture where the typical employee is a middle-aged Danish white male that went to DTU. DTU is probably the best engineering school in Denmark. From all the different students I have been talking to, students from DTU left me with the best impressions.
Idemolab is the skunkworks inside this company. With a higher percentage of foreigners and women, it has a user-centered culture and almost all its members have a strong interest in electronic music. In their work, they mainly deal with three areas of interest: energy harvesting, the internet of things and meaningful design. They work both for public and private clients.
During my time at the company and on top of day to day business, I mainly dealt with three projects: Idemotrainer, creating meaningful devices, and installing a component library.
The first project was a collaboration with CBS on the future of connected gyms. Daniel and Cultural, two students, came to us with a thesis proposal “how might we create a better-unified experience for fitness centre users?”. Together with them, we analysed their user research, did an evaluation of the state-of-the-art on connected fitness devices and created a concept of the ultimate fitness experience. Daniel and Cultural implemented a new design process that led them to have the best grade in the Danish system, a twelve (the danish grading system is particularly confusing).
Meaningful devices
In our pursuit not to make the next Juicero, Idemolab tries to see how and when electronic devices can have a significant impact on the lives of people. In line with this objective, I made a few prototypes around haptic actuators and helped Vanessa with a paper we hope will be out soon.
Component Library
Together with Soren, we have been putting up a component library inside Idemolab. Similar to a material library, a component library aims at sparking conversation around sensors, actuators, display and microprocessors. It is to be shown in the preliminary phases of Idemolab design process. From a business point of view, it is a good conversation starter when meeting clients or brainstorming ideas. From a company perspective, it is a good way of sharing knowledge among employees, different from a powerpoint presentation or an intranet post.
Idemolab is a great, comprehensive company. Unlike most design consultancies, they have all the technical know-how in-house to investigate the possible concept your firm needs in order to create the electronic prototypes and to assess them. If you are in Denmark and trying to make sense of technology, or a student interested in how tech can be useful, I urge you to contact them. Alternatively, you can go to one of their bits and beers event, where they invite top speaker to speak on a tech subject. You can also go to their yearly conference.
