XR Innovation: walking the walk
Innovation is a fancy word for ideas. We are all capable of them and when we riff off other humans we see them blossom into something they never could’ve been in isolation. So when we say “innovation” , are we actually talking about safe spaces that allow groups of people to be vulnerable together, to be spontaneous, to improvise and collaboratively create a pearl of an idea and have a shared experience? *trickier to fit on a slide.
As a freelancer, consultant and contractor for XR agencies, I have the luxury and the honor to move between teams and peek into the heart of their design processes. Over the past 5 years, the already massively popular word innovation has only increased in mentions in company culture decks, role descriptions and client pitches and it continues to dominate in the XR space. I find myself looking for metrics by which to measure a company’s success in being innovative: do they have a clear vision and future roadmap? Are there tools and processes in place to turn ideas into projects? Is the required mindset and skillset there to achieve innovation goals? Are there facilitators of ideation strategically positioned in the company?
The bigger and faster the company, the harder these things are to discover. It takes a UX research hat and a generous chunk of time to get to the meat of these questions; to understand the relevance and impact of all the moving parts that create the familiar stakeholder interview reply that begins, “well, yes and no…”.
It’ll be a never-ending journey of discovery into this rich topic but the most success I’ve seen so far came as a result of approaching design by:
walking the walk + being life centered.
With the masterful Innovation Labs Berlin, we created Discovery XR where we ran events for business leaders and startup founders who were struggling with Product-Market fit. They didn’t quite know what their value proposition was because they didn’t fully understand their customer’s needs.
The design feeling workshops looked like this:
1. Warm, human-centered welcome with timeboxed ice breaker activites where the team get to know one another deeply. Setting, sounds, smells and energy all created with intention.
2. A presentation of a problem to solve. (In this example, we’ll take a 2017 workshop reducing single-use plastics, an active IDEO design challenge at the time.)
3. Sub groups are given a character printed and mounted on the wall where they answered questions about that person — their personal information, the pain points in their lives, their joys and priorities, their personas and jobs to be done JTBD.
Having written out all of the characters information on their boards and created scenarios for them, things get interesting. So far, we’ve been life centered by focusing not only on the individual humans who each might interact with the product but also a positive impact product.
Now comes the juicy part — walking the walk.
The participants move into a room with a PC-Vive and a staging area. Little do they know that each of the characters printed on the whiteboards are characters from the VR experience Mindshow. In this amazingly fun and excellently made game, players can jump inside the skin of a character, change their expression and control their body as they move around and record their dialog. Our players hop into the skin of the character they’d been creating all morning and perform the sentences they had written that expressed their jobs to be done as those humans. Or sometimes aliens and bananas. #lifecentered
This was a powerful exercise. We were unlocking those parts of the brain that we so rarely have the time or space to flex in a busy agency setting — improvisation and human empathy. The players understood what it was like to be Becky, a mum with a busy job and who just needed a quick contribution to family picnic but so wanted to make an ecologically friendly choice. And all of this value gain in one day.
Perhaps more powerfully, the team were able to design solutions that Becky actually might use. The next step was to brainstorm ideas to solve the problems of our characters and, having been through the exercise, the nuance and imagination of the resulting solutions were unrecognisable from the ones people would dream up on the spot with no immersion into the problem they were trying to solve.
Added bonuses:
1. the team-building benefits reported by the participants after these sessions showed a dramatic improvement in their relationships increasing understanding, tolerance and empathy with one another.
2. In many of the workshops we intentionally invited participants from other parts of the company not traditionally invited to “creative” meetings and we found that this activity quickly made room for more diverse voices to be included and made the biggest impression on the traditional designers and artists who welcomed the expansion of thinking.
Maybe we can do our agency teams a service by first and foremost giving UX a seat at the table so that we build our problem solving efforts around humans, but also if we’re in the XR space — by tapping into the benefits of the technologies we advocate for our own teams as well as our clients.
*Special thanks to Mindshow.
