If you run meetups, why not (try to) solve some real-life problems at the same time?
Or what good can you do with service design and some applied strategic thinking?
Our Business Love Design team will have its first Meetup on the 10th of March, hosted by our very own community, Isobar Budapest.
Why real-life problems? BLD team consists of product and service designers, brand strategists, business consultants and researchers. We simply function better when we can walk the talk. Also, in order to present our team, credo and methods, it is easier and quicker to do it through a demonstration of a project-like example that would add constructive and usable feedbacks to the topic.
MoMa curator, Paola Antonelli asked in her keynote speech at the AIASF NEXT conference last November, that we think of design as a form of activism. She argues “that for design to be truly effective it should be used as a tool for complex, critical thinking as opposed to problem solving. That we consider design’s potential as a political vehicle to engage and build empathy. She asks how we can be “responsible stewards of design” to make sure that it is used for positive impact, especially in this era of advanced technology.”
Ok, but what exactly is this about? For the first Meetup (yes, it’s going to be a series of Meetups!), we choose the current topic of taxi-uber opposition.
In Budapest, the fight between the taxi companies and the new-wave mobil ride hail company, Uber has been on the news lately. Everyone has an opinion and many have experienced first-hand the two types of car service. While opinions and reasons may differ, it is undoubted that Uber and the classical taxi companies operate in different modes and both have positive and negative features.
Our team had the idea to use this situation to demonstrate how design can be used as a tool for complex, critical thinking, in order to (re)design services & sparking novel business models. In this case, taxi services, their offerings for customers and their business model.
Nice… and how? During the Meetup, we are going to work in smaller teams. The teams will examine the specific steps and elements of a “taxi customer journey” through a method called “service autopsy”. Representatives both from Uber and a classical taxi company will work and think together with us, so that we can implement hands-on insights from both sides.
Based on the findings and a previously conducted research, we are going to formulate intervention suggestions, that the taxi companies can freely consider for further use.
Uber, Wundercar and the other illustratives of the sharing economy has challenged the taxi industry and in return, Uber got challenged legislatively by the government (and not only in Hungary). While everybody is trying to prove their right, the situation would also be able to give space to examine the underlying opportunities to improve the named services.
The goal of the Meetup is to analyze both the car sharing and taxi services, decompose them to their elements then recompose them, in order to emphasize their strengths and redesign their differentiating values.
Because we believe that taxi companies and Uber (and other car sharing examples) operate on different levels of customer needs and if both could learn or just get inspired from each other, they could exist next to each-other, only challenging themselves to better their services.
Let’s try it this way, after all… why not?
