Edge: towards the future of experience.
For the past year, Sketchin has created a team committed to exploring the future of experience and interaction, starting from the core of the studio itself as a pilot project.
When I founded Sketchin almost fourteen years ago, I had the ambition to design digital products and services that could benefit people. I had worked in banking services and realized how depersonalized they were, far detached from people’s needs and thus disappointing. That was a long time ago, and many things have changed.
However, my ambition has remained the same; over the years, it has grown along with Sketchin. Now I would like Sketchin to be one of the most cutting-edge studios in the design of products and services that make people live experiences beyond their expectations.
The contexts in which we operate have changed as well, and so did the tools we can rely on, and people have also transformed their expectations.
Technology has become much more pervasive, change faster, risk perception for individuals and businesses much more pronounced. Never has the uncertainty been greater than in recent months. I think that just in times like these is important the ability to explore, experiment, look carefully at what is around us, pay attention to the signals that society and the market give us back; establish a sort of permanent lab that can focus on the future of the experience.
Moreover, talking about expectations and how to overcome them thanks to design means, ipso facto, talking about the future. Let’s start from one consideration: the future is not all the same. There are futures so close that they are now, and practically inevitable, others a little more distant but which can be examined and treated with a reliable degree of certainty. Others are so remote that they can be explored only based on our intuitions and by projecting our hopes.
The uncertainty to which these stormy months have prepared us has made it clear how important it is to consider and to do so systematically, on what awaits us. The signs of change are there; it is just reading them. And mine is not superficiality: the task is far from an easy one. It needs attention, practice and time to try to understand the lines along which the future moves.
Sketchin has changed and is changing accordingly: the study is a small portion of reality that reflects what surrounds it. It is a small society with its rules and its specific culture, steadily changing and with a more or less defined vision of the road it wants to travel. But it is also a service to the market from which our clients may decide to benefit.
The studio is a project as well.
The firm and its approach are also a project and should be considered as such. To remain relevant in an ever-changing world, you need to evolve, or slowly you lose focus.
For this reason, a year and a half ago, we made an important decision as a firm. We created a team committed to exploring new scenarios, research and development, the evolution of the firm’s thinking and experimentation with the future of the experience and the technology applied to it. To put it another way: of all those activities that allow Sketchin to position itself as one of the most advanced experience-design studios.
We have called it Edge precisely to underline this: on the margins of what we know, to look ahead, to have a broader vision. Edge as an edge between the outside and us, a sort of permeable frontier for learning, knowing, experimenting.
A team like this is no small commitment for us: today, Edge counts seven people out of 120, and to take many of them out of the paid projects is a challenge.
The Edge team, of which I am personally the Design Director, has so far focused mainly on the core of the studio. We have reflected on the positioning and the offer of Sketchin’s services; we have rethought the brand to mirror these thoughts (have patience a few more days to get to know them); and we have carried out some R&D projects, one public — Lugano Moves — and others that will be revealed in the coming months.
Facing the future and exploring what surrounds us raises many great dilemmas. The team is responsible for collecting and systematizing some of the internal reflections of the studio about design and the future of technology, business and society. There are no definitive answers, but we can, as designers, share our point of view. And I believe that sharing what we think and our insights can be a way to feed the debate and continue to gather stimuli.
In the same spirit of reciprocity, the Edge team makes it easy for the firm to participate in in-depth discussion events, such as Interaction20, or Milano Digital Week.
The team is open and porous to both the rest of the firm and the outside world. Edge can also be hired by other Sketchin teams to lead advanced research into the future of the experience or on the use of the latest technologies, for the benefit of the projects we carry out for our clients; on the other hand, Edge can receive the same kind of stimulation from clients and partners.
But ambitions must be supported by action. “Do or do not do. There is no trying”, and Master Yoda is always right.
