Statsbygg for The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI)Refstad transit centre/Oslo,norway/2015/designit

Role: Project manager, Lead service designer

Through this is pre- project we helped The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration to define the best way to restructure the health clinic at Refstad transit centre. The project aimed to give guidelines and proposed architectural solutions for more time and cost efficient use of the premises. Our focus was to increase capacity and to better the use of the facilities for all users, but with a main focus on the employees and today processes.

Statsbygg is the Norwegian government's key advisor in construction and property affairs, building commissioner, property manager and property developer.

The project consisted of several stakeholders and it was crucial that they all agreed to which solution was best before the official tender went out to entrepreneurs and architects.

The transit centre provides asylum seekers their mandatory tuberculosis screening and if needed their initial health treatment when arriving to Norway. The amount of asylums seekers arriving to the transit centre is unpredictable and can change from day to day, because of outside factors/actors as political decisions and global changes. That means that the premises needed to facilitate for rapid changes in capacity and use. The other crucial factor we had to take into account was that the work processes worked today because of the small space and close proximity to everyone that works in the clinic. Since we were not going to change the fundamentals of the todays work processes we had to design for this factor as well. And these two factors were leading in why one solution fulfilled the need better than the other one.

The project was done in a very short time with a small budget, but through careful planning and co-creation and involvement of stakeholders at the all the phases, Designit delivered a detailed proposal that everyone agreed on. We used 3 weeks with 2 designers full time and delivered collected insights that led to one clear solution that was consistent with the initial findings. In the final meeting the stakeholders all agreed on which solution was the most effective for the health clinic, due to the involvement of stakeholders at the right times in the process.

The proposed solutions and insights leading up to the solutions were delivered in a document with floor plans and zone distribution, supported by future work scenarios and room specifications. It was important that it was communicated in a way that all stakeholders could easily communicate it to others and felt like they owned the project.

The deliverables are to be used as foundation for further work and construction as well as a basis for applying for funding within the Directorate.

The project will continue with Designit as reference partner in the building phase.

“This is a new way for us to do projects and we would really like to work more like this in the future” Project manager- Statsbygg)

Storebrand-Service design workshop series/Oslo,Norway/2015/Designit

Role: Project manager, speaker 

Storebrand wanted help to introduce service design thinking to a wide variety of their employees. We held day-long workshops for 120 employees where they got theory and hands-on experience with designing good services. Christin organised and led the workshops. 

Statens Vegvesen- new menu and new services for website/Oslo,Norway/2014/bekk consulting

Role: Interaction designer, project manager

Led the process of introducing and defining the new menu-structure and new self-service pages on vegvesen.no . Collaborated with graphic designers, developers and internal stakeholders to get the changes through.

Enonic Website/oslo,norway/2014/Bekk Consulting

Role: Project manager, concept developer

The project included establishing a totally new concept and design for the client's website. From being a website that had approached IT purchasers, the goal was to change the focus towards market- / communication dep. in large companies. The website also had to become more focused on the international market and not only the Norwegian market. Through interviewing potential clients Christin got insights into what was important for the new audience/clients in their choice of CMS. The project team worked to make these insights the concept and not just what they internally thought was cool. Christin was responsible for concept development and led them through a process where they together created a new structure of the site and they got to think more visually and emotional rather than long texts. Through sketches, Christin documented information structure and navigation. Along with a graphic designer they continued with documentation and design until delivery of finished page templates. The customer was very happy with the result. The client did the implementation of the webpages.

Home & Family-Storebrand/OSLO,NORWAY/2013/Bekk Consulting 

Role: Service designer, project manager

Worked at the intersection of IT and Marketing and was responsible for specifying the concept and get both parties to cooperate and to lead a team of interaction and graphic designers. Christins core competencies in the project was to communicate what would work for the end user and what the groups had to change for the end user to get value from using the concept. The objective of the concept pages: Customer has around 120,000 policyholders (injuries and death) and 50,000 bank customers. They had a challenge of linking customers with more products, both within upsell (general and life insurance) and cross-selling (banking). They had a website that makes it difficult to buy more products at the same time, both within the same product areas and across. The new concept let customer quickly recognize their needs for banking and insurance services on the basis of their family situation. Tell us who they are and the company will offer you what you need in the banking and insurance services. With this solution the company thought customers would experience less barriers to purchase products online as well as they would buy multiple products. The service was designed for mobile through responsive design.

the future of health care specialist/OSLO,NORWAY /2014/Bekk Consulting

Rolle : Service Designer, Process manager

Christin´s role in the project was to be responsible for all the insight and needs analysis in the project. That meant that she talked to about 70 people through qualitative interviews and workshops with residents, specialist healthcare practitioners, GPs, industry and researchers. She led the first phase of the analysis process through workshops and design of user journeys and processes. The project had an unclear task, many players and many processes that was needed to help define how the future of health care specialist will look for the citizens.

"Finn utlysninger"-new website-norwegian research council/OSLO,NORWAY/2013-2014/Bekk Consulting

Role: Service designer ,Concept developer, Process leader

Christin´s role in the project was to map the applicants' experience of the service and communicate this to the communications department and process managers in the organization. She also led them through a conceptual development process that was supposed to lead to a finished website. Christin spent two years at this organization, but unfortunately she left before it was implemented. Through the process the organization became more confident what creates value for the applicants, and cooperated with the third-parties to come up with solutions that meet real user-needs. The challenge for the organization is that they are to be perceived as one organization in the meeting with the applicants, but internally there is no control over what the individual departments communicate out to the applicants. This meant that the applicants experience of the organization was very little consistent and not easily understood. The objective of the project was to improve the process and flow of information as well as quality of service, without making radical changes. The process started with Christin interviewing 16 users of the service who had different experiences. They helped her to identify all the steps they went through and their experience of every step. The product of this first phase was a customer journey (steps) and an emotional map (on a scale from good to bad experience). When this was communicated to the organization it made the project expand as they saw where and when they needed to make changes in the application process, something that before was only based on personal opinions of the employees. Christin took them through a concept development phase where they together worked to come up with ideas and make decisions on what creates value. Christin left the project as they were detailing out the transition from the old system to the old. 

RBUP Øst & Sør (Regional children & Adolescent psychiatric department) Oslo, Norway/ 2012/livework

Role: Service designer

RBUP wanted test out the applicability of service design in psychiatry. Our main focus was on children and families with ADHD. (Oslo, Norway 2012)

Through 3 sets of qualitative home-interviews with parents of children with ADHD-diagnosis, we found the sweet spot for creating the smallest possible change with the largest effect. This was the transition between kindergarten and school.

Our perspective was that we need to help all kids and not only just the troubled kids, this to fight the negative stigma around mental diseases in society as well as we wanted fewer kids to be diagnosed.

When we helped the parents and school to be more prepared to receive the troubled kids, we made the information flow better through a set of physical meeting and a notebook where information was gathered by kindergarten and parents. 

The different affected parties helped us co-design the experience and they also ran the 5-month pilot on their own. This was essential to create engagement and also make the pilot work. To prove the effect of using the service design perspective; data was collected throughout the whole pilot and will result in a paper written by RBUP.
See more about the project here 

Ruter Service design strategy/OSLO,NORWAY/2012/ Livework

Role: Service designer
Ruter wanted us to help them incorporate the understanding of their travellers need into their projects, process and culture.

We had been helping Ruter the last 4 years with understanding their travellers and therefor also knew the organisation well.

Through close collaboration with a selected group of employees we created a set of hierarchical needs and criteria’s based on qualitative interviews. The Ruter employees participated in the interviews as well as workshops, where we synthesised the insights created ideas as well as gave us further insight into how a customer strategy would be most successful for the organisation.

One of our key learning’s was that if you are working with strategies you need to collaborate better and more direct with top-management as they needed a different outcome compared to the employees in our group. Combining these two levels while mainly working with the employees was difficult, but we created a package that contained top level vision, criteria’s for evaluating projects, lists over the most important changes that needed to be done as well as blueprints of the travellers journey.

Johnson & Johnson Global Strategic Design Office/ New York City, USA/ 2011/ livework

Role: Service designer
The medicinal drugs industry are facing challenges with decrease in earnings from the production of drugs and need to look for new ways of creating value around their drugs. They see the potential in developing a portfolio of services around the drugs.

We went over to work at their office in NYC for six weeks to help them design and select the right services for these patients that would receive this drug. J&J customer is the physician, but they are starting to understand that they also need to look at the patients and their caregivers to create a winning product-service-offering. The project started with talking to experts in the system then we created a set of services that we role-played in the physician’s office and let the patient and caregiver use a set of services over a week. After the pilot we video-interviewed them about the experience. We delivered a set of suggestions of further testing of certain parts of the service offering as well as a patient blueprint of the services and what needed to be done front-stage as well as back-stage.

Ruter timetables and maps/OSLO,NORWAY/ 2012/ livework

Role: Service designer
« Livework made us realise how important qualitative research is before we design touch-points»

Ruter is responsible for public transportation in the Oslo region. Together with Grid they have been designing new timetables and maps.These was designed to be easier for travellers who are visually impaired, new to the system or regular travellers to understand and use. Grid and Ruter needed our help to understand how the changes worked for the travellers.

This was the second part of a an exploratory study conducted by us a couple of months earlier on timetables.

For this test we tested both their new timetables and a map at a tram station over two days. We invited 5 travellers for an hour interview each and grabbed hold of 15 people from the streets  which we asked single questions. The questions was formed as tasks which the travellers was going to solve by using the printed touch points.

We learned that where we had done previous research and given guidelines, the design worked very well(timetables). Where there was no previous research done and no guidelines, the touch points was not very useful for the travellers(map). Another problem was that the two touch points had not been designed together, so there were a lot of confusion between the meanings of colour and signs, when travellers used both touch points to find the answers.

We delivered a detailed overview on what worked and what didn't work, as well as visual and textual suggestions on how to improve the touch points.

Madshus,Cross-country ski production/Lillehammer,Norway/2012/livework

Role: Service designer

« We never thought we could accomplish so much in so little time» Madshus

Madshus started a service-focused initiative early 2012, with several workshops trying to understand what would be new great business opportunities. This initiative was based on new technological improvements, which could have great value for end-users.  

Livework held the last of the initial workshops and concluded their idea-gathering process. This was the first workshop held with mainly Madshus employees and also their first encounter with service design. 

The workshop was mainly focused on getting ideas and then choosing a few of them to pilot. As this was their first experience with user-focused innovation process for Madshus, no user-research had been done yet.  We had to let them imagine the lifecycles, problems and solutions based on their own experience. 

Bridgespan/San Fransisco/2011/ Stanford University

Role: Design thinker
Bridgespan is Bain's non-profit consultancy. Bridgespan wanted us to work on creating a better knowledge capturing system. Since in business consulting most people leave after 2 years,it was important for Bridgespan to contain the valuable information these people produce and use it for future projects. They wanted us to help them understand how to make people use this system more.

The last five weeks we have been working together with them once a week for 3-4 hours.We have been working on their problem and as well learning them the design process ans its tools ,which will help them improve the system and their culture of sharing. We found more complex cultural problems laying behind the failure of the system. We left them a plan on how they can approach the challenge and how do they create buy-in from partners to continue working  with the design process.

Controlled Connectivity for AT&T/San francisco/2011/stanford

Role: Design thinker
Worked with AT&T , to detect greenfield opportunities and suggest structure for building an Innovation Center. Travelled to Seattle, Redmond, Dallas and Austin where we interviewed AT&T employees to understand their culture and their needs. Our team came up with a concept where AT&T could monetise all the data their users are creating as well as their users could profit on it by selling their data and choosing their own privacy settings. We also suggested them to simplify their privacy settings,because of all the privacy buzz in spring 2010 around Facebook. In summer 2010 they simplified their privacy settings.

American Heart Association in China, San Francisco/Beijing/2010/Stanford

Role: Design thinker, project leader
Creating awareness around cardiovascular diseases in China.We were two Stanford students and two students from Peking University who collaborated over 6 months, to develop new initiatives that AHA could develop. AHA's main focus is on changing policy , but after visiting and doing extensive research on Chinese culture we developed games and a grass-root system, which focused on empowering the local society and train them in CPR . Currently the chance of surviving a heart attack in Beijing is 0%,  we came up with a Hero-system , where we incentivised people to be proud of saving strangers. Currently people will rather leave someone dying than trying to help. The risk of helping is higher than leaving them to die.
Summer 2010 AHA went back to China with our idea and started building games where you save people as well as educate them in CPR.

The Future of Education/2009/stanford

Role: Design thinker

We researched teenagers and came up with a new technology that would affect the structure of education . We found that teenagers hang out at the nearest mall during their lunch , even though they wished they could learn more about their future and their hobbies at school, so we came up with a system that encourage students to learn even in their lunch-break

Finding opportunity spaces for Playtex/san francisco/2011/stanford University

Role: Design thinker
Playtex wanted to know about new opportunity spaces for their products. We found that fathers relationship to newborns was very limited, but at the same time he wanted to have a way for connecting with the baby and not only the mother in early stages of childhood. Playtex thought this area was the most interesting of all the proposals and  was very interested in taking this further.

Technology and health/San francisco/2010/ stanford university

Role: Design thinker

How can we change health behaviours among 35-50 years old?
We went to Weightwatchers, interviewed mums and came up with a game/system that would encourage a sporty and healthy lifestyle for the whole family. As mums are the key influencer in the family's decisions around food and activities in the family.

New public-transportation system for the Norwegian Government/OSLO,NORWAY/2008 /livework

Role: Service designer

A project in collaboration with Livework Nordic and Oppland Fylkeskommune (District), creating a new public transport system that facilitates for the spread out population in rural areas. As people live far away from each-other ,a city-system does not work , because the buses take too long time and have very few passengers. By creating a "taxi" system for picking up passengers, buses could run more efficiently and people could quicker get to where they wanted. This system is in the process of being implemented.