Blog frogs on the road
By Elizabeth Roche - May 10, 2011
Social media amulets in Cairo
Aboard this Air Egypt flight from Cairo to Munich, I am grateful for five hours in limbo before being deposited back into Western life. After a week on the ground in Cairo with Jan Chipchase and other colleagues from frog design, I have a sharpened understanding of how little I know about this region. Anyone who has spent time talking to people on both sides of "the line" in Egypt is struck by the monumental gap between those found in the poor, illiterate corners of the city and the fountain-ringed office parks filled with the savvy Egyptian businessmen educated in the best schools the West has to offer. Our research traversed much of this continuum. While we were not in the poorest of poor areas (meaning, communities living in and mining garbage dumps), our interviewees ranged from the latte-sipping, shisha-smoking students wearing designer clothing to the tea peddlers in dusty, goat-filled alleys. When I asked, with the assistance of my translator, if they used Facebook, faces lit with a smile and a nod—even in the goat-inhabited corners.
Blog frogs on the road
By Kristina Loring - February 8, 2011
In the summer of 2010, frog's Executive Creative Director for Global Insights Jan Chipchase conducted field research in Afghanistan with generous support from the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. He worked with his research partner Panthea Lee and a nimble local team to investigate how people use cell phones to do their banking—known in the industry as mobile money.
Blog frogs on the road
By Hannah Regier - December 21, 2010
On December 12 & 13 I joined a group of 10 speakers and 40 participants for the TEDx Kumaun conference. We met in a remote Himalayan village to discuss and share knowledge on the major social issues facing India today. The event was organized by CHIRAG (Central Himalayan Rural Action Group) and hosted at the Himalayan Village Sonapani. For a foreigner trying to absorb as much as I can about India, it was a crash course in politics and social programs. The conference focused on the tension between India's economic growth and the enormity of its problems relating to poverty, poor healthcare, low quality education, lack of food, pollution and rampant corruption.
Blog frogs on the road
By Kate Canales and Lauren Serota - November 23, 2010
Our team of designers on the ground in Zambia discover that meaningful connections and conversations can be as valuable as days of field work.
Given all the broken-down infrastructure, dirt roads, unmarked streets, potholes the size of small swimming pools and other hindrances to getting around in Zambia, our trip was pretty cushy when it comes to transportation. There are three ways to get around in rural Zambia, and 99.9% of people are on foot or on a bike. For longer distances, a handful of people brave a rather hodgepodge bus system. A few people - very few - have a car.
Blog frogs on the road
By Lauren Serota - November 10, 2010
Today we’re excited to announce our collaboration with UNICEF as the organization’s lead design and innovation partner on Project Mwana, a major mHealth initiative to improve maternal and infant health and welfare in peri-urban Malawi and rural Zambia.
Blog frogs on the road
By Elizabeth Roche - October 25, 2010
The château in the wooded, castle-dotted countryside north of Paris is owned by Cap Gemini. The event is the i7 Summit, calling together experts and influencers in technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, and society ‘on the dawn of open innovation and in the aftermath of the greatest economic rethink since the Great Depression’.
With a 40 year history embedded in innovation, frog attended. Not just to inspire and be inspired, but also as the facilitators of business ideation sessions leveraging our frogTHINK method. The breadth of the topics and diversity of participants meant that these sessions served as a sort of mental yoga, stretching us in unaccustomed ways. Instead of our usual one to two day frogTHINK sessions, these were power burst one-hour sessions - meaning the results were high-level and in need of deep refinement. Yet the discussions were lively and bright minds bounced ideas.
Blog frogs on the road
By Sam Martin - September 16, 2010
Jan Chipchase talks at the Economist’s Human Potential 2010 conference in New York about Afghanistan, “extreme research locations,” and a shift in how design researchers do work.
frog Executive Creative Director Jan Chipchase gave a keynote presentation at the Economist’s Human Potential 2010 conference in New York on September 16, 2010. The talk was born out of his recent trip to Afghanistan where he did a field study on how people use cell phones to do their banking — known in the industry as “mobile money.” While he is still processing the findings of his research, he revealed new insights on the practice of design research — specifically on doing research in unusual and “extreme research locations” such as the Middle East. “Five years ago when we were conducting street research, one of our team would document the research with a camera; it was a one way process,” he said. “Three years ago …[people] would bring out their camera phones and start documenting us…. In three year’s time you’ll be able to point camera phone at someone’s face and know within a reasonable time-frame and level of certainty who they are, their history and their history of interactions.”
Blog frogs on the road
By Jon Kolko - July 7, 2010
I finished presenting at the Design Research Society conference today on the topic of Sensemaking - the manner in which we make meaning during the design process, and arrive at insights and new design ideas. You can read more about this topic in my paper, and if you are looking for my slides, you can grab them here. [On a mac, use Acrobat - not Preview]
Blog frogs on the road
By Jon Kolko - July 7, 2010
Blog frogs on the road
By Various frogs - October 3, 2009
Over the past few days, IIT held their annual Design Research Conference. The conference, run and organized entirely by the students of IIT’s institute of Design and led by graduate students Tal Shay and Kate Pemberton, brings together practitioners and students in an intimate setting to discuss issues of design, research, business, culture and society.
I gave a talk that I’ve been building and refining for the past few months, entitled “A new global design intellectualism: predicting – and avoiding – the commoditization of design research.” The talk articulates what I’ve observed over the past decade as a repeated cycle of offshoring, responsive process innovation, and cultural expectations point to the demise of a particular skill or set of methods in the United States.
