Meaningful Visions for Life, Langenæs Alle 53, 3tv, 8000 Århus C, Denmark | talk@mvl.dk  
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Design as Innovation

The design approach and design research are key elements of successful innovative processes.
Creatively engaged in creating the future the designer collaborates with users as well as stakeholders in the client organization to deliver the best and most appropriate product, service or system to fulfill the needs and desires of the market.

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Collective Intelligence in the creative process

Just like no man is an island no product can be created be one person. Based on a thorough design research and a shared knowledge of the current situation, a process that engages the collective intelligence of the entire developmental team as well as its closest neighbors is needed to reach the best possible solution.
Collective intelligence is often only engaged in isolated brain storming sessions, but can just as well be utilized through the entire developmental process through personal and organizational practices as well as supporting technologies like web 2.0 platforms.

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The Social Product

When is a product deeply meaningful to its users and buyers? On the internet we currently see a spurring of social product and services that link and connect us in new ways and for new purposes. Or actually the purpose is ancient: As a social beast human beings have always had a desire to both stand out and be part of a social context at the same time. How do we as designers develop product that can fit this desire and how can we develop platforms that enable new social patterns to emerge and possibly novel social actions to impact the world.

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What we do

The highest aspiration of design is to create the new and better world. A better world is place where more people than today are able to pursue a free life and grow as they see fit. The products we design should all support this highest aspiration, because there is no inherent conflict between prosperous business and a healthy global society. The only thing we need to add is intelligence and presence in every action we do.

Product design today is not about making things – it is about making meaningful tools in our lives. A product is anything one does that some other are prepared to pay for with money, attention, time or any other number of ways. That is why design means to handle and engage the creative process in interaction design, industrial design, branding, process design, service design, systems design and spatial design.

What MVL can do for you is to engage this focus to qualify the innovative process of creating that which your organization is to share with the world as your product.

By looking and the social interplay around product use and product innovation MVL uses design and design research methods in complex contexts and future scenarios to produce simple and elegant solutions and proposals – always in strong collaboration with any client.

Interaction design

- is looking at the designed product in relation to the context in which it is used and how it makes meaning over time, how it will influence activities in this context. Interaction design most often works with the relationship between humans and their digital technologies, but also extends to facilitating social interaction between people.

Design research

- is to explore the future potential of a design space. That means to engage in user centered processes where ethnographic design methods are used to understand buyer, users, audience of the future design, and maybe even involve them in the design process. The people that are going to buy, use and experience your product are the real experts on how it is meaningful product.

Design research also means to explore ideas through a creative design process, making prototypes of different kinds to give us the best knowledge to move further ahead. These can be and range of experience prototypes or technical prototypes depending on what the purpose is and which phase the development process is at.

Service design

Many businesses today sell a service rather than a physical product. And many ordinary products might as well be sold as services. For instance you can own a washing machine or you can subscribe to a cleaning service, or you can own a car or join a car-club. Often the intelligent solution in a design space is to see a business in a service perspective which opens many new possibilities for innovation and brings a new clarity to the customer-business relation.

Systems design

Today the most successful global products are software and computational systems. It is a highly complex task to make such a success, and the design perspective can broaden the perspective in this process to include user experience, qualify the focus of the finished product. Including design is not an unnecessary complicating matter in this developmental process, but way to refine and strengthen the core and presentation of the product or system concept.

Innovation process facilitation

Collaboration is at the core of the innovation. It is true that some ideas are hatched and carried out an individual, but while we wait for the lightning to strike a range of processes can be applied to get to creative ideas for solutions in a design task. Building on each others ideas and using all the different perspective that are present in an interdisciplinary team can be essential to the success of an innovative process.

From an outset in methods for collective intelligence MVL facilitates creative processes to produce the best and most innovative solutions in design spaces. Collective intelligence means to engage creatively beyond what we already know and explore the future. There is more to it than that but this is best understood in practice as opposed to in text on a website.



 
 
        Design is always 'in the making' continually engaged in creating the future, because  
        clarity of potential evolves in action