Marketing and Participatory Design Thinking, 21/10/11, Inspires Learning

October 21, 2011

Marketing and Participatory Design Thinking

I taught a session this week as part of the MA in Global Media and Communication (Cultural Policy Studies). It started with a 1 hour long lecture and discussion, followed by a practical session (see the results here).

Here are the slides and videos from the lecture. The mind maps, and links to the software, will be uploaded in a separate entry. Click on the thumbnails to see the full size slide...


	Companies, governments etc are prepared to spend staggering amounts of money on advertising.
	Asking this question leads to a better understanding of the complex social and cultural dynamics of business and the media.
	We could naively accept a simplistic view of advertising: consumer has specific well understood need, producer has the product, consumer buys product, need satisfied.

Intel has global domination of the desktop and laptop processor market. But they still need to create amazing adds like this.

	Asking the question leads to some interesting insights about business, society and culture. There are many motivations, explicit and implicit, behind spending on advertising.
	Advertising might play a significant part in the internal strategic work being done in the comany. It might have a significant internal focus, for example trying to stimulate motivation and allegiance amongst the work force. There are many possible reasons.
	A recent trend has been the move from a product-oriented business model to a service-oriented model, in which consumers become participants in the cultural and industrial production, co-creating brands, designs, markets etc. Marketing campaigns need to help to build this co-operation and participation.

The DHL That's Logistics campaign makes people feel part of the logistics operation. Perhaps this will result in greater client-service cooperation, contributing to avoiding problemsor resolving them faster?

	This is the name for a range of approaches that aim to bring product development, design, support and marketing into a single well-integrated whole, with active participation from all stake holders. The IDEO design partnership are key drivers behind this.
	IDEO members have published and spoken about their methods. See the work of Tim Brown on Design Thinking, and David Kelley on Prototying in the Shorthand of Design.
	At Warwick we have used these approaches to design new services and courses. For example, a design workshop brought together students, managers and teachers to create and test lo-fi prototypes for possible distance learning courses. We started with creating fictional but realistic potential students.
	We then considered how they should have changed having undertaken the course.

We built a prototype timeline of resources and events, to show how the course might achieve these changes, and to ensure that the vision of the teachers and the admin practicalities could work towards these ends. We then filmed a walk through of the timeline, narrated by the students. This could then be shown to other potential students, teacher, funders and managers, for a next iteration of prototype and test. Thinking about marketing was an essential part of this process from the earliest stage.

	Understanding and engaging with real people is ob absolute importance. Don't just build products, services and adverts, build communities.
	Bruno Latour's actor-network-theory approach offers a powerful approach to understanding how real people build real communities, how they get things done with their network, how they theorise about them, and how technology plays a central role.
	Finally, the creative brief for the practical session.