At the 2009 Service Design Network Conference in Madeira, STBY and Spur presented a paper together with Reach client T-Mobile on in particular how our use of video made our design research ‘stick’ throughout the process. In the paper we discuss the problem of the lost shoes. At the start of concept development processes we often do some kind of ethnographic research to be able to step into the shoes of the people we design for. But when the process develops, these shoes don’t fit anymore or get lost. We wondered: How can we keep walking in the shoes of our users throughout the entire design process?
Short video films recorded by the participants in our initial research proved to be an answer that not only worked surprisingly well to keep stories from the people we designed for at the centre of the design process and even the business case we had to develop, but these films were also very inspiring for the whole team. The paper explains how we benefitted from the films in detail.