Service Design Through RIP+MIX Exploring a new ideation method appropriate for both designers and non-designers
Mike Press is Professor of Design Policy at the University of Dundee, author of two books on design management and over 100 papers and articles. He has managed design research projects for the Design Council, the Crafts Council and UK government departments.
Hazel White is director of Open Change, a company working with public, private and not-for-profit organisations using creative tools to undertake organisational change. She is a Senior Lecturer and founder of the Design for Services masters programme at the University of Dundee.
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RIP+MIX is a workshop method used to generate new ideas. Developed originally by ourselves in cooperation with T-Labs at Deutsche Telekom to engage multi-disciplinary teams involved in bringing products and services to market, the method has developed as an engaging ideation tool that has proven its worth in a variety of contexts. Most recently, it has been used to enable co-design in public services. Here we describe the method and evaluate its use at the Service Design Global Conference 2013 in Cardiff. Background
RIP+MIX was developed in partnership between Re.Design at the University of Dundee, Scotland and T-Labs, Deutsche Telekom, Berlin. The challenge was to develop a fast, effective and engaging design tool that helps encourage creativity and innovation in both designers and nondesigners. This method was a practical exploration and application of research into “case transfer” by Rosan Chow and Wolfgang Jonas. Their theoretical work suggested that the conventional design wisdom of ‘first user research, then design’ was useful when the design context was highly determined: in other words, when the problem was well defined and amenable to systematic analysis. However, when the context was undetermined then “a design project Mike Press, Hazel White
might begin with projecting new, possible alternatives instead of studying the users.”1 RIP+MIX emerged as a method allowing users to quickly pull out the knowledge embedded in products and services and reconfigure it in alternatives for new contexts. Tools were developed to apply this method for use by Deutsche Telekom, which we applied with design, engineering and management teams in the company, with the aim of developing new perspectives and approaches for new product development, and applied for a range of uses and applications. The simple analysis tools codify parts of the design process that are often left to intuition. A version of the method can be understood and synthesised to ideate innovative products or services in a two-hour