Speakers: Stokes Jones - Design Research Conference, IIT Institute of Design

Stokes Jones, Lodestar

Stokes Jones Stokes is Principal of Lodestar, which he founded to help organizations innovate by responding to the technological and cultural changes shaping their customers. Lodestar focuses on capturing daily life and its transformation through emerging practices in order to access the wider structures shaping people's thoughts, actions, use of tools and services. We then work to build strategies for differentiation from this foundation. Lodestar's clients have included the BBC, HBOS, Procter & Gamble, and Nokia.

Stokes was trained as a social anthropologist at the London School of Economics. His background is as a Director of XMod (the Experience Modeling discipline) at e-consultancy Sapient, a strategist and trend researcher at futures consultancy Henley Centre/HeadlightVision (now 'the futures company'), and most recently he was Philips Design's Director of Foresight, Trends & People Research for North America.

Stokes has won the Emrys-Peters Prize for anthropology writing, and a WPP Group Atticus Award for published thinking in marketing. He is a recognized practitioner of the growing field which applies consumer ethnography and design thinking to business strategy, and he spoke and published for the inaugural EPIC 2005 and 2006 (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference).

Talk: Getting Embedded: In Search of Alt-innovation

Friday Oct. 2, 2:30 pm

Whatever innovation process you favor, chances are it's a relatively 'top-down' one. In this presentation, I will explore the roots of, and a working model for, an alternative type of innovation that is 'bottom-up' and anthropologically grounded. What we call "embedded innovation" is not something companies do to the world – after a staged series of research and workshop events – but a cultural process that people are continually unfolding in the world over time. In this approach, the key focus for design research and strategy becomes 'attunement' not invention - identifying the embedded innovation already taking place in a context or marketspace, then aligning to and enhancing it.

We will look at cases of how this method has been applied cross-culturally by Lodestar; for researching with P&G the design of new over-the-counter medicines in South Africa; for social networking in Brazil, as well as by comparison to a familiar household product in the US. We will then consider the implications of complementing the usual 'heroic', company-led innovation with this more humble form. We believe research into embedded innovation leads to solutions that are truly human centered and empathic because it connects people to the value inherent in proposed products and services by designing offers from the inside out of their own 'folk models' and situated practices.