This week we were happy to visit The Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, GIH. Teachers in the course of Innovation & Entrepreneurship invited us to give a talk about design thinking, and how we work with design at Ocean. But, we believe in learning by doing! Instead of giving a lecture about the process of design thinking, Kajsa and Samir held a workshop where the students got to try out the process themselves – from gaining empathy for the user, defining the problem, ideate and conceptualise, test, build a prototype and test again. Some really groovy concepts were built and we hope that these future entrepreneurs in sports and health will continue to innovate by design =)

Prototyping in full motion.

After seeing the first prototype, one of the factory workers told us, “This tool will lead us from darkness to light.” We couldn’t think of a more powerful statement that represents our drive to design meaningful services that make people’s lives better.

We are thrilled to announce the green light to move into the next phase in our work with QuizRR, a socially conscious Swedish start-up whose mission is to educate and empower factory workers to drive sustainable change throughout all levels of the supply chain.

Through an iterative and co-creative process that is inclusive of users and stakeholders, Ocean has been working alongside QuizRR since the Spring of 2014 to design and develop a prestudy, proof-of-concept, and first version of a web service based on strategic insights and valuable input from factory workers, suppliers, and global buyers. At the heart of the service is a digital training tool designed to educate and empower factory workers around their rights and responsibilities via a series of training videos and questions. The data from the tool is then collected, reported, and visualized via a web portal aimed at global buyers looking to find and connect with responsible supply partners. (Read the QuizRR Case Study on our website here.)

Funding for the design phase has been made possible through support from Clas Ohlson, who provided financing and resources for user research and testing, as well as additional collaborators like Intersport and Swedwatch. And just this week QuizRR has announced that they have received additional funding from Ax Foundation (Antonia Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Sustainable Development), with participation and support from Filippa K and Ax Food during the pilot phase, as well as funding from Almi Invest. The additional funding means that we can now continue with the design and development of a first version of the web service, planned to launch in Spring 2015.

In addition to support from proud collaborators and esteemed organizations, QuizRR is being recognized with honors in social entrepreneurship. Earlier this year, QuizRR was selected to join the CSES Incubator (Center for Social Entrepreneurship Stockholm). They were also nominated by Carnegie and Svenska Dagbladet as a candidate for the 2014 Entrepreneur of the Future.

But for Ocean, the biggest honor has been the reaction from the factory workers themselves. In June of 2014, members of the team had the opportunity to meet face-to-face with garment workers in Bangladesh to get a better understanding of their reality, environment, and needs. We spent four days in several garment factories in Dhaka, meeting with factory workers and sharing prototypes to gain input and feedback on the training tool. After seeing the first prototype, one of the factory workers told us, “This tool will lead us from darkness to light.” We couldn’t think of a more powerful statement that represents our drive to design meaningful services that make people’s lives better. We are truly moved, and so honored to have this opportunity to design for change.

Last week we participated in the Almedalen Week, also known as Politician Week, which is an annual event taking place in Visby on the Swedish island Gotland. The week used to host speeches arranged by the political parties in Sweden but these days it has grown into an important forum not only for the politicians but also with representatives from public and private industries as well as the media. This year almost 3400 activities were scheduled and about 50.000 visitors came to the event.

Ocean Observations kicked off by participating in Beata Wickbom’s event Hej Digitalt where our founder Sofia Svanteson participated in a panel discussion on the future of digitization together with Anna Omstedt Lindgren, MedUniverse and Jeppe D Larsen, Cradle Net. Sofia’s main point was that the digitization of our society cannot be run solely by IT-divisions but strategies need to address an ethnographic perspective when transforming our country with help from new digital services.

We continued with helping our client QuizRR demoing the educational tool we have designed together with them. The tool educates textile factory workers in Bangladesh in their rights and the managers in their responsibilities. The results are transferred to a portal where fashion brands in Europe who are serious about CSR can select a factory that is focusing on creating a better work environment.

Eventually we participated in Region Skåne’s event on e-health and electronic patients’ records. Together with Sofia Ernestam, MD PhD at Karolinska Institutet we told the story on how we mapped the patient journey from symptom to diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis and how that helped us find a strategy and a service for how to shorten this journey and get patients quicker to specialist care.

The first online screening service to identify and support people with symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis is now launched as a pilot in Stockholm County Council.

Together with Karolinska Institutet, Ocean Observations has co-created an online screening with RA patients, GPs and specialists, based on needs and behaviours.

Chronic diseases are among the most prevalent and costly of all health problems.
In Sweden, about 80% of the total healthcare budget is spent on the chronically ill. The American investor Steven Burrill says that if we do not fundamentally change the health care systems, all countries in the world will go bankrupt by 2020.

Scientists and doctors in Rheumatology at Karolinska Institutet, with MD Sofia Ernestam as a driving evangelist, had realized it took too long for patients with symptoms of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) to reach specialist care. This is a serious problem because delays in the diagnosis and treatment of RA increase the risk of patients becoming disabled, going into sick-leave, and needing expensive medication, which is costly for the Swedish state. This is a situation that has to change. So the initial question and challenge assigned to our design team at Ocean Observations was: why is this journey often so long, and what can we do to shorten it?

In this much-needed transformation of healthcare, the possibility to tell the story of the patient and his or her experiences is not only important, but is vital to get a holistic perspective on healthcare and how to find solutions to the problems in front of us. We initiated this project by gaining empathy for the patients and mapping their journey from symptom to diagnosis. In this map and accompanying analysis, all stakeholders in the project learned about why we needed to change healthcare, and how and where we could impact the process.

The fact that today’s healthcare journey starts on the internet brings up two problems, one being the fact that people find information that is not validated or is outright wrong, which has the potential to invoke feelings of fear rather than comfort. The second problem is that doctors are generally reluctant to patients bringing their own research and having ideas about their diagnosis. But in both of these cases, the result from an online screening service, which the citizen finds while searching for terms like “painful joints” or similar, could solve these problems. If the screening is based on the patients’ or citizens’ needs and is focused on educating and guiding rather than frightening, and is co-created together with both GPs and specialists (and thus consists of validated information) we could eliminate these problems because we get a trustworthy source for both health seekers and care givers.

Several patients told us that they tend to get nervous when meeting with a GP, as they are such an authority figure. The patients can have trouble remembering all the symptoms and when they started. With the result from a screening online–taken at home, or on the bus, or during the lunch break–both patient and doctor can be supported in the consultation and form a common understanding of the symptoms.

A GP can be confronted with 10,000 different diagnosis, and it is not possible to be an expert on all of them. But a GP could accept guidance, and we believe that an online screening service can offer a welcomed level of support to medical professionals by helping the GP to write a correct referral as well as providing access to patient medical records.

You can find more information on the project here (in Swedish); 4D Artriter
You can find the online screening here (in Swedish); Ont i lederna

The Student Interaction Designer Conference (SIDeR) was held this year at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm in co-operation with MobileLifeCentre and the Interaction Design Foundation. SIDeR is an annual conference that enables interaction design students to participate and contribute to research in the emerging discipline of interaction design.

On the first day of the two-day conference, an industry panel was held with representatives from the industry world discussing the next 10 years of professional Interaction Design.

Ocean Observations were invited to represent one of the companies for the industry panel and our Interaction Designer, Tianlin “Tintin” Gu, was up for the task. The other panelists were James McConnell from Screen Interaction, Anders Mellbrandt (Stand-in for Darja Isaksson) from Ziggy Creative Colony, Björn Johansson from SVTi and Lidia Oshylansky from Google.

The attending students had the opportunity to ask the panelists questions about the future of Interaction Design, Service Design and design processes, new means of interactions and what it is like to work as an Interaction Designer.

The panel discussed bodily gestures and eye interactions and how these approaches will become relevant and important for the future of interaction design. Screens are getting bigger, hardware is getting smaller and everything is connected. It will become more crucial to move away from just using the tip of our fingers to interact and create more experiences that involve bigger gestures for platforms that are way bigger than a single smartphone screen.

The panel also discussed the importance of receiving haptic feedback, citing an article by Bret Victor. The most important function of our fingers is to be able feel things and a lot of our current interactions with touch-on-screen solutions are regarded as “moving pictures under glass”.

Another interesting discussion was about what the next “big thing” after touch-on-screen would be. We as users are currently looking down on our screens and the panel agreed on that there needs to be more focus and ideation regarding how we can present interfaces that allow users to instead look “up” and beyond. 3D projected user interfaces, augmented reality and the emergence of Google Glass will definitely become game-changers in terms of how we will interact with future user interfaces.

Gender equality in the Interaction Design industry was also discussed and it was interesting to see that the IxD industry is regarded as much more equal compared to other fields within the IT-industry. Most companies represented at the panel had high gender equality.

We are currently working in very exciting times with new technology such as wearables, internet of things and augmented reality flourishing, inspiring us to create more innovative and meaningful designs and user experiences. Unfortunately, there was only one hour for the panel discussion but it is safe to say that these discussions could have gone for hours, or even days!

Ocean Observations is proud to have been part of this conference and would gladly return to help the research world of interaction design.

A few weeks ago one of our Design Strategists, Kajsa Sundeson, was invited to speak at a Health 2.0 meet-up in Stockholm, where the theme for the night was Design.

Kajsa shared insights from the collaborative service design process of Genia, a mobile health application designed with and for children with cystic fibrosis (CF) and their families.

Genia is a user-driven initiative starting from CF families’ own wishes for tools to ease daily life and to support collaboration with care providers in understanding disease patterns and determining what is the best individual treatment.

In 2013 Kajsa got the possibility to work with Genia as a part of her thesis project at Aalto Arts. She focused on empathic design research to understand children and families’ daily experiences of living with CF. The research findings then helped to define a concept for the mobile application, which aims to support both care management at home and collaboration with care providers. To ensure secure data sharing between patients and care providers the application was built in collaboration with Mina Vårdflöden.

Ocean is now taking part in the iterative design process of developing Genia further together with families and care providers. At the moment we are doing user tests to understand how we can improve and refine the concept to create a great user experience and continue to support families in their daily life with CF.

Take a look at the concept of Genia here:

A few weeks ago, we were fortunate to have been invited to speak and facilitate a series of creative sessions at MEX, a small but high-profile biannual conference for people from the UX industry and with a general interest for UX.

Curated by Marek Pawlowski and Dr Andrew Muir Wood, the event is built up around the concept of designing for User Modes, where user ambitions and behavioral attributes define the user experience instead of focusing around specific devices or screen sizes. There were six different user modes covered in the workshop; Locate, Trust, Consume, Create, Control and Communicate.

Our own Per Nordqvist was invited to present Ocean’s design approach to new digital healthcare services. Per then facilitated one of the six creative sessions focused on Control as a design challenge.

The digital intelligence of things around us is increasing rapidly and lots of personal behavioural data is tracked and analysed. With our personal environment knowing exactly what our next move is, it can work in the background to aid us controlling the increasing amount of user attention demands. But even if it is possible to automate a lot of everyday routines, how do we ensure that the user is still in control? Or at least have the feeling of being in control?

The group challenge on the Control theme was to design a UI for end users to construct chains of automation across numerous different touch points. From this we should also derive five reusable design principles that can be applied to other situations where the Control user mode is applied.

By sharing personal everyday routines in the group, we mapped touch points and user scenarios where we are in control of digital experiences. We also located a set of control mechanisms by re-imagining physical user interfaces, such as an alarm clock and a fishing rod, as digital user interfaces.

By the end of the second day, the team presented a concept for an end user UI along with five reusable design principles.

I en artikel i interntidningen Karolina beskrivs arbetet med värdebaserad vård där Sofia Ernestam, reumatolog och registerhållare för SRQ, är en av de starkaste evangelisterna. I sin strävan att finna nya sätt att möta patienten vill hon skapa förnyelse i vården. Sedan juni 2013 har Ocean Observations haft förmånen att jobba tillsammans med Sofia och hjälpa till att förverkliga hennes visioner. Läs artikeln efter bilden.

Fotograf: Allan Larsson, Medicinsk Bild, KS

Kvalitetsarbete nära patienten

Artikelförfattare: Catarina Thepper

Reumatologiska kliniken har ett arbetssätt som på många sätt illustrerar det man vill uppnå med värdebaserad vård. Data från deras kvalitetsregister används både för forskning och i patientmötet. Nu letar de vägar till tidigare diagnos.

Det talas mycket om kvalitet på Karolinska just nu. Värdebaserad vård, en av de prioriterade åtgärderna i verksamhetsplanen 2014, handlar om att mäta resultat och kostnader för patienten i hela vårdkedjan.

– Värdebaserad vård är ett komplement till flödesarbetet. Det sätter resultaten för patienterna i centrum, säger Sofia Ernestam, reumatolog och registerhållare för SRQ, svensk reumatologis kvalitetsregister.

Hon har gått kurs i värdebaserad vård för grundaren Michael Porter och beskriver inflytandet av hans idéer inom sjukvården närmast som en världstrend. Mycket är bra, tycker hon, annat är hon försiktigt kritisk emot.

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One of our Interaction Designers, Tianlin “Tintin” Gu, gave a speech last week at KTH Kista’s FutureFriday about his journey to become an interaction designer. Tintin spoke about his experiences as a student at KTH, how he discovered his passion for Interaction Design and the user experience, how KTH taught him to view problem solving from different approach and how it has changed him as a person.

FutureFriday is a yearly inspirational event held by KTH Kista, hoping to inspire and influence young high school students in the ever-developing fields of technology and art.

(Video is in Swedish)

Europe’s digital economy and app sector are booming, but where are the women? Women represent less than 30% of the EU ICT workforce and only 9 in 100 European app developers are female. The European Commission launches today a campaign to find and celebrate role models who could encourage young women and girls to study and to pursue careers in technology.

From the press release:
“Sofia Svanteson @sofiasvanteson, from Sweden, advises young women considering a career in tech to keep an open mind about what technology can be used for. She thinks that progress in tech cannot be for the sake of technology itself; when something is user-friendly and meaningful, that’s when it can change peoples’ lives for the better. Sofia finds it amazing to be part of this process.”