Overview

In 2013, the printing division at Samsung approached Streng for help understanding how the then evolving role of mobile devices in the office would impact the future of printing, with a goal of crafting their own vision of printing experiences in the year 2018.

I was part of this project from the first meeting with Samsung, to leading the process development and proposal creation, and subsequently serving as the research and strategy lead for the project itself.

Approach

As the desired context for this project was a horizon of 5 years in the future, I personally created a unique foresight led approach that focused on anticipating how today’s user needs & technology trends might align with business goals to develop a strategy for the experiences of tomorrow.

This project leveraged a combination of strategic foresight and human-centered design methods to uncover how consumer adoption of mobile devices today would create new expectations from technology used in the workplace of 2018.

A combination of primary & secondary research allowed us to understand user needs, identify trends in technology and business, and synthesize these inputs into principles that define criteria for touchpoints of future mobile printing user experiences. Research methods utilized include: ethnographic observation & contextual inquiry, in-depth interviews, competitive analysis, & technology trend assessment.

To leverage the talent of the designers in the Samsung printing team and create a sense of ownership in these future visions, the project included several collaborative innovation & ideation workshops. I personally travelled to Seoul, SK to lead a two-day ideation workshop with industrial & experience designers from the US, South Korea, and Japan aimed at translating the principles into innovative features & components of future service experiences.

I led the Streng team of designers in exhaustively mapping the current state experience of three mobile printing personas. The key moments & painpoints in the present user experience were used to connect the dots between ideas & concepts generated in the workshops and the ideal state service experience of the future.

Outcomes

Samsung wanted to a deliverable that was more than just another deck, so we deliver two short films aimed at give a glimpse at the vision of the future of mobile printing we created for Samsung. These short films tell the (relatively mundane) story of two mobile printing personas, as they work and print on-the-go using a fictional future service, the Samsung Management Cloud. Key service components portrayed in the film include adaptive content, intelligent printing devices, and seamless micro-interactions meant to serve as a beacon for future printing hardware & software experience design and development efforts by Samsung.

Credits

Client: Samsung Role: Research Lead Year: 2013