M+E Connections

Amid the ongoing, revolutionary changes that are being seen in the media and technology sectors, it would be in the best interest of those who work in those industries to start thinking like designers as part of their innovation strategies, Peter Hyer, portfolio director at global design firm IDEO, said at the Hollywood IT Society’s (HITS) “Holly-wired: Where IT and Entertainment Meet” conference in Los Angeles May 25.

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success, according to IDEO. The product-development technique puts customers first when creating goods and services and thinking like a designer can transform the way companies develop products, services, processes and strategies, Hyer said.

IDEO typically creates design teams that include people from different backgrounds, including engineers and graphic designers, he told the conference, pointing out he had a background in architecture initially.

Five to six people on a team tackle each design challenge, he said. “It’s taking the tools of the designer’s toolkit and applying it to a much wider range of challenges,” he said, adding it “takes many different perspectives and … different minds to see a problem through a new lens.” It’s important to be able to take a look at a “very complex system, break it out into its pieces, understand how the dynamics of it work and put it back together thoughtfully and strategically,” he said.

Hyer pointed out how the same kind of development strategy can be applied specifically to media using such concepts as empathy. “It’s really about putting yourself in the eyes and the shoes of not just your customers, but in all of the people within the ecosystem,” he said. Media is “very unique in that it’s not just one set of users” involved, but rather a “whole range of users and we recommend talking to them all and understanding what all those needs are,” he said.

As part of an exercise in empathy that his company did for a game studio that was trying to figure out how to bring new consumers into gaming to broaden its audience, the IDEO team took the game makers to an exercise studio’s trampoline class, he recalled. IDEO didn’t tell the game makers exactly what they would be doing there or for how long.

“They were scared,” in part because they did not know how long they would be there, they didn’t know what to do, and they felt stupid being there alongside people who were part of the class and experienced at it, he said. When it was over, the game makers were furious, but the IDEO team explained to them that they were trying to put them in the same position as new gamers would be in. “How do non-gamers feel when they step into the environments that you’re playing? How do they know how long it’s going to take? How do they feel when their level of experience is put up against something that feels a little less comfortable” to them? The exercise taught them how to empathize with who their end users would be and also taught them what their biases were, he said.

He also pointed to an IDEO project with HBO several years ago. “We made a whole interactive environment” showing different ways that HBO could “grow to be a more consumer-facing brand” and what an “innovation pipeline for that might look like,” he said. The lesson that IDEO tried to share there was that technology “continues to change and new things come out,” so any blueprint created can’t be fixed, he said. It’s “incredibly important” to be able to “reevaluate continuously,” he said.

When it comes to media and technology overall, it’s important to gauge needs across the entire ecosystem, he said. “The landscape has changed a lot and it’s continually changing … . Different screens and technologies don’t have the same sort of hierarchy and priority that they used to,” he said, referring to the fact that consumers now use multiple devices with screens to consume their content, including TVs, smartphones and tablets.

“On one hand, you have an ecosystem of different screens and on the other hand you have a bunch of different habits and behaviors and routines. And it used to be that certain media types had an appliance that was specifically used for serving that kind of media,” he said. But that’s just “not the case” anymore, he added.

However, “there are still ‘unmet needs’ around what going out with one’s partner means or what family time means or what “nerding out” means, despite all the changes that have taken place, he said. “Those are real human behaviors that… continue to exist, but the experiences on the [various device] platforms aren’t necessarily mapped one to one to each of those,” he said.

The path from content creation to consumption “used to be a lot more linear than it is now,” he said. In the past, there were “creatives that would pitch their ideas and studios that would develop it and sell it to distributors — and now you’d be hard-pressed to identify, well, who’s the advertiser and who’s the distributor and who’s the creative and who’s the consumer in the age of Snapchat and YouTube stars,” he said. “Each of those nodes are much more independent and less linear than before.”

“Our job in media and technology is to … connect to those user needs in a way that is tied to real behavior,” he went on to say. “It’s not just about selling stuff” anymore. “It’s about creating these relations between these independent nodes. Media and technology companies must relate to their consumers not as consumers of their products [alone] but as participants and collaborators” now, he said. “This relationship changes how success is measured. It changes how the media is sold and to whom,” he said.