Background
Design firm Halogen has grown steadily in size during their 20 years of business. They have rapidly gone from under 60 employees to over 80 in under two years. Their ambitions for growth has lead to a need for more structure in the organisation to ensure healthy growth. Various design methods were used to propose a quality system consisting of eight concepts for creative and organic processes for Halogen to use.
Some information is under NDA and is therefore omitted.
Some information is under NDA and is therefore omitted.
My role
Scope
For this project I worked alongside three other designers during the whole project. I had a key role in conducting user interviews, structuring and facilitate two workshops, and creating graphical materials.
Service Design, Research, User Interviews, Workshops
Team members
Tools
Hedda Valeur Ottmann, Khai Sigve Nguyen Litleskare & Ferdinand Steen-Johnsen
Figma, FigJam, Illustrator
Continuous quality requires continuous improvement
Our philosophy is that in order to consistently deliver quality, a quality system must be constantly improved. Improvement is a result of identifying errors and solving these issues. This means that as long as the quality system, in-house processes, and project deliveries are consistently studied and improved upon, Halogen will deliver quality to its customers and employees.
But what is a quality system?
Quality Management Systems
A system that documents processes, procedures and areas of responsibility to ensure that guidelines are followed and that the company achieves its goals.
A system that documents processes, procedures and areas of responsibility to ensure that guidelines are followed and that the company achieves its goals.
Advantages
We began our process by identifying their routines, values and challenges
Getting to know Halogen and their needs was the first thing we needed to do to wrap our heads around our task and how we wanted to frame it. A huge part of our insight research was through a field trip to Halogen's office in Oslo where we interviewed employees and observed in their natural environment. We wanted to understand the core of their struggles, and how they all connected.
...and uncovered 9 key insights we needed to consider
Contextualising the interviews and the wast amount information into comprehensible key insights made it easier for us to fine-tune our understanding of the problem. We also presented our key insights to our interview objects to confirm our insights and make sure we were focusing on their actual struggles.
...which we turned into 11 problem statements for Halogen to tackle
One way of generating ideas is to turn insights into problem statements. If we are able to come up with solutions to these problems, we will be one step closer to a functioning quality system for Halogen to use.
Workshop 1 - Generating Ideas
Lateral thinking was an important part of our approach. This way of thinking involves solving problems in an indirect and creative manner, often from unconventional angles. The result is often new and unexpected solutions that wouldn't have emerged through traditional problem-solving.
We used this method to help Halogen look at its own challenges with a fresh perspective in the initial workshop. This resulted in a myriad of ideas that we sorted, analyzed, and formulated into concept sketches for a second concept workshop.
Workshop 2 - Looking at concepts
The second workshop involved participants receiving concept cards that they were to detail and further develop into finalized concepts that could be implemented in the company. In total, eight concepts were further developed.
Final result
We have come up with eight concepts, which will find potential for improvement and trigger it. Each concept has a description of what the concept is about, advantages and limitations of the concept, and a concrete process description for implementation.
We ended up looking back at the GIGA map we created early in the process to see how our concepts would change a typical project timeline at Halogen. With our concepts, warning signs and problems we noticed with this timeline were solved and processes simplified to accommodate a growing company.
Retrospective
This was my first big service design project, and the project I maybe have learned the most from through my years at Industrial Design. Being able to visit Halogen not only one, but two times through the semester was incredibly valuable. I cannot thank Halogen more for their valuable contribution to this project.
