What Can’t Be An Email?
Material analysis puts designers on a fast track to new insights, but designers can get caught up in status quo methods that hold them back. In this project you can see the high level of potential that a well curated object study can provide in a short amount of time. You can also see some blockers to getting the most out of this technique.
India
July - September '21
What external trends might impact this opportunity space?
What of the existing postal system should remain unaltered?
What public and/or private sector partners could produce new value?
What might be repurposed?
Arita M.
Dnyaneshwar M.
Nagalakshmi
In this case the design team fell back on their usual journey mapping method, but their instincts led them to pick a very useful object to trace.
Rakhi are bracelets that sisters tie on their brother’s wrists for the Raksha Bandhan ceremony and festival. When they are not near enough to meet in person. an alternative to tying the bracelet is to send one by mail.
Tracing this journey of an object rather than a user shows that the designers are open to applying status quo methods in new ways which is worth celebrating.
Journey are great for surfacing invisible labor and overlooked steps in a produce or service experience, but they tend to minimize the details where insights about the value of a product or service live.
What journey mapping can and can’t do
The step of the journey is not enough.
You can see that event though the shopping step is in the journey, the details about how Rakhi are chosen don’t fit into the typical journey map format.
With some alterations to, and expansions on the map, the team could have identified details about Rakhi that would allow them to see Rakhi-like qualities in other kinds of personal exchanges that don’t translate to digital communication.
Look to ethnography for techniques on capturing insightful detail.
We regularly point designers in our workshops to this collection of field notes curated by designers and social scientists at The New School / Parsons.
Jan Chipchase and Sarah Pink are other references to turn to for clear guidance on best practices in this work.
Good instincts can take you far, with the right guidance.
If some things can’t be an email, what are they? How can the Post Office shape it’s future value proposition to enable these kinds of interactions to be preserved in a world of smartphone filtered human connection?
With another pass to surface more detail and synthesis insights from that detail, there are a few actions this team could take next for great results.
Analogies could be a technique that helps this team find different settings where the post office could provide new value, and objects that help the post office deliver on that value.
