www.ijdesign.org

International Journal of Design Vol.5 No.2 2011

S. Clatworthy

The Development Process for the Cards

The development process has been iterative and evolved over the

past three years. Several touch-point workshops have been held

with cross-functional teams from industrial clients. In addition,

student projects working with industrial clients have also utilised

the cards as part of the workshop process.

The cards were initially developed to enrich existing

innovation workshops based upon the touch-point analysis and

mapping. A need was quickly identiﬁed during these workshops

to have a checklist or resource bank of possible touch-points

to save time and to reuse knowledge. We found however, that

developing the cards helped further develop the tools, so the tools

and cards developed together. The tools and the cards have been

prototyped several times and improved each time, most recently

during workshops during the Autumn of 2010.

The ﬁrst cards were images denoting different touch-points.

They were larger (ca. 15x15cm) and placed on foam-board. This

made them tangible elements that were easy to handle and share;

they were a strong improvement on post-it notes. However we

found two problems with them. Firstly, they were too large and

unwieldy when many touch-points were being grouped, simply

taking up too much space on a table or a wall. Secondly, it

was unclear from some of the images which touch point they

represented - the images were ambiguous.

The second cards were made as an innovation game for

one of the industrial partners in the project. The intention was to

identify touch-points speciﬁcally for lottery and betting contexts.

This time the cards were of normal playing card size. We found

that the size worked well for the game context, and was a size

that worked both on tables and on walls when used for group

work. In the images, we attempted to show both the touch-point

and the use context. This caused two types of confusion. Firstly,

ambiguity of some images caused confusion, similar to the ﬁrst

series. Secondly, the association to context made it difﬁcult to

distinguish between the object in the images as a touch-point

(for example a glass) or the context being a touch-point (a bar).

This confusion raised questions within the group during group

processes and transferred focus from the innovation process to

discussion of card meaning. Although not a signiﬁcant problem, it

interrupted the ﬂow of conversation.

During development of the third and present set of cards,

the project leader and designers discussed the issue of confusion

and multiple interpretations. This led to two decisions, the ﬁrst

being that we would put the name of the touch-point on the card.

This enabled a quick recognition of the touch-point, and together

with the image, presented an unambiguous representation. This

led to a discussion regarding the choice of images for the cards and

the usage of the cards themselves. Were they to be abstracted and

inspirational for idea generation in themselves, or should they be

concrete representations of the touch-points? Our second decision

was to make them as clearly descriptive and concrete as possible

based upon the confusion earlier reported. This eliminated the

Figure 1. The ﬁrst cards were images of individual touch-

points and fairly large.

Their tangibility was good, but they

were too large when mapping complex service systems

involving many touch-points. They were also difﬁcult to hold,

group and manipulate by hand.

Figure 2. The second series of cards were playing card size

and incorporated into a game.

They included more contextual

information about the cards by showing the touch-point in its

natural place of use.