By Andy Boynton
Human-centered design focuses on customer empathy, ethnographic research and rapid prototyping. “Stagecraft”, a related approach, fakes a new product or service to get real-life reactions from users early in the development process. It uses all the tricks of theater and film to fool an audience into believing that what they are seeing, hearing or touching is the real thing.
In a recent project at Continuum Innovation, a Boston-based firm with which I am affiliated, the Science and Technology Directorate of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used stagecraft to learn how new technologies could be used in equipment for first responders.
Picture this: Through the windshield, two emergency medical technicians (EMT) see cars pull over to make way for their self-driving ambulance. A windshield data display shows a map of the crash site and indicates the locations of the most seriously injured passengers and their vital signs, which are transmitted from skin patches that have been applied by police officers or firefighters already on the scene. At the site, one of the EMTs crouches over a victim and glances at a display on a cuff wrapped around her wrist, seeing that the patient’s blood pressure has dropped—a sign of hypovolemic shock. The EMT shakes her wrist to activate the built-in cell phone in the cuff to call her colleague and tell him that the victim needs to be transported immediately.
It’s all staged. The driverless van is a mock-up, with a foam-core dashboard. The view through the windshield is a projection. The crash victim is a dummy. The ambulance technicians are real EMTs who are doing their best to replicate how they would handle situation like this on the streets of Boston.
By staging emergencies, designers quickly discovered important things about proposed ideas. In the past, the DHS had hosted workshops with vendors, surveyed police, EMTs and fire departments, and run focus groups to get requirements for new technologies, which engineers and designers then turned into prototypes. The process was costly and slow.
After the staged exercises, DHS was confident that it had the insights needed to begin working on actual design ideas.
Andy Boynton is the dean of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management.