Summ( )n (Hi) Story

summ n © Summ( ) n, 2013

Exploring! Futures!

Transforming ! Minds!

Understanding ! People!

We summon the futures. For you to play with them now. www.summn.com

The new


Summ( )n is team of passionate and experienced professionals that help you

to create the new, being it new product or service, new brand or new business

model. We help you to innovate — in a new way.

We are doing it by helping you to better understand the people of today —

what, how and why they do things, and how these activities unfold in the real life

contexts. At the same time we help you to explore the possible futures —

the futures of cultures and societies, industries and markets, or the futures of your

own enterprise.

We also create opportunities to experience and probe these futures, to play with

them in realistic yet risk-free environments (well, almost), thus transforming your

minds. In short, We summon the futures. For you to play with them now!


Summ( )n’s roots are in the high-design process developed by Philips Design, with its focus on people and futures:

human-focused research-based multi-disciplinary business integrated

Iterative high-design process, circa 1996 ‘Vision of the Future’ process (circa 1998)


…and as such is compatible/compliant with the vast majority of the approaches, methods and tools for design/innovation developed later, including ‘design thinking’, the latest buzzword:

Design innovation funnel

Service design

Iterative design process

Fuzzy front-end innovation


‘Understanding people(*)’ and ‘Exploring futures’, each with with its own set of diverse tools and methods to inform and inspire design and innovation, are a ‘given’, a default mode of operation for Summ( )n

Understanding people

Exploring futures DESIGN

(*) Every time we write ‘people’ it means not only ‘end-users’ or ‘consumers’, but also partners, customers, and, speaking broader, an entire stakeholder network.

The new


Understanding people

Exploring futures DESIGN

The new

But we also (painfully) discovered a ‘missing link’ that often prevented this beautiful new to emerge and make impact...


Which lead me to the development of Trans&, a new transformative proposition, based on interactive playing with the nows, the futures, and your selves.


Which eventually became the founding principle of Summ( )n, a transformative agency aimed to prepare people for the ‘turbulent tomorrows’, by

Transforming minds


We developed and played a few excellent ‘future games’ helping people to explore the futures…


Exploring! Futures!



The new

… but there were too few of these games, and they didn’t work in full, being conducted in isolation from other two crucial ingredients, People and Futures. Eventually, we constructed a more holistic approach, that combines in-depth understanding of people’s experiences, exploration of possible future developments in societies, cultures and industries with specifically design ‘transformative mechanisms’ (‘serious games’, ‘immersive environments’, ‘interactive installation’ and the like.) Notice that it’s not linear process (left-right), nor it is a ‘circular’ or ‘spiral’ one: the best way to read this scheme is 3D, it is a breakthrough process, the ‘hole’ in the middle is in fact an entry to the new, a portal which we help people to enter.


What people

say

do/use

think feel value

What researchers do:

surveys interviews

focus-groups

observations

co-research

co-creation

Summ n


Contextual observations


Co-researching with people


Co-creation of new values


The traditional researchers do:

predict

develop scenarios

develop roadmaps

What future researchers do:

sense ‘future signals’

co-explore

probe & provoke

analyze developments of the past &

extrapolate ‘trends’

Summ n


Sensing the ‘future signals’


Making sense of the futures


Playing with the futures


If we don’t help people to change…


?

?

?

they will be spending time and efforts to calculate the ‘right’ future


instead of preparing to the different futures


Summ n

That’s why we help people to transform, to try new states of mind, new ways to interact with people and things, and think about themselves.


Transforming toward the future of creative spaces


Transforming toward the future of gamification


Roadmap of innovation for Sree Chitra Medical Research Institute, Trivandrum, Kerala, India

The Future of Your Startup (TechPeaks Accelerator, Trento, Italy)

Summ( )n works internationally, from India to Russia, from Estonia to Greece


In 2012 Summ( )n joined an international 16 members strong network of design research agencies Reach, which made us capable to design and conduct truly global projects

www.globaldesignresearch.com

REACH !


Prior to Summ( )n, Slava worked for ten years with the Strategic Future Design team of Philips Design, a design house of Philips Electronics in the Netherlands. He participated in numerous future studies to explore scenarios of the possible developments for enterprises, industries and regions, supporting strategic design and innovation of products, services, systems and brands.

Slava Kozlov is a co-founder and director of Summ( )n, the Netherlands-based collective that supports companies and organizations in their strategic innovation initiatives. Summ( )n provides in-depth understanding of people’s behavior and values today and explores the societies and cultures of tomorrow, helping to change personal and collective mindsets using ‘serious games’ and other transformative techniques.

Slava led/participated in a range of large-scale research projects, including design and development of ‘smart environments’and intelligent interfaces’ (such Ambient Intelligence and the Internet of Things) and numerous design explorations, supporting Experience Design, Design Probes and Co-Design/Co-Creation practices. He developed a range of novel methods and tools to conduct contextual research, future studies, cross-cultural and multi-stakeholder analysis, and to enable collaborative, participatory design (from co-research to co-creation). He was one of the pioneers of using 3D virtual worlds and MMORPGs in research, and actively employs serious games and social web for research, innovation and transformation.

Slava is one of the first members of the European Council of the IoT (Internet of Things), and currently a mentor with the star-up accelerator TechPeaks (Trento, Italy) and HighTech XL startup bootcamp in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He is an advisor for the social innovation hub iX-Kerala (Trivandrum, Kerala, India) and together with Summ( )n a member of a global design research network Reach.


Exploring! Futures!



The new

Summ( )n (Hi) Story

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