INTRODUCTION

In a European context small-to-medium sized companies¹ play an important role to the national economies. Understanding how design anthropologists may fit into a small manufacturing company is important for the promotion of ethnographic praxis in other settings than large multinational or consultancy companies.

Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a central role in the European economy. They are a major source of entrepreneurial skills, innovation and employment. In the enlarged European Union of 25 countries, some 23 million SMEs provide around 75 million jobs and represent 99% of all enterprises. (European Commission 2005)

In a Danish context the theme of User-driven innovation has over the last three years gained much attention by policy makers and companies. The Ministry for Economic and Business Affairs is currently sponsoring projects to ensure a national competitive advantage within the field of user-driven innovation². Anthropology is promoted in government reports as a key discipline in pursuing this strategy and in particular in understanding users’ latent needs. (Rosted 2005: 36-37) (Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation 2006: 16) However, as the Danish company landscape consists of a high number of SMEs there is potential room for finding ways of utilizing the skills of the anthropologist in ways that goes beyond employment in large companies or short-term consultancy offered user studies. A full-time employed design anthropologist in an SME is implicitly conceived of as unrealistic as his or her task doing user studies has a certain duration and momentum within the innovation process. I believe that this rather limited perspective of the anthropologist’s potential role is due to the fact that anthropologists both have been given and partly accepted a role within the field of user-driven innovation by the co-inventors of the field such as FORA (The Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority’s Division for Research and Analysis). Anthropologists are slowly but critically embracing this invitation, but the challenge is now to develop our own role in this game. Do we want to take the expected role as the user experience advocates inspired by large U.S. companies such as Intel, Pitney Bowes and IBM and is this in a SME context even a plausible approach? Or do we need to challenge our own and others’ expectations of what design anthropologists can and should contribute with in small-to-medium sized enterprises?

This paper points out some of the implications for design anthropologists working in SMEs based on experience from a single manufacturing company between 2006-2008. I suggest that working in a small or medium-sized manufacturing company can redefine the role of the design anthropologist in several ways but this requires; the design anthropologist to necessarily understand the broader context of the company – the value network (Christensen 1997), as SMEs often are sub-suppliers and thus dependant on larger companies. Moreover the design anthropologist needs a basic understanding of business to be able to argue findings in a relevant terminology. The design anthropologist must pragmatically be able to balance looking into the company and studying end-users (Heiskanen & Repo 2007). This apparently obvious premise might not be that obvious after all as observed by Janice Anne Rohn (2007:25).

An irony of UX professionals is that they are often so focused on understanding their external customers, they do not spend the time necessary to focus on the internal customers: the stakeholders within the company. However, without buy-in and support from internal customers, the products and services will never reach external customers.

The proposed all-rounder role of the design anthropologist will of course have an effect on how deeply she or he can go into the various fields and thus potentially dilute the quality of the work. These trade-offs might not fit the attitude of the skilled design anthropologist who will have to redefine and expand his or her area of competence and interests by also critically examining the internal organizational and managerial foundations for supporting this approach to innovation. This means challenging procedures, traditions and taken-for-granted ways of doing within the organization and thus challenging the managers who maintain such structures. The attitude and willingness of the anthropologist to leave the comfort zone is crucial (Baba 2006: 35-36). Concurrently the small organization can potentially support the design anthropologists’ holistic approach in understanding the business context as well as support quick decision-making in an un-bureaucratic environment. This I refer to as the company’s aptitude. Design anthropologists in SMEs face a number of challenges that can either support or hamper their efforts. How the design anthropologist responds to these challenges is of course individual, but will be important to understand and accommodate in formal anthropology education as more and more design anthropologists move into industry. The smaller SME organization potentially will have a more receptive audience that can support the design anthropologist’s attempts through ethnographies and anthropological perspectives to influence strategic design decisions (Dourish 2006) and business development.

Case study

I will briefly describe the context and some findings from my research. The SME categorization is probably not interesting in itself – what is though, is the specific company behind this broad category. Dizplay A/S³ is a relatively small sub-supplier and from a value system perspective, rather distant from the end-users. Dizplay is a leading manufacturer & integrator of Information and Passenger systems for the train industry and the primary customers are train builders and train operators. Products include seat reservations displays, system controllers, emergency speech units and infotainment systems. The company employs app. one hundred people with highly specialized engineering and project management competencies – ranging from software, hardware to mechatronics. It has limited experience with user-centered design methods. Human resources are scarce when it comes to explorative activities that distract employees’ attention and time from the core business of running projects. This issue will of course appear in large companies as well. The company develops systems based on (and limited to) their customers’ (train builders) expectations and thus has a rather reactive approach to product development. In this example it seems that a conservative market makes a conservative sub-supplier – and if one adds the very strict standardization, quality and safety regulations in the train industry the willingness to take risks becomes even smaller.

This incremental and technology centered approach to product development makes sense to train builders and has given Dizplay a competitive advantage, but hardly nurtures innovating products and services directly aimed at enhancing the passenger experience of traveling by train. The strong affiliation and market focus between Dizplay and key customers has had the effect that the company historically has had limited attention to new (to-the-company & to-the-world) product development and innovation in a broader sense (Schumpeter, 1934). Product innovation within the company can be described as incremental, sporadic and technology driven – a general tendency among Danish SMEs (Rambøll 2005: 8). Innovation based on end-user needs (whether articulated or non-articulated) is practically non-existing and if so, the needs are heavily filtered and formulated by the customers. Operating within this fixed value system is what has made Dizplay a successful and well-established company despite fierce competition. The same value system is what limits Dizplay in exploring passengers’ needs and thus hampers a proactive approach to new product development that goes beyond the existing systems and value system (Dizplay – Train builder – Train operator – End-user/passenger). Or maybe it is the managers and employees who are more likely the main reason why the company has been successful. Perhaps it is not even the value system that limits anything – but rather our (the Dizplay employees’) imaginations of what is possible. Broadening the boundaries of what is possible and provoking existing assumptions on value systems and business models is in my opinion what is at stake here. Whether the small sub-supplier should be limited by traditions and value systems is a negotiation that takes place between people and of course in the context of the market. One example of Dizplay’s focus on optimizing activities within the existing value system was in 2006 when the company received the IRIS certification, which is an industry specific quality standard measurement certificate. At that occasion Senior Manager of Sales & Marketing, Jens Møldrup, commented in a press release: ‘We are now even more prepared for conducting the development within passenger information in the next many years. And our customers need no longer audit Dizplay to approve us as supplier’, thus implying an alignment of Dizplay’s value chain activities with the customers’ value chain activities. The IRIS certificate reflects the company’s ability to structure complex project management with a focus on quality and standardization. The conditions for dealing with the complexity of innovation activities are present, however optimization is not innovation and does not lead to new products. The point I wish to make is that the design anthropologist is equipped to facilitate this kind of knowledge creation of the relation between the habitus(Bourdieu 2006) of the organization and the untapped potential in both product and business development that arises in the wake of bringing in end-user perspectives to a company with non or little experience with this approach. In sessions of making sense of user studies it therefore becomes essential that the design anthropologist can couple the analytic and constructive approach to new product and service development with a more reflective approach. By facilitating and investigating how the same user studies potentially can inform and provoke assumptions of a company’s product development approach, how value networks are conceived of and their strengths and weaknesses, the design anthropologist can assist employees and managers in articulating strategic implications. The anchoring and positioning of the design anthropologist within the organization would preferably be between and within conceptualizing product/service ideas and business opportunities typically in R&D and Management. I suggest that the design anthropologist should engage not purely in user studies and the translation into concepts, but to also help link organizational learning with product & business development.