COLLABORATIVE FUTURES — Dominika Swierad Portfolio Site

About me

I bring research, innovation and experience design together, helping teams build products that are useful, thoughtful and fun. Right now I'm part of the AI Labs team at On, where we're working to bring people more joy through movement. I've worked across sectors, with a particular passion for media and storytelling, my time at the Financial Times and building the Guardian's Feast being the highlights.

After hours I write a newsletter about metropolitan life and culture.

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COLLABORATIVE FUTURESUX ARTEFACTS, DESIGN METHODOLOGIES, FUTURES

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I WORKED ASRESEARCHER AND DESIGNER

Collaborative Futures was a project for the Royal Bank of Scotland, aimed at expanding their emerging design research model and its capacity to develop future-based scenarios that inform the bank’s strategic shift from transactional to experiential financial services.

We helped the RBS designers to create an understanding of the short, mid and longer term vision, enabling them to make an informed response to changes happening now, whilst simultaneously considering where to move next, and in turn, build a services for the future.

The goal of the project was to develop the research into a method. We begun by creating STEP cards contextualising the gathered insights around current and future user behaviours, needs and technologies. We complemented them by designing customer profiles representing characters on the full spectrum of the digital literacy scale - a factor that we established would be most impactful to the client. Each customer was given basic banking data supported by work and personal life stories, favourite brands and “guilty pleasures” to indicate their personality and motivations. The aim was to develop inspiring and informative artefacts that would have real use in the product development cycle.

Ultimately, we created The World - a flexible method based on the set of physical tools, enabling the RBS design team to create plausible, insights based scenarios to frame the development of their future financial products and services.

Card from an ideation workshop utilising user profiles (Diana) and emerging technologies to think of new products and services.

Card from an ideation workshop utilising user profiles (Dorothy) and future signals to think of new products and services.

Snapshot of a map created during a worksop we designed and run for the RBS design team.

Poster of the Future World we designed to illustrate how the method can work like in practice. This artefact was put up in the RBS design studio in their HQ in Edinburgh.