The Alchemist Club

• Problem owners: Cosméticos Marlioü París Ltda.

• Process owners: Ricardo Mejia Sarmiento

• Part of the research project: Vision Concepts for Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Developing a Design-Led Futures Technique to Boost Innovation

• Supervisory team: Promotors Prof. dr. P.J. Stappers (Pieter Jan) and Prof. dr. H.J. Hultink (Erik Jan). Daily Supervisor Dr. G. Pasman (Gert). Mentor Dr. E. Karana (Elvin).

• Completion Date: July 2015, The Netherlands

Challenge

I made this vision concept as part of the development of DIVE. It is a design-led futures technique that assists designers in making and sharing vision concepts for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Its development began with an inquiry into concept cars in the automotive industry and concept products and services in other industries. We then combined the insights derived from these design practices with elements of the existing techniques of critical design and design fiction into the creation of DIVE’s preliminary first version, which was then applied and evaluated in two iterations with SMEs, resulting in DIVE’s alpha version. This vision concept acts as a probe that explores a new territory, the speculative future of Marlioü.

Cosméticos Marlioü París is a Colombian medium-sized enterprise focused on hair care products. The Strategic PES (see more details of this tool here) revealed that “Marlioü is a two-headed trout, living in a peaceful pond”. Through its life of permanent service to the community, the trout is changing, and sprouted a second head; as the family enterprise is handing down the business to the third generation, the company seems to move in two opposite directions at the same time. One head, the incoming manager, wants to move to an unexplored small pond, a high-income market where the company can use information technologies; the other head, the outgoing director, is focused on the current pond, where the fish is already well known by many low-income users.

Purposes

Marlioü then needs a new vision of a desirable future, genuinely informed by its beliefs, that blends the desires of the relevant heads, the family members. A vision that:

• inspires ideas about the future of the business

• choose the strategic direction of the company

• understand how to implement new technology

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Process

After analyzing products trends and users’ expectations, I defined a vision for 2025: “Marlioü wants to reinforce its presence in the low-income market by offering a personalized care service via a network of beauty consultants, who are fully supported by information technology, helping them identify users’ needs.” With that vision, I sketched the service offered by the consultants and the equipment they needed. With these sketches, I made rough cardboard prototypes of various initial ideas of products and mobile apps and then tested these in a role play with two designers.

• Activities: DIVE: setting a domain, defining a vision, creating the vision concept, and making the prototype. Moreover, I have used the prototype to discuss the future with the company representatives.

• Length: four days in the whole project, including one day making the prototype.

• Budget: I spent less than 50 Euros making the prototype and I have used the facilities of the Industrial Design Engineering Faculty at TUDelft.

Results

This exploration resulted in a vision concept: The Alchemist Club 2025. It is a network of beauty consultants assisted by a kit of hair products; an input device which interacts with tablets and cell phones to measure, compare, and experiment with the hair products; and a do-it-yourself apron. All these elements are supported by a mobile app which trains the beauty consultants and collects insights from the clients.

Finally, I developed a sequence of screenshots of a Twitter account to share the vision concept. The sequence of tweets presents the story of a fictional beauty consultant, part of The Alchemist Club, in 2025.

Here the final presentation: