Summ( )n helps people to innovate - to develop new products, services, brands, to develop new skills and capabilities or may be even to change the world for better (‘innovation’ means different things for different people).
We can help because we constructed a special ‘Future Portal’, that allow you to imagine and explore possible futures. Using our portal you can experience and ‘play’ with these futures, to probe them in realistic yet risk-free environments. All that helps you to generate new ideas, design and develop new ‘future-ready’ products and services, and master new skills.
Our ‘Future Portal’ consists of the three major parts: Understanding People, Exploring Futures, and Transforming Minds:
Understanding People
To efficiently explore the futures, one has to understand the ‘now’ first.
We help our clients to gather high-granularity data about people’s behavior and activities today, their uses (and abuses) of products and services - but also about their motivations, ideas, dreams (and often concerns and fears). We develop and conduct in-depth, contextual studies in the people’s ‘natural habitats’, using a wide range of research methods and tools. We then extract valuable insights from the data and help in translating them into design and innovation. We also enable collaborative encounters of our clients with their current – or potential – customers and facilitate co-creation of the new opportunities.
Exploring Futures
“The future is not what is used to be“, said Paul Valéry once. The French poet was seemingly disappointed with that fact, but we at Summ( )n take it for granted that the future will be different from present. Instead of ‘predicting the future’ or making prophesies about yet another ‘future trends’, we help our clients to explore new possible pathways, imagine and co-create more interesting and promising opportunities. In other words, to conjure new bright futures.
We gather and analyze information about the key developments, on the industry, cultural and social levels. We help to make sense of these data in the specific client’s context, and explore the possible future scenarios through active dialogue and collaboration. We make sure that this dialogue is serious and informative, but also engaging and playful. We develop customized ‘serious games’ to play with these future possibilities, to create new ideas but also to eliminate well-known clichés.
Transforming Minds
The most difficult part in all that is to imagine different ourselves. It’s not only the world will be different tomorrow, but us, too.
We construct various playful situations and interactive environments where people can suspend their current assumptions and believes, and experience new qualities, new facets and new features of the possible futures. To achieve this immersion into possible futures, Summ()n applies a wide range of tools, from online platforms and virtual worlds to simple analogue physical environments (and everything in between – hybrid spaces, interactive installations, and multimedia performances).
For every client we the construct a customized flows of ‘future experiences’, consisting of iterative provocations, reactions and reflections, all designed to ‘feel the futures’ and discover new skills and qualities that people have to develop now. The choice of the tools is always defined by a thorough analysis of the current assumptions and believes about the futures, both expressed explicitely and more ‘shadow’ ones.
What does ‘summon’ mean?
The very word ‘summon’ originally meant a magical skill. The powerful mages could have move things and people from one place to another; the most powerful of them could also move the things through time. Summoning has always been a collective, collaborative ritual – at the end, to summon your futures we need you!
To enable these games with the futures have to apply a complex, interconnected system of tools and methods – that is, our ‘Portal’. But we also rely on our wide of network of partners.
Summ( )n has recently joined Reach, a renown global network of design research agencies and an industry leader in research for service design and innovation. Working with this great network, Summ( ) n can now offer our expertise and skills worldwide!
