Ed Burak is the User Experience Design Manager at Tourism Holdings Limited (THL). THL is the largest provider of recreational vehicles across Australia, New Zealand, and the USA. A talented industrial designer and marketer, Ed has built a reputation for innovative work driven by customer insights. Ed talked us through the development of THL’s Mighty Jackpot Campervan. This project used insights uncovered through research into how people “campervan” to inform the design of a campervan which makes campervanning a lot more convenient and enjoyable. Not a bad summer-time project. Ed’s secret to good research: “We’re looking for opportunities not answers.”

TAKEAWAY POINTS

• Learn how to extract the gold from users. There is an art to interviewing for insights.
• Check your world-view at the door before going out into the field.
• Go out into the field!
• Cross functional contribution to the design process transforms into ownership (when it counts, at commercialisation)
• Pre-prototype your ideas really early, at low resolution, and don’t be precious with them. Not only is it fun, it’s incredibly valuable.
• That place you call work, where people gather  together, is really just a framework for social interaction. Leverage this to build a culture of innovation.

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