How might we reimagine how a ship and its crew will fight in the future?
The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) tasked my team with answering this question. We set out on a journey to inform the overall design and crewing of the Navy's future ship – 2035 and beyond.
We focused on:
Emerging technology
The needs and personas of future sailors
The changing landscape of the future battleground
My team at a glance
Our Process
We began by understanding the current needs and pain-points of the service members aboard the ships now, as well understanding their flow of operations during all phases of sail. This helped us break up our challenge space into three parts:
Information Flow, Physical Space, and Crewing & Teaming.
This research drove our analogous research exploration where we looked for inspiration in other organizations solving similar challenges. These insights culminated in a four day workshop where we brought the stakeholders together to envision future concepts and brainstorm solutions.
The Outcome
We created a series of vignettes illustrating future capabilities and key players of the Operations Suite for the year 2035 and beyond. Initial ideas were produced through user co-creation during the workshop and underwent further iteration through user feedback sessions.
The concepts capture the voices of sailors and are rooted in the pain-points and needs gathered from initial user interviews with evident traceability.
Research Process
From Halifax to Legoland, and beyond!
We started our research interviewing sailors in Halifax, NS and then in Victoria, BC - two locations of the Canadian Naval bases. We also toured ships and observed sailors running mock missions during simulation trainings.
By the Canadian naval base in Halifax, NS.
Analogous Research trip in Tampa, FL! This is one of my favorite stages of any project where we look for inspiration in out-of-the-box places and situations, anything to help us expand our imagination in tackling the challenge.
Analogous Research: We visited Legoland as analogous inspiration for solving some of the pain-points that sailors expressed in regards to complex information flow and coordination, and creating multi-sensory environments and experiences. And yes, we did get to ride some sweet rides! :)
Analogous Research: We also interviewed the CEO of Tesseract Ventures and a representative at DefenseWerx to learn more about collaborative spaces and smart technology.
Analogous Research: We spoke with the CEO of The Inc Lab and a representative from Collins Aerospace to learn more about human-machine teaming, cognitive load, and simulation-based training.
We visited the FUTURES exhibit at the Smithsonian museum in D.C. to get inspiration on emerging technology and how to immerse workshop participants in a future state to encourage imagination.
More from the FUTURES exhibit.
Designing for the Future naval ship requires....
...co-creating alongside warfighters through workshops and user feedback sessions.
The Exploration Workshop
The workshop was four days long and was held in Halifax, NS, Canada with ~50 sailors and RCN representatives.
First thing to know about how we designed this workshop...
...we employed some really interesting storytelling techniques to immerse the sailors in a future-thinking and out-of-the-box mindset.
We worked with Sci-fi writers to create short stories that outlined various "Stories from the Future" that illustrated how emerging technologies could be used in everyday life
We created faux newspaper clippings/ magazine covers/ advertisement posters to hang in the hallways that illustrated society in the future (some were so realistic that participants thought they were real, like guitarist Keith Richards turning 100 years old!)
We displayed artifacts illustrating the personas of the future warfighter - the future warfighter of 2035 is your 8-year old kid, how will they think and behave?
We created life-size snapshots of emerging technologies and how to use them as inspiration
We had workshop teams present their final ideas in the form of a "sea story" or "dit" (as the Canadians call it). These are the war stories sailors would tell each other over drinks for example. They acted these out with props and prototypes they made and it was hilarious and inspiring.
A design thinking workshop is an opportunity for changing mindsets.
During the second day of the workshop, I was working with my team of participants during an ideation session. They were given a mission to complete. My team’s mission went something like this: a commercial airline crashed into the sea and the navy had to perform a search and rescue mission. The participants were having a hard time pushing the envelope and thinking futuristic. The following is a paraphrased conversation between me and a participant:
Me: “Come on guys, think more sci-fi, push the envelope, we are talking 2035 and beyond here.”
Participant says jokingly in reference to locating the crashed airliner: “Well, we could drain the ocean”.
Me: “Write that down on a sticky note and put it up on the board!”
Participant: “It hurts to write that down, it’s a ridiculous idea!”
Me: “Just do it, trust me - this is going to go somewhere”
I explained to him that this idea, as ridiculous as it may sound, captures the essence of what you as a navy are trying to do in the mission, to remove distractions in the area of interest in order to accurately locate the crashed plan.
Me: “What else, perhaps a certain technology, performs this same function of removing distractions in order to have a clearer picture of the area?”
Participant: starts listing technical naval jargon and writing down ideas.
Later that day, the same participant tells me that he admires how we (my work team) is able to think so creatively. He said he has been conditioned for so long in his career as a sailor to think a certain way and wishes he can think more like us. I told him that he does have the ability and he proved that in the workshop.
Final Deliverables
We created an innovation blueprint (which tells our process like a story) that synthesized user research to provide clear traceability of final ideas to the needs and pain-points of the sailors.
We synthesized design principles for continuous ideation and iteration on the future vision of ship operations
We prototyped final ideas through futuristic illustrations in an interactive digital format
Note: Final deliverables cannot be disclosed in detail (classified)
My Team
We are a group of design strategists, artists, prototypers, and experience managers.