Culture is driven by people working together, and cultural change starts by involving the community early on. Ruggero Crameri, founder and change coach in Crativ, shared some ideas about participatory design, user engagement as change management strategy, and community building as part of the workplace transformation process, stressing the importance of all these aspects in the development of a work culture based on authenticity.

Experiential design, interaction excellence and facilitation principles all three combined, help improve how humans convene. Mara Sandoval, Head of event design at the World Economic Forum, posited the following questions: “How can we evolve as an organization that brings people together? How can we make it more accessible and more possible for more people?”

The natural answer is inside what we can define as the Metaverse. So how will that work for people to come together in that digital space? In the end it’s all about human interaction and the way modern organizations can align their strategic vision to get the most from modern technologies.

Products today have a higher service component than in previous decades. The old dichotomy between product and service has been replaced by a service–product continuum as many business offerings are being transformed into services. This very much sums up the new paradigm for companies focusing on providing solutions to their customers rather than an actual product to be sold.

According to Dr. Mareike Ahlers from Bruhn & Partner, this is a challenge for companies. “But it’s worth it, because you get to know your customers better and move closer to them. The whole concept of the circular economy (reduce, reuse and recycle) is actually based on providing services, not products . And this is the story about service transformation.”

Laura Company, from iart shared an inspiring reflection about the role and challenges of nature within the design of the built environment. According to her, “…even though technology is based on models that come from nature, for some reason we do not find a way to connect humanely with these advances that surround us every day.” The key question for her is that “If we put our creativity together: will we ever be able to find a way where technology and nature could merge?”

Therefore, she concluded that “we need to create projects and visions with a powerful idea, an engaging story to tell behind it. Because it’s all about emotions.”

Andreas Erbe, founder of Launchlabs Switzerland and among the pioneers of design-thinking in Switzerland, shared his vision on how collaboration is naturally evolving from face to face meetings to hybrid work meetups.

“In a certain situation where collaboration takes place both in person and hybrid” some previous questions need to be made: “What kind of scenario am I facing here? How can I avoid improvisation? And… are my resources ready?”

This challenging new hybrid environment demands appropriate “spaces in terms of technology but also in terms of the physical infrastructure, as the majority of events will not be all virtual or all physical, but somewhere in between.”

* Photography: Kelvin Silva for STUDIO BANANA.