The trend of retail spaces, particularly in East London, having a contrived worn and old-fashioned look is a curious one. Rough wooden surfaces, condensed typography, steel girders, exposed brickwork… As we started to research clothing stores this week, it seemed to be everywhere. It’s an aesthetic that is certainly very attractive - it suggests an older, more wholesome age from the past (though one that possibly never existed).

This aesthetic was also evident in the coffee shops we were looking at last week. We noticed an interesting difference between the clothes stores and the coffee sellers though, and this was the role of the staff in shaping your experience. If you approached someone working at Prufrock or Caravan and asked them about their coffee, they would have a lot to say about where its sourced, how its made, what it tastes like - and would be more than happy to tell you about it.

With clothing, there is just as much (if not more) to discuss about the process of making. Materials, sizing, stitching, cut and fit - every stage of making a quality garment is a careful, deliberate and engrossing process. But I found that if you asked staff about their products in a clothing store, their knowledge of these things tended to be far more limited.

The reason for this, I think, is because there is too much of a divide between how & where clothes are made, and the places they are sold. It allows some manufacturers to get away with making really cheap clothes in exploitative conditions, and it allows others to put extortionate price tags on clothes that are actually of poor quality. If more could be done to bridge this gap, I think it might help people to value clothes in a different way - based on how well-made and long-lasting they are, rather than price or image.

Retail experiences where customers are physically involved in the making of what they buy do exist, but in other spheres. Build-a-Bear is a chain store of teddy making factories, jazzed-up as retail outlets, rather than hidden tools of production. Customers choose the ‘skin’ of the bear, how much stuffing goes into it, what clothes it wears, and can even record their own sound for the speaker that goes inside of it. However, I would say the most intriguing part of this process is the electronic beating heart that the user is asked to place inside the teddy whilst screaming “I LOVE MY BEAR” at the top of their voice. Its interesting because when the customer has a part in the process of making a product, they have a much stronger emotional investment in it.

The last couple of days, we’ve been thinking about you might try to do that with clothing. There must be ways that technology and good design can help make this process of customisation accessible to more than just those who can afford a high-end tailor. Blank Label is a great little website where people can order custom shirts that they have designed themselves online - choosing the material, fit, buttons, pockets, to name just a few of the choices. It could be really interesting to take that sort of “make-your-own” interaction and start to put it into physical stores, involving and educating people in the way their clothes are put together as they shop.

- Chris (with a little help from Ben)

Somewhere in the midst of this caffeine-fueled riotous week, we visited the lovely Caravan to gather a bit of comparative research to aid our investigations into the dark and glorious world of coffee. Our objective was simple: How do the good folk of Clerkenwell interact with that thick brown liquid they love so much?

After settling down in the uber cool surroundings of sufficiently rusticated tables and pre worn floors, the first thing that immediately struck us was the shear amount of machines and devices being used by both staff and customer alike. Now, this should act as no surprise - walk into any east London coffee shop and you wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the number of trendy media cats on their various Laptops, blackberries, iphones, etc. I think this only became a subject of interest because of the slightly clashing context they seemed to exist within. What I mean is that there seems to be a fairly well matured trend at the moment of attempting to re-create the good old days when men were real men with moustaches, and bicycles were bicycles with baskets full of freshly baked bread. Whether this springs from a nostalgic longing for a time when society wasn’t crumbling around us, or simply an unjustifiable attraction to impractical footwear and facial hair is not the point here. The point is that it all just seems slightly odd when Captain rustic pants struts into the coffee shop you are observing, and whips out the latest and greatest advancement in high end digital devices.

This is interesting to me because at a basic level, no matter what time period you’re in (or think you’re in) there is a highly individual and personalised interaction with machines and devices that spans decades of evolution, thought and development. Captain Rustic pants will have an amount of personal nuances, shortcuts and settings on his Mac, just as the barista at the bar will have an extremely unique and identifiable style of making fantastic coffee on his espresso machine.

I find these personal variations fascinating when doing design research because it gives a focused insight into a single process or means of production. It’s a bit like watching a single individual’s episode of ‘How its made’ and because of this, you feel like you’re learning a much greater deal about the audience you are observing and how you may be able to create or gain some value with that experience.

For example, as Tim mentioned in the previous post, there can be a common assumption of pretentiousness when it comes to high-end coffee shops. I held this assumption when I went into both Prufrock and Caravan. I would probably still hold it had I not spent a significant amount of time pestering Dan the Barista about how he made his coffee, why he did certain things and where it was roasted. It is conversations like these that break down any notion of pretension because it makes the levels of value, passion and dedication to any process transparent. Making you realise they’re not just pretending to be really good at what they do, they just are really good and don’t want to get all preachy about it.

Dan then directed me downstairs to meet Sam the coffee roasting man. This was yet another fascinating example of man and machine. Caravan has a large-scale coffee roaster in the basement, right next to the kitchen. It is truly awesome -basically a massive steampunk tumble dryer that you can change certain parameters on to achieve different results. A wealth of data can be gleaned from this process such as how long the coffee is roasted for, to the exact temperatures at which certain chemical reactions begin to take place. All of this can be meticulously logged by the roaster and used to re-produce certain popular batches if need be.

I thought this had some potential because it turns the routine of just having a coffee into a highly unique time based experience, where certain batches acquire different colours, tastes, smells, and densities. The thing is, I wouldn’t have known about any of this, had I not gone and chatted to the staff of Caravan and had my pretentious assumptions shattered by their welcoming, friendly and patient attitudes - so thanks chaps. The other thing is, it was extremely rewarding for me as both a customer and and observer to gain first hand knowledge of all these processes because I can appreciate the value of the final product that much more. Like this guy.

So maybe there is something there we can play around with. It’s still early doors yet, and for the moment we still have a great excuse to sample the delights of London’s finest coffee establishments. Let us know about any hidden gems you know of, we’ll be sure to pop down when the shakes wear off.

As Chris has already mentioned in the last post, there’s been rather a lot of caffeine consumed this week, all for the cause of research though! Whilst he provided a summary into a few of our idea generation techniques experiments, Ben and I will give you a bit of background into where we got our insights…

Firstly, on the suggestion of Tom and Utku (who deserve some grand introduction as they will undoubtedly crop up a lot throughout this blog) - the guys that tell us what to do - we went off on Tuesday morning to check out Prufrock Coffee. Having no knowledge of what to expect other than “don’t ask for a cappuccino with chocolate, you’ll find out why”, we entered, prepared for the pretentious, and were met with a welcome aroma of fresh coffee, friendly faces, and a whole heap of pseudo-scientific-coffee-contraptions. Their minimalistic menu consisted of either espresso or espresso with various volumes of milk so we ordered a round of coffee– none of us ordered a cappuccino.

Our task here was to gain an understanding of the place and highlight avenues for potential development through observations and taking to people so we began by enquiring about the coffee machines but ended up learning a whole lot about coffee. It turns out that the flavour of a coffee is not only dictated by the beans but also by the filtration process – hence the array of machinery. Each one provided a different means for the water to interact with the ground coffee which in turn meant that each one created very different styles, textures and tastes within coffee. Alongside the recognisable general coffee machine there was one which filtered cold water though ground coffee over around 8 hours to result in a caffeine intense yet very smooth chilled coffee; one which required the coffee and water to be manually pumped through a filter into the mug; a device for weighing out to-the-milligram quantities of ground coffee then pouring to-the-millilitre volumes of water at equally specific temperature; and one which worked through an iterative process of evaporation, filtration and (seemingly) magic. There was also a nifty wee device called a refractometer which was used to calibrate the automated machines each morning though analysing water temperatures and the coffee extraction rate. We were further informed that the owner of this small chain of coffee shops is world renowned among barristas having won a number of worldwide lord-of-the-coffee awards (not the official title but this conveys the general idea and my impressed reaction).

What came from this crash course in coffee was an understanding that the team behind the bar really were the experts in what they do. They were not pretentious, they were passionate and happy to share their passion! What’s more, the minimalist menu was really just a result of their understanding of how coffee should be made – not with chocolate sprinkles. This was an interesting area: they are a business trying to educate people about the diverse complexities of coffee though many customers will be content with just an americano. This provided a starting point for us to develop our ideas – “how do we share the passion and knowledge of the staff at Prufrock, to generate a wider community of coffee lovers, without sounding like a dickhead”.

One approach to this was inspired by a handy visual map / shelving unit on the walls of Prufrock connecting coffee packs to their place of origin and their recommended preparation device. We felt this was a great means to make background knowledge in coffee more accessible to your usual coffee drinker. Another point of interest was that elsewhere on the walls around the café, there were pictures of other coffee shops around London. These places were not united under the same business banner, they were cafés which Prufrock admired as peers, with staff which Prufrock were mates with. This chivalry among competitors was pretty admirable and another great kick start for ideas.

Anyway, we left Prufrock buzzing on caffeine and ready to embark on some idea development. Not to give everything away right now, we will save the ideas for later posts as we begin to develop them but, for the time being, Chris’s post shows a few methods we used to approach the idea creation. Thanks to the team at Prufrock for providing a thoroughly enjoyable, albeit brief, tea and coffee masterclass!

I’ll hand you over to Ben now to continue.

-Tim