7daysofmylife.com is an online design and brand research tool. It is based on the technique of cultural probes. Selected end users keep their own week-long online journal, by uploading images and text (by moblile, email, or web) in response to daily questions and themes, and creating collages with their data.

Selected designers and researchers can view these online journals, comment on them, organise and cluster data, and print them for user insight workshops.

The tool is adaptable to any theme, series of questions, target group or brand.

Drop us a line at welcome@zilverinnovation.com if you want more information obout this tool and we'll provide you with a demo log in.

You can also download the brochure (in dutch).

This tool helps you project your brand into the future. It shows you how the relationship between you and your end-user may evolve over time.  It helps you envision possible and desired futures, and the touchpoints that support that future. And it helps you create roadmaps towards your desired future. The best way to predict the future....is to create it yourself.

We use the city square metaphor to work with your brand. Squares in cities have very strong identities, defined by the buildings around them, the pavement of the square itself, and the statues and fountains on the square. Planners, architects and designers go to great lengths to create these identities. Still, without users, these squares are dead. Users bring them to life and create the true meaning of the plaza.

Brands are like that as well: if they are not used they are dead constructs, confined to a poster on the brand manager's door.

We think about the brand as a plaza, and about brand usability as  getting everyone involved to use the plaza to their benefit and insight. That's why we get marketing and designers/developers involved in brand insight sessions in a very early stage. Together with end users and other brand stakeholders. Creating and maintaining the brand relationship is a joint effort. Getting everyone on the plaza is the key.

Consumer journeys help your organisation get a grip on the full range of touch points your end-user interacts with while experiencing your brand. Better yet, it helps you uncover what connects all these touch points in the mind of your end-user: the underlying relationship between you and your user, that we call the brand.

Context mapping is not so much a single tool as it is a complete design research approach. It helps users share their latent needs, dreams and desires, in a very hands-on and visual way. It leads to highly usable and inspiring end user insights. We use this approach to uncover brand insights -both from the organisation's point of view and from the end-user's point of view- that make sense as a starting point for design and innovation.

We define design as 'the creation of carriers for meaningful interaction'. Our design layers tool helps you envision the full scope of the interaction the end user has with your product or service. We distinguish 5 layers of interaction. These layers occur in the order the end user comes in contact with the designed touch point. they are the sensorial layer, the behavioural layer, the functional layer, the physical layer and the mental layer.