How does STUCK repeatedly create X-factor ideas that are interesting and unexpected, without being far-fetched?

Besides researchers and skilled design technicians, central to our team is a visionary, imaginative core. This is made up of conceptual thinkers, speculative designers, and people who have a keen pulse on how humanity and technology evolves. This is also why we build our team to comprise inquisitive individuals who have broad exposure, wide interests, and change-awareness. Our unique design and research process also systematically puts paradigm-breaking thinking at the front-end of all our project steps, where we don’t get too entrenched in the development before we find the critical creative angle. Concurrently, our visionaries align to reality and emergent possibilities because of their own deep expertise – usually in one or two domains – where they are genuine practitioners. Their domain knowledge and real-world experience keeps them from being satisfied with the far-fetched blue-sky while they stretch the innovation frontiers. Thus, we arrive at the sweet spot of creative disruption. At STUCK, we call this our SURPRISE dimension – where vision and imagination leads with genuine capability.

How do we consistently find new resonant insights and opportunities beyond those uncoverable by a typical ethnography research process?

In our own attempts in the early years, we’ve found that poorly-run ‘design thinking’ tends to generate only incremental solutions to cliché problems, and provides a false sense of ‘effective’ user-centredness. Solutions feel like add-ons that don’t fundamentally shift competitiveness, and complex problems remain unsolvable without bold, disruptive thinking. Does this sound like your experience too?

We reinvented this and – with a proven run of almost a decade – tested our unique methodology by having our SURPRISE – or vision – pillar lead and inform the research process. This is the engine by which ‘STUCK… adds creative sparks to your projects’ (Client testimony, Wong Kok Keong – Senior Manager at Samsung, 2016). This means that when we dive into ethnography studies, we are armed with lenses to probe new possibilities and emergent needs that users and stakeholder aren’t yet cognisant of. This vision-led approach also stimulates our respondents to inspiring conversations which help us see the future of their lives and contexts more vividly, and how to meet emergent needs that are relevant to the changing landscape. This ability to suss out new opportunities, and then testing, iterating, and validating them diligently for resonance, is our PERCEPTIVE dimension.

What makes us distinctly able to arrive at solutions implementable for real-life impact, beyond the typical ‘design thinking’ workshop?

STUCK is very intentional about building an innovation design and research team – instead of being a pure UX agency, ‘design-thinking-only’ evangelists, or market research company. This means our members are required to have – and continually deepen – their experience as genuine practitioners of at least one technical or artistic field. Many of us have 2 or 3 expertise areas between which we can fluidly bridge. Therefore we can connect the dots to spot the best plausible solutions between fields, and also know how to build them for implementable impact. This is how and why we can land the ‘design thinking airplane’, not just fly it. This practitioner orientation – referred to as our SENSIBLE dimension – also gives us a broader creative palette of solutions because our experience in pushing the frontiers of each specialised domain keeps us abreast with the latest possibilities in implementation as well.

Apart from research-based projects, what gives our product design and interface design projects their signature flavour of cleverness and their well-considered quality?

When working on projects that are more singular in their discipline area, e.g. Industrial Design, UI/UX, Spatial Design, or Marketing Activations, our same three pillars of SURPRISING, PERCEPTIVE, and SENSIBLE enables our design and innovation work to be smart and well-considered. The SURPRISE dimension means we operate design with a clear trajectory and visionary story that sets your products and interfaces at the emerging frontiers. The PERCEPTIVE dimension means we go beyond the immediate technical needs and functions, and beyond basic user-centredness, to consider how should an innovation best fit with humanity. Our SENSIBLE dimension, especially within a mixed team of multiple disciplines, means that we can help product development break out of the usual confines of its specific domain, to access inspiration and the enabling technologies that are found in other fields.

So, you’re giving it all away. What then, is STUCK’s secret sauce?

It is no secret that meaningful and herculean undertakings require team effort – building that team is the hardest part. We continually hone our culture and creative processes for talented individuals to collaborate fruitfully and enjoyably – so that people of different gifts thrive by complementing and mutual sharpening, instead of tearing one another down. Lubricating this creative mechanism and providing a nurturing and positively challenging environment for growth is our secret sauce – and behind all these is the blessedness of divine provision and inspiration.