The Value of Memories

How do you preserve tangible evidences and physical artifacts that are associated with memories?

Project goals

Understand current stakeholder relationship with memories through artifacts and the value they provide. Understand stakeholder desirability to preserve these memory artifacts. Understand current state of memory preservation services and identify opportunities for innovation from customer and provider perspectives. Gain a deeper understanding of innovation dynamics and institutional transformations through service innovation of existing services.

PROBLEM SPACE

There are currently very few options for customers to preserve their artifacts that have memories attached to them. For the few options that exist their barrier for entry is high in terms of the level of motivation and trust required to participate in the process.

Opportunity space

Through primary and secondary qualitative and quantitative research we discovered an overlapping opportunity between insurance companies wanting to mitigate disaster relief and families losing their physical memory artifacts to these disasters. The question is proposed; How can we capture and preserve memories in the form of physical evidences?

proposed solution

Current industry offerings require a lot of time investment and high cost or motivation to participate. Can we lower this barrier of entry by creating a service that makes it clear on how to organize everything you will need and gives guidance throughout the process to build trust that your items are being taken care of. We created a prototype to test our solution with potential customers in order to uncover insights within the process.

Solution Evaluation

Customers don’t trust their insurance companies or they have lost touch with the close relationship that used to exist with your provider on a face to face basis. Can we restore this? What if your local insurance agent came to your house to handle the preservation of these artifacts? People don’t have a catalogue of everything that is in their home when it comes time to file a claim when property has been stolen or damaged from hazard or disaster. How can we balance technology with human connection?

solution iteration

Insurance claims expert comes to your house with a mobile scanning unit and at the same time can evaluate and catalogue what is in your home for future claims and coverage adjusting. This mitigates a large problem with customers having trust with sending out their valuable artifacts. It also justifies the cost for the insurance company by creating deeper customer loyalty and saving backend cost when filling claims.

predicted outcome

Reduced costs for insurance claims through time of needing to track down value and catalogue items, work through claims. Increase retention of customers by building stronger relationships and intimacy. Insurance companies build cost analysis database of items within a customers home. Surveyed customers saw increased value in the service offering from their insurance provider. Expert interviews with insurance strategist confirmed their current need to create stronger relationships with customers in order to retain them.

ROLE

Design researcher, interviewer, data collection, synthesis, insight development, vision video animator, blueprint design, value frame work design, value flow design.

Critical moments

A critical moment that occurred during the process of this project came during a one on one interview with a potential customer. They made a point to explain that they are not a very emotional or sentimental person when it comes to reflecting on past memories. As we were walking them through the process of uncovering old photographs that could be archived with our service they began to cry and gain a deep sense of connection with these memories. We recognized the power in walking someone through this process and saw this as the moment where the opportunity existed for field agents to reconnect with their customers by simply being present and participating in their memories.