Xploratory was a joint research project between 2018 and 2020 by the Service Futures Studio at the Royal College of Art and Telefonica Alpha Health. It aimed to explore future service visions for the digital mental health space, focusing on developing a novel service innovation framework for ‘wicked challenges’ and distant futures.
Service Design at the RCA
The RCA Service Design course, established in 2012, has a world class reputation as pioneering the discipline of service design and producing cohorts of talented students who have gone on to transform organisations in financial services, telecoms and technology, healthcare, public sector and government.
At the heart of the course is a project-based approach where partner organisations across business, technology, the public sector, social enterprises, and charities work with the students to access their creativity in a safe and independent “sand box” for exploration of issues, trends and new opportunities in the immediate or long-term future.
The Service Futures Studio runs with a core team of staff, graduates and technical expertise and is in charge of building these relationships. By framing collaborative projects and conducting action research-through-design, we envision and develop new service innovation strategies.
Xploratory Alpha Health
Envisioning the Future of Digital Mental Health and Wellbeing
Xploratory Alpha Health was a joint research project between 2018 and 2020 by the Service Futures Studio of the Service Design Programme of the Royal College of Art and Telefonica Alpha Health. It aimed to explore future service visions for the digital mental health space, focusing on developing a novel service innovation framework for ‘wicked challenges’ and distant futures. Alpha Health graduated in late 2020 as Koa Health —an independent spin-out company. It was the first moonshot by Alpha, Telefonica’s moonshot factory.
We explore and scope future horizons
We research the societal, environmental and technical shifts likely to impact people’s everyday lives to identify and nurture unique opportunities to pave the way for the future and enact social change.
Proposition Types
Ethics Providers
Platforms as facilitators and brokers of value judgements. It’s possible that in the future we could foresee an advancement of AI with the ability to codify and model the highly complex ethical parameters of everyday life.
Propositions
Mobible
Mobible is a chatbot that helps connect your faith with you, your life and your community based on church teachings and knowledge decoded from the scripture.
We developed an integrated service innovation framework
This design-led innovation project proposes a novel service innovation process for moonshot design, validation and acceleration using an action-research through design approach.
Phase
Phase 1: Envision Future Scenarios
The lab team mapped plausible future context & developed future personas to create full scenarios.
Phase
Phase 2: Explore Service Visions
Excursions into future scenarios. Expanding the collective imagination of what services could emerge in various contexts by creating concepts of future services.
We accelerate the impact of future businessess
We enhance and iterate existing services or features through multiple cycles of planning, building, measuring and learning to establish in-house development, incubation or the creation of an external business.
Deliver Live Services
Unit 1: Developing services in-house.
Transforming the value propositions of the phase into live services to test their commercialisation in the market and their strategic value beyond monetisation.
Deliver Live Services
Unit 2: Incubating at InnovationRCA
Turning a service concept into a functioning service that can exist in a live marketplace in a way that it can de-risk investment by incubating at InnovationRCA, the Royal College of Art’s centre for entrepreneurship and commercialisation.
We work in collaboration
