DK&A

DK&A is a European product design and development studio, enabling innovation where it matters.

“LiDAR — how autonomous vehicles see the world”. DK&A enables automotive suppliers to push the boundaries of mobility.

Anaxeos — A multi-modal travel application for the future of transport. — For Virgin Hyperloop One, 2017.

—Shaping
deep emotional connections

Creating anything meaningful requires the ability to understand the needs and views of all our users, customers and fellow humans on both on a rational and emotional level. This is how we’re biologically wired. We must suspend our disbeliefs and openly engage new ideas to fulfill the needs of others. This is called empathy. The very best companies, products, and services are built on a foundation of empathy. It’s our most important skill.

True innovation happens in context

We now have a chance to do more with less and, above all, a chance to listen to and serve customers better than ever before. In 2017 the primary decisive factor of success is no longer budget, headcount or experience — it’s the drive and ability to continuously innovate.

Digital transformation has changed the way we think of the products and services we interact with every day. Very similar to natural ecosystems, digitalisation has enabled the creation of self-organising, scalable business realms which now permeate every facet of our lives. In less than ten years, we’ve seen the crumbling of entire decades-old industries. Virtually any business, product or vertical can be wiped out overnight by something more user-friendly, convenient or cheaper.

UX design for the most advanced UAV in the world.
© Sharper Shape Inc. 2017

The four ecosystems we are working on right now

Our research and work on products, services, and strategies have recently focused on these four areas of modern human life:

Living
Mobility
Work
Health

Living

In search of the good life

The home is considered the holy grail of IoT service providers of all sizes — including Google and Amazon, with very mixed success. Late 2015 we decided to dive into (smart) living ourselves. The Finnish startup Alvardag has made it their mission to tackle the ecosystem as a whole — by designing and building beautiful homes and fitting them with an integrated and foremost appropriate smart living service layer.

We supported Alvardag in the creation of a strong brand and enabled the team to explore smart living conceptually as well as through the development of innovative digital services and products.

Keywords: branding, business concept, digital design, funding, industrial design, management, service concept

“The Passage” — Experimental user interface for smart homes. © Alvardag 2017

Mobility

On the electronic horizon

Our strong experience design culture and many years of experience working for automotive customers form the perfect breeding ground for highly innovative mobility solutions. With level 5 autonomy just around the corner, we believe it’s time to reconsider mobility as a whole.

We believe that it will be data and the ability to make sense of it in a service design context that will allow automotive OEMs, MAAS providers as well as the communities that provide public transport to move towards truly sustainable mobility solutions. With customers like HERE and Elektrobit Automotive, we’re supporting providers of the data sets and services that will power this mobility revolution.

Keywords: mobility as a service, data-informed design, machine learning, autonomous driving, vr/ar, data visualisation

Work

The nature of work

Early 2016 we joined forces with famous Finnish entrepreneur Jari Sarasvuo to change the way the country thinks about work. The result of many crazy ideas, brainstorms and an intense design phase is a company and service called “Tinki”.

Tinki enables people looking for work to discover employment opportunities perfectly suited for their skills, experience but also ambitions. The team aims to lower the barriers of professional service supply and to create a new market for small and medium size work assignments, very much like a grocery store for professional services. The service learns from each user and becomes more accurate over time, proposing the right help for a job at hand and training professionals how to market their skills for maximum impact.

Keywords: branding, business concept, design, development, funding, management, service concept, venture

Health

Sitting is killing us

A flood of fitness and health wearables has hit the market in the past few years and it has become increasingly hard to imagine a space for truly new and impactful solutions. In our work for a currently undisclosed national research organisation in this context, we have discovered however that most applications solely aim to increase activity by various means. Utilizing a new type of sensor for a pilot test case at a large airline we took a different approach and aimed at eliminating passiveness.

Being able to clearly correlate nation-wide research data about illnesses such as Type II Diabetes or cardiovascular disease to passiveness, we're working on something that might just earn it's space the ecosystem.

Keywords: business concept, design, development, service concept