Given that it is essential for hotels to understand how guests experience hospitality, hotel managers need more concrete and tangible insights into this issue to improve their service. Quantitative research on experience of the physical environment and employee contact has shown that the comfort of hotel rooms and an inviting ambience are the factors that most influence guest loyalty. This exploratory paper employs verbal and visual association methods to translate comfortable and inviting into tangible sensory characteristics. Results show association of comfortable with lingering, sitting, resting, natural colours, rounded-off rectangles, and multiple layers. By contrast, inviting is associated with common (meeting) areas such as corridors, white, grey, transparency, and colourful accessories. Visual dataproved suitable for identifying tangible (sensory) characteristics, and delivering concrete recommendations for improving invitingness and comfort.
MULTIFILE
This study explores the application of systemic design approaches used in a complex commercial context to create positive and sustainable change. The case study was a business case on sustainable parenthood, in which the company tried to balance its ambitions for environmental sustainability with the need to survive in a highly competitive market. In close collaboration with the internal business company stakeholders, a causal loop diagram was created. The diagram mapped relations between global relevant trends for emerging young adults within the DACH market, sustainability, and parenting as a business. Leverage points for systemic change were identified which were explored through in-depth user interviews (n=10). This process eventually identified ten systemic insights, translated into insight cards to facilitate business actions.Based on these combined approaches, the MINT framework (Mapping Interventions and Narratives for Transformation) was developed, with a strong emphasis on co-creation, iteration, translation, and communication of systemic interventions. However, while the internal business stakeholders and company representatives appreciated the bird’s eye view that systemic design gave them, they were challenged by the methods’ abstract language and translation of systemic insights into concrete action. To address this, the developed framework utilized systemic design artefacts such as a storytelling map and user-centred insight cards to facilitate a more comprehensible systemic design approach.Overall, this study provides a first attempt at creating an actionable systemic design framework that can be used in commercial settings to promote positive systemic change. Future research will require further validation.
‘Als bewust en onbewust het niet met elkaar eens zijn, naar welk systeem luistert de klant dan?’ Stel: je loopt tegen sluitingstijd in een winkel en je hebt nog maar enkele minuten om je boodschappen te doen. Het personeel is de winkel al aan het opruimen, terwijl jij nog snel langs de schappen snelt en wat boodschappen voor het avondeten in je mandje doet. Welke producten zul je kiezen? Je kunt kiezen uit een enorm assortiment, maar je hebt maar weinig tijd om er over na te denken. Waarschijnlijk kies je voor de producten die je al kent en waar je een goed gevoel over hebt, zonder hier al te veel over na te denken. Zou je wat meer tijd hebben, dan zou je waarschijnlijk wat langer stil staan bij jouw keuze en een meer rationele afweging maken.
LINK
