At Cognizant’s recent A.I. Summit, ReD Partner William Welser IV talked to conference goers about their approach to A.I., and how they work to leverage the possibilities in the best way possible.

A moderate approach believes AI can be a powerful force for good. But to understand AI risks and opportunities, we first must understand what we mean by AI.

New Danish textbook out with contribution from ReD Associates on tools for doing fieldwork in teams.

In his new chapter published in a volume with the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, ReD Associates partner and former RAND researcher William “Bill” Welser brings much-needed clarity to our decisions regarding privacy and technology.

Rand Corporation engineers William Welser and Dave Baiocchi bring AI and Systems expertise to social-science- and humanities-based consultancy ReD Associates

ReD Associates recently started a collaboration with renowned photographer, Alastair Wiper, exploring our clients’ industrial landscapes.

Christian Madsbjerg talked about the power of observing and listening in a recent guest lecture at Princeton.

The Helping People Heal white paper provides a deeply researched perspective on how digital is uniquely positioned to fulfill key unmet patient needs and enable warm care with individualized, adaptive, empathetic and scalable support.

Critical thinking feels almost revolutionary in the context of deep learning and AI. But perhaps it’s just what we need.

In this piece, a truffle hunter in Italy describes what it takes—from generations of passed down knowledge to the climate the soil— to produce white truffles, which even now, cannot be intentionally cultivated.

In this brief talk, Mikkel Rasmussen demonstrates the power of reframing a business challenge through asking a new question: what business are we in? 

Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, sits with Christian Madsbjerg to talk about the explanatory limits of scientism and the models that allow us to develop a substantive understand of human behavior.

Transforming the customer relationship for the financial services industry by understanding how people relate to money.

Trough our studies of the everyday lives of people, we have seen how Baby Boomers still offers a huge opportunity for smart companies that understand what thrills them as they near their retirement. This white paper provides an introduction to what we have called The Second Coming of Age for the Baby Boomer generation. 

How Heidegger’s notion of dwelling helps understand problems with the vehicle space.

As a part of our engagement with Edison International, ReD Associates created a small video outlining some of the major findings from our projects together.

Christian Madsbjerg and Gillian Tett, author and U.S. Managing Editor at the Financial Times, talk about silos, tunnel vision in major coporations, and why smart people do stupid things.  

In the webinar we discuss the key findings from our study highlighting how large energy users think about this changing energy landscape and what they are looking for in terms of strategies and solutions to lower their energy costs across their enterprise.

Luxury is rooted in rarity. As "luxury" goods become mass products, people are turning towards unique, non-reproducable experiences to fulfill a desire for the rare.

Through a new understanding of high-value design, Samsung was able to renew the product design of its TVs and double market share in the TV segment in just a few years.

Kristian Villumsen is senior vice president of global marketing for Coloplast, an international company that makes medical devices related to ostomy, urology and continence, and wound treatment.

Most companies struggle to service their customers in ways that are swift, thoughtful, and consistent. 

Globalization has created more customers and more ways to interact with customers
Points of contact between companies and customers have multiplied over the years. 

Lufthansa is best known as an airline: the largest carrier in Europe, with more than 110,000 employees, it serves hundreds of destinations and millions of passengers each year. But even when you’re not on a Lufthansa-branded flight, chances are that some Lufthansa-designed systems—from aviation IT to maintenance to entertainment, even catering—are keeping you safe and comfortable in the air.

From the advent of penicillin to anti-cholesterol treatments, history has witnessed major developments in medicine and therapeutic offerings. At the same time, however, the prevalence of both lifestyle and chronic diseases continues to rise

The U.S., Japan and Eurozone remain the key markets for most companies, but the increasing focus on cost effectiveness and the difficulties of the general economy, make the potential for significant growth in these markets questionable. In contrast, emerging pharmaceutical markets have been growing in the double-digits and are expected to continue expanding in the years ahead, due to strong economic growth, demographic changes, and improved funding for health care.

Most of our work in health care involves new research and our approach to it always involves more than just one stakeholder, taking several stakeholders in the specific disease ecology into account. In our experience, it is through understanding different stakeholders’ perspectives that new insights can be found and new solutions developed thereafter.

Although a concern for healthcare systems for several decades, 2013 was a watershed year for obesity. Its recognition as a disease by the American Medical Association provides an opportunity to move beyond dead-end debates around personal responsibility and create renewed focus on what healthcare systems can do to treat this burgeoning epidemic. 

Pharmaceutical companies should begin to take a closer look at how they create the most value for their multiple stakeholders. In the emerging world of value-based health care, the answer will increasingly go beyond a new drug.

Economic change in China will move hundreds of millions of households from poverty to prosperity. But what does everyday life look like for a Chinese family? One of our ethnographers shares some intimate experiences from a meeting with a middle-class man who has lived through the country’s enormous transformation.

If Facebook is serious about becoming the social index for the entire web, it needs to do more not to just export social networking functionality but to make Facebook itself a more hospitable place for outside web page content to live.

Over the course of 14 projects in 5 years, ReD has been responsible for helping set in motion, and for strengthening, Novo Nordisk’s commitment to the needs of diabetes patients.

ReD helped Samsung develop their own distinct visual design philosophy–one that gave up the aesthetics of technology to instead reflect the aesthet­ics of the home.

Authenticity has always been an important criterion for premium products.  Naturally you would put a higher value on Parmesan cheese made in Parma than if it was made in Detroit.

In a recent poll we conducted, we found that more than 90% of the respondents wish that Facebook would help them deepen their friendships in the real world—yet only 40% said it has actually done so. That’s a small but important misalignment.

For the neocraftsman, the process behind their product is what makes it exclusive, meaningful, and ultimately of high value. 

In real life we jump through hoops for friendship. Facebook makes it too easy. So what real life has, and which Facebook doesn’t have, are barriers to building a friendship. 

Just this year, Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, that using a fake handle online was an example of a “lack of integrity.” In this new social graph, the use of your real ID online has apparently become an issue of moral uprightness — after all, don’t we all want accountability and reliability for every citizen of the social graph?

A more interesting question is whether people are using the social Web the way its designers think they are — and should they be allowed to? For social scientists this is a fun phenotypical question: Give humans a tool and watch it engender all sorts of odd behavior.

For many teachers a totally orderly classroom is now something to be rectified; an iPod Touch is a powerful learning tool, not a forbidden device; good students don’t just do as they’re told — they approach their lessons critically and challenge what they think doesn’t make sense.

Airport design is becoming less monumental, and more user-driven. 

Mikkel B. Rasmussen argues that corporations are increasingly attracted to cities on the basis of their people and lifestyles. 

Ten years ago, things did not look good for the Danish toy giant LEGO. The company was losing
money fast, and was feeling the pressure from new, digital competitors. 

Several years ago, a governmental agency tasked with foreign affairs in Denmark was under siege by the Arab world after it defending the right of Danish cartoonists to publish cartoons depict­ing Mohammad in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. They enlisted ReD to help explore how Arabs perceive Danes and Den­mark in more depth.

Between June 2009 and December 2010, a not-for-profit Danish and Egyptian cultural institute approached ReD to work on a project with them. They hoped to understand the value systems of everyday Egyptians through a series of research activities and methods. Regardless of class, age, gender, political leaning, religious affiliation, or geographical location, the project intended to explore dialogue-building among Egyptians based on shared values.

In the period leading up to the Arab Spring, ReD was tasked with understanding what—if any—shared values Egyptians had across religious, gender, age, and economic differences. Toward the end of our project, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia, and the Arab Spring was soon fueling an uprising in several Middle Eastern countries. Three elements proved key in making our research as fruitful and rich as possible, given the circumstances

In a conversation with Charlotte Vangsgaard, CGAP’s Gerhard Coetzee discusses how to help the financial sector discover the business potential of low-income customers. To him, the root cause of why financial inclusion is still an issue lies in the minds of the decision makers in the financial sector. 

If everything hinges on a survey or two, you may be missing the individual and sociocultural drivers that reside below the surface.

To convince consumers to buy and use environmentally friendly alternatives, new products must inspire equally strong desires and aspirations as those they are intended to replace.

Five biases that significantly complicate consumers’ adoption of environmentally friendly solutions.

To create business models and go-to-market plans that will succeed, businesses need to understand the social contexts that influence consumer decisions.

Analysis injects dissent and criticism into the ideation process, and contrary to what the rules of brainstorming tell us, this makes people more, not less, creative.

A not-for-profit raising money and awareness for a debilitating chronic illness came to ReD Associates because they needed a new take on fundraising. As their disease was not well known, the organization struggled with growing its donor base beyond those directly affected.