Fjord

Summary

• Foundation: 2001
• Employees: 1,200+
• Founder and global co-lead: Olof Schybergson
• Global co-lead: Baiju Shah
• Founder and CCO: Mark Curtis
• Fjord, part of Accenture Interactive, is a design and innovation consultancy that reimagines people’s relationships with the digital and physical world around them
• Fjord has over 33 studios in Atlanta, Auckland, Austin, Barcelona, Berlin, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Canberra, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dubai, Dublin, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Lima, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Mexico City, Milan, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Seattle, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington, D.C., and Zurich

Fjord

Fjord is a design and innovation consultancy that re-imagines people’s relationships with the digital and physical world around them. We believe digital services are similar to human relationships; people go through different stages of engagement — from first fascination to serious love. With an emotional, human-centered approach combined with robust methodology, we use the power of design to create experiences that people love.

Now, as part of Accenture Interactive, we combine Fjord’s design prowess and innovation capabilities with Accenture’s expertise in technology and operations, strong analytical tools, and the scale of their immense network to allow us to deliver end-to-end digital transformation for our clients.

Fjord is a geographic formation that occurs in cold regions, forming a fluid sea arm, constantly moving, between two giant and firm mountains. The Fjord company was founded in a city between England and Scandinavia, where the geographical phenomenon is more common and acts exactly like it: it’s an innovative moving flow that passes by big steady companies. This job starts already inside the “house” since the agency acts as a design consultant and has been part of Accenture, a huge business and management consultant since 2013: so, it can be said that Fjord is a change agent both at Accenture and its clients.

Fjord acts in the Accenture Interactive area, bringing creative solutions in over 33 studios all over the world, including the US, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Latin America.

In the beginning, there was some resistance from both sides to work in more collaborative ways, uniting the suit & tie experts with the outgoing communicative teams. But then, after some adaptation, they realized that working together was bringing much better results, connecting Accenture’s relationship with clients and its expertise in the business field with Fjord’s design of creative solutions and services.

The multinational service allowed Fjord to expand their British vision and incorporate aspects of all over the world, like a more warm communication based on Latin culture.

Services

Fjord works with a deep immersion within the client’s routine, problems, public and then solutions, in an unconventional way that takes more time (and more money), but also can bring more reliable and concrete results. For that same reason, the agency can’t handle every job offer received, acting like a funnel establishing what is more doable at the moment.

All the work is realized putting people in the center, making sense of the latest technologies available to create and design services and products that will outstand, being relevant, functional and innovative, surprising and delighting its users. In order to maintain these solutions applicable and in a spotlight nowadays, Fjord develops Living Services, that are digital experiences based on what is pumping at the moment, like AI, VR and AR currently, that are responsive to the user and the environment and, most importantly, that are able to shape-shift, renewing itself and adapting to new realities. This decade brought a lot of innovation and transformative changes. The wishes and needs of consumers shift all the time and the companies must be ahead of this shift, predicting what is coming next and suiting its services to that.

The company uses the mixed skills and expertise of its team of forward-thinking developers, data/content/visual/interaction designers, creative technologists, and business strategists to tackle its clients' challenges. Some of them are: stretch their brand or squeeze maximum impact for a new opportunity, transform the organization and its culture, using user-centered products and innovative ideas to hit the market faster, search for a disruptive project that will make them spearhead a shift in the market, seek for launching new products or services as quick as possible and, also, improve their engagement scores.

In order to build all this kind of solutions, Fjord works with three main pillars: design-led strategies, that shows the client why it’s necessary to change something, how to do it, who for and how it will attract more money into the company; in service design, Fjord create or retouch the company’s services, so they can be more interactive with customers, employees or both, transforming the ecosystem around it and simplifying the complex; the product creation, on the other hand, take part of all the development process, shaping, building and launching digital solutions or connected products that have an impact on users’ life, delivering the best and more suitable result to the market.

All services count with elegant simplicity, a design that is enjoyable, beautiful, and intuitive; a fun collaboration between teams, that works with shared experiences in a multidisciplinary way; a blend of emotion and logic, bringing human-centered solutions based on researches and analytical tools that measure data and creativity; the curiosity of a team composed by cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary and cross-industry able to bring complete outstanding solutions; constant innovation with groundbreaking prototypes, always searching for produce the best, and most likely the first, of its kind.

To exemplify, here goes a case: Fjord and Accenture did a project for a bank to improve the performance of their credit area. Doing the immersive research, Fjord found out that the clients saw the institution like a villain and then decided to draw a more clear communication with the public, with a policy of approximation with clients and, also, a writing manifest that is being used in advertising campaigns and internally.

Fjord also launches every year a trend report that brings what is next for business digital emerging solutions, technology, and design, to suggest how companies can act to transform their business and transform these tendencies in some positive changes.

Fjord Trends 2020

The Fjord Trends 2020 study approaches the need for realigning stances, principles, and fundamentals. With the advance and evolution of capitalism, people are now more conscious about the effects of their spending, such as how companies are acting around subjects like diversity and sustainability, worrying about themselves, the environment, and minorities. This change of priorities is transforming all business areas. Running after profit and maintaining that as the only goal will probably carry some firms in the opposite way - people are searching for products that are actually useful, necessary, and made by socially conscious and active brands. This is a clash that is affecting all society, from social circles to politics. Worries about the use of plastic have become a global movement and one of the main priorities nowadays, forcing companies to take alternative roots.

Other than that, 5G technologies will generate a lot of new opportunities for services and products in that area, creating a speed of data processing never seen before, optimizing the relationship between humans and machines.

The Design is now exchanging its focus from “me” to “we”, extending beyond only the user-centered experiences and redirecting itself into whole lives and all its aspects.

The companies that can enjoy and adapt to all these changes are most likely to assume an important role in the business world for the next few years - until others changes and needs to take place. It’s more than necessary to start the development of engaging, transforming, ethical and intelligent experiences that will string the relationship with clients. Besides this is also very important to associate purpose with profits, beginning to see significant actions that are aligned with the world's social change as profitable, setting a new way of making money.

The complete study can be accessed in Accenture’s website, with a full report of these 7 trends: many faces of growth, money changers, walking barcodes, liquid people, designing intelligence, digital doubles, and life-centered design.

Conversations blog

Fjord website contains a category of “Conversations”, where are published a lot of texts, done exclusively for the website or some materials done by magazines and others means, about design and business themes, bringing ideas of what is newest in the market, trends, and reflections around it. Fjord also publishes some content at Design Voices, a Medium page