Osage Associates provides two kinds of services; strategic planning and innovative product development. Both are founded on human-centered design principles.
Our clients include online and out-of-home entertainment companies, museums and heritage institutions, education technology, software, and consumer electronics firms.
Osage Associates helps clients optimize market entry in terms of timing, features, price points, and strategic alliances.
Our projects often begin with new technology; opportunities to enter new markets or address customers in new ways. We help our clients respond to competitive market changes: How best to use new technologies to enhance your market share or product offerings. Creating strategic alliances is more important than ever before. Our human-centered design perspective ensures that customers/users actually understand and benefit from your innovation.
Technology assessment is another starting point. We define potential product applications, market demographics, features, and price points for an emerging or pre-competitive technology. Technology assessment can include patent analysis. We have analyzed hundreds of high-tech patents for potential entertainment applications and/or possible infringement. This leads to new licensing opportunities for our clients.
We think of it as interface design; every product you use is an interface to accomplish something. The goal of human-centered design is that the product is designed around the user, rather than users adapting to the product. This means perceptually, logically, and physically. For devices, the industrial design can no longer be thought of apart from the object behaviors. Our product development work involves redesign of existing online and integrated interfaces for a device or software. We can start from scratch — from creative concept development to functional specification to feature specification, on up to project management for a working prototype. We specialize in large-scale (re)active public environments for use in urban space design and interactive museum exhibit applications.