I immensely enjoyed (late) last night’s first episode of Olympic Dreams, which you can catch on BBC iPlayer here and follows a number of young British athletes and former and future Olympians as they prepare for London 2012. The documentary gives a fascinating insight into the balancing act that is the life of an elite athlete, particularly an upcoming elite athlete. I’ve talked often on this blog about some of my own experiences performing this balancing act and a big part of my role as Young Ambassador for the Youth Olympic Games is assisting the members of TeamGB with this balancing act of juggling training and a social life with the demands of education.

These challenges are far from unique to elite athletes however, I’m sure all of us are familiar with the pressures associated with ensuring good performance in either our personal or professional lives or indeed in our hobbies or sporting commitments. For me as someone with fairly a dominant kinaesthetic and visual learning style, visualising performance was always a huge part of ensuring I achieved what I set out to do. I was excited to see Tom Daley talk and demonstrate his pre-dive visualisation process in last night’s documentary and it reminded me of my undergraduate dissertation project ‘Insight‘ a mobile phone and augmented reality environment to aid athletic performance.

Canadian Cross-country skier Chandra Crawford using music to help prepare her performance at the Vancouver Games (c) Vancouver Sun

I’ve often found however, that visualisation (and supporting performance preparation with music) can also be really effective in terms of helping prepare for lectures or presentations that I’ve given, thinking through in my mind where and what I’ll be presenting and how I anticipate the audience to react.

This is an approach that is also increasingly employed in the design world and by service design consultants to help their clients achieve innovative and creative insights or ensure effective service design and delivery. Vocal proponents of these theatrical, role play and embodied approaches to service design include Adam Lawrence (who is well worth following on Twitter, if you don’t already).

Fast Company also covered a related notion a while back, talking about how standup comedy helps design and creativity. As one of the coaches in last nights documentary pointed out – its really about standing up and delivering your performance when it matters – how different they is this to so many other aspects of life? What can the way sports people deal with this pressure do to help us inform our own processes and (quite literally) practice? These principles are similar in justification to why experience prototyping and test-rigs are such effective tools for new product and service development – as just like Tom Daley they allow stakeholders to act our their performances whilst developing them. This process in turn makes those performances ‘more real’ every time they are iterated or evolved – making the experience more realistic every time it is enacted. The outcomes of this aren’t always positive however, and the downsides of realistic training environments and visualisation is something that @georgejulian has blogged about recently.

Prototypes - another form of visualisation (from Ergonomics - Real Design at The Design Museum

One of the big attractions for me of Service Design as a discipline is the myriad ways, tools and processes that it affords practitioners and participants to help people visualise their needs and demands from a service or the complex socio-technological systems and relationships that make up the service. I wonder how Service Designers and designers more generally, might be able to collaborate with sports psychologists and athletes to share practice and experiences on new and creative approaches to visualisation and expression. Would this be of reciprocal benefit – in other words would sports people benefit from more creative and collaborative approaches to preparing for competition?

I also wonder if there is a career pathway or opportunities for athletes to support the design and development of user experiences and the design of products, systems and services after, or in order to support, their careers as full time athletes?