Saturday, June 18, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
The Canadian Olympic Team Brand on Vimeo
via vimeo.com
Branding Asperger's So It Evokes Real People, Not Just Rain Man
via fastcodesign.com
The branding campaign speaks to those with Asperger's -- and visually represents what it's like to have.
Thanks to Hollywood, lots of folks think of autism spectrum disorder as Dustin Hoffman counting matches. That’s, of course, a gross simplification of a broad, complex, and deeply mysterious set of psychological conditions. Here to dispel some of the myths is UK-based The Click Design with an identity package and ad campaign for Asperger East Anglia.
The design had to appeal to people with Asperger’s, too.
Asperger East Anglia is a Norwich-based nonprofit that helps people living with Asperger syndrome (a high-functioning autism spectrum disorder) and their families. Recently, the organization tapped the creative minds at The Click to revamp its branding -- which, to judge by a cursory Google search, looked like a middle-school logo roughed out in Kid Pix -- in order to attract new sources of revenue. The new scheme also needed to help “raise awareness of both Asperger East Anglia and Asperger syndrome itself,” The Click’s Callum Liddle tells Co.Design.
The Click’s initial idea was to exchange the 'P' in Asperger for a question mark, “the idea being to question public assumptions of Asperger Syndrome,” Liddle says. But The Click faced an added challenge: The design had to appeal to people with Asperger’s, too -- those who ultimately stand to benefit from the rebrand. Meeting with Asperger East Anglia, perusing medical journals, and talking to people with Asperger’s, the designers quickly realized that they had to toss out anything figurative. “One symptom of Asperger syndrome is an acutely literal use and understanding of language,” Liddle wrote on Identity Designed. “It can make navigating the subtle intricacies of day-to-day communication, something many take for granted, substantially more difficult.”
So they pared down the brand to “visually represent this straightforward and honest nature.” The result is the clear, crisp, typographic arrangement you see here. The logo is dead simple: just the letter A, and it’s used to lead the bold, literal titles ("the message," "the contact," etc.) that attach to each element of the stationary suite. Much of the brand identity is done up in Akzidenz Grotesk, the 19th-century typeface on which Helvetica was modeled.
The pared down brand “visually represents this straightforward nature."
The Click also whipped up a clutch of posters that reprises the nonprofit's fresh, minimal brand identity. They show head shots of clients at Asperger East Anglia and simple typographic messages: “People with Asperger syndrome can often perform extraordinarily well with just a little support”; “Almost everyone with Asperger syndrome has a unique interest or talent”; “People with Asberger syndrome can often be concerned about their relationship to others”; and so on.
The posters, which Asperger East Anglia is distributing throughout the region, are designed to both raise the nonprofit’s visibility and combat the social stigma associated with Asperger’s. What’s more, they put a real face -- make that several real faces -- on a family of disorders whose public image to this point has been some guy in a movie.
[Images courtesy of Click Design]
via fastcodesign.comAll Aboard: China's Next Export Is A Trans-Asian High-Speed Railway
For all of its grand ambitions, China has had some problems implementing high-speed rail--severe safety issues, construction fraud, and lack of ridership are just some of the issue the country has had to deal with recently. But China will not turn back from its vision of high-speed rail. And the country cares so much that it wants it's neighbors to have fast trains, too. China is starting by extending tracks into northern Laos.
Laos is one of the poorest countries in Asia, and it currently only has two miles of rail lines. But the nation anticipates that a high-speed rail system built by the Chinese could increase tourism, gambling, and local construction jobs.
No word on when construction will begin on the Laos line, but this is just the beginning of China's plan for a trans-Asian railway system. Eventually, the country envisions a system that could zip riders from China to Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Pat of the reasoning is economic security. As it stands, China does more trade with Western countries than with fellow Asian nations. But in the event of a maritime blockade or a disaster, a high-speed rail system could easily allow China to trade goods with its neighbors--and a link to Burma would give the country another access point to the Indian Ocean if the Straits of Malacca became tangled in an international dispute.
This is all still a long way away; China has high-speed rail struggles of its own to deal with. Just this week, the country opted to lower the top speed of the Beijing to Shanghai bullet train in part because of maintenance and safety concerns. But China's dreams of a world linked by high-speed rail are commendable. Unlike the U.S., which can't build a mile of high-speed rail without years of wrangling, China doesn't have an elected government or concerned voters getting in the way--so the trans-Asian rail link may actually become reality.
[Image: Wikipedia]
via fastcompany.comPandora's IPO: Beyond The Music
Back in February Pandora filed the relevant documents to signal its intent for an Initial Public Offering, which was tentatively priced at around $100 million. It's taken four months of the usual haggling and planning by the company and its financial advisers to settle on a price, which it's just announced today: $16 per share to the public.
As part of its press release, Pandora notes this will be the price for around 14.7 million ordinary shares--meaning the company's notional income from the IPO will be in the region of $235 million, a bigger figure than the initial estimate. Around 6 million shares will be offered by Pandora itself, and 8.7 million will be offered by "selling stockholders," the firms who've already invested cash into the company. That means Pandora and its execs will make approximately $96 million, which actually does line up with its IPO filing. The tentative valuation this gives the company is around $3 billion--an enormous sum.
How does this tally with its most recent performance though? At first glance it looks good: At the end of May Pandora reported its revenues for the quarter were up 136% to $51 million from just $21.6 million for the same period in 2010. That's a success story--a sign that the company is growing its registered userbase (up 77% over the 2010 figure) and their cash engagement with Pandora's services. But the firm actually reported a net loss for the Q1 period of this year, and at $6.8 million this is a big leap from a $3 million loss in Q1 of 2010. The loss is mainly excusable as Pandora's been investing in its infrastructure in the run-up to IPO, and in this same internal-spending manner, the firm actually expects to run at a loss throughout 2012--and possibly beyond.
And here's where a few worries may creep in. Pandora is indeed now something of a success, having previously reported profits after a grim period, and its people-driven algorithm does appeal to users. But rival service Spotify, which is highly successful in Europe, is now reported as close to signing the final deals with the U.S. music labels that would let it bring its own Net streaming music model to the American market. Depending on how this market develops, Spotify may rival Pandora for consumers in the space, and possibly eat up some of Pandora's share.
Meanwhile Google and Amazon have just launched cloud music services which, while not exactly replicating Pandora's services at least offer something comparable--the cloud music locker, which may satisfy many consumers looking for a way to access music online (this time from their own collection). Apple, which controls massive market influence as the biggest retailer of music, has just revealed its plans to put iTunes in its iCloud, via a half-music locker, half-cloud-server model.
And Pandora, its rivals, and Google and Amazon all rely on data streaming to the device the user's using to access their systems--whether over terrestrial broadband or 3G wireless links. In an era where unlimited data access seems to be disappearing and data caps with fees for overage are becoming the norm, Apple's model for cloud music access may prove the most resilient.
Pandora mentions some of this in its S1 filing:
Internet radio is an emerging market, and if we are unable to increase the number of listeners and listener hours or to convince advertisers of the benefits of our advertising products, our business and future prospects will be harmed.
The S1 also notes Pandora really must aggressively attract users in order to capture the market and bring in advertising revenue (86% of its income in early 2011 was from advertising). With peers and similar rivals, including the giant that is Apple, stomping into the market, Pandora's IPO is going to be an interesting affair to watch.
[Image: Flickr user heza]
via fastcompany.com
Sony's Music Unlimited On Android Joins The Mobile Streaming Tunes Fray
Sony's Music Unlimited system, through its Qriocity cloud portal, is about to hit Android phones in the U.S., France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand--the first time Sony's put its service on a mobile device.
Music Unlimited was launched in the U.K. in December 2010 and hit the states in January of this year, streaming music from Sony's own extensive recording archive and other music labels to Sony devices. The experiment came to a horrible clunking halt during the recent spate of high-profile hack attacks targeting Sony's online assets, but is now back online. The new "Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity" app on the Android market is Sony's latest attempt to earn revenue from the system, which has already been available via PS3s, connected Bravia TVs and other static machines, and it's tapping into the current vogue for streaming music.
For $9.99 a month you'll get multi-device compatibility, some basic ad-free curated channels "categorized by genre, era as well as mood through SensMe technology," a personalization service which learns your preferences, playlists, on-demand playback, some premium content channels and other features. A $3.99 monthly subscription gets you a more limited list of services, but both subscriptions offer access to Sony's "Music Sync" system that lets you "scan and match your existing music files and playlists on your PC to the service for playback on compatible devices at anytime." And this sounds a lot like a cloud-based music locker very much in the vein of what Google and Amazon offer--Sony even goes as far as noting it's compatible with "playlists from other media players including iTunes."
Kazuo Hirai, the deputy president of Sony Corp says in a press release: "Music Unlimited ...for Android is the next evolution of the service which enhances the value proposition for our customers."
This new tweak has got some serious push behind it, Sony fans. But can it allow Sony to really make a splash in the mobile music streaming game?
Sure there are some nice tweaks that its rivals can't match, but $9.99 a month doesn't compare to Apple's $29 a year for iTunes Match or Amazon's low-price 20GB music locker access--which is being pushed as a free purchase when you buy an MP3 album from Amazon's store. Will users be prepared to spend between $48 and $120 to access Sony's seven million licensed tracks and benefit from a mood-based curated channel using Sony's high-tech SensMe system? There is, after all, stiff competition from the likes of Pandora (currently ascendant) and upcoming challenges from Spotify and Apple. It's a telling move, too, that the inventor of the Walkman and a doomed range of MP3 players is now putting its mobile music chops on a Google-powered suite of phones and tablets.
[Image: Flickr user markolino]
via fastcompany.com
A New VC Model That Turns Designers, Not Techies, Into Startup CEOs | Co.Design
via fastcodesign.com
Enrique Allen's angel-investor and mentoring network is meant to encourage entrepreneurial designers to get into the tech startup game.
Enrique Allen had an epiphany one morning about how to bring design literacy to Silicon Valley. Instead of spending so much of his energy mentoring and consulting with startups about how to bring iterative creative thinking and a respect for user experience to their company culture, why not do the inverse? "I realized I should be helping designers become more startup-ey," Allen tells Co.Design. "Those are the people, who, if they become leaders of a company, will model that 'designery' behavior that from its inception, right in the company's DNA." So he started The Designer Fund to give entrepreneurial designers an on-ramp into the Silicon Valley world of angel investor networks, demo days, and funding rounds. "It's about helping to give designers a seat at the startup table that engineers and MBAs already have," Allen says. The intended result: Smarter companies, better products, happier users -- and an improved world.
"It's about giving designers a seat at the startup table that engineers and MBAs already have."
But don't think that The Designer Fund (or D.Fund, as insiders call it) is a cutesy attempt to turn font monkeys into dot-com tycoons just for the hell of it. "When I'm talking about design, I'm not just talking about the visual layer that everyone seems to think of when they hear the word," Allen asserts. "We really believe that designer-founders need to be able to guide the guide the product and organization through 'the full stack': user research, interaction design, information architecture, all the way to the interface, and everything in between." In other word's Allen's fund is seeking people who already have the vision and entrepreneurial spirit that any Silicon Valley founder has -- but just happen to self-identify as designers, too. Allen points out that designers have recently earned a rich pedigree in the Valley, having founded YouTube, Tumblr, Airbnb, Android, and Flickr, among others. And yet their talents are still unappreciated.
"What we're hoping to do is shift the paradigm of what design is. Design encompasses systems now, not just 'making things look pretty,'" Allen continues. "Designers have traditionally been paid a lot of money to make what people want; meanwhile, most startups fail because they make things that people don't actually want! But designers are trained in methods of getting to these 'aha' moments about customers, products, and use cases. And that's a great opportunity for designers to make a foundational contribution in a startup venture."
But Allen isn't preaching a gospel of "designers can do everything by themselves." Business is about profitability, engineering is about feasibility, and design is about usability -- and all three specialties need to overlap in a successful startup. "This space is all about consumer tech, where the user experience and the brand is so important for differentiating from all the other crap," he asserts. "And that's what designers are already good at."
"Most startups fail because they make things that people don't actually want!"
Allen also takes pains to note that the Designer Fund is meant as a complement, not a competitor, to established startup incubators. "I hope to position the D.Fund as accelerator agnostic," he explains. "We can help direct them to Ycombinator, Graywalk, and other networks to get their business off the ground, while also demystifying jargon about getting incorporated, and other things that can seem intimidating. We're primarily offering mentorship, and some angel investor money just to give someone a runway. But the network is the most important thing."
The Designer Fund's application cycle runs its course every three to four months, and Allen purposefully timed it to sync up with key dates at other tech incubators. The first two startups in the D.Fund's pilot program, Storytree.me (think a for-profit version of StoryCorps) and Culturekitchensf.com (social networking meets cooking culture), were advised by IDEO founder David Kelly and have "graduated" to other startup accelerator programs in the Valley.
For Allen, a designer himself (and cofounder of 500 Startups), the Designer Fund isn't about drawing lines in the sand about what design (and designers) are or aren't. "It's breaking down these artificial barriers. That label, "designer," simply articulates the founder's intention to create systems and experiences that persuade people to do something. That will be the best indicator of who they are, not their titles or methods or definitions. If design is so important to startups, let's lead and model these behaviors -- and its impact will speak for itself."
[Top photo by Tim Collins]
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Data Sprawl: How The Web's Rapid Expansion Will Transform The Global South
In most of Western Europe, North America, and Asia, the Internet is old. The personal computer led the way, eventually bringing hypertext and multimedia into our offices and now, a huge range of digital appliances that regularly stream more data than they store locally. The growth of data traffic over the next decade will be led by every user relying on more devices for megabyte-dense content.
In most of the rest of the world, the Internet is still quite new. The growth of data traffic in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East will be led by an expansion in the number of users. But these new users won't follow the same trajectory as their counterparts in the already-industrial world. Deep-rooted cultural differences and the simple fact that most of these users will be encountering the web on mobile media devices means that the Internet's map will need to be redrawn in more ways than one.
Networking giant Cisco has assembled a forecast of the web's growth over the next five years that showcases some startling numbers:
- By 2015, there will be nearly 3 billion Internet users. That's more than 40 percent of the world's projected population.
- Annual global IP traffic will reach approximately one zettabyte threshold (966 exabytes) by the end of 2015. As The Atlantic's Nicholas Jackson notes, a "zettabyte is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or the same amount of digital data that was on the entire Internet in 2010."
- Some of that will come from data-hungry households: 6 million will generate over a terabyte per month in Internet traffic, up from just a few hundred thousand in 2010. Cisco calls this group, concentrated in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, "the terabyte club."
- Currently, there are roughly as many networked devices as there are people on the planet. By 2015, they'll outnumber us two to one.
- We'll also reach the wireless tipping point: Right now, wired devices account for 63% of the Net's traffic; by 2015, wireless will be in the majority with 54%. Consumer use will tip even more heavily.
- IP traffic is growing fastest in Latin America- an estimated 50% growth rate between 2010 and 2015-- followed closely by the Middle East and Africa. Central and Eastern Europe aren't far behind.
- Despite all of this, the overall Internet growth curve, at least in terms of year-over-year percentages, is actually bending downwards a little. Traffic octupled between 2005 and 2010; it will "only" quadruple between 2010 and 2015.
Those are the numbers. For a sense of how this growth will likely differently affect different parts of the world, a new report by Octavio Kulesz on digital publishing in developing countries for the International Alliance of Independent Publishers offers some perspective. "[W]e must ask ourselves how useful it would be to reproduce the prototypes from the North in the South," Kulesz writes, "as in addition to the disparities in infrastructure, there are also enormous cultural, linguistic and even religious differences... [T]he experience of reading from the screen of a cell phone means something very different to a Chinese user, for example, than it might do to a European one, due to the qualitative difference in the characters used in each case."
The consumer desire for data in the global south is enormous, but infrastructure investment and research and development still could potentially prove to be a bottleneck for growth. Kulesz is generally less optimistic on this front than Cisco. Nevertheless, Kulesz is optimistic that the global south and other parts of the developing world can work together to blaze their own trails:
Sooner or later, these countries will have to ask themselves what kind of digital publishing highways they must build and they will be faced with two very different options: a) financing the installation of platforms designed in the North; b) investing according to the concrete needs, expectations and potentialities of local authors, readers and entrepreneurs. Whatever the decision of each country may be, the long-term impact will be immense.
To a certain extent, he also notes, you don't need an infrastructure as large as the West's to link up devices and cultures that are entirely different from the West's:
Of course, it would be extraordinary to obtain 80% Internet penetration in Africa or make huge investments in infrastructure throughout the developing regions, but--as Steve Vosloo observed--that may never happen. And in the event that it does occur some day, by then the industrialized countries will no doubt have made another technological leap, meaning that the disparity in infrastructure would still persist. So the most effective option is to start working right now, with what is available.
We're increasingly looking at a global mobile world where video and audio will be as much or more of a driving factor as text. At the same time, the sharing of information and the connections forged between people within and across national and cultural borders means that the sheer amount of bandwidth consumed might be the least important thing that happens to the web in the years to come. In the Arab Spring, we've already seen what a little bit of data can do to a society that hasn't had any. The effects of this massive shift on the developing world could be truly astounding.
[Image: Flickr user MattJP]
[Front Image: Ivan Kashinsky]
Follow Fast Company on Twitter.
via fastcompany.com
http://jantervonen.com/data-sprawl-how-the-webs-rapid-expansion-willThursday, June 9, 2011
A Chainsaw Stylish Enough For Wannabe American Psychos
via fastcodesign.com
Is Next of Kin Creatives scarily sexy redesign an example of "everything that's wrong with design"?
Next of Kin Creatives had a very specific set of users in mind when it designed the “nokgear” -- a sleek retooling of the brawny chainsaw. Internally, they called the target group the “functional luxe tribe” -- "users who would purchase luxurious (expensive) outdoor equipment so that they can pose, look good and feel good when camping (or not)." You know, the guy with the tricked-out navigational watch whose sense of adventure stops short of using a Porta-Potty.
When the chainsaw concept first hit the blogosphere, its perceived functional drawbacks met with an outpouring of derision. One Core77 reader exclaimed, “This is the worst of design. It looks seductively sexy but in actual use the various features would be somewhere between awkward and downright deadly.” Another decried: “This sums up everything that’s wrong with industrial design.” Ouch.
Now, to be fair, we’ve never actually handled a chainsaw. But reimagining a product that has long escaped aesthetic scrutiny seems to us to be a useful exercise -- even if the result, at first, is nothing more than restyling. That’s not to say that the concept as it stands should make it to market, and Rodney Loh, the founder of the Singapore-based firm, agrees: “It will have to go through a process of validation and refinement,” he tells Co.Design. “But with the obvious design elements set in place, the eventual design (if it gets product) will definitely address the shortcomings and yet preserve the story we started out creating.” So there may one day be a chainsaw worthy of being sold at the MoMA Design Store.
Toms Glasses: The Newest Buy-One-Get-One Product From Toms Shoes
Toms Shoes--the canvas shoe company that pioneered the "buy one, give one" model now copied by nearly everyone--is debuting a brand new "one for one" idea called Toms Glasses. Buy one pair and people in the developing world, who have just as bad vision as we do but little access to ophthalmologists, will get free glasses, medical treatment or surgery.
Could it mean a change of title for founder Blake Mycoskie, Toms's Chief Shoe Giver? (We kid.) Mycoskie says that his travels in the developing world revealed a new problem: "What we've seen with our shoes is that they really help people with two basic needs: education and being able to work and have a livelihood." Improving sight has the same affect. Children who can't see in school can't learn; older workers who lose their vision can't work. And it's a large problem. There are 284 million people around the world who are visually impaired, and 39 million who are blind.
"As I traveled around the world, I started to see more people who were visually impaired or blind living these desolate experiences. As I started asking question about what they needed, it was so simple. They either needed glasses, cataract surgery, or medical treatment." Thus was born Toms eyewear.
The glasses themselves--which start at $135--come in three styles and feature three hand-painted stripes that are supposed to represent you, the person you're helping, and Toms connecting you. The company, which gave away a million shoes last year, is launching its eye care programs in Nepal, Tibet, and Cambodia (where Pol Pot targeted people who wore glasses). It's working with what it calls a "Sight Giving Partner," the Seva Foundation, which will administer the actual eye programs. Mycoskie says it's a helpful step for him to be less involved than in his shoe-giving past: "I've been there when they got surgery... and I've handed out the glasses. But as Toms grows, it has to be less about 'What's Blake's most intimate, joyful experience?' and more about 'What's the great need?'"
And that's the key to the new "one-for-one" company model: solving the great needs through Western consumption. Shoes, and now glasses, are just the beginning. It wants to be the company that embodies every aspect of consumption that also results in help for the developing world. Once they get the glasses right, expect to see many more products from the company. "I want people to know that they're giving, in a one-for-one way, with every purchase."
And what does Mycoskie think about Warby Parker, a company that's been around since 2010--as Toms was preparing to launch--and also gives glasses away? "I was super excited. I can't solve [this problem]. They can't solve it. It has to be a collective effort. I stand up on stages all across America telling people to start a business that gives back. And they listened to that, and they did it. It was hard, though, because I couldn't congratulate them."
Follow Fast Company on Twitter. Morgan Clendaniel can be reached by email or on Twitter.
via fastcompany.com
http://jantervonen.com/toms-glasses-the-newest-buy-one-get-one-produSunday, June 5, 2011
Tablet Computing Is Here To Stay, And Will Force Changes In Laptops And Phones
via fastcodesign.com
Without us realizing it, our needs have evolved beyond the smartphone + laptop ecosystem.
Let’s call 2011 the year of the tablet. In the last several months, virtually every major electronics manufacturer has introduced a hopeful competitor to Apple’s iPad, and the aisles at January’s International Consumer Electronics Show were crammed with dozens of variations on the rounded rectangle.
But the idea of a portable touchscreen computing device is nothing new. You know that thing you sign when you get a package from UPS? The touchscreen tablet with a card reader that speeds you through checkout at the supermarket? Those are tablets, too. The Kindle and the Nook? Tablets, albeit very specialized ones. (Read Linda Tischler's post on the All New Nook here.)
The tablet is one of the only CE devices with no analog precedent.
So why are they popping into the foreground now? For one thing, technology. Improved flash memory, cheaper high-quality displays, more accurate touchscreens, and faster processors are converging to give us unprecedented computing function with few moving parts. Low power requirements are making technology more portable. Furthermore, the ability to stream movies and other content without actually using any memory makes the tablet the ideal mobile media-consumption platform. You don’t have to be an early adopter to see its appeal.
But the most interesting thing about the current fervor is that the tablet is one of the only consumer electronic devices with no analog predecessor. Unlike smartphones and laptops, which replaced analog phones, typewriters, and filing cabinets, the tablet is pure digital abstraction -- the love-child of two digital devices. The clay tablets of biblical times were primarily designed to create content, not consume it, but the digital tablet’s onscreen keyboard barely functions. It’s no replacement for a paper notebook and sketchbook, but it’s a trade-off we accept. So why do we need a new product in our digital lives that only consumes?
The answer is that our current digital ecosystem of smartphone + laptop doesn’t really fill our needs. Our phones aren’t good at making phone calls, and our laptops don’t share well. Both cost a lot but use only a fraction of their features. So much has changed since these platforms were originally defined that it’s time for a major re-adjustment, and the tablet is the first step. It’s the tip of the iceberg.
The tablet’s greatest impact on the technology ecosystem was in pointing out this weakness. Far beyond its technological innovations, it’s this insight that put Apple on the map as the tablet company. They saw the hole before we did, they told us about it, and they filled it. Remember when the iPad was just a big iPhone? Those days didn’t last long. This reset of our digital landscape holds endless opportunities for CE companies. Tasks that had been split between two devices can be distributed among three. So how do we map out the experiences, products, and interfaces for this new three-device ecosystem?
The tablet is a first step. It’s the tip of the iceberg.
Start with the smartphone. Currently, its biggest problem is that it’s a terrible phone. The critical function of making and receiving calls is lost in an array of competing tasks -- camcorder, calendar, photo gallery, media viewer. This is no accident, and no mistake, but the options don’t reflect what we really want from a phone. When was the last time you had a successful conference call on your Droid?
At the same time, the laptop computer is suffering from its own identity crisis. Hardware manufacturers still speak of processor speed and memory, but most laptop users really need just two things: Internet and email. There are plenty of other things it can do, and we occasionally do them, but without email and the web, the laptop’s value proposition is negligible.
So what happens next? As a result of the tablet, your smartphone is going to get a bit dumber. It won’t lose all of its functions, but most ancillary features will drop deeper back in the user interface, bringing the two killer apps of phone and camera to the surface. It will always be nice to use your phone to check an address on Google Maps in a pinch, but isn’t it more important to hear the person on the other end of the line? It’s convenient to watch movies and TV on something that fits in your pocket, but the experience is far better on a tablet. This change opens up opportunities for UI and hardware designers to elevate the function of the phone’s key features, which are currently tangled in a morass of other options.
The laptop is not going away, but it’s getting more focused as well. It will continue to be indispensable for working, traveling professionals (which will soon be most of us) who need real computer power. It’s going be a long time before tablets are the right platform for serious graphics, coding, or CAD. You need the precision of a mouse and a level of computing speed and memory that’s out of range for a tablet, at least for now.
So what happens to your phone and laptop, as a result of the tablet?
As the most-used functions of the laptop make their way over to our tablets, the need for a shared platform at home becomes more urgent. This is the computer that sits in the living room, used by the entire family to store and manage content, run the household, and allow everybody to see what’s happening on YouTube. Tablets, though well suited to sharing content, are primarily personal devices. They’ve inherited that characteristic from their smartphone parents, and this creates opportunities for shared digital access in the home.
The point here is that the tablet adds value to our lives when it functions within a complete ecosystem. It’s neither a smartphone nor a laptop -- and wasn’t designed to be. Its power comes from the ways in which all three of those key parts of the system work together: the laptop generates, the tablet consumes, the smartphone communicates. No one device can do everything we need. If we “need” all three, as Apple says, then proper integration is critically important.
As I walked the halls at CES, time and again, I saw people gathered around the tablets. But every pitch I heard was about technology: processor speed, memory, size, weight. What I didn’t hear was why anybody would need or want this device, and it’s not a trivial question. Without a clearly demonstrated ability to plug effortlessly into the rest of our digital lives, the tablet is seriously limited. Without the right context, it’s just another neat way to watch movies.
[Top image: Moses Coming Down From Mt. Sinai by Gustave Doré]
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Japanese Airline Taps Starchitect For Its Branding | Co.Design
L.A. architect Neil Denari gives the new low-cost airline Peach some juicy-fresh design.
Plenty of architects design buildings that reach for the sky. But here’s a guy who’s designing something that flies clear through it. Come next spring, folks booking on Peach, a new, low-cost Japanese air carrier, will board planes gussied up by Neil Denari, the L.A. starchitect behind the futuristic HL23 tower on the High Line.
The airline’s name was chosen because peaches are “a well-known and much loved fruit that symbolizes longevity, energy and happiness across Asian countries” to quote press materials. Denari wrapped the plane’s body in a swirl of pink and fuchsia -- peach, apparently, would’ve been too literal -- then stenciled “Peach” on the tail in lettering reminiscent of the text on a fruit box. More details from The Architect’s Newspaper:
Inside the planes will have purple and grey seats, purple strips on overhead bins, grey rugs with purple specks and purple partitions.
Geez. Will the flight attendants be purple, too? It’s an aesthetic that falls somewhere between Virgin's sexy, clubby cabins and a box of Pocky sticks, which was roughly the point. Peach is conceived of to appeal to twenty- and thirtysomethings who want to make quick, cheap flights between the airline's base in Osaka and other airports in Japan, China, Korea, and elsewhere in Asia. As Denari told The Architect’s Newspaper, “it needed to be cool and cute, but not Hello Kitty cute.”
Mission accomplished. Mostly, though, it's just nice to see an airline (and a low-cost airline in particular) invest in slick design. Flying is so dreadful that anything carriers do to make the experience less horrific can go a long way toward luring passengers and keeping them loyal to boot -- so long as Peach doesn’t adopt some of the less savory aspects of starchitecture.
[Images courtesy of Neil M. Denari Architects]
Innovation Starts With Disruptive Hypotheses. Here's How To Create One | Co.Design
via fastcodesign.com
The process hinges on three steps: Defining the situation, searching for cliches, and twisting those cliches around, according to Luke Williams.
A disruptive hypothesis is an intentionally unreasonable statement that gets your thinking flowing in a different direction. It’s kind of like the evolutionary biology theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” which states that evolution proceeds slowly and every once in a while is interrupted by sudden change. Disruptive hypotheses are designed to upset your comfortable business equilibrium and bring about an accelerated change in your own thinking.
The ability to ask, “What if?,” is an essential part of every executive’s skill set.
Contrast this with the more traditional definition of “hypothesis,” which is a best-guess explanation that’s based on a set of facts and can be tested by further investigation. With a disruptive hypothesis, however, you don’t make a reasonable prediction (if I charge the battery, the phone will work). Instead, you make an unreasonable provocation (what if a cell phone didn’t need a battery at all?). The difference between prediction and provocation, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw’s famous line, is the difference between “seeing things as they are and asking, ‘Why?,’ or dreaming things as they never were and asking, ‘What if?’” In our fast-changing world, when business certainties are no longer certain, the ability to imagine things as they never were and ask, “What if?,” is an essential part of every executive’s skill set.
What Do You Want to Disrupt?
To meaningfully differentiate yourself from everyone else in the same space, you have to define the situation in the industry, segment, or category that you want to challenge. Here’s what a list of what you want to challenge might look like:
- This is an area in which everyone seems to be stuck in the same predicament and nothing has changed in a very long time.
- This is an area where profit performance is average—it really should be more successful than it is.
- This is a category where growth is slow and everything seems the same.
Once you have a situation to focus on, describe it in one sentence: “How can we disrupt the competitive landscape in [insert your situation] by delivering an unexpected solution?”
Whether you choose to think about an industry, segment, or category is up to you and your business needs. For example, if you owned a boutique hotel in San Francisco, you might describe your situation in one or more of the following ways:
- How can we disrupt the competitive landscape of the Travel & Leisure industry by delivering an unexpected solution?
- How can we disrupt the competitive landscape of the Hotel segment by delivering an unexpected solution?
- How can we disrupt the competitive landscape of the Luxury Hotel category by delivering an unexpected solution?
That’s it. The important thing is that the high-level situation you choose is just that—high-level. It’s essential that you resist the natural urge to start thinking in terms of specific “problems.”
What Are the Clichés?
Now that you’ve defined your situation, what are the clichés—the widespread, hackneyed beliefs that govern the way people think about and do business in a particular space? If you pay attention, you’ll notice that clichés are everywhere.
Consider the multi-billion dollar video gaming industry. Video consoles were driven by several clichés. First, that the world is split into “gamers” and “nongamers.” Second, that gamers mostly care about faster chips and more realistic graphics. Third, game consoles are expensive. And fourth, that people play video games sitting down, barely moving anything but their fingers. With the Wii, Nintendo turned the gaming industry’s clichés on their head.
Searching for Clichés
Just being told, “Okay, get out there and find those clichés,” can be extremely daunting. So, here are a few tips that will help you jump-start the process. Start by getting online and identifying a handful of direct competitors in the industry, segment, or category you’re focused on. Group together those with similar characteristics (such as size and resources), strengths (such as brand name, distribution), and strategies (such as high quality). Select one or two competitors in each group that are pretty representative of the group as a whole. A total of three to six competitors are the ideal number to work with.
With the Wii, Nintendo turned the gaming industry’s clichés on their head.
Now, do a little research on each competitor and make a list of the clichés that keep everyone doing the same thing, competing the same way, or operating with the same set of assumptions. Keep your research activities quick and informal, intuitive and qualitative. To keep you from drowning in a sea of information, consider using the following three filters:
- Product clichés: What are the cliché features and benefits? What are the cliché product attributes that are advertised (convenience and reliability, for example)? Where are the cliché areas where the product competes (typical customers, typical geographies, and typical market size?).
- Interaction clichés: What are the cliché steps a customer experiences when buying and consuming their products and services? Is the interaction face-to-face? How frequently do customers purchase or use? In the rental car business, for instance, the prevailing interaction clichés include the following: face-to-face interaction with a service agent, completing a lot of paperwork, and renting vehicles by the day.
- Pricing clichés: What are the typical ways companies price their products and services and charge customers? Are they packaging products and services together or pricing them individually? Are they charging the customer directly or through a retail partner? Are they offering discounts or other incentives?
What Are Your Disruptive Hypotheses?
Now that you have a list of the clichés that are influencing the business situation you’re focused on, your next goal is to start provoking the status quo. To do that, you’ll take those clichés and twist them like a Rubik’s cube. You’re trying to find a way to rearrange the pieces, which in turn will provoke a different way of looking at the situation.
What Can You Invert?
If there’s an action, look at the opposite action. If something is happening over time, run the time scale backward. Whenever there’s a one-way relationship between two parties, try changing the direction 180 degrees.
What Can You Deny?
The denial method works by completely dumping key aspects of a cliché. Back to our rental car example for a minute, where the prevailing industry clichés include: See the customer. Complete a lot of paperwork. Rent by the day.
What would happen if you no longer needed to see the customer, you got rid of the paperwork, and you started renting by the hour? Well, you’d end up with something very much like Zipcar. The disruption? Don’t see the customer. No paperwork. Rent by the hour.
What Can You Scale?
What is scarce that could be made abundant? What is abundant that could be made scarce? What is expensive that could be free?
After going through these steps, you should be able to generate several hypotheses that will challenge your established way of looking at an industry and help you imagine radically new scenarios, ask unconventional questions, and discover unexpected advantages. The general rule is that the bolder your “What Ifs,” the fresher the perspective they offer.
Now, while that’s a huge accomplishment, hypotheses aren’t really worth much all by themselves. In the next post, we look at the process process of taking hypotheses and gaining the customer insight necessary to turn them into business opportunities.
[This is a condensed version of the first chapter of Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business. Click here to buy the book.]
[Top image by Daniel Novta]
Four Keys To Creating Products For The Lady Gaga Generation | Co.Design
via fastcodesign.com
If you want to succeed in development of new brands, products, and services, today you need to be following Gen Y. But how? Sarah Nagle, of Smart Design, has some lessons.
I think Gen Y is awesome because they are dramatically shaping how we all think about design. But, I am a little biased -- I was born in 1981, which makes me Gen Y, too. In April, one of my colleagues at Smart Design and I were asked to speak as part of the IDSA:LA California State Long Beach Duncan Anderson Design Lecture series. We decided to build our talk around understanding Gen Y and how to design for them. It turned out to be to be an opportune subject due to the fact that our audience was primarily made up of design students from the generation that we were exploring. Like every generation, Gen Y has been shaped by events that happened in our formative years, resulting in some strong opinions on how we see design. In our talk, we considered how this generation’s motivations and values were molded and how they have been translated into unique expectations toward the design of new experiences, services, and products. Below is an overview of the insights that rose to the top through our research and discussions.
The purchasing power of Gen Y rivals that of the Boomers.
First, a clarification. Everyone has a different name for Gen Y. Some call us Millennials or Generation Next. Some use the name Echo-Boomers because we are the hipsters born from hippie parents of the Baby Boomer Generation. Gen Y is generally defined by birthdates, born approximately between 1980-2000; but more significant than birthdates is our mindset. We have a common bond of growing up through some intense events: the first era of reality TV, Columbine, the rise of dot-com millionaires, and virtual relationships. Today, the purchasing power of Gen Y rivals that of the Boomers so we at Smart Design think that Gen Y is pretty awesome. Gen Y thinks so, too.
Everyone is Awesome
Gen Y is a generation of self-confident optimists due to years of helicopter parenting and unconditional positive encouragement. Just think of all the trophies we got for just showing up. After the shootings at Columbine, "jock" domination started to make way for more tolerance and a rearranging of the social constructs in Gen Y’s high schools. Today, Fox’s über-successful TV show Glee celebrates the new age of high school hierarchies -- or lack thereof. In Glee club, "We’re all losers" but that’s a good thing. Design needs to support this sense of feeling unique and awesome, but also the feeling of honesty. A brand that is picking up on this idea is Levi’s. Their product design and marketing actively acknowledges different body types with their “Curve ID” platform. Their latest communication uses typography that appears hand-painted and snapshot photography that celebrates "real-looking" people.
Change is Mandatory
The best designs for Gen Y offer flexibility but also the ability to slow down
MTV, YouTube, RSS feeds, Twitter, and Facebook status updates have transformed Gen Y into a generation that expects change and regards instant as not fast enough. Lady Gaga and her ever-evolving persona are a perfect example and expression of these evolutionary ideals -- she never wears the same look twice. Change is now expected but some things also need to slow down. Gen Yers want to retain the notion of nostalgia and the meaningful moments that this technology-driven era has taken away. If we primarily communicate through Facebook posts, text messages, and Twitter, what will happen to real conversations? The best designs for Gen Y encourage change and offer flexibility but also offer the ability to slow down and enjoy life’s meaningful moments. In this context, it’s no surprise that the iPhone with its many possibilities within controlled boundaries is such a favorite for Gen Y. It has an OS that allows for infinite customization but it also offers apps such as Face Time, Hipstamatic, and Words With Friends that offer nostalgia and encourage conversations.
Sharing is Second Nature
Boomer parents instilled a philosophy of “we can share anything” in their families. Gen Y has a closer relationship with parents and family, in contrast to Gen X, the independent "latch-key kids." Growing up online and with mobile phones has amplified this trend. As a result, Gen Y today is highly connected and uses peer-to-peer exchange, crowdsourcing, and collaborative filtering to shape their world. Design must take into consideration that Gen Y is more interested in use than ownership. Relayrides, the first peer-to-peer car-sharing site in the nation, is an example of a company that has built a platform on Gen Y’s willingness to share and trade. Their idea found its inspiration from Zipcar but the model is different. Rather than renting a car from a company, Relayrides enables people to rent their next door neighbor's car for a run to the store, or a trip out of town -- or, conversely, to make an average of $250 a month lending your car out to your neighbors.
Gen Y is more interested in use than ownership.
I Can Make it
Gen Y is the generation of new entrepreneurs. Forget traditional business hierarchies, Gen Yers want to be the CEO of their own companies. We grew up seeing instant pop "idols" and teenage nerds turned billionaires overnight. Gen Y has struggled with an unstable economy but we are bouncing back because we were raised to feel like we can do anything. It’s no wonder that YouTube sensations like Rebecca Black make it. Sites like Etsy have given the "crafty" among us a way to support ourselves while Kickstarter encourages a community to help make innovative projects into realities. Gen Y doesn’t want to work for the man, so by providing tools to let us co-create, customize it, make it meaningful, and see success quickly, we will love it –- and we will make it.
So now what?
The designers we spoke to at Cal State were enthusiastic about the impact that their generation is having on culture and design but they also feel a responsibility to guide generations to come. They are worried that if everything is fast, instant, and abbreviated -- what will be meaningful? We are excited about the design implications this growing trend will have on our work, specifically in the connected home and in the mobile space. We are excited to see how technology can be used as a platform to bring back meaningful experiences and to increase interactions with other people. Design is about people and Gen Y is the group of people that will be the catalyst to cultivate and design the future of "awesomeness" in our everyday lives.
[Top image by Lori Tingey]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)