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(Credit:
Victors & Spoils)
It's always good to be the first, and while crowdsourcing, the trend, may have jumped the shark, a fully crowdsourced creative agency is a bold creative experiment and still news. Two Crispin Porter + Bogusky alums, John Winsor and Evan Fry, together with Claudia Batten, the founder of Microsoft-acquired video game advertising shop Massive, have launched Victors & Spoils (V&S), "the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principle."
V&S says it will "provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world's most talented creatives." The press release promises that "perceived crowdsourcing flaws will be addressed through world-class creative direction delivered through the use of the reputation-ranked Victors & Spoils crowd" but stays mum on how exactly the crowdsourced creative department will operate.
In any event, V & S is eating its own dog food. The first line you notice on its web site (after the humble "Welcome To Victors & Spoils. Let's Change An Industry") is "Why does this site look so plain, Jane?" and the answer is: because the site design, the look and feel, and even the logo are being crowdsourced.
Whether crowdsoucing yields better creative results, who knows? It certainly is a differentiator. V&S COO Claudia Batten twittered that she got calls from five Fortune 200 CMOs in the first five days since launch. We will follow this one closely.
(Credit:
Jossey-Bass)
A Fine Line offers a step-by-step overview of the innovation process -- from targeting goals to shepherding new products and services to the marketplace -- in order to reveal how to arrive at an authentic human design that connects strongly with consumers. With a unique perspective, rich stories, and a global mindset, Hartmut Esslinger explores business solutions that are environmentally sustainable and contribute to an enduring global economy.
Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital, in his foreword, said it all: "Hartmut's book contains the ruminations of a man who has devoted his life to the challenge of marrying the aesthetic with the functional while standing firm against the deadening forces of mediocrity. His work shows that taste can triumph, design and production can be soul-mates, and the eye of an individual can shape a product and a company. The idea that finely designed products can change the fate of companies while also becoming our indispensable companions is a message that millions of us owe to Hartmut."
You can find the table of contents, sample chapters, testimonials, and videos on http://www.afinelinebook.com
And here are some excerpts from a video interview with Hartmut:
(Credit:
Frog Design)
Famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Internet entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki offers a colorful interview with Frog Design founder and legendary designer Hartmut Esslinger. Hartmut discusses his philosophy on design and his new book "A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business," to be published in June by Jossey-Bass. Hartmut talks about how Steve Job’s brain works and why the world’s richest companies continue to put out “crappy” products. Hartmut also reveals his top 10 best and worst products of all time.
Here's the article: The Inside Scoop on Design: Ten Questions with Hartmut Esslinger.
(Source: Open Forum)
By Nick de la Mare, Associate Creative Director, frog design
There's a saying I remember from when I worked in advertising: "nothing kills a bad product faster than a good ad." That seemed to make a lot of sense when I heard it, but the more I look back I realize that it's defining things so narrowly as to be absurd. What IS a product anyway? A service-based thing like a house cleaner or a mechanic? A single-minded tool like a cup or hammer? Something digital and deeply nebulous like a Wi-Fi network? And what does "kill" mean in a world of constant innovation and updates in both successful and unsuccessful products? To compound that, what role does traditional advertising have to play anyway, especially as word-of-mouth is becoming the TRUE definer of success for so many products.
We're now in a place where production costs are down and competition is up, products are networked into systems, and getting the actual thing into users hands is becoming more important than telling them how cool it could be for them to try it. More and more we're letting people form opinions of their own, and changing the product to better fit those opinions. Brands are alive and sales channels are as elastic as the products themselves. The desire to get product out to individuals and then iterate based on incoming data goes by many names; perpetual beta, direct sampling, open-source, etc., etc., but all adhere to the same core thesis, as Brian Collins puts it: "The singular is often the universal. The more an experience matters, the faster the word goes out in a zillion-channel world."
What does this do to traditional advertising and top-down branding? For one thing you're seeing more and more ad and brand agencies getting into the product game, and that scares the hell out of the traditional players. Carl Alviani wrote an interesting article about it a few months ago in which he states:
"Ad agencies designing products has a sort of apocalyptic ring to it for many traditional ID folks, who may bristle at the idea of product design as just another way of getting people excited about buying. The small mound of moral high ground product designers have seized for themselves over the years is largely composed of statements about making things work better, last longer, offer more relevance. If that makes them sell better, goes the argument, then great, but don't think for a moment that market appeal is the primary motive; that's what ad agencies do. This breeds wariness, and while it might have some justification, it's also a little beside the point: the marketing landscape has shifted dramatically since the claim was first made."
That queasy feeling of reaching too far into the marketing world extends beyond the insecurities of traditional ID'ers. What happens when marketing and product converge; does that change the very essence or power of a product? Does it become more superficial, designed to impress for an instant rather than live with the user for long periods of time? Is superficiality and the short attention span taking over the world? Are we doomed to a Wall-E or Idiocracy like future? Well, perhaps traditional product designers shouldn't be so scared, or better yet, perhaps they're scared of the wrong thing.
Just as the newspaper world was blindsided by digital (the original fear being short-form articles and color in print ala. USA Today), the product design world is about to get a smack-down. It's not from any singular new innovation, but more from the multitude of them. As consumers we're at a tipping point where we no longer need brands or other top-down entities to mediate our experiences for us. In an impersonal world we crave conversation and for the first time we can conduct those conversations with the things we use; whether that comes in the form of constant updates that simulate the back and forth of person-to-person dialog, or through communication between objects where we act as the intermediaries. Strength doesn't come from singular many-to-one messages anymore, it's user-defined, one-to-one and elastic.
Again Brian Collins, "Now, even the best-crafted messages are attenuating to the vanishing-point. Media have subdivided into capillaries, too numerous and often too narrow to measure." Apply those words to a product and you get the Apple App Store; fundamentally a tool used as an opportunity to present the essence of a company in bite-sized pieces, each designed and defined by users for users.
Last word goes to Russell Davis, who pretty much sums it up:
"The point I'm groping towards is that as objects informationalize communication channels are getting built in. And there are ways of doing this that are mass, cheap and easy. Printing. Paper. Ink. RFID. And cleverer phones will be the perfect things to interact with these clever objects. This is what advertising and marketing and media people really need to get afraid of. All this web stuff is going to look like a picnic compared to the horrors that will be dealt to the agency and media businesses when every product has a communications channel built right in. And I suspect it's a channel that most brand-owners will feel a lot more comfortable with. Marketing/advertising was always a necessary evil for most businesses. And Something bolted onto the culture. And they've never liked ITV. And having to do all this social networking stuff gives most of them the willies. But integrating communication and information into the product is something they can get behind quickly and easily.
I think. I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this but I think it's interesting. I think there's a whole model here that integrates the conversation into the stuff, creating a much more natural relationship between people and things, with much less mediation in the middle."
Amen.
(Credit:
The Product Workshop)
In a great essay for Core 77 ("Stepmothers of Invention: Branding Firms Enter the Industrial Design Fray"), Carl Alviani describes a trend that has been emerging for a while now: Not only do digital agencies like R/GA enter the branding domain, branding, marcom, and advertising firms also round out their services portfolio by adding product design capabilities. Alviani expects that "a lot more branding firms will be hiring product designers over the next few years, just as ID firms hired lots of media and identity specialists a decade back (and continue to do)." John Winsor director of strategy in product innovation at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, an ad agency which now bills itself as a "factory," reckons that "Product is the ultimate communication tool. To me, branding and ID are different sides of the same coin. We're both satisfying the needs of the customer."
And indeed, Alviani observes that "In the last few decades, 'product' has become a word that can describe a toothbrush, a piece of software, or an advertising campaign with equal justification, and this trend of metaphor-as-synonym shows no signs of slowing."
But he does not just simply buy into the song of creative discipline convergence. His view is much more nuanced. While he acknowledges that "branding agencies are just as good candidates for performing product design explorations as design firms at this point," Alviani questions whether real break-through innovation will ever originate from branding firms: "When we look for examples of 'authentic,' 'innovative' design, (...) we're almost always looking at a different sort of team. The current poster children of innovation-spawned market success--the Wii, the iPhone, the Flip video camera--emerged from large groups of researchers, designers, engineers, programmers and manufacturing specialists who worked together for a long time, and knew both their brand and the applicable technologies intimately. This type of work cannot be emulated by assembling a team or hiring an agency and handing them a brand bible, no matter how good they are at their jobs."
For the most part I would agree with his conviction that it's one thing to tell the story (even across different technologies and consumer touch points), but a very different thing to create it. Branding firms may consider product design simply as a means of brand extension. But then again, what is chicken, what is egg? I remember how Eric Feng, Chief Technical Officer at Hulu, emphasized in a presentation at the Milken Conference that it was critical for them to start with a clear understanding of what the Hulu brand should stand for -- long before they drafted even a rough concept of the actual product.
(Credit:
Next Big Thing Awards)
The Table Tennis Triples and Modular Table Tennis System (MTTS) was a finalist in the Australian Next Big Thing Awards.
I love how the invention's "unique benefits" are listed on the award site:
"- More people play on one table: social benefits, reduced waiting times
- Greater shot range, fairer 'Triples' scoring system
- Conventional tables can be reversibly 'Triples' retrofitted
- Numerous games/table shapes possible with the MTTS sectors"
(Hat tip to Jordan Kanarek from frog)
(Credit:
Sennheiser)
Rob Walker, the author of the just-released "Buying in," is a marketing connoisseur, an expert in reading the cultural underpinnings of commerce. In his Consumed column for the New York Times Magazine, he examines how technology shapes consumer culture and vice versa. In tomorrow's piece he elaborates on the history of headphones, and how their role evolved in modern society, from the first Bose set to the Sony Walkman to the iPod earbuds.
With the miniaturization of devices, the public exposure of personal space increased. I remember that when I was 14, I came home from school, had lunch, and didn't wait a second to lie down on my bed, put my clunky Sennheiser headphones on, and listen to an album I had just bought. Thomas Dolby's "Aliens Ate My Buick" or Prince's "Sign of the Times." I closed my eyes and forgot the world around me. It was a moment of total immersion and uncompromising intimacy, both with the artist and myself. I wasn't ready to share the music with anyone else until I had fully experienced and vetted every single note through the immediacy of the headphone connection.
Looking back, headphones seem to have anticipated the era of performance-enhancing body extensions that we may be entering soon, but at the same time they now appear like a nostalgic relict of a time when the supply of attention among young consumers was still excessive. Having their social function shifted from providing excessive to expressive intimacy, headphones have become a status symbol for consumers who want to consume in between or parallel to other activities, and who want do that on their own terms -- in public, alone; in a perfect manifestation of what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan coined "extimacy." The album has dissolved into 99-cent units on iTunes, and the headphone experience has been succeeded by portable soundtracks for permanent distraction.
(Credit:
Todayandtomorrow)
These seem to be apocalyptic times for designers. If you happen to be a member of this threatened species, you better look for another calling. We had just put Pillippe Starck's "Design is dead" fatalism to bed, and then I read Peter Merholz's essay from 2007: "Stop designing products!"
What sounds like another shocker initially, however, turns out to be a milder riff on an old and well-known theme that Merholz himself has been promoting for two years now: "Experience is the product -- and the only thing users care about:"
"When you start with the idea of making a thing, you're artificially limiting what you can deliver. The reason that many of these exemplar's forward-thinking product design succeed is explicitly because they don't design products. Products are realized only as necessary artifacts to address customer needs. What Flickr, Kodak, Apple, and Target all realize is that the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing that our customers care about."
I guess what Merholz wants to point out is that while many brands may think they're all about the experience, their thinking is still centered on the eventual "thing." You could counter that, of course, and contend that it's a question of how you define this "thing." "It" could be an amalgam of both the physical form and its history and meaning. Whatever your approach (the experience as the Holy Grail or a broader definition of "thing") the overriding theme is the same: A product is not just a product. But what is IT?
In an era "when all of us, journalists, business people, and designers are making the transition from being leaders of thought to curators of conversations," as Bruce Nussbaum describes it, designers, including product designers, evolve from information architects to communication architects. Interaction designers start designing interactions between people (a.k.a conversations) and not just interaction with machines. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, while typically not the most eloquent CEO, nailed the mantra of the Generation C(onversation): "The other guys think the purpose of communication is to get information. We think the purpose of information is to get communication."
Good designers are conversation starters. They instigate opinions and re-create the "aura" of the (art) object that German philosopher Walter Benjamin considered to be erased by the mechanics of technical reproduction. While the destruction of "aura" signaled the passage from the artwork as cult (i.e. as a religious object) to the artwork as exhibit (in museum and inevitably in cinema), the "age of conversations" catapults it back into the sphere of cult.
The "aura" of the product is the people who talk about it. Products are the stories of products, and meaning is construed by memories, associations, and provocations. If product and user story match, at least partially, a narrative sandbox, a room of emotional resonance emerges that creates new, proprietary meaning: a third story, if you will. Call it "branding."
Designers are marketers; marketers are designers. They are unified by one and the same task: branding. Or in other words: creating a memorable, auratic and yet reproducible experience for consumers. Conversations are part of this experience; they are integral to the "aura." Designers visualize it. They unearth, discover, and articulate the consumer stories. They invent the product stories. And then they connect both. Industrial design, web site, software design, organizational design, etc. -- all design is essentially an act of branding, regardless of the proportion of emotiveness to functionality.
For designers as curators of conversations there are three trends to take into account:
First, the stories behind products and the consumer stories increasingly appear on the web. More and more consumers spend their social lives on the web, networking, shopping, producing, consuming, socializing, etc. And so do products: The web is where they are discovered, examined, and experienced by consumers. The digital domain is the sounding board and the archive for the stories behind them. It is the emotional resonance room that resides at the intersection of click streams, transactions, virtual encounters, and real-time and recorded conversations.
Second, a growing number of product and consumer stories on the web are "social." This means, they are open-sourced conversations that anyone willing to engage in a multi-logue can enter and shape. Many of these conversations are cross-platform and cross-media. They can go on for a long time; they may start anytime, anywhere, with anyone; and other people may choose to join them. They can start in one medium and continue in another. (Imagine a conversation via IM that continues in e-mail -- Gmail allows for that already -- or a Wiki entry that continues on Twitter and then on the mobile phone before it ends on Facebook.)
Third, both product and consumer stories may occur at the intersection of virtual world and the traditional web: the boundaries are blurring and not only do the interactions and transactions converge but also, increasingly so, perceptions and behaviors. Virtual worlds like Second Life have serious implications for products: they give form to"intangibles" and dematerialize the "tangibles." Virtual worlds create forums and experiences to express and visualize intangibles such as emotions, perceptions, and opinions, and at the same time, they create virtual artifacts (avatars, 3D objects etc.) that represent real world physical objects.
For designers, the task at hand is to listen to all these crossover conversations and design the conditions for them to take place in hybrid forms and formats, enabling, facilitating, and curating them without creating them.
(Credit:
Ravi Chhatpar)
This high-end designer boutique in a trendy part of Seoul sells these bags at higher than Louis Vuitton's full prices, which is not nearly as hilarious as Louis Vuitton's unique methods in fighting back counterfeiters these days. Just look at this fake set-up of a fake bag seller that sells real bags during a recent exhibit launch party in New York. (via Notcot)
(Credit:
Microsoft)
Philippe Starck had an epiphany, after all these years: "Everything I have designed is absolutely unnecessary," the French star designer admitted in a recent interview with the German weekly DIE ZEIT. I had the dubious pleasure of hanging out in the Starck-designed Volar club in Shanghai last weekend, and my initial reaction to his statement was: yeah, right! I've never really liked his pompose celebrity design. But then I read his quote again in the context of the whole interview and realized: he is right, actually. In fact, his thoughts are so poignant and humbling that it is worth reprinting them in full length here (below is an excellent translation from the German original, courtesy of the mademoiselle-a blog).
Naturally, designers (and the watchdogs of 'design thinking' in particular) cried foul and tried to reconcile Starck's design nihilism with their own beliefs. David Armano and Bruce Nussbaum, for example, refer to the democratization of design.
Armano: "No, design isn't dead, especially the really good design that adds value to our lives. But the notion of design's gatekeepers may need some additional thought as more of us begin to act like 'professionals' and take on the sacred role of design."
And Nussbaum: "Design is wonderfully alive and well -- and evolving fast. The tools and methods that were once the exclusive province of a handful of designers are now in the hands of millions of people who are shaping their own experiences on Facebook and MySpace, much less on the cell phones. This democratization of design, the open-sourcing of design is driving much of the field. Apple is pretty good at controlling the design of its products, but it too is giving in and opening up the design of applications to the iPhone platform. I think the meta-trend is all of this is IDENTITY. It's the next Big Thing after Experience and Emotion."
Hmmm... this to me sounds like C is the next big thing after A and B, but hey, better a lukewarm notion of the future of design than no future at all, right? We get the message, anyway: Starck is wrong because "really good" design -- in star(c)k contrast to "consumer excess" design, and defined as design by everybody for everybody, serving a good cause and solving a real human problem -- is not dead, cannot be dead (because that would really mean the end of design, of human power, and all hope).
Here's what Starck had to say:
ZEIT: Monsieur Starck, you have designed everything, from toothbrush to spaceship. What do humans really need?
Philippe Starck: The ability to love. Love is the most wonderful invention of mankind. And then, one needs intelligence. Mankind, as opposed to animals, has managed to create a civilization based on intelligence. For this reason, no human can afford to not work on their intelligence. And humour, humour is important.
ZEIT: And you can't think of something material?
P.S.: We don't need anything material. It is more important to develop one's own ethic, and to stick to these rules. There is nothing else one would have to worry about.
ZEIT: You can't be serious. Isn't there so much else one needs in order to survive?
P.S.: If you want to talk about objects: one certainly needs something to light a fire.
ZEIT: Can you think of anything else?
P.S.: A pillow maybe, and a good mattress.
ZEIT: So why, then, have you become an industrial designer in the first place?
P.S.: That is an interesting question. And I haven't found an answer to it for myself yet. Look, I have designed so many things without ever really being interested in them. Maybe all these years were necessary for me to ultimately recognize that we, after all, don't need anything. We always have too much.
ZEIT: So all the things you have created -- unnecessary?
P.S.: Everything I have created is absolutely unnecessary. Design, structurally seen, is absolutely void of usefulness. A useful profession would be to be an astronomer, a biologist or something of that kind. Design really is nothing. I have tried to install my designs with a sense of meaning and energy, and even when I tried to give my best it was still in vain.
ZEIT: So this is the balance you strike of all your creating?
P.S.: Those people with more intelligence than me would have gotten to this point much earlier. Perhaps I wasn't smart enough and had to learn it the hard way. Ever from the beginning I had the feeling that ultimatively, product design was useless. It is because of this that I have tried to change this job into something else; into something that's more political, more rebellious, more subversive. So maybe the most important thing that I have created is not a new object, but a new definition for the word "designer."
ZEIT: You said that we are undergoing a transition towards Postmaterialism. What does this mean?
P.S.: Society is pursuing a strategy of dematerialization: it is more and more about intelligence and less about material. Take a computer, for example. In the beginning, computers were big as a house. Now there are computers in the size of only a credit card. In ten years from now they are going to be in our bodies - bionics. In fifty years from now, the concept of computers will have dematerialized itself.
ZEIT: So what else would designers create then?
P.S.: There won't be any designers. The designer of the future will be the personal coach, the fitness trainer, the nutritionist. That's all.
ZEIT: You have often stated that it was your goal to destroy design. How far have you gotten with that?
P.S.: It is accomplished! When I started out, design objects were but beautiful objects. No one could afford to buy them; design stood for elitism, but elitism is vulgar. The sole elegance lies in multiplication.
ZEIT: Please explain this.
P.S.: If one is fortunate enough to have a good idea, one has the obligation to share this idea with others. That is how democracy works. When I started to design, a good chair would cost about $1,000. Should a family that needs six chairs and a table have to pay $10,000, just to be able to have dinner? What an obscene thought. Four years ago, I designed a chair that would cost less than ten dollars. If you just strike three zeros off the price you change the whole concept of a product.
ZEIT: And yet you recently designed that motor yacht for a Russian millionaire?
P.S.: Exactly this is part of my Robin-Hood concept. I do use such projects like a lab. It allows me to try out new technologies and render them useful for the mass market. For this particular yacht, I developed a hull that wouldn't cause bow washes at 20 knots. I applied this concept to a solar boat, which in turn could be the prototype for a Venetian vaporetto.
ZEIT: And you don't want to stop designing?
P.S.: I do want to, for sure. I am definitely going to stop designing in two years. I will be doing something else instead, I don't know for sure. But I know that it will be a new way of expression; a weapon that will be faster, mightier and lighter than design. Design is really a terrible way to express oneself.
ZEIT: So you will only be switching the job.
P.S.: Exactly. I have been a producer of materiality. I do feel ashamed for this. What I want to be instead now is a producer of concepts. This will be much more useful.
ZEIT: Is there any object that you like, then?
P.S.: No.
