Technology Nostalgia

Guess this stuff has been around for long enough for a viable nostalgia industry to have emerged. 

These two are examples of this. The first is a company producing these 'retro' Apple decals for your latest Apple device, and the second is a reboot (sorry) of a once defunct brand - the much loved C64 - where the original casing is considered cool enough to be desirable. 

So the fan-boy within me just thinks this a cool thing, the thing I really respond to is the inference of 'classic' in both these examples. In the Apple case people are reaching back and selecting elements of the brand's history that they (not Apple) feel are relevant today, lending credibility to the companies' past and badging themselves as 'original' Apple advocates. 

And, in the C64 case the company is bringing back an object that is closely tied to the beginning of the home PC boom of the last 20 to 30 years. It's re-launch draws a line under a period of personal computing defined by paradigms of work (the QWERTY keyboard) and driven by the bedroom programmers who have most recently delivered services like Facebook.

So just back to Apple briefly, Steve Wozniak recently said that Tablet computers are "for the normal people in the world". So if the retro Apple stickers and the relaunched C64 tell the story up to today, the new burst of Tablets and Smartphones suggest the next chapter will tell a more connected, aware, professional (and of course monetised) story. 

That makes me feel nostalgic again ...

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Service Authenticity

I recently stumbled across a beautiful oil skin bag self-sew kit in the Design Museum. A bit of digging revealed it is from a draper in Hay on Wye called Merchant & Mills – here's what they say about themselves "We like stark design and clear words. We reference our roots. We acknowledge the 21st Century."

This put me in mind of another company I love: Labour & Wait, who say they "believe in a simple, honest approach to design ... we endeavour to search out specialist makers from around the world, who continue to manufacture goods in the traditional way to their original designs ... therefore appropriate in a traditional or modern environment"

Neither of these companies are massive brands, but they do inspire a fiercely loyal and articulate following. At the heart of what both these brands offer is 'authenticity', an idea which due to straightened times and pressures on people's wallets, has been entering the mainstream for a little while. Need a mainstream example? How about this Budgens supermarket, who grow their own food on their roof and sell it in store every Friday. These brands inhabit a world where the consumer chooses to engage with the history of an item, it's purpose & form, it's relevance to daily life (both theirs and everyone's) and weighs this the value for money equation they are running in the bg. 

So, the principles mentioned in the two examples above: 

• clarity - of purpose and message; 
• relevance - to present day needs and behaviours;
• continuity - from the original ethos or purpose to the current offer

... clearly work well for a brand dealing with physicality, but are they applicable to the intangible as well as the tangible?

Well I'd certainly hope so. And a brand that can't achieve these three things will I think start to struggle in the next few years.

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End of an era

So, it's goodbye to the Space Shuttle Discovery – now it's undertaken it's final mission – and goodbye to the NASA shuttle program, with only two more trips left before it's shut down for good. To be replaced by and astronaut Robot and a contract supply deliver company from L.A.

I was one of the millions of kids to be inspired by the ambition of that program and to dream about all the adventures that their missions represented. Although it didn't take me long to realise I was never going to be an Astronaut – I hope that I take a little of their sense of adventure to work with me everyday. 

The shuttle program was not about individual heroes, but the collective effort of a group of people who know where they are going (literally and metaphorically) and who did everything they could to get there. And it's that vision and sense of shared purpose (however small your share) that helps keep a disparate group of people moving in roughly the same direction. 

Being clear about where your organisation is going and why it does what it does will help in attracting and retaining the talent you want, it will differentiate you from your competition and it will give you the confidence to have a point of view and to be a thought leader. 

Then you can insert your own 'take-off' metaphor here, without me needing to sound cheesy. 

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The New Content

I am excited by the blurring of the lines between our digital and physical worlds that we are seeing the moment.

In a roundabout way, this has been coming for a while, with its roots in 'shared-ownership' of entertainment media. We have had book and movie/music libraries for quite a while of course; they are continually evolving in various forms – how about an Amazon eLibrary on the Kindle, free to the end user and paid for by local councils (BookLending.com in partnership maybe)? After all Spotify has successfully managed to build a business that (just about) delivers free music to consumers and provides revenues for the record labels.

This model is also present with the more tangible objects of our world. Street/Zip-car have long understood that consumers are adept at weighing up the value and cost of owning a high cost item vs. paying for it when you need it. While this does not mean downloadable cars (at least not yet) - it does mean that a new car is just a cheaper subscription fee away – and this mindset is showing itself cheaper, in-frequent use categories such as D.I.Y tools and fashion bags, with Fashion Bags for example. And of course, it has made entrepreneurs of us all, giving us the ability to unlock the potential of the physical assets we own. Airbnb the peer to peer accommodation service is the current high-flyer, but expect many more examples to follow soon.

What this adds up to is an evolving relationship between us, these items and the channels to using them. With ownership no longer a pre-requisite to use,  physical objects have effectively been 'positioned' alongside digital content, enabling people to choose the cheapest/most flexible/quickest/etc ... service to access this new 'content'. 

And for us (and our clients)? We will need to continually evaluate the decisions people make when looking to solve their needs. Knowing what people consider 'content' (therefore a commodity) and what they consider 'service' (therefore ownable) will be a key aspect how we shape future interactions with brands and organisations. It is this shifting relationship that will provide the most exciting opportunities ... 

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Open source moves into the mainstream

It’s been great to see the idea of ‘open source’ gain ground. Although the nerd in me will always delight at platforms like Arduino and Ubuntu, it’s how the idea and it’s principles moves into the mainstream that’s really instructive.

There are the literal translations from sites like My Starbucks Idea to the more abstract shared ownership services like the Paris Velib and Zip car. And data is forming the basis of a new wave of services to hit our (touch) screens – services like Waze which are wholly driven by user contribution and mysociety.org which is making formally hidden data available to the public.

But where it gets really interesting is where the principles behind open source are applied to a brand. Currently this is most visible in the runaway success of App Stores – where the brands have provided the platform on which users can build their own services and the channels to sell them through. All of a sudden our experience of a brand has shifted from being defined solely by that brands’ outputs to being defined by the shared output of that brand and it’s consumers (prosumers?).

So what? Well what if you could ‘open source’ your HR department? What if the hiring processes was an opportunity for people to design their job roles? What if your job description was an opportunity for improvisation rather than a script? The best experiences of brands and services come through people who enjoy and are engaged with their role –  people who are able to put themselves into the company they work for, rather than having to conform a template.

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What shape are designers?

There is a long and dearly held assumption in the part of the design industry in which I work, that being T-shaped is a prerequisite for long the long term success of individual practitioners. And why not? The idea of the ‘T-shaped designer’ makes a lot of sense. Here it is defined by IDEO CEO Tim Brown in an interview as:

“T-shaped people have two kinds of characteristics, hence the use of the letter “T” to describe them. The vertical stroke of the “T” is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist or a mechanical engineer. The horizontal stroke of the “T” is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective- to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.”

Sounds great and makes sense.

This does however leave the door open for a problem to arise. Specifically when a company, wilfully or otherwise, distorts the T-shape and starts to insist either through it’s hiring process, or it’s culture, that the depth of the T should be a design discipline. That a design education somehow denotes a superior breed of design thinkers.

My experiences over the last two years have shown me that large parts of the ‘design toolkit’ I gathered during my design education and on through the first few years of my career no longer satisfy the challenges I am being asked to solve. When tackling increasingly abstract and cultural questions, those tangible skills struggle to find a grounding from which they can start to build a solution.

And I am unconvinced that pure strategy has the answer either (think-tanks anyone?). As that method seems to start in the abstract and stay there – struggling to come out of the clouds except in the form of 'recommendations' – which notoriously hard to design against.

So, imagine if the vertical part of a designers T is strategic thinking.

Making strategy actionable is the most important vertical skill in any T these days and people who can translate between the clouds and the ground are becoming the key member of any design team these days.

Ross.

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User led can mean users last.

So I have just finished possibly one of the hardest projects I have taken on so far. 

Phew ...

And it reinforced something I had been vaguely aware of for a while. Which is that sometimes it is easy to confuse the logistical version of user led design, with the philosophical version – with the result of delivering a well thought and soundly backed-up 'me too' run of the mill solution, rather than something truly different. 

In other words, it is sometimes better to speak to your users at the end of a piece of work, when you really understand the challenge and know what to ask them, rather than at the beginning, when you might be more likely to ask the wrong questions. 

The challenge of course is recognising when you are in that situation, and finding a way to get to the right set of questions (for example, in this case we spoke to sociologists to help us through the fog).

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Just a thought ...

For a designer to be of benefit to his/her/their clients, getting paid is the most important element. Not just in the Maslow way ... but because it affords us the opportunity to 'practice'. Clients give us a focus, a problem to solve, that stops us becoming self indulgent, and projects give us the vehicle or channel to push our craft(s). Payment sets a value on our offer, gives us a tool to express that value when all else is intangibe, and defines the boundaries of the profession. Boundaries that we can then push, knowing that there will be the push back from others that shows us context and keeps us honest. 

In this context, the craft of design can be any tool that solves the problem at hand – talking & thinking, drawing & building – and it's the opportunity to practice these that seems most valuable to our clients. This opportunity has been afforded by people matching our valuation of the benefits we bring, which means that if people are willing to pay, we must be doing something right, right?

RT

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Why door to door marketing is as bad as all the others ...

So a little rant today... :-)

I am wondering whether the x% of people companies reach through door to door marketing is worth the damage their image can suffer due to pushy and frankly crap sales people, and it's obvious opportunism. Now I assume that the recent increase of this I have experienced is due to measures to reduce that other incredibly annoying tactic - cold call telesales (in 2007, 14.8 Million numbers were registered exempt from cold calls). And, I guess one of the main reasons is that a company can be sure that they are reaching their target demographic directly, which much increase the percentage of success versus the effort they have to expend. 

In the last couple of months I have been door stepped by a couple of people from N-Power and EDF, both selling me identical services that apparently "... are only available today, on this street!" (their emphasis). Services identical to my current British Gas offer too, by the way. 

What really made me think about this though, was a visit from an Aviva salesman. Who's pitch for health insurance, was based around how bad the NHS is. Now this is an interesting departure. Never mind that I have absolutely no interest in talking about paying for my health on a cold Tuesday afternoon on my own doorstep, but to start your story by disparaging a competitor (which is what the NHS is) feels like a throwback to the pre-internet era. It feels incredibaly naive when you consider how available data and stories are today–and how much it could expose Aviva (or any other insurance provider) to extra scrutiny. 

Their attack on the failings of the NHS was based on data - as along with our schools, it is now one of the most analysed institutions around. It seems an unfair fight when Aviva are not currently subject to the same scrutiny, and are not judged by the same metrics. It also of course, opens a political debate - and I'm not too sure that the barely 20 year old lad who was selling this policy would have been ready for a heated public/private debate, had he stumbled across someone up for that fight.

Anyway - I walked away with the impression of a company attempting to profit on the (necessarily public) failings of one of our public services, and asking me to disengage from my interest in the success of that service to invest in my own private wellbeing, and ultimately, make their shareholders some more money. That does not seem a good deal to me, and it's not a good reflection on them either...

harumph!

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wonderful storytelling - http://youtube.com/searchstories?x=R31ge09jaXw

if only the movies were as elegant...

R.

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Reading Spa

Here is a thought: that you can't be a good shopper if you don't know what you are looking for. But what happens when you are looking to be inspired or entertained? How do you shop for ideas?

Seems to be that this bookshop has the right idea by overlaying the therapist's couch onto the proposition of book buying - and ending up with an intimate, guided customer experience.

And isn't the best bit of reading buying the book? The expectation of a beautiful cover, the smell of new pages, the tease of blurb… all that anticipation for a thrilling story - or maybe that is just me. Maybe this is a side effect of having worked in Publishing.

At Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath (what a name!), you pay £55 and in return you have 45min chat with an expert bookseller over tea and cakes who will help diagnose your needs - likes and dislikes, info on special gems and new releases - and make recommendations. You will walk out with £40 worth of books that you have chosen during the session.

Even better, you can then sojourn to the Reading Booth to get right into the act of reading, along with a few extra treats to extend the experience into your home - a mug and hot chocolate, music, tickets to a literary event. It could be the beginning of a beautiful new relationship with paperbacks.

Seems that this level of personal attention is hard to replicate in the digital world and that despite the empowerment of being able to make our own choices in a world of proliferated content - a cup of tea and a chat is still a valid solution to finding the best content for our needs.

Why so sad...?

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Distributed Technology

So not so much an emerging trend, but a long delivered promise re-localisation is apparently underway... I heard a recent story on the radio that spoke about the growing eco-power technology industry. What caught my attention was a segment that covered the principle of rewarding community contribution. In somewhere in a small German village is a scheme that does two things. 1 - pays people when they give power back to the national grid (old news) and 2 - pays for providing the local community the heat that is a by product of the energy creation. 

This technology is now at the scale where we could all become mini-power stations - but it is also smart enough to utilise the by-products as well. An finally, the government is smart enough to incentivise people to make the effort to establish these systems. Nice.

This concept of distributed technology is also showing up in the open source hardware platform - Arduino (www.arduino.cc) - which is essentially an enabler that rewards dedication and passion to learning the platform with greater results in people's experiments. The potential of the technology+passion+community+competition equation is probably huge...

Now of course there is a counterpoint to this idea of distribution, as the Swiss government looks to centralise the country's identity - http://www.brandchannel.com/start1.asp?fa_id=492 - recognising the power of brand, their response is homogenisation and consolidation. 

Although there is only a loose link between these ideas, they do throw up an interesting challenge. What is balance between the individual and the wider community in solving problems? How much is carrot (paying for power put back into the national grid), how much is stick (are Switzerland's going to mobilise a brand police?) and how much is enterprise and entrepreneurship (let's see what the community generates with Arduino that isn't just 'toys')?

RT

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great idea - http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/maeda/2009/08/blogging-as-management-not-mar.html

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"The ability to create a website is an indispensable skill. Learn HTML as soon as possible." - www.newmindspace.com

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Testing the mood...

There's a very interesting tension showing up in the media that people are consuming, and the messages that are taking hold in popular imagination. 

On the one hand, we are frequently and widely see the words "Keep Calm and Carry On". A reprint of one of a series of Second World War posters which has gained currency mainly due to it's level headed-ness. It inspires a great sense of shared community and spirit, which has great relevance and power during these uncertain times (although what times are ever certain...?).

On the other hand however, we see a trend of popular media becoming darker. Twilight (not O.C, or 90210 etc...) is the teen smash of the year, Let the Right One In has been widely hailed as a great piece of (dark) movie making, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is not only dark, but retells a popular classic in this new context.

The main opportunity here seems to be in the gap between the outward message of the collective, and the inward message of the individual. And understanding where your story lies in this spectrum ...

RT.

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this is a great idea...

http://www.novatelwireless.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=285:mifi-2352-intelligent-mobile-hotspot-for-hspa-networks&catid=75:mifi&Itemid=622

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The NHS

In this one display are these brands: Boots, NHS, NHS camden, Royal Pharmaceutical Society, Boots midnight pharmacy, PAGB, The havens and Macmillan cancer trust. Seems that while the debate rages at a systemic level (that is where politics lives after all), it is easy to loose sight of the day to day consequences of these discussions.

I love the NHS, and I am a 'heavy user' so to speak, and so can see it's flaws clearly too... And one very human level problem was apparent to me during a visit to Boots today - brand story dilution. This photo is one example of the very blurry boundary these days between public and private, between the core offer and the other services, and between who provides which part of your health care. While this is not a new problem, and certainly one that is not easy to fix - it does mean that it is the front line staff, of both the public and private companies that are bearing the brunt of this... dealing with queries that arise from confusing communications such as this must account for a lot of their time.

It seems that in the grand scheme of things, especially as the philosophical debate rumbles on, not loosing sight of the small things is ultimately the thing that most influences the public perception of a very ambitious project.

RT.

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#NHS

In this one display are these brands: Boots, NHS, NHS camden, Royal Pharmaceutical Society, Boots midnight pharmacy, PAGB, The havens and Macmillan cancer trust. Seems that while the debate rages at a systemic level (that is where politics lives after all), it is easy to loose sight of the day to day consequences of these discussions.

I love the NHS, and I am a 'heavy user' so to speak, and so can see it's flaws clearly too... And one very human level problem was apparent to me during a visit to Boots today - brand story dilution. This photo is one example of the very blurry boundary these days between public and private, between the core offer and the other services, and between who provides which part of your health care. While this is not a new problem, and certainly one that is not easy to fix - it does mean that it is the front line staff, of both the public and private companies that are bearing the brunt of this... dealing with queries that arise from confusing communications such as this must account for a lot of their time.

It seems that in the grand scheme of things, especially as the philosophical debate rumbles on, not loosing sight of the small things is ultimately the thing that most influences the public perception of a very ambitious project.

RT.

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"All our materials are recycled" - shame it needs an entire label to say that.

RT

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