innovation playground Idris Mootee

Does Social Media Makes All Of Us Phenomenologists?

It is every designer’s dream to design a chair. I have yet to meet an industrial designer that doesn’t want to design a chair or a car. It is designer’s dream for those who study transportation design is to design a car and I get it. Chairs and tables? The reality is how often designers get a chance to design their own chairs? And every transportation designers ended up doing is styling a car that was designed by a computer. There are disproporationately large amount of chairs being designed than to other objects and products.

Any object whether it is chair, a table, a smartphone, or a coffee maker does not exist in a vacuum and are part of a informal system that links to a complex set of interactions both human and machines. And even a complex layer of meanings for a relatively simple object – a chair or a functional tool – a smartphone. For some, the term “phenomenology” is only restricted to the characterization of sensing qualities such as seeing, touching, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of different kinds that forms a human experience. But our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation.

Sensational experience is great but short-lived. To create meanings is the ultimate human experience. To design, in phenomenological terms, is to address the meaning of things or objects have in our own experience, in our own “life-world” and how we "experience" them. Just ask any designers if they see their discipline this way? Mostly not and 90% of designers’ effort are on aesthetics and not phenomenology. Is there a discipline called "design phenomenology"?

Phenomenology is the examination of the structure of various types of experience ranging from a broader and deeper perspectives and including deep diving on perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activities, linguistic activity etc. We need to apply that before we strategize a new business concept, a new service design model or an innovative new product.

It is what we need to understand context of anything. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Edmund Albrecht Husserl (German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology) called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something and this is what makes the jon fun. It is not for someone without imagination. It is all about seeing “intends” as well as “jobs-to-perform” and “concepts of the world”. The idea is studying the units of consciousness is like “giving voice to” and these units of consciousness are called intentional acts or intentional experiences. It is basically the most human centric approach to understanding human experiences.

When designers try to design experiences, perhaps they should need to first consider phenomenology. It is not really a rocket science, for centuries poets, writers, painters, film producers are born phenomenologists. I think most of us are born phenomenologists particular in the days of Facebook and other social media where we share everything, we understand very well by means of words, videos and images, our insights with our friends — we are all practicing phenomenology without knowing it.

Wearables That Promiss To Make Us Smarter. What's Next?

Do you wonder how we measure brain activity? Our brains communicate through the cell sending tiny electric signals to each other and the more signals the more electricity it will produce. An EEG can measure the pattern of this electrical activity. There are some who believe that if we stimulate certain part of the brain (pre-frontal cortex) will improve certain functions. For years, there had been experiments of stimulating the brain using small electric currents and see if it can make us thinker better or smarter.

Some believe the results are temporarily and some belief that it helps us overtime and the impact is long lasting. Not enough studies to prove it but expect products like this availabe in the market as werables soon. But attaching dozens electrodes to your head that shock your brain, a new product called Foc-us headset is designed for gamers (18 years and older and have $249 to spend) promise to make you a better gamer.

If it can do that to gaming, then it should work for other brain activities too. I can see a high end version for stock brokers and probably one for hedge fund manafers too. So far, scientists have tested the technology, but mainly to figure out if it's has any effect but no idea of prolonged use. Brain enhancement wearables can be a big thing and it is like Viagra for the brain.

A recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE, it examines how to identify emotions without relying on people's ability to express themselves. It could be used to assess an individual's emotional response to almost any kind of stimulus including faces, advertising or products. The idea is based on the assumptions that different people tend to neutrally encode emotions in similar ways. The researchers believed that is the case. In the future, wearable means literally wearing our emotions on our sleeves. The method for brain stimulation here istDCS, for transcranial direct current stimulation, and it's a brain stimulation method that involves sending ultra low amounts of electrical current through various parts of the brain to achieve different effects. You probably have seen this in movies for medical treatment and it has been used since 1804.

Actually the design of the device is not complicated, The tDCS enthusiast community is also blossoming, especially considering that stimulation can be replicated with do-it-yourself electrodes and over-the-counter batteries and perhaps it is the next iPhone and we will all be wearing one around with downloadable apps for stocks picking, chessgame, dating, anti-repression, golfing, negotiating and fishing. The competition to become strataight As students will depend on which werables that you use.

Design Thinking Requires Storytelling. It Is Both An Insight Tool And An Organization Culture Building Tool.

 
Stories inspire, motivate, and shift the way the people think and work. Many civilizations throughout history understood the power of storytelling. From ancient Egypt to modern China story- telling provided the foundation for nearly everything. For business, often there needs to socialize strategies within executive management, the board and senior staff and they include telling innovaiton, survival and hero/heroine stories. Most survival stories are around when organization had to overcome big challenges from disruptive business models that threatened its existence. It is an important piece of organization culture building.

There are a few universities offering storytelling degrees. I believe Columbia University offers a BA in storytelling an mythology and East Tennessee State University offers MA Storytelling, one of a select few fully accredited graduate programs in Professional and Applied Storytelling. All MBA should include a module for this.

From our daily routines to historic events, storytelling can be the best tool to uncover insights. Historians use storytelling to draw out the facts – and it can be used in the modern corporate world too.

Storytelling has been used as an insight tool to give idealized accounts of ancient life. Sometimes drawing from events and at other times drawing from art itself. When I was in Egypt, I learned about the poems found in an excavated workers' village on the outskirts of the Valley of Kings. These poems contain insights into the life of ancient Egypt – a window that can still shed light on ancient life.

In Japan, Kamishibai was a popular form of visual and participatory storytelling that combines the use of hand drawn visuals with the engaging narration of a live presenter. ‘Kami’ in Japanese means ‘paper’ and ‘shibai’ means ‘play’ or ‘drama.’ The presenter stands to the right of a small wooden box (call it a mini stage) that holds the 12-20 cards that feature the visuals that accompany each story. The presenter changes the cards at the speed that matches the flow of the story he is telling. Today, this type of performance is rare but the essence of what was achieved is still alive and well – to capture the audience with a story.

Anthropologists and ethnographers have long been using storytelling to communicate findings. By painting a picture of a situation, the insights gleaned become clear and understandable. Not only used to communicate the findings, anthropologists use the method as part of the research as well. Individuals are asked questions and in return, a story is told. CEOs are telling stories everyday from painting a future to crystalizating emerging market opportunities.

Despite the universality of storytelling, many research professionals that use classic research methodologies for qualitative and quantitative studies are reluctant to accept storytelling as an insight tool and some may be skeptical about how storytelling can be beneficial in applied research.

A few tips to keep in mind if you are willing to embark on a new story. First it is not about the number of stories that correspond to a particular segment; it is the quality of the stories. There is no need to be overly concerned about the factual accuracy of the story. And second, the focus should never be around the discussions. While it may be useful for the researcher to understand the questions in the client’s mind, a discussion guide is only useful in a limited sense. At idea Couture, storytelling is considered a leadership skills as much as it is an insight tool.

 

Have You Noticed The Emerging of Professional Visual Anthropology? Now You Can Be An Anthropologist Even If You Can't Read And Write!

I carry my camera (Leica) for 2 reasons. One is to capture pictures that remind me of what I've experienced or just something for inspiration and two is to share with others what I am doing. A picture can often tell a story better than a thousand words. Photography can capture the pure spirit and beauty of life, to tell a story to tangiblize humanity or to create a real (or fake) personality and to communicate an idea. I called it the practice of visual anthropology. Does it mean I am now an anthropologist?

Photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange or Steve McCurry have made their names by using photography to help us see the lives of so many that we may never be exposed to. They are more than artistic expressions, they are creating social meanings and codifying our cultures through the use of photos. As Cartier-Bresson said, “Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing).”

There are many known social scientists and anthropologists who focus on the social meaning of photography including Elizabeth Edwards, Pierre Bourdieu and Jay Ruby to name a few. This is still an emerging field but will continue to add a creative layer of analysis to many existing methodologies. Visual anthropology and ethnographic photography do not currently have a well-articulated theory or method but is an explicit theory even needed? In the beginning, the primary function of photography in anthropology was as an aide-de-memoire, like written field notes, photography served to help reconstitute events or aid in writing. Now we're all using Instagram.

This includes all aspects of our culture that are visible, from nonverbal communication, objects, light, texture, ritual, ceremonial performance, expressions and movement. The study of photography has been dominated and also limited by art historians.

The notion that visual anthropology is a means of scientific research may not be commonly accepted, the camera becomes the main visual anthropological tool. It helps many viewers to see things they would not normally be exposed to; it captures the scene around dialogue; and it depicts the mood and state of people in their natural context. The photos become “ethno displays” capturing moments of observation. There has always been a natural relationship between anthropology and photography - called it "anthrophotography" and I just invented a new term.

As Henri Cartier-Bresson said, “In photography, the smallest thing can become a big subject, an insignificant human detail can become a leitmotif. We see and we make seen as a witness to the world around us; the event, in its natural activity, generates an organic rhythm of forms.”

Visual anthropology can also be used in persona development, adding a tangible element to the identity of a customer. As the camera emulates the anthropological principles of participant observation it makes all things real. Events unfolding in front of the camera, reveal insights by showing – not telling – a specific truth about specific people. An important discipline to master as a photographer is not interfering with the subject; being there by trying not to be there.

When faced with a camera, a photographer will often get one of two very distinct reactions. One is interaction. The camera becomes the point of conversation and people respond by reacting – they come up to you and sometimes even pose for you. The other reaction, is people suddenly become aware of the camera, change their behavior or even retreat away from the interaction.

A point of debate is whether the anthropologist can separate their point of view from that of the camera. Can you capture and analyze? Can both perspectives exist during fieldwork? Each perspective brings different things to the forefront, and it is the combination of these perspectives that give shape to visual anthropology. With a camera, both the expected as well as the unexpected are captured. And it is with the unexpected that analysis becomes interesting. The rapid proliferation of visual media coupled with our already rich visual cultures expands the opportunity for visual anthropology immensely. As culture evolves in tandem with the technology of capturing culture, the field becomes an even richer place of study. Just look around at those who are taking photos of themselves using their iPhone.

Article first appeared in MISC Magazine speicial 'Insight' Issue.

Design Thinking, Business Transformation And The Creative Enterprise.

It is time to take a look at the report card of our design for business organization, management and strategy. After half a century of quality movement, brand management, marketing and catefory management, globalization, customer service automation and organizational design fine-tuning, we should have a pretty good of idea of what is working and what is not. As a result of all suboptimization efforts over past decades, we begin to see the impact on the whole system.

The idea is that optimizing the outcome for a subsystem will in general not optimize the outcome for the system as a whole. Some porodcts, brands, businesses are better at the expense of other things. This intrinsic difficulty may degenerate into the "tragedy of the commons": the exhaustion of shared resources because of competition between the subsystems. This is exactly what had been happening in different business units and functions including product design, marketing, operations and sales/channel management. The principle of suboptimization states that suboptimization in general does not lead to global optimization, and as whole businesses and societies are far worse. Here comes Design Thiking.

Finally, this is the Design Thinking Workbook for the Harvard Design Thinking Seminar. It ook us a week to put this together. Coming together nicely. Design Thinking allows us to to rethink, reimagaine and reset the game. I am not saying every company needs to make radical changes in its core business itself, and a lot of instances the case for change becomes desperately obvious – as in the case of Blockbuster, it came too late.

Business model redesign is driven by of strategic innovation (to play a new game). This means complete or partial transformation—of the organization, its core offerings, structure, systems, culture and capabilities—to create, deliver and capture value at the new way not in a sub-systems level.

Business model transformation may include a strategic decisions to move up-market or down-market or sideways along the value chain or shift from products to services or solutions when the pace of commoditization continues to accelerate or the industry boundaries is opening up for new entrants. The idea is to apply visual sense making as part of the Design Thinking tool kit to reimagine new value ecosystem and value chain reconfigurations.

Vvisual thinking can play a very vital part in the business design process. The key to successfully design a capital-efficient business model is to visually identifying assets, risks, and cash flows by their distinct risk characteristics and then visually modeling them and retaining only those that are central to how a company creates value.

The Harvard Design Thinking for Business Creativity Seminar in NYC tomorrow, for the first time I will be introducing these applications to people outside Idea Couture and expecting a large group of very senior executives and looking forward to a great day of intensive discussions. Here’s the workbook as takeaway together with the 150 slides. Here’s a first glance at the workbook and workshop material. Planning to bring this seminar to Europe and Asia next.

Great M/I/S/C Launch Party Last Night! Post Party Radom Thoughts On Innovation, Organization Design And Design Thinking Cuture.

Great party last night for my magazine M/I/S/C lunch party held at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. And Karin Wall (editor-in-chief) from Innovation Management joined us all the way from Sweden to co-launch their hard copy of Innovation Management with M/I/S/C. Cool people and great venue and not to mention good food. Exhausted after talking to 200+ people and there were about 20 people whom I last talked to was 7 years ago and actually never met in person and then there were some friends whom I have not seen for years. Oh what a night! And the girs at the office did a great job. I am thinking we should add 'party planning' to our innovation offerings. Anyhow, I have a lot of treat feedback on the magazine. Onto the next one!

I was watching the film ‘Inception’ on a long flight last week and I remembered one interesting dialogue from the film “How do you translate business strategy into emotion?”. I was not really watching as I was editing the next issue of M/I/S/C magazine, but the line caught my attention. I rewound it back and tried to make sure if I’ve heard it right. Yes. Translate business strategy into emotion!

That’s a great question and I am not sure people realize how important that question is. We’re human beings. And it is our emotion that makes us human. In business, we’re taught in business school about rational decision-making and fact-based decision making etc. etc. When it comes to design thinking and innovation, we realized how little we could apply these decision-making models. It is about the organizational culture as much as it is about process, framework and creativity.

The concept of organizational culture has drawn attention to the long-neglected, pretty subjective or the ‘soft’ side of organizational design. And many aspects of organizational culture, emotion and its relationship with design thinking have not received enough attention. Instead, emphasis has been placed primarily on the cultural and symbolic aspects that are relevant in an instrumental/pragmatic context. Organization culture is treated as a management tool and a instrument designed by management to shape employees' behavior. The idea of emotion is largely ignored.

The method of identifying organizational culture characteristics that foster innovation through design thinking is an interesting one. The more visible and tangible manifestations of culture are the artifacts. These may be easy to identify and observe but difficult to decipher. Values and state-of-mind tend to remain hidden and may only reflect rationalizations or aspirations. So often design thinking values are hidden deep within an organization and there are those who should design thinking and innovation and there is nothing beyond marketing slogans.

Can you pick a piece of documentation from an organization somewhere that can elicit some tacit aspects of design thinking and innovation culture? The idea is to provide a stimulus back to the organization so that they can reflect on an interpretation that is based on their cultural framework rather than on the corporate ethnography? What stimulus is required for the corporate ethnographer to get the dialogue flowing and what is need to provide a specific context but leave enough latitude for interpretation. This was achieved by asking the team members to discuss the concrete examples of successful and less successful application of design thinking in the context of their everyday work.

Starting with data gathering and analysis, the idea is to gather data for any example of design thinking applications experienced by the team and allow the team members to talk about their experiences of application. The interviews were semi-structured and cognitive mapping techniques were used to capture the views of each participant.

The individual cognitive maps were individually validated and conflated into a single map to represent the company’s collective cognition. The single map was further validated and refined. In a parallel process each of the transcripts was analyzed and codes were produced from transcript content analysis that represented the aspects of organizational culture that influenced radical product innovation. This resulted in the clustering of codes into aggregate themes (higher level codes) that represented aspects of the design thinking culture that were collectively considered to be positively associated with the facilitation of innovative outcomes.

This type of work is still in an early stage but I believe it will be extremely useful for organization to understand how design thinking (and to what extend) is embedding in an organizational culture. Without this understands, they are talking about more design and prettier things, not more design thinking.

With The Emerging Of The New "Object-Culture" - Meanings Are Sought Through Social Identities, Visual Information and Interfaces / Interactions

There are objects that I love for many different reasons. They range from my Leicas to my JBL speakers, LV bags, Prada shoes and Mac computers. Objects that are highly functional can also be highly personal … expressive, reliable and artistic. Designers, brand marketers and product development executives often have to deal with the philosophical dilemmas such as subject vs. object; humanity vs. nature; function vs. style; and simplicity vs. complexity. Every time we come up with an innovative product design or experience we need to consider all of these things.

When does the value of a product exceeds its functional value and at what point the emotive value reaches a point of diminishing return? What is the value of the emotive premium or should there be a premium at all? Can we engineer emotive elements into the design without adding cost? Whose job is it? Did they teach that in MBA or MFA ? Or neither? It is something we think about everyday at Idea Couture. The engineering of desire; emotive attributes as product features; and interactions as gateways to collective experiences.

We are definitely reaching another higher state of our “object-culture” when consumer electronics such as cell phones and other gadgets replace or compliment our usual “badges” and these new form of badges are more than just symbols of tribes and tastes, they are windows to our other world – somewhere that our identities are developed and validated. It is worth to deploy our anthropologists to study the new role and meaning of social objects (electronics gadgets) and what it means to marketers.

Honestly speaking, I think men need badges more than women and men likes to see the world in groups and believe people in groups (including clubs, schools, sports, tribes, politics, religions or nations) tend to differ from one another to such a degree that they perceive each other as though they were totally different species from another planet. These groups (reflect by badges) provide their members with a strong sense of distinct and superior identity.

As designers and marketers we design objects that wonderfully fit in the palm of our hands; sometimes bring us a sense of confidence and occasionally moments of delights in the form of a text message. This is what it looks like. It’s got a little touch screen on it; you can shake it and it will respond to your command. It is ultra thin and fits nicely into the pockets of your Hugo Boss jacket. Call this the period of late modernity or postmodernity if you wish. We are living in a time when the legacy of the modern era, in which empiricism and utilitarianism rise to prominence. It is simply just part of being human. And that’s why marketing and product design is never a true science despite people come up with useless fancy tools.

Philosopher Charles Taylor has offered an explanation of the meaning of these activities within modern societies. He says that in the modern worldview meaning is sought through concepts such as progress, reason and freedom and a sense of meaning in one’s life. I think technology is a clear sign of “progress”, collective thinking and reasoning in mass and real time code is the redefinition of “reason” and “freedom” is reflected through Facebook and other social media. Let’s see what our anthropologists have to add.

Now back to my day job. It is not so fun anymore when my to-do-list is longer than my blog post.

Experience Design Innovation Can Use Nostalgic Clues To Create Emotive Connections. Don't Under Estimate The Power Of Nostalgia.

As technology pushes forward and sometimes it is easy for us to forget about the past. I think marketers and product designers could benefit more from looking to the past. I am not ready to claim that many of the classic design whether it is product or interfaces will stand the test of being both functional and timeless, but I can comfortably say that many brands/ products /interfaces carry a lot of sentimental value for many people. And many of these deign will not only survive this lifetime and well into the next generation. 

For me, I am at a stage where the best objects or brands or products are the ones that connect me with my childhood and memories of my time with my Dad when I was a little boy. I have been collecting these objects since a while back and they seem to contain a bit of my past. I guess as we age we will become more receptive to marketers and designers who make use of what market researchers call "a longing for positive memories from the past."

The science of nostalgia isn't yet fully understood, but studies have shown nostalgic cues that can be exploited and the ways in which images from the past can yield favorable attitudes about products in the present. Ask our team of resident anthropologists and they can explain why.

The best examples would be my McIntosh amplifiers, JBL studio monitors and Leica cameras. I couldn’t really accord these (not the top end models) when I was 14 and my dad ended up buying me the entry models. I remember the joy when we bought a pair of giant speakers and we struggled to carry that home. It seems the objects I love most around the house are those that reminds me of him.  He once said to me “You're the most wonderful boy in the world, and doesn’t matter what you choose to do you will do it well. And you can do anything you want to.” 

I’ve heard the saying “A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it” and I am not sure who said that. That’s kind of what I feel when I look at stuff around me. I have a thing for McIntosh (picture above my living room) and have quite a few of them lying around everywhere, I think I have at least 3,000 watts of pure clean power to feed to my JBLs. These pretty "Big Blue Meter" McIntoshes are more than sound machine, the classic design and the physical knobs are part of a very simple user experience. I am sick of remote control and I can’t even use them other than power on and off. It brings me the question why machine + usability + style can come in such a nice package then and we hardly see many today (Apple is the exception).

A nice surprise for me is now I can download a McIntosh app for my iPad (picute above). It is very smart idea, not that the app will upgrade the sound from my iTunes, but the skins with the big blue VU meter brings moments of joy even when I am not in front of my McIntosh. Now I can listen to and playback music from my iPad within the classic McIntosh experience. I can now access to my digital music library in a simple elegant interface inspired by the line of McIntosh audio equipment. Genius idea!! And it is free too!!

A great brand/product and even interface if stylistically design and adding some nostalgia touches can power up a wave of innovation that has strong emotive connections.  With more and more people entering the boomers lifestage, expect to see collectable toys inspired nostalgia factor. The essence of these brands is very appealing and emotive; something that people grew up with. It is more than Lanvin porcelain dolls and Prada toy keyrings, it is time to visit eBay.

 

 

Ursula Burns, CEO Of Xerox Talked About Printing The Future For Xerox At The World Innovation Forum.

Also speaking at the World Innovation Forum in NYC is Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox. Xerox is a company that was on a roller coaster ride the last 10 years and currently in a stabilized state with sales of over $22B (included the newly acquired company). But the future is still uncertain. Burns was made CEO last year after serving two years as President. With more than 80 products launched in the last 3 years, the company has increased the portfolio of document management systems and software in an unprecedented way, but it is an ultra competitive space as digitization of document blurs the boundaries of their business.

Burns believes a company needs to sustain itself into the future. Invest money to do better next time…a better product… for Xerox, they spend 5% on R&D to solve the next customer problem. She sees crisis is always a great motivator. When people think things are going well, there are no reasons to change it. The best time to change is when everything is uncertain, that gives you permission to do something differently. Good advice.

For Burns, high-level communications are good but can only go a certain way. We need to find the right and intelligent people to talk to and communicate where the company is going. Not everyone can connect the dots and understand the whole story. She is quick to acknowledge that she may not know the end point,but definitely can show people the mid point. Part of her job is look for orchestrators within the organization, and have many of those running the business.

PARC will do 50% research for Xerox and they will do work for other. Allowing partners to come in and take advantage of PARC’s R&D capabilities also help to bring in revenue for them. They do ‘dreaming with customers’ and spend time with them and spend time understanding what they do and identify the true pain points of their customers. Not by asking them but by watching them. The question for many was why can't PARC helped Xerox avoided many of the crisis and transform Xerox into the future? Since founded by Xerox in 1970, originally created to provide a path to the digital future and a window to Silicon Valley. PARC was chartered to explore "the office of the future." The stories of invention and innovation are a lot bigger than PARC itself, which is a small/medium R&D outfit but created a big footprints. I always PARC is never truly aligned with Xerox and almost an independent company although it is owned 100% by Xerox.

Now PARC is moving into clean technologies, a research team there identifies cleantech market opportunities and aggressively goes after them with a multidisciplinary approach. Joel Makower (also peaking at the WIF) has an interesting take on PARC’s move beyond the computer world to the cleantech arena. “It’s a watershed moment of sorts: the birthplace of today’s user-friendly computing wants to be the birthplace of tomorrow’s clean and green innovations."

Meeting with her senior managers a few months back, when asked about the legacy she hopes to leave at Xerox. “It’s all about growth,” she says. “It’s all about getting bigger.” OK she gets it. She needs to make Xerox a growth company gain. That includes both top and bottom line and bringing as many new innovations as possible to the market. These three things don’t seem to work together all the time. This is no easy job, bringing innovation to Xerox. It is a company has a long legacy of R&D excellence; that alone is not innovation. Innovation is more than R&D.

The challenge remains 1/ how to effectively converting good R&D into innovation (commercialized products and services) 2 how to manage the self-defeating limits of a narrow financial view of innovation but see it as creating the future 3/ how to put Xerox in different industry ecosystems rather than creating their own in order to accelerate growth? 4/ And how to avoid the gravitational pull from a company's best past and defy that to invent and deliver the next best future for Xerox? Burns has a big task in front of her.

What does Xerox has in its back pocket for the future? Can they reinvent the whole idea of what a document is? Is it printing skin? Or smart paper? Should they be sticking to the core as a document company or should they start to explore adjacencies? Is there an unavoidable collision path with Adobe possibly partnering with Cannon/HP?  The future is uncertain indeed.

iTouch Jumbo, Large Soda and Magnum Condom. What Do They Have In Common? It Is All About Size.

Size is always a big factor in product design and marketing. The iPad essential becomes an iTouch for the tallest man in the world. I always have a problem with oversized drinks in this part of the world, but I also have a problem with the undersized drinks in Europe and Japan. A cup of tea in London is really too small for me and I almost needed to order two. A cup of tea in New York is usually way too big and I have to pour away 30% of it right away.

Oversized cold beverage sales is maxing out at 32 oz., in the eyes of the marketers they generally views "bigger" as "better," field data us telling us that gigunda 44 oz. size fountain beverages have very little appeal. Marketers love to sell large drink because of economic reasons and they are mostly targeted to blue collar workers. Some locations push 20-oz. and 32 oz. fountain beverages and people really prefer 20 oz drinks. Big is not always better many people now realize, at least when it comes to soft drinks.

Small is an easy sell for cellphones or laptops, but not in the case of selling condoms. But small condoms are a marketing challenge, even though small size condom does fulfill a customer unmet needs, but you can’t really based your marketing around the product feature. I am believe what they are selling fits the average man, but according to a medical journal, 45% of men reported that they had experienced an ill-fitting condom within the last three months. The misfits were significantly more likely to report breakage and slippage, along with difficulty reaching the goal. Not surprisingly, men with ill-fitting condoms were more likely to end up taking them off which becomes a massive product failure for the job a condom exists to fulfill. What good is a product when the user ended giving up on it.

If you hit the store, you will find many labeled as ‘large’ or ‘extra large’ even though they are just normal size. To be fair, collecting accurate market data is a problem too. LifeStyles has by far the most direct code, called "Snugger Fit." I think there is a lot they can learn from Starbucks. Call them ‘tall’ or ‘grande’ etc. And there is no indication of which product are ‘green’ or manufactured from ‘reused material’. Or throw in some new ideas of how you can use a condom and save the world. 

Even ignore the fit problem, duration is probably the biggest sexual anxiety of the average man, we can use some innovation in rethinking the product design and experience and even packaging and labeling. This is an ignored product category and seriously needing innovation.

And what about custom fit condom? Or even designers condom? There is no reason that you can custom order them with your preference of size, shape, color, material, favor, packaging and any other special features. What happen to the idea of mass customization? I have never consulted for this industry, may be this is the big idea I have for them. We always start any project with field research. Who’s up for it?

Talking about product research and testing, a while back a condom manufacturer was looking for a few product testers. I am sure some of you will be interested in that job. I am not sure the recruitment criteria or what special activities you need to perform. Sorry this job is only for men only. For this job, they do have instruction for the ‘positions.’ The first box to be checked in the document to be filled after field test is ‘your positions’. You might think it is great job, but the pay sucks. The 200 selected product testers would only get a free pack of Durex condoms (cheap), plus a bonus prize of $425 for one lucky winner but not sure based on what to determine who the winner is. I’ll pass.

I Am Happy WIth My IPad Mini So There Are No Reasons Why I Won't Like My iPad. Just Add A Camera.

Some are comparing iPad to Netbooks, but it is not a fair comparison. I don’t like Netbooks myself, I used to have one 14 years ago made by Sony, it was a very powerful mini notebook with a built-in camera (a first at that time). It costs me $2,300 when I purchased that from a now bankrupted computer store chain in San Hose. It was a good one except keyboard was too small and battery life short. According to the guy at a local Best Buy store, 8 out of 10 Netbooks sold got returned. I am sure that’s not the case in Asia. I think many people have wrong expectations and not aware of the limitations of Netbooks.

There was one kid working at Best Buy asked me if I like the ITouch Jumbo, he was referring to iPad. I said I like the IPad mini (iTouch) that I have now, so I think I will like the iPad. The only disappointment for me is the lack of a camera, because I think if I carry that all the time and being able to use Skype is great plus. It doesn’t add much to the cost. The camera needs to be in the front obviously. It is still a little heavy; adding 11.5 lbs to my Louis Vuitton briefcase is pushing it. No video output is a negative; the other Lenovo Ideapad I bought has a HDMI output. The Lenovo tablet will be out soon and Brother (pic below) has a robust design for business use, not sure about the Brother brand name. Should rebrand this tablet to "iBro". Even with many criticisms, iPad will be an instant success. It is not a Newton I can guaranteed you.

IPad preorders are pouring in. Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity board (subscription needed) noted that iPad pre-orders dropped from an estimated 25,000 per hour on Friday, the first day of availability, to around 1,000 per hour over the weekend. For the three-day period, the cumulative total was estimated at 152,000. That’s pretty good.

I think iPad will open up opportunities for print media and help shape portable media experiences. I can’t read magazines from my Blackberry of iPhone, with the iPad, it is a different story. The iPad platform has more than enough screen real estate and resolution to build interesting media sharing and communication experiences. Off course we have choices, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Lenovo and almost everyone is working on one in addition to those who have products out there such as Amazon.

Microsoft’s Courier is an interesting one, currently in "late prototype" stage of development. At least they are not making the tablet mistake, the dual 7-inch screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. There is a camera at the back too (sorry Apple). Currently, Microsoft is working on the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies. Microsoft's tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we've seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD. And

Sony is doing some catch-up although they are stuck with their paradigm of competitive advanatage. The Wall Street Journal reports that Sony is working on a device that's described as being part Netbook, part e-reader and part PlayStation Portable. Sources within the electronic giant also report that Sony is working on a "PlayStation Phone," which would be capable of downloading and playing PlayStation games. Sony needs help.

Can You Tell The Differences Between Customer Archetype, Customer Personas And Customer Segmentation?

One big crazy week. We have clients visiting from San Diego, Seoul, London and Boston for big work shops, a local station TV crew (second TV stations this month) filming us at work plus 3 very cool project kick-offs that we need to prepare for (and also pitches). The workshops were great and clients were participating fully and great people. Our team always bring a lot of creative energy to our data rich process which is probably the most rigor and scientific in the industry. I didn't spend too much time with them but managed to sneak into some of these meetings to get a peek at the concepts discussed. Some were busy drawing deep visual metaphors RISD style.

Can it get crazier than this? The answer is probably yes. No one has time to breathe. I need to have an oxygen bar in our offices.

One thing comes to my mind, marketers or designers or product planners sometimes confuse about the differences between customer archetype, customer personas and customer segmentation. There are also confusion around customer themes, marketing themes and customer archetypal themes.  Marketers and designers are using those interchangeably but it shouldn't be the case.

Customer archetype is created from a body of anecdotal material either through direct or indirect data and it is based on cultural constructs. Customer archetypes are constructs of shared meanings that encapsulate and articulate social understandings. They are used to organize narrative that comes out from hard and soft data so we can find meaningful analogies to a situation or bringing a customer story to life.

The creation of archetypes are particular useful when applied to brand marketing to make sense of aspects of customers’ lives and their rituals. Every ritual we have is tied to a hard-coded subconscious archetypal structure we can never get away from. Once brand marketers learn how to make the connections between archetypes and brands, they see can the connections.

On the other hand, personas are most useful when applied to interactions design. To assist you in designing specific features or user experiences. A persona is basically an imagined user profile that you can use to help make design decisions. These profiles are created from your knowledge of users, usually knowledge gained from secondary research, stakeholder interviews and user testing. It is a “virtual” user for you to bounce ideas and help you keep the goals of the user in mind throughout the design process. But you cannot have 10 personas. One time a client asked for 16 personas.

Marketing segmentation's key purpose is to allow your marketing/sales folks to focus on the subset of prospects that are "most likely" to purchase your products or service offerings. Widely used bases for segmenting include geographic differences, demographic differences, psychological differences, and psychographic differences.If done properly this will help to insure the highest return for your marketing/sales expenditures.

There are three archetype manifestations and the least known among the three is customer archetype. And there are basically three types of customer archetypes:

• Archetypal characters or customer archetypes are extreme or dramatized representations of idea customer’s characters.Very effective for brand development and marketing theme development.
• Archetypal themes are extreme or dramatized representations of issues or concerns, such as "institution rebels" or "social connectors". Archetypal values are extreme representations of things that are given values, positive or negative, such as "deeply loyal", "trust", and "uncertainty".
• Archetypal scenarios are illustrative scenarios of decision-making situations, such as "fear uncertainty doubt". Not used much but which may be useful in the future. Consider the possibility of archetypal relationships ("respectful adversaries"); intentions ("fake concern"); changes ("sea change", "mounting jeopardy"); and heuristics ("step back and look at the big picture").

They are all useful in sense-making opportunities but archetypes are not the same as stereotypes. Archetypes are uni-dimensional extremes, caricatures that could never describe a real person or issue or situation. Part of their utility is in their extremity, that they help us to discuss the boundaries of experience, which are usually the places we are most concerned with coping with. In short, stereotypes divide but archetypes integrate.

Have a great weekend!

Research Design Is More Than Just A Design Tool. The Truth Is 80% Of The Time They Weren't Designed And Conducted Properly.

What is design research? It is generally refer to the upfront contextual inquiry work that designers perform before they start ideation. Sometimes it involves some light ethnographic work and some interviews, but it is primarily not structured as comprehensive or rigor. Design research emerged only in the late 60’s with the goal to improve see how consumers use the product and looking way to improve the effectiveness of a product. Pretty much a human factor investigation, but It is now widely practices but facing a few serious challenges.

The emergence of transdisciplinary design is changing what skills are needed for those who undertake research design. It goes beyond improving a physical product. Building in the voice of customer into the design research process, either directly or indirectly, is a key factor in the design process. Generally the ability to collect data is not in essence the critical activity, it is the ability to decode visual and non-visual data and translate emergent issues into concrete insights that are actionable.

The effectiveness of design research can be characterized by the research teams ability to translate identified functional and emotional characteristics into unique innovation drivers. Ineffective design research activities are often characterized by the presence of assumptive decision-making, lack of immersion into the consumer's world and undifferentiated innovation drivers. Design research is less known than traditional market research among marketers and often misuse as a market research tool rather a product development or innovation tool.

Many organizations are only beginning to use design research to its full benefits. Many sees it as unnecessary cost simply because the people who perform it did not do it justice. The reasons that many of the output I came are often useless and unactionable. There are many reasons for this. First, most designers are trained to observe the insights for the purpose of applying them directly to their work, but poorly trained to codify these insights and lack the writing and analytical skills to make sense of what they see. And the second one is this observation research and individual contact is very consuming, particularly when you need to see them performing non-daily routines. Turning useful data input into the creative process is a critical skill. it is an “intuitive learning process”, during which ideas ‘evolve’ or ‘mature’ and lead to improvement of the previous idea.

Design research in Idea Couture is not just an observation exercise; it is often a participatory exercise. I can’t talk more to our proprietary methodologies, but they are a lot more than just send in two designers to learn about how consumer uses a product. It is not productive to do that. Cross-disciplinary teams, often considering issues from multiple perspectives, from anthropological to human factors and brand influences, perform design research at Idea Couture. Research design for us is the starting point of reflective collaboration, getting D-School and B-School collaborating to solve wicked problems. It is fun. Designers often like the idea of involving uses early and generally hate focus groups. Then unfocus groups is hard to manage and they have concerns whether the discussions will be side tracked. Involving users is always a good idea particularly you need to gain a deeper understanding of cultural issues such as lifestyles and wider issues beyond functional details. This is why you need anthropologists.

It is interesting to see that the contextual inquiry hype has been migrating toward the participatory/designer led corner of the design research space the last few years as design-led methods such as visioning and storyboarding have been added to the contextual inquiries. A lot of  designers have  difficulties of having a unfocus group evaluation for a product idea designed by the designer himself/herself who moderates, as the personal aspects involved often cause some uncomfortable situation. We can see why but that could be the case.

What Do You Know About Customer Unmet Needs? Have You Heard About Needs Such As "Bolstering Self-Esteem" Or "Social Signaling"?

What do you know about unmet needs? Theodore Levitt (a retired HBS marketing prof) used to say that "people don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill – they want a quarter-inch hole." It is true and not true. While it is always useful to understand what customers want to achieve and get done, but there are often times when consumers don’t know what they want and what they need. Or even when they know, they cannot articulate it.

There is more in life than getting things done. We do a lot of things we don’t know why. Customer satisfaction surveys are of very limited use, because many of the things are not actionable. These surveys are largely useless when it comes to identifying unmet and unarticulated needs. The challenge with unmet needs is that customers are almost always unaware of these needs. At least not until they see a product then they see the needs. Think about this, people may not be satisfied with how cumbersome the process of making their music portable, but would not be able to articulate the value of an interface such as iPod iTunes. Users didn't ask for the touch screen for iPhone orITouch either.

Applied imagination is still something difficult master for most organizations. There are many reasons why many companies fail to take advantage of innovative opportunities in their own industry: the lack of risk/prototype cultures, complex bureaucracies that stifle creativity, functional silos that are out of synch with what the customer ultimately wants and vendors that keep telling you you’re doing great etc. And the biggest one is everyone operates under the same logic or dogmas that are not getting enough challenged. It is also tricky in terms of finding the best approach to identify customer unmet needs.

I’ve seen so many company trying to do it in a wrong way and end up getting a sea of data that are 1/already known 2/unactionable. At Idea Couture, we do have a more unique and systematic way to identify unmet needs and linking them to high value opportunities.

Here is one funny example of unmet needs and you will have to tell me if that is high value or what job it helps a customer. One company learned from their research that their customer want to show their friends that they have active sexual activities without talking about it. Example would be a hicky (love bite) on the neck.

Talking inspiration from people who use “fake evidences of victimization”, someone has designed a kit that can be used to "strategic instigate jealously" or “bolster self-esteem” or for"social signaling". I don't think I need to explain what those means. This complete toolkit provides a number of tools designed to create a wide variety of skin marks, from love bites to bondage marks. And on top of everything comes with “a lipstick marker, perfume and traces of hair (any color and length). The kit is called Traces of an Imaginary Affair. It comes in a choices of a wooden box or if you prefer an aluminum MacBookish finish box without the Apple logo of course. Anyone interested? Perfect brand extension for a company such as Braun or Durex?  Can you think of any brands or friends that can use this?  Let me know if you want to join when we start recruiting advanced users.

Desigin Is Cool. From Co-Creation To Design For Social Change. The Question Remains What Makes Design Strategic?

This is a week of design for me, meeting with two talented design practitioners in Boston who are running a very successful company, talked to the folks running two of the top design schools and interviewed 4 designers respectively from London, Brazil, LA and Toronto. And catching with my design reading on the weekend. UK has been a big believer that design can solve many problems and forget the role of economics in many of these issues. People should not forget the advise of architect William Pena: "To put it positively, a social problem calls for a social solution. After there is a social solution then it can be part of a design problem for which there will be a design solution. You cannot solve a social problem with an architectural solution. Let me add another category of design, call it "Social Design".

Design, design, design. Why is suddenly design is so popular? Why business leaders are suddenly talking design? What does design has to do with strategy? Other than sexy products, design thinkers are aspiring to solve the big problems that face modern society. From sustainability to schools, poverty to healthcare, it's the future perfect.

One very popular concept is co-creation. Here's an example how it is in practice. Architect Will Alsop was asked by the British non-profit organization Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation) to rethink the concept of prison. If Idea Couture is doing the project, we will start with ethnography. We will send in a team of anthropologists and human factors to do a week of field work.I am not sure we have people in the office with that vertical experiences (unless I don't know).

What Alsop did was he handed large sheets of paper to a group of inmates and asked them to draw a new cell. Each participant (minimum of 15 years) drew the cell in which he was already incarcerated. He asked if they would like more space. Next, he asked them to draw what they'd like to see from their windows. They all drew gardens. In prison, there is time to watch things grow. Alsop's conceptual solution uses an old space-saving technique: build upwards (photo below).

In a series of brightly colored towers, The Creative Prison (yes prisons can be creative and may be Richard Florida would be interested in doing a study too) provides inmates with more individual and collective legroom, surrounding each structure with deep moats of greenery: working gardens, training areas and sports facilities. Next, he tackled the community issues. Rather than caging inmates in massive cell blocks, he proposes units designed to house groups of up to 14 prisoners. For socializing within a wider community. The crazy part is he proposed to add a restaurant, barber shop and radio station. He did not include a spa. I would add an XBox room for them to play Grand Theft Auto, everyone there should beat the game in 15 minutes.

The London Design Festival will begin in a week and this is always one of my favorite events, unfortunately I cannot attend this year. Royal College of Art will be holding two major exhibitions, one is exploring new ideas in solar energy and he other is people-centered design. EPFL+ ECAL Lab, a new Swiss initiative to foster innovation at a crossroads between technology, design and architecture is presenting Sunny Memories.

Sunny Memories is a project that explores the potential of a newly invented technology: dye solar cells. Inspired by photosynthesis in plants, the technology harnesses solar energy with flexible, colored and even see-through surfaces. Over 80 students from the Royal College of Art's Design Products department, the California College of the Arts, the University of Art and Design Lausanne and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris took part in the project, under the guidance of top-level designers. Lots of design minds working together.

Concepts include a letter box which sends an e-mail when the post arrives; a bench which lights up public parks to make them safer and more welcoming; a signpost for cycle tracks which provides useful information to users; a charger enabling homeless people to recharge a small radio on the street; a radio where the cells capture almost all of the light spectrum; while a fruit bowl suggests a fundamentally new way of positioning solar cells.

Another great design idea is the Dream ball, a brand new soccer ball which is made by recycling famine relief packaging. Since a lot of children in third world countries cannot afford a soccer ball, they usually use pop can and other to use as soccer. A team of Korean designers observed that all aids provided by NGOs are usually packaged in boxes whether they contain medication, food and consumer products. Unplug design came up with an idea that can reuse these boxes to turn them into different types of balls depending on the size of the boxes. They can be made by simply cutting the perforated cardboard boxes and weaving the pieces together. Hats off to Hwng kung chan, Jin song kyou, Lee hak su, Han min hyun and Jun jin of the Seoul based design studio Unplug .