February 23, 2012
"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution."

—

The above quote, c/o Bertrand Russell, is quoted in Innovation for the People, by the People, a solid overview of open innovation initiatives being considered/implemented by the various branches of the federal government. The author, David Bornstein, highlights the quote as a way to show the importance of asking the right question when trying to spark the most inventive and useful submissions to a wicked challenge. As he puts it, “the question needs to be open-ended enough so that it does not restrict creativity, or imply a method of solution, but it has to be defined sharply enough so that someone who doesn’t understand your whole mission can still solve your specific problem.” It’s a really tricky balance to get right, but absolutely critical, nonetheless.

[Story via Catherine Tomezsko.]

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Filed under: open innovation crowdsourcing problem solving problem framing creativity government 
February 23, 2012

This makes my heart sing. For some time now, Mike Joyce, of Stereotype Design fame, has been working on a personal project designing posters inspired by two of his favorite things — punk rock and Swiss typography. The project, which he calls Swissted (haha) turns up some totally bizarre-but-lovely juxtapositions of grungy gig info set in Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk Medium. Now, he’s set up an online shop in which to sell his creations, so you too can rejoice in their strangeness. Admittedly, it’s all something of a nerdy designer in-joke, but I suspect people will be into these even if they don’t have the first idea how strange the posters are. I mean, look at them. They’re so cool! Here’s more of the backstory, c/o Mike:

“I grew up going to punk and hardcore shows in the mid-to-late 80’s and was inspired by the flyers used to promote the shows. They were almost always black and white photocopies of some crazy image copied from a newspaper or magazine with the band’s names scrawled across it with a magic marker or, if the designer had the money and time, Letraset. I thought it would be interesting to see the contrasts between the strict and rigid grid systems of the International Typographic style with the no-rules ethos of punk and the underground hardcore movement. The clean and modern geometric designs play well off of some of the more abrasive band names like Dirty Rotten Imbeciles and the Dicks. And sometimes the designs seem to speak to the band’s energy like the poster for 999. It also might be a surprise to some people who aren’t too familiar with punk, to see that some of the designs don’t stray too far from the band’s original image—the Germs are a good example. If you look at the cover of GI, their debut (and only) album released in 1979, you’d never know it was from one of LA’s most notorious punk bands. It looks like it could have been designed by Josef Muller-Brockmann himself.”

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Filed under: design music Mike Joyce Stereotype Design cool 
February 23, 2012
"By crowdsourcing product interest, Fancy enables merchants to see what consumers are most interested in, and then sell products directly to them based on that interest. Into a helicopter tour of Hawaii? You got it. A new style from Christian Dior? Click away."

—

Hype and interest in Pinterest has gone off the scale recently. Now, here comes a piece about a high-end competitor, Fancy, which has just introduced a social commerce platform that, writes Austin Carr, “allows brands and merchants to sell products directly from Fancy.” It’s an interesting proposition, one that rewards brands savvy enough to track and capitalize on trends and interests. Will I use it personally? Call me grumpy, and never say never, but for now, I’m filing under “interesting and yet not interested.”

[Story via Erik Van Crimmin]

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Filed under: crowdsourcing Fancy Pinterest products consumers brands selling 
February 22, 2012
"Personally, I’m a minimalist: I value content more highly than aesthetics."

— In Graphic Designers Are Ruining The Web, Observer writer John Naughton outlines his dismay that so many webpages have turned into so much bloat (over the last decade, the size of web pages has more than septupled.) He has a point, and designers and developers certainly need to work together to create streamlined pages that work whether you have broadband or dial-up. But don’t you find the quote above peculiar? It’s like he has no idea that minimalism is itself a design choice. The pages he professes to adore all accord with a set of design principles, even if those principles are to include a whole boatload of information (and, as it happens, have nothing whatsoever to do with minimalism.) Craigslist may be designed according to “un-design” principles, but it’s designed nonetheless. It’s a shame that more people don’t understand this, and it’s somewhat infuriating to hear designers equated, as here, with dumb maniacs who gleefully refuse to understand how the web works. Some of them are, of course. But it’s an unhelpful generalization, and makes for an irritating read. Don’t know about you, but I value content and I value aesthetics, and I firmly believe that the two can co-exist. </rant>

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Filed under: design rant web graphic design developers minimalism design principles idiocy 
February 22, 2012
"Everyone I spoke with who was familiar with the project repeatedly said that Google was not thinking about potential business models with the new glasses. Instead, they said, Google sees the project as an experiment that anyone will be able to join. If consumers take to the glasses when they are released later this year, then Google will explore possible revenue streams."

— Amidst all the excitement around Google’s potential introduction of “wearable computing”, or glasses that can stream real-time information, I was struck by this comment in New York Times reporter, Nick Bilton’s article, Google To Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses By Year’s End. Given Google’s previous inability to figure out revenue streams for its ideas, this seems like a risky if somewhat predictable strategy. Business model design is just as difficult as inventing stuff, and equally important.

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Filed under: Google invention innovation business models AR advertising 
February 16, 2012
"It was classic Kubrick, winning the chess match through perseverance and ingenuity."

—

Nowadays, we’re all way too comfortable with the incredible computing power often in our pockets or at our fingertips, so it’s funny to think back to a simpler age, not so long ago, when tasks that now happen in seconds took days, even weeks. How Stanley Kubrick Invented The Modern Box-Office Report (By Accident) tells the wonderful story of how the notorious director figured out how to get A Clockwork Orange playing in exactly the right movie theaters. Mike Kaplan, who worked on marketing Kubrick’s films, recounts how they got Maureen, “a sweet lady from St. Albans” to enter the box-office figured from 1,000 American cinemas onto individual pages of accounting paper, compiled into notebooks alphabetically listed by city. Writes Kaplan:

This hand-crafted data base would be our bible, guiding our directives to Warner Bros. concerning which cinemas should show A Clockwork Orange.

In other words, they could figure out which audiences might respond best to the, well, challenging content of the film. Not only did the approach guarantee record figures for the movie, but it also led to Variety changing the way it reported box-office takings in its magazine. It is also a wonderful example of Kubrick’s belief that filmmaking was “an exercise in problem solving.” Lovely.

[Story via Jarrod Cady.]

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Filed under: problem solving Stanley Kubrick ingenuity innovation the olden days 
February 15, 2012

My favorite quote in my Fast Company piece about the inaugural Interaction Awards (of which I was a judge) came from the event co-chair, Jennifer Bove: “Behavior isn’t explicit in computer chips; interaction designers are the people who understand how to make things work.” But what was also interesting about this particular awards show was that it made it clear that interaction design is stretching beyond the screen and ever further into the physical world. That’s a super interesting proposition and challenge, and I confess I was particularly partial to those entries that moved beyond the promise of technology to offer something seamlessly crafted and infinitely compelling.

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Filed under: Interaction Awards IXDA Fast Company interaction design pixels Jennifer Bove technology 
February 14, 2012
"Researchers are forced to become increasingly specialized, because there’s only so much information one mind can handle. And they have to collaborate, because the most interesting mysteries lie at the intersections of disciplines."

—

By now, everyone has surely read and dissected Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker piece on brainstorming and ways to promote creative thinking, Groupthink. So I won’t add much but to say it’s a must-read for anyone charged with working on big thorny problems or how to manage collaborative creativity. The above quote, highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, one of my favorite topics, is great but there are gems throughout. Another: 

Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential.

The piece also includes a fascinating analysis of the most effective genetic make-up of a creatively driven team, and the need for proximity in collaboration. Finally, the lovely story of “the magical incubator,” the story of Building 20 at MIT reminded me of talking with George Kembel, co-founder of the D.school at Stanford, who once told me how nervous he’d been to move into a swanky new building after having endured years of making do wherever they could find. Place matters and, as Lehrer concludes: “The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.”

[Story via everyone, and Nick Gaubinger.]

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Filed under: research creativity brainstorming collaboration interdisciplinary thinking tension discussion MIT Stanford 
February 13, 2012
"When, in 1999, McDonald’s requested that its suppliers give caged hens 72 square inches of space instead of 48… not a single factory-farmed hen in the country was being raised with 72 inches of space. Yet the entire supply chain was converted in just 18 months, and 72 square inches is now effectively the industry standard."

—

In OMG: McDonald’s Does The Right Thing, food writer Mark Bittman details plans from the fast food restaurant giant to have its pork suppliers provide plans to phase out pig gestation crates by May. Yes, that wording is a little hinky: they won’t “phase out” by May, but have to “plan to” phase out by May. This means, Bittman reckons, that the changes won’t actually take effect until 2017, but it does show just how powerful corporations are these days. Bittman’s conclusion:

McDonald’s is among the most important food companies in the world, and one could argue that it and Walmart are the true pace-setters: what they do, others will do. When McDonald’s bans gestation crates, gestation crates will go bye-bye. If McDonald’s were to have a hit with a spot-on non-meat offering, you’d see something similar, lickety-split, at Burger King. If McDonald’s announced it was using organic milk for its coffee (as it does in Britain) or cage-free eggs for McMuffins (also a British practice), you’d see that happening everywhere. If McDonald’s were to pay its workers a dollar more than minimum wage, minimum wage in the restaurant industry would effectively go up.

When McDonald’s does the right thing, it’s a game-changer.

Any chance they might be able to actually phase out barbaric gestation cages before 2017? That’d be some pace setting.

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Filed under: McDonald's innovation corporations power supply chain fast food game changing 
February 12, 2012

I’m a sucker for public art installations at the best of times, and Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture in Chicago is always pretty special. The massive, reflective installation and the ever-changing weather provide a novel, magical experience every time you see it. Now I’m trying to figure out how I can wangle a trip to the city (perhaps to Doblin’s head office, which is right near by) before February 20th, in order to catch this spectacular-looking night time video design/sound installation by Sean Gallero and Petra Bachmaier of local firm, Luftwerk. According to this piece in the Chicago Sun-Times, the piece was funded by a $100,000 tourism grant from the State of Illinois, with the hopes that out-of-towners will brave the winter and pour their tourism dollars right back into city businesses.

[via Janet Ginsburg.]

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Filed under: public art installation Chicago Anish Kapoor Cloud Gate interactive art video design sound interaction experience 
February 12, 2012
"The biggest resistance was an investment in the way things are done today. But I don’t think it’s going to be difficult going forward to dye textiles using zero water."

—

Eric Sprunk is the vice president of Merchandising and Product at Nike, and I was really taken with this comment, in a piece looking at the sportswear giant’s recent announcement of a bid to remove water from its apparel dying process. Color It Green: Nike To Adopt Waterless Textile Dying details a new partnership between Nike and the Dutch company, DyeCoo Textile Systems, and is clearly a huge deal for environmentalists. Water is already a focal point in our collective fight for survival, and any initiative that can either remove its use upstream (as it were) in the product development cycle, or prevent rampant pollution of it downstream is significant. As this article notes, up to 150 liters of water are needed to process just one kilogram of textile materials; 39 million tons of polyester will be dyed annually by 2015. That’s an awful lot of water, and the pollution levels in China are already horrible: this piece refers to the “countless billions of gallons of polluted discharges into waterways near manufacturing plants in Asia.” 

But look at the quote again. The open admission of the internal resistance to change is really interesting, and an excellent reminder that innovation is never easy, even within those companies such as Nike that are constantly lauded for their innovation prowess. It’s important to remember that every single executive in every single firm meets the same forces, the ones that deliberately—and for the most rational reasons possible—attempt to prevent change. Acknowledging and dealing with these forces consciously and deliberately is the only way to have an impact—both within an organization, and in the world at large.

[Nike announcement via Andrew Zolli; Green Biz story via Adam Aston.]

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Filed under: innovation internal culture change transformation resistance to change investment water environment sustainability Nike Eric Sprunk DyeCoo China 
February 10, 2012
It&#8217;s a nosecone, silly. This one was customized by the ridiculously talented artist (and friend), Eric White, and featured in an *amazing* sounding show currently on at the PIMA Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona. (I am already trying to figure out how I can get there.) The Boneyard Project involved artists such as Nunca, Retna and Faile using retired World War II airplanes as their canvas, while it also includes another collection of customized plane nosecones from the likes of Shepard Fairey, Futura 2000 and Ron English. Eric also gave a (perhaps unwittingly) brilliant insight into the highs and lows of the creative process with this emailed description of his contribution: I picked this cone out of the six I was shown months ago because it was the strangest one. The entire thing was covered in that white, shimmery fabric; the outer layer was peeling off. For some reason I kept picturing it pink, and I decided to go for a flat, opaque pink surface being revealed by the torn away fabric. I was tempted to leave it there, but one of my best friends said he thought it needed something else, so I developed the idea of one little window, maybe another level existing beneath the pink. Time was running out, the pickup had been scheduled, so I was frantically trying to come up with something. The night before it was due I settled on something that I thought was great: I found a picture of a little kid with an asthma inhaler that was hilarious to me, and seemed like the perfect meaningless and absurd image that would put it over the edge. I finished about 5am on the day it was due and realized it was terrible. So I then scrambled through 10 different ideas and landed on the &#8220;Love Crazy&#8221; thing, taken from a title card from an old film. I worked on that for the next three hours and finished. I couldn&#8217;t believe I pulled it off. The other thing would have been lame. The text works with the obvious phallic shape and sexual connotations of the pink etc, and I thought the black and white fit well aesthetically&#8230; I hope it doesn&#8217;t sell. I want it back!&#8221; I hope it doesn&#8217;t sell too, so that I can arm wrestle Eric for it. Gorgeous.

It’s a nosecone, silly. This one was customized by the ridiculously talented artist (and friend), Eric White, and featured in an *amazing* sounding show currently on at the PIMA Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona. (I am already trying to figure out how I can get there.) The Boneyard Project involved artists such as Nunca, Retna and Faile using retired World War II airplanes as their canvas, while it also includes another collection of customized plane nosecones from the likes of Shepard Fairey, Futura 2000 and Ron English. Eric also gave a (perhaps unwittingly) brilliant insight into the highs and lows of the creative process with this emailed description of his contribution:

I picked this cone out of the six I was shown months ago because it was the strangest one. The entire thing was covered in that white, shimmery fabric; the outer layer was peeling off. For some reason I kept picturing it pink, and I decided to go for a flat, opaque pink surface being revealed by the torn away fabric. I was tempted to leave it there, but one of my best friends said he thought it needed something else, so I developed the idea of one little window, maybe another level existing beneath the pink. Time was running out, the pickup had been scheduled, so I was frantically trying to come up with something. The night before it was due I settled on something that I thought was great: I found a picture of a little kid with an asthma inhaler that was hilarious to me, and seemed like the perfect meaningless and absurd image that would put it over the edge. I finished about 5am on the day it was due and realized it was terrible. So I then scrambled through 10 different ideas and landed on the “Love Crazy” thing, taken from a title card from an old film. I worked on that for the next three hours and finished. I couldn’t believe I pulled it off. The other thing would have been lame. The text works with the obvious phallic shape and sexual connotations of the pink etc, and I thought the black and white fit well aesthetically… I hope it doesn’t sell. I want it back!”

I hope it doesn’t sell too, so that I can arm wrestle Eric for it. Gorgeous.

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Filed under: art creativity amazing customization graffiti installation Eric White Boneyard Project 
February 10, 2012
"The editing function has been replaced by the filtering function. The former, addressing communication before it is released, is the responsibility of the creator or someone acting on her behalf. The latter is left to the reader or audience."

— If you haven’t yet read the book By Design: Why There Are No Locks On The Bathroom Doors In The Hotel Louis XIV And Other Object Lessons, then consider this the most exuberant recommendation ever. It’s a classic from 1982 (reissued in 2005) by Ralph Caplan, a god among design writers, who mastered the art of wry insight both as editor of I.D. magazine (RIP) and as a thoughtful commentator on design throughout the last many years. He’s still writing, and Running Out Of Running Time, his latest, shows he is as sharp and thoughtful as ever. We all talk a lot about the need for filters and curators and editors yada yada. Yet I hadn’t thought about the issue in the terms Caplan details above, which I found to be an incredibly helpful framing.

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Filed under: Ralph Caplan design criticism curator filter communication editing 
February 9, 2012

How amazing is this? Greek multimedia artist, Petros Vrellis converts Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” into a swirl of animation and interactivity. The music and the movement are perfectly matched to the spirit of the original painting. As Local Projects principal Jake Barton wrote of the project, it’s “a startling flow of lines, color, sound and interactivity.” Wonderful.

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Filed under: interaction design animation art design painting creativity amazing Petros Vrellis 
February 9, 2012
Independent Video Game Raises $643,698 (and counting…)

Gaming world veteran, Tim Schafer and his company, Double Fine Productions, launched a campaign on Kickstarter to raise money for a new “point and click” adventure. They reached the $400k minimum within, well, a day, and showed the genuine power of the crowdfunding mechanism done right. They also launched another warning shot across the bow of the current big gaming world players, which simply do not seem to know how to respond to this shift in the economy—and seem too often to have become far removed from the fans of the medium who put them in positions of power in the first place. Schafer breaks it down beautifully:

Big games cost big money.  Even something as “simple” as an Xbox LIVE Arcade title can cost upwards of two or three million dollars.  For disc-based games, it can be over ten times that amount.  To finance the production, promotion, and distribution of these massive undertakings, companies like Double Fine have to rely on external sources like publishers, investment firms, or loans.  And while they fulfill an important role in the process, their involvement also comes with significant strings attached that can pull the game in the wrong directions or even cancel its production altogether.  Thankfully, viable alternatives have emerged and gained momentum in recent years.

Crowd-sourced fundraising sites like Kickstarter have been an incredible boon to the independent development community.  They democratize the process by allowing consumers to support the games they want to see developed and give the developers the freedom to experiment, take risks, and design without anyone else compromising their vision.  It’s the kind of creative luxury that most major, established studios simply can’t afford.  At least, not until now.

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Filed under: Tim Schafer video games design economics Kickstarter new world crowdfunding