"There is a grandeur in this view of life... from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. - Charles Darwin
Over the past 12 months, the whole notion of "design thinking" has come into vogue. Not only are there entire books devoted to "design thinking" - like Tim Brown's Change By Design or Roger Martin's The Design of Business - there are also a proliferating number of educational institutions that are combining business thinking with design thinking to create next-generation "D-Schools". With that in mind, Tyler Brûlé's Monocle recently tracked down four of the leading establishments in the world that are spearheading the design thinking movement:
(1) Strelka Institute (Moscow) - The institute teaches a one-year master's course, designed by legendary architect Rem Koolhaas, that focuses on five core areas: preservation, energy, public space, design and urban thinking. Strelka itself is housed in the old "Red October" chocolate factory overlooking the Moscow River.
(2) Aalto-Tongji Design Factory (Shanghai) - This new design school, set up by Finland's Aalto University, partners Tongji University students in industrial design, engineering and urban planning graduate programs with Aalto design students in Finland to work on real-life design projects for Finnish companies.
(3) Stanford d.school (Palo Alto, California) - This is perhaps the world's most famous "design thinking" school, and has already been touted by none other than Steve Jobs of Apple
(4) Akiyama Mokko (Yokohama) - Part design school, part boot camp, and part trade schoool, Akiyama is rooted in Japan's centuries-old tradition of artisans passing on their knowledge and skills to youngsters who devote years to learning a craft.
What's interesting, of course, is that "design thinking" is no longer a purely Western concept - it's being embraced by emerging markets such as Russia and China as a tool of economic competitiveness. In fact, also within the current issue of Monocle is a wonderful piece on how Mikheil Saakashvili, President of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, is importing architectural talent from Milan as a way of changing the Tbilisi skyline and, in the process, laying the groundwork for updated Western conceptions of Georgia as an investment destination.
Of late, I've been thinking a lot about visual storytelling and the various ways that the Internet and digital devices like the iPad require us to process information and content. Over the past decade, there has been an astounding rise in the value of visual literacy -- the ability to process information and content that is delivered via images rather than text. When you think about it, all of the most popular forms of new Internet content - whether infographics, casual games or video clips - place a premium on visual storytelling. At the end of the day, the Apple iPad is primarily a device for consuming visual content.
Which is why I've been on the look out for new forms of visual storytelling and new ways of exploring visual literacy. Take, for example, the new Park Avenue Armory exhibit Leonardo's Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway, which attempts to encourage a new dialogue between painting and cinema. The show takes place within a full-scale replica of Milan's Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, complete with a "clone" of The Last Supper projected on multiple walls, which is then brought to life over 45 minutes using a manipulation of light, sound and theatrical illusion. As Greenaway (best known as the director of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, less so for his 50+ short films and documentaries) points out in the liner notes for the show, the work is a provocation to reconsider our approach to visual literacy in the 21st Century. What happens when the 10 seconds you might spend looking at a masterpiece painting in a museum gets transformed into a 45-minute cinema-like walk-through experience?
"We have had two thousand years of Western painting and only 115 years of cinema. Both are supposedly in the business of delivering ideas by making pictures, by making images. Do they do it well? Do they share the same language? Are they in the same business? [...]
Supposing we try to hold a dialogue between the two? To mingle and share and cross-refer their vocabularies... To use painting to fix and stabilize and limit and frame the image... and to use cinema to make a painting move and change, have a temporal life and have a soundtrack...
That's exactly what Greenaway did - he took DaVinci's famous painting and gave it movement -- through changing colors, changing shadows, different atmospheres, music and even dialogue. The goal, of course, is to discover the multiple layers of meaning in the painting and to explore the techniques used by DaVinci - whether it is the painting's various light sources, the atmosphere and tonality of the work, the relationships between the figures within the painting - even the arrangement of the food and cutlery on the table. Throughout the show, you are free to move about and consider the work from your own unique perspective.
With the arrival and popularity of the iPad and other devices for consuming digital content, are we seeing the development of a new and fascinating era for storytelling that uses video content in entirely new ways?
Bluto Blutarsky might just have something to teach Corporate America. Just as fat, drunk and stupid is no way to make it through life, big, wealthy and bloated is no way for corporations to go through the innovation process. Big, bloated companies with excess budgetary funds tend to throw money at problems rather than devise ingenious solutions to their problems. They do lazy, inefficient things to acquire customers. They over-rely on sales & marketing to "sell" inferior products. And perhaps worst of all, since they are so big and bloated, they feel almost compelled to do something BIG. As a result, they have a blind spot to new, emerging technologies.
Small, scrappy start-ups, on the other hand, are forced to bootstrap themselves with almost no money at all. They find a way to market their products & services in ingeniously efficient ways. Contrary to the popular consensus, resource constraints are actually a great way to accelerate the creative process. (There's actually a whole sub-genre of management thinking out there dedicated to resource constraints on the innovation process).
Perhaps one anecdote (perhaps apocryphal) makes all this clear: during the 1960's, the U.S. space program was desperate to play catch up with the Russians, who had just launched the Sputnik satellite. As a result, the U.S. government was willing to throw dollars at the problem. Millions of (inflation-adjusted) dollars later, the U.S. space program had developed an ergonomically-sound "Astronaut Pen" capable of writing in zero-G conditions. Thrilled, the head of the U.S. space program was eager to show off the new Astronaut Pen to his colleagues. He quickly called a security official within the government: "Tell me, do the Russians have anything close to this?" After a moment's silence, the reply came back: "We already checked... we found out they're using pencils..."
Which is to say, it's possible to produce innovative work with a big budget -- but the path to a simpler, more elegant solution usually doesn't require a lot of money. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
Ever since the introduction of the iTunes music store, I was under the impression that $0.99 would become the default price for all digital content. One way or another, content would be continually sliced and diced into ever-smaller pieces of micro-content, such that the market-clearing price for that content would become $0.99.Then I ran into Kickstarter, the innovative crowdfunding site for artistic and creative projects.
While Kickstarter bills itself as "a way to fund and follow creativity," I'm starting to think that the true genius of the site is in the creation of a radically new pricing model for creative assets. Simply stated, it unbundles the pricing from the physical asset, and instead, bundles the pricing with the creative process. This is a subtle point, but here's how it works: the old model was that you pay $0.99, $9.99, $19.99 or whatever price for the finished artistic work (an album, a book, a magazine), regardless of the amount of time, effort and financing that went into the production of that work. That price was the price that established a minimum level of profit-taking for all the middlemen involved in distributing that creative asset.
The new model is that you fund an artistic process, and in return for a specified level of funding - anywhere from $25 up to $10,000 - you receive an increasingly personalized creative asset. (I've funded a book, a piece of art, and a film on Kickstarter, and each time, I've been offered different terms) For example, a $25 funding pledge for a film might get you a copy of the final DVD as well as a personalized thank-you note from the artist. A $50 pledge might get you all that - plus a mention in the final credits of the film. A $100 pledge might get you all that, plus a limited edition poster for the film. A $1000 pledge might get you all that, plus a 1-on-1 dinner with the film's producers and a private screening of the film.
What's interesting is that other artists - whether directly or indirectly - are experimenting with similar types of pricing models. Consider what bestselling author Tim Ferriss is doing: ahead of his book launch for The 4-Hour Body on December 14, he's offering readers a unique opportunity to receive additional bonuses and discounts that are linked to the book. In fact, in a "landgrab" promo that expires this weekend, Tim outlined how he planned to give out more than $4 million in "prizes" over a 48-hour period, based on the number of books that people buy. Every package is worth at least twice the cost of the books, often up to 10x the value of the books. The more you buy, the more you get.
My head is starting to churn on this one... It will be interesting to see how many books Tim Ferriss manages to sell -- especially whether he ends up on the New York Times bestseller list as planned. I loved his 4-Hour Workweek, and based on that alone, I'm willing to pony up for a Tim Ferriss bonus package. I don't quite have the purchasing power to be able to hang out with Miss India on a private Indian archipelago (that required a hefty investment of 1,000 books, or about $15K) -- but even with one book purchase, you still get $140 in bonuses...
Why do we love our digital devices? The answer might surprise you -- it's not because they look good, feel good or are somehow aspirational of where we want to be in life. It's because they are increasingly becoming a "second self" that we carry with ourselves wherever we go. In the New York Times, Damon Darlin recently interviewed a number of leading design thinkers - including Mark Rolston of frog design and Don Norman of Nielsen Norman Group - who are coming to the consensus that we love certain objects for what they contain within, rather than their sleek exteriors:
"The devices — whether a flat-screen TV, an EVO Android smartphone, a Toshiba laptop or a Samsung Galaxy tablet — have become frames around a screen that gives us access to the amazing software that is that brain. Designers have begun to refer to that screen, in whatever device it is in, as “the window.” The frame keeps getting smaller and the window gets larger and clearer.
In other words, what we’ve become attached to is not the glass and metal and plastic, regardless of how it is beveled, but to the software running on the device. The love wasn’t there until the software got smart enough. “I doubt that people really loved their cellphones,” says Don Norman, a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, a design firm, and author of “Living With Complexity.” The software inside a smartphone changed that. He thinks people merely like their Amazon Kindle e-readers, but don’t love them because the software doesn’t function as an auxiliary brain."
It's all part of a changing concept of the way that people interact with objects that MIT's Sherry Turkle refers to as "evocative objects" -- everyday gadgets and devices made of glass & plastic that have the power to impact things like memories, relationships, ideas and emotions. These evocative objects are designed to create emotion and empathy.
For any company that sells devices (or appliances or other gadgets) - the mandate is clear: Focus less on designing a sleek, attention-getting exterior and more on the software "brain" that create the inner magic. It will be interesting to see how design firms respond to this mandate - whether or not they will refocus on the "intangibles" rather than the exterior design.
Likewise, it will be interesting to see how the Android operating system -- a worthy rival to the Mac OS X - will force Apple to change its design aesthetic. When the first iPad came out, it had no worthy challengers and was immediately lauded as a design and even fashion object. Now that challengers like the Samsung Galaxy are gaining traction, sophisticated buyers are starting to focus more on the operating system (Android vs. Mac OS X) and less on the "frame."
It's almost a cliche these days to say that the Web is accelerating the move toward an attention-deficit disorder literary culture that celebrates the 140-character tweet but has a hard time digesting the 140-page book. We're constantly reminded that the Web is somehow making us stupid, but I'm starting to wonder if the next iteration of the Web - helped along by the explosion of new content experiences made possible by the iPad and the innovative programming capabilities of HTML5 - could actually lead to a backlash of sorts against short-form content culture and a renewed celebration of deep, experiential content.
I recently attended "Gatz," a seven-hour marathon production of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" at the Public Theater in New York and was simply blown away by the experience of hearing actors read aloud the entire book on stage before a rapt audience. During Gatz, the cast members literally read every word on every page -- 49,000 in total -- over a period of more than seven hours in a tour de force of narrative nuance that leads you deeper and deeper into the magical world of Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Jordan Baker and Tom & Daisy Buchanan. This was like an audio book on anabolic steroids.
In his theater review of Gatz, Charles McGrath of the New York Times described this phenomenon of "what happens when you get caught up in a book" on stage, compared to reading it in conventional format:
"When we read a book we don’t really watch or listen to a mental movie. We mostly imagine characters in a kind of shorthand, calling to mind only what’s absolutely necessary. This is what makes watching a filmed or televised version of a book... so pleasurable and sometimes so distracting: the blanks get filled in. But what “Gatz” captures so cleverly is the improvisatory quality of reading: the characters aren’t cast perfectly according to type, the way they would be in a film; they’re pressed into service out of the available office staff.
Our reading and listening imaginations do much the same thing. Reading in bed, riding the subway with the iPod plugged in, driving the car and feeding CDs into the dashboard slot, we’re not transported from this life to another, exactly, but to a sort of halfway realm. We’re partly in East Egg, or wherever, and partly still in that cluttered mental office, where the phone rings — literally sometimes. We look out the window and see, oops, that we’ve just missed our subway stop or, worse, that a state trooper has just pulled alongside and he has his lights flashing."
This is where the next iteration of the content Web needs to take people -- to new types of meaningful content experiences and away from throwaway, disposable (and dare I say it) junk Web culture. Imagine a content world where the experience of The Great Gatsby on your Kindle or iPad is richer and more meaningful than what is possible with a favorite, dog-eared, coffee-stained and annotated book -- even more engaging than what is possible with film.
I think this type of content experience will require more than just interactive content modules on the Jazz Age, hyperlinks to original book reviews of F. Scott Fitzgerald's works on the Web, or brief contextual video clips from previous film versions of Gatsby. These multimedia additions, while wonderful in and of themselves, would only encourage more sampling and "browsing" rather than deep concentration and focus. I'm thinking more along the lines of a live reading of the book by an actor in a different city via Skype as a way of immersing yourself in the dramatization of the text in a radically new way.
Since 2007, Bulbstorm has been at the forefront of smart thinking about ways that companies and brands can tap into powerful ideas online and then transform them into new products or services. In this exclusive interview with Endless Innovation, Bulbstorm CEO Bart Steiner shares his views on how brands must continually move to where their fans are, highlights a few success stories from Facebook, and gives a hint of what's next in the "online ideas" space.
Endless Innovation: Can you talk a little about the way that Bulbstorm has evolved over the past 12 months in terms of helping brands bring their best ideas to light? Has there been any shift in focus from "online communities" to "social media"?
Bart Steiner: You have to be willing to go to where the people are. You cannot count on them coming to you. So, we want to provide the platform of ideas wherever ideas strike – whether that’s in our own online community or in communities on social networks like Facebook.
In 2007, we launched Bulbstorm.com, a social community where people could share their ideas for products and businesses and solicit feedback from other community members. Bulbstorm.com has grown to become one of the world’s most popular idea-sharing communities, surpassing combined traffic figures for idea-sharing sites owned by Starbucks and Dell.
As Bulbstorm.com grew, we recognized that consumers were aggregating on Facebook – and that brands wanted to engage them there. So, we translated our philosophy of ideas into Facebook applications that enable brands to engage fans around the fans’ ideas. Our flagship Idea Challenges application for Facebook provides a branded, game-like environment for the sharing and rating of those ideas and has yielded tremendous results for every company that's used it.
Endless Innovation: In what ways is Facebook becoming an increasingly important platform for brands to tap into the combined wisdom of their fans?
Bart Steiner: Today, the party is on Facebook. The party’s been on other platforms in the last decade. But right now, Facebook is where consumers are spending their time and Facebook is where brands are seeking to build communities of fans and engage them.
We've demonstrated that the best way to engage with your brand’s fans is to ask them for their ideas. And innovative brands are discovering they can tap into the tremendous passion fans bring when they contribute. We are seeing more and more brands recognize the value of Facebook as a platform for harnessing the power of their fans’ ideas.
Endless Innovation: What are some of the success stories from Facebook that brands have had by implementing the Ideas Challenge application?
Bart Steiner: We recently executed our first idea contest for Intel, which sought to gather ideas for an upcoming phone product. The promotion attracted over 47,000 participants, who engaged in the experience for 7 minutes per visit. Fans submitted 5,200 ideas, which in turn drew 195,000 idea views, 108,000 ratings, 8,100 comments, and 2,900 wall publishes. The fan who submitted the top idea – as selected by community voting and Intel's judges – will actually visit Intel’s facilities to share her idea with Intel engineers.
Another example is our work with Ruiz Foods. We recently helped them crowdsource their 2011 product line for the Tornados snack brand. The company had already identified desirable flavor categories (such as breakfast and dessert), but wanted consumers to contribute specific flavor ideas. So, the top flavor submissions in those categories will actually hit the market next year. In just over a month, they received over 1,400 ideas for new flavors, plus 70,000 idea views, 48,000 idea ratings, 5,000 idea comments, and hundreds of thousands of valuable engagements with the brand.
Endless Innovation: Once brands are able to crowdsource ideas, what is the process for executing and implementing the most successful of them?
Bart Steiner: The process for implementing these ideas is as diverse as the ideas themselves. In the Intel example, they’re scoping the feasibility of implementing the best ideas around functionality. But they’re also mining the consumer ideas in aggregate for insights into how products can be developed on their platform by their partners. In the case of Ruiz Foods, the most popular Tornados flavors will move into their R&D kitchens and will actually be added to the product mix in 2011.
The marketing benefit in both cases is potentially huge. Intel’s partners will be able to develop and market a wide variety of solutions, each with audiences of consumers anxious to try them out. When Tornados’ new flavors are launched, they’ll encounter a market of consumers ready to taste what they helped create, and excited to tell their friends.
Endless Innovation: What are some of the things that we can look forward to in 2011 from Bulbstorm? What's next?
Bart Steiner: For 2011, we’re really focused on the concept of providing the platform of ideas wherever ideas strike. We want to be there when the light bulb turns on – and it doesn’t always turn on when you’re browsing photos on Facebook.
What that means for us is expansion of the platform into new channels such as mobile devices and corporate web sites. But the philosophy will remain unchanged. It’s all about the ideas!
It's always fun to watch I Drink Your Milkshake moments play out in the corporate world - those dramatic moments when one company announces that it will take over another company's entire industry, and there's nothing you can do about it. Google does it all the time -- but it's usually directed at a company like Apple, Facebook or Microsoft. This time, however, Google has its straw pointed at the milkshake that belongs to the major credit card companies.
"Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, showed off the company’s next Android-powered phone, which will contain a chip that will allow people to make payments via their handsets. Opening this year’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Schmidt showed off the new phone, which had the manufacturer’s label deliberately covered up, but is assumed to be the next Nexus device, following the Nexus One, and will contain a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip, that will allow people to use their phones like credit cards. [...] The latest version of Android, called Gingerbread, due to come out in the “next few weeks”, will power this new handset according to Schmidt, and will feature this new mobile payments system as a key tool. “This could replace your credit card,” Schmidt said."
Moving from a card-centric view of payments to a device-centric view of payments is no longer a hypothetical what if? More companies are experimenting with innovative ways to transform mobile devices into a "digital wallet" capable of making and receiving contactless payments. The emerging NFC technology mentioned by Google at the Web 2.0 Summit makes it possible for a mobile device to wirelessly communicate with another device or object at very close range and exchange data. By doing so, the NFC chip has the potential to reshape the mobile payments space by shifting the payment experience from plastic cards to mobile devices.
Keep in mind that TIME magazine recently named the Square payment system - which threatens to disrupt credit card companies at the low end of the market - one of its Top 50 inventions of the year. The wildcard, of course, is Apple, which is rumored to be looking into integrating an RFID chip into the next iPhone 5 to facilitate NFC payments. Once customers are able to purchase NFC-ready smart phones, the market for contactless payments should really take off.
When you look at how Apple completely disrupted the music industry with the introduction of the iTunes digital music store back in 2001, it's natural to ask: Which other companies or brands are capable of such wide-scale disruption? My current pick is Nespresso - and not just because I recently purchased a super-cool Nespresso Essenza espresso machine at Crate & Barrel.
Look at the structural characteristics of Apple iTunes -- and it's easy to see why Nespresso is on its way to becoming the next iTunes. Apple fundamentally created a "closed" system in which digital songs would only play on Apple devices (just try to transfer songs into or out of iTunes!); radically changed the way we think about buying music (a la carte, 1-song-at-a-time for $0.99); and created a "boutique" experience around the product ecosystem (the Apple stores with their Genius Bars and live events). On top of all that, Apple overlaid the impossible-to-define "hipness" quotient over the entire music experience.
Now, compare that to what Nespresso is on its way to replicating within the coffee industry. First of all, Nespresso has created a "closed" system where special Nespresso capsules are required to brew espresso - and these are only available online via Nespresso or at one of a handful of boutique stores in America. These capsules are not usable in any other coffee machine. Secondly, Nespresso has absolutely crushed it when it comes to the single-serve coffee market. Each capsule brews one cup at a time, and that's it. You buy little boxes of capsules on an a la carte basis. Thirdly, there's the growing network of Nespresso boutiques (two in New York City, one in Chicago, and several more planned around the U.S.), where Europhiles cluster around to drink really expensive espresso and then shop upstairs in a minimalistically elegant area. Finally, there's the whole Nespresso branding campaign that is centered around creating a new "coffee culture," complete with its own language and lingo ("grands crus" for coffee, anyone?).
In a digital world, passionate consumers are taking on the role of online brand ambassadors, and nearly anyone has the ability to influence a brand’s reputation online. To explore the role that branding plays in a digital world, American Express OPEN - creators of the Project RE:Brand video web series - hosted an evening salon (Does Branding Still Matter in a Digital World?) in SoHo last night to discuss the issues involved in re-branding a city, an iconic cultural institution and a successful small business.
Panelists Willy Wong, Creative Director of NYC & Company, and Julia Hoffmann, Creative Director of Advertising and Graphic Design at MoMA, kicked off the night with a discussion about the ways that their respective organizations are approaching branding and marketing in a digital age. While the proliferation of digital tools means that even an iconic institution like MoMA can no longer control the conversation online, it does mean that they can shape, inform and contribute to the types of conversations that tourists and visitors are having. Word-of-mouth marketing, in fact, was cited more than once during the evening salon as still the most effective form of marketing there is.
Looking back at what worked well in 2010 from a marketing perspective, Hoffmann cited the phenomenally popular Marina Abramovic "The Artist is Present" exhibition, which combined a personal, one-on-one experience for visitors with an online webcam component that enabled potential visitors from across the Web to tune in and watch the marathon performance. Fans became so caught up in the Abramovic performance that they began remixing parts of the performance online in other digital formats - like the Marina's Chair Twitter feed.
Next, Lesley Horowitz and Dominic Sinesio, Co-Founders of New York branding agency OFFICELAB, discussed their brand makeover project with Iris & Elliot Schreier of Artyarns, a small business that recently extended their offline marketing into the digital space. What was interesting was the aspect of "self-discovery" that occurred when the Schreiers took a closer look at their company's marketing strategy. As they pointed out, you can get so caught up in your small business that you start to lose focus about the way your customers (and potential customers) perceive you. Answering the simple question "Why?" is one way to re-align the execution of your marketing campaign with the underlying purpose of your business. For example, too often, a website will explain what you offer, but not explain why you offer what you do.
If you haven't yet watched the series of videos from Project RE:Brand from American Express OPEN, check out how five New York-area small businesses embarked on a voyage of self-discovery and re-branding by partnering with five New York City branding agencies.
FULL DISCLOSURE: My employer Electric Artists co-hosted last night's event with American Express and worked on the Project RE:Brand web video series. (Congrats Cider!)
Dominic Basulto is a digital thinker at Electric Artists in New York and the former Editor of Fortune's Business Innovation Insider. He is working on a manuscript of a new book on innovation called "Endless Innovation, Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful."
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