Workshop Team 5 Presentation: Introducing NIKE FIT
Concept for Nike's entry to the hand tools market
Other highlights included:
-Exploring Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. The campus is a former TB hospital and village and all RMCAD buildings are restored historic facilities. Can't beat the fresh mountain air!
-Conference facilitation and presentations from Michael and Kathy McCoy, Highground Design Workshops. They were both great facilitators and clearly enjoyed themselves.
Michael covered small scale tools and strategies for people centered design, including ways of asking, ways of envisioning, and ways of trying. Kind of a soup to nuts methods overview.
Kathy covered cultural sustainability -- a concept she is exploring. She said that as a society, we have reached the end of mass communication and economy of scale and are moving towards a period of narrowcasting (personalization of communication) and an economy of individual choice. Globalization is at odds with a desire to preserve local cultures. CULTURAL sustainability is a way to think about preserving, acknowledging and encouraging geographic, ethnic and special interest subcultures. Her goals is to design target messages and communications to reflect the values and needs of the target audience-- a kind of cultural sustainability.
I thought it was an interesting extension of the current focus on environmental sustainability. Are we being too narrow by focusing on sustainable practices for the natural resources? She asks us to give our cultural resources the same amount of care and attention. She observes that globalization is erasing local cultures while micro-movements arise in protest to preserve the old ways of doing things. It's an interesting way to frame the upcoming challenges that face our global society.
-Presentation of projects by antenna design. They are industrial designers whose work includes the NY subway kiosks. Especially interesting was their playful concept work, like this:
This is a proposal for Nyw York City sidewalk interventions inspired by their observations of the city. This was my favorite -- allow city transients sanctified space to sell their wares and legitimize their services.
-Hugh Graham talked about Emergent Design -- involving the storytellers in the creation of the evolving. He calls it "story-centered design".
I talked to him afterward about his Denver stories project.
Here is his process:
-understand context
-consider the subtext
-do some research
-create personas
-explore maps and models
-develop scenarios
-build prototypes
-iterate rapidly
-increase fidelity
-Party at KNOLL! I learned about the woman architect who founded KNoll in the 30s and browsed their incredible textile library.
-Hugh Dubbery talked about Service Design.
10 principles of service design:
1) the value is in the experience
2) experience = reputation
3) sending a message is not enough, it must be recieved
4) learning requires interaction with an environment
5) conversation buildings meaning
6) services are intangibles and unfold through time -- they must be seen as a whole
7) experience is an activity /performance / journey
8) create conditions in which users can design (meta design)
9) build platforms systems and rules
10) take advantage of network effects
-Melody Roberts talked about plans she has in the works to reinvent the model of quick service at McDonalds. She heads up customer experience for the global innovation team at McDonalds. She talked about her process for uncovering problems that no one has identified before. Highlight was a video of comedians ad-libbing ways that McDonalds employees could convey that food is made fresh and to-order.
-Tucker Viemister thinks that branding is a cool tool for good design. He gave us his whole life story including being named after a car, designing the OXO products that were later endorsed by jesus.com, how we should look to bad design (i.e. Nazi domination) to learn lessons, and overall, how brands make stuff better. His philosophy (and the old razorfish mission): everything that can be digital will be.
The value of a brand:
To business:
-cohesion
-shared language
-mission
-differentiation
To the user:
-shortcut
-reliability
-trust
-symbol
Branding = developing the soul of a company.
More senses = more touchpoints = more valuable
Brands make stuff better.
The end!
