Somehow I ended up at an afterparty with Gnarls Barkley last night, and then home at 3:30.

I'm totally too old for this.

Notes from the IDSA 2008 Polar Opposites Conference
Phoenix, Arizona, September 2008

The Industrial Design Society of America held its 2008 national conference in Phoenix, Arizona. This conference, attended by approximately 700 people from all over the world, featured presentations, discussions, conversations and connections between industrial designers, interaction designers, design researchers, and business development experts. I've always been critical of the content at the conference, usually finding value in the networking and casual discourse but not learning a great deal from the actual conference sessions. This year's event had a slightly different feel to it; while there was certainly a great deal of chaff, I was able to find a strong amount of wheat in the specific breakout sessions.

Highlights from the event, and comments on the general theme, are noted below. I've also reproduced my raw notes; I've found that I'm able to synthesize the material from the conference better when I capture as much of it as possible in real time.

One of the biggest changes in the conference content was the push away from a celebration of product and artifact, and towards a less self-congratulatory, more humble research and insight-based set of content. I attended compelling sessions by Emily Pilloton from Project H, the ladies of femme den at Smart Design, Valerie Jacobs from LPK, and others who are supporting a more research, culture, and society-centric way of looking at design. This isn't particularly new, but it's new to see represented in such continuity at the IDSA conference; perhaps the best session I attended, Culture/Counter-Culture by Dan Formosa of Smart Design, had no explicit design content at all. Instead, Dan walked us through the history-transfer of the song Louis Louis, and discussed the temporal aesthetic of culture and influence.

The typical design-in-crowd of FIDSA seemed to have been diminished, and instead of tuxedos and cigars, the conference had an undertone of swimming pools and rum. While the conference is always a booze fest, this year seemed to recognize and embrace the design youth, and celebrate the under-40 crowd's intellect and capacity for deep and meaningful discussion. Additionally, the conference program was filled with young speakers who are in formative and strategic positions at major consultancies. I spoke with Matt Schoenholz; our session, Designing in the Face of Chance, was attended by about 120 people and was well received. Equal crowds were drawn to sessions by under-or-nearly-under-40s Kasey Jarvis (The Design Story of the Nike Trash Talk), Erica Eden & crew (Design and Gender: Thinking About Sex), Valerie Jacobs (Now is the New Future: Designing Into Presence), and Marty Gage & Lauren Serota (Sustainable Development Meets Design Research). Serota also drew quite a crowd with her session "Bond vs. Bourne: Designer's Life Roundtables Featuring Young Design Hotshots and their Seasoned Coutnerparts. I managed to pick Jim Couch's brain for upwards of an hour, learning about his history at Fitch, his work with Jay Doblin, and the patterns of design research and strategy that have existed for the last forty years or so. A sense of optimism was present, due both to the content as well as the age; these people are young, but experienced, and have an idealism that is tempered with the pragmatism of being the "9/11 generation", the "generation X", or the "wired generation".

The conference has, for the last three years, grown continually "green" in content; while much of this is backed by a substantial and meaningful - and well intentioned - want to change, I couldn't help but find irony in the greenwashing in many of the panels, and in the subtle culture of the conference venue.
Perhaps the most obtuse talk I attended was by Bryan Nesbitt, from General Motors; Nesbitt, who claims responsibility for the design of the PT Cruiser, made an obviously artificial and self-defeating attempt to spin GM as a green and progressive company. His comment that "consumers aren't ready for a green car, so we tried to figure out what percentage of green they would be ready for" was met with a dull and blunt silence.

Equally as silly was the general amount of disregard for resources found at the conference venue, the Arizona Biltmore. The venue, beautiful and well manicured, offered excess in all capacities - from the nearly constant ground-watering done to maintain the beautiful, green venue, to the $9 bagels wrapped in paper, placed on a plastic tin, re-wrapped in paper and finally in a thick paper bag, I found myself more aware than ever of my waste and negative impact on the world around me. I received a complimentary KOR ONE water bottle at the Eastman InnovationLab Breakfast; this bottle, claiming to be developed in support of the environment, was accompanied by unintentionally ironic plastic samples that the hundreds of attendees promptly threw out. The conference then offered plastic water bottles, accompanied by plastic cups to pour the water into, at every coffee break.

I enjoyed the beauty of the venue, and I also appreciate the amount of detail that IDSA considers in planning the event; however, I wish that the conference organizers would realize that the $1500 conference pricetag could be cut in half if they were to "put their money where their mouth was" and identify a more simple, more subtle, and more appropriate venue.

This conference was positive, and offered an optimistic look at the future of design; as Bruce Nussbaum described in his opening presentation, "Health, politics - this is the next frontier for design. Work done in civic, non profits, today is an investment for design for tomorrow". This theme, and push towards design of and for culture and society, matches the work Richard Anderson and I have continually featured in interactions magazine, and mirrors the continued contents of frog's Design Mind. Forces in design are coming together to realize that design in a business context is but one of many appropriate venues to frame our profession; design in a social, environmental, and cultural context is of equal, or greater, importance.

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Raw Notes from the IDSA 2008 Industrial Design Conference

Polar Opposite Moment: Shape Grammars & Brand Languages
Craig Vogel and John Cagan
How do you figure out are the right forms? Engineers hadn't figured that out; so, to start, thought about ways of combining an interest in shape grammar and brand language, and looked at the GM brand for Buick. Longest running brand, and one of John's graduate students created software to generate new versions of integrated forms for what the brand could be in the future, and starting to project future brand to look at multiple forms and project futures.
International truck project: 2000 images of international's history, deriving - just like Buick - the same eras of history from the company, and worked to develop and understand the key eras, they can identify key brand elements. "Paradigm shifting truck".
John Cagan new about running the controls, and Craig understood where the controls may go, and that synergy creates a strong sense of polarity.

Bruce Nussbaum
Start with a few stories. Was out in the southwest, at the Indian market in Santa Fe, and there was a big juried contest for indian art, and it's a large event, and very exciting. This is the first year they had a category called "innovation". This was surprising to me, and a person who won was a young woman named Marla Allison, who did a portrait of her mother; she's 18 or 19 years old. In the top right quadrant, she had pulled out the image and had put in a digital thing that played a series of images, and her mother's voice, describing her life. This is it; a traditional portrait, and the subject of that portrait is there telling you about her life. It begins by moving into concentration camp - her terminology; an interim camp for the Japanese during WWII. Her tribe was moved into that housing, because they figured it was good enough for them, and then it goes into her wholes story, and what struck me was that she had changed the frame of painting, by putting in a dynamic element, and having the object of the portrait tell her own story. The next iteration would be interactive, and you could talk to her mother, and she could answer questions.
Another person at that market who changed the frame of things was a guy named Pat Pruitt, an Indian, who grew up in Phoenix. His early work was in body piercing, and he owned a shop called Halo, and his work was in stainless steel, and it evolved into some very beautiful and sophisticated jewelry. I'm wearing one now. What he did was evolve his body piercing into a new form of art that had basis in native American Indian tradition, and if you could of look at this, it has beautiful river or cloud patterns, and it strikes at the soul of native American culture, but it's made of stainless steel.
It comes from a totally new area of art.
This is dramatic in many ways; one of the most important is that the price of stainless steel is a lot cheaper; beautiful art, done in a different way, and in a less expensive manner. This could be thought of as disruptive innovation.
This was "crazy cool".
Telling these stories because before I went to the market, I was in a funk. The great polarity for me was in the field of design itself; did the growing success of design in the business world mean that design was becoming the world orthodoxy? Were we now positioned in a period of acceptance and implementation? After years of creativity, is design now all about execution?
Then I went outside my usual frame, and realized that getting out of the frame may be critical to design in general. I called someone I knew at the Rockefeller foundation - Maria Blair - and heard about how Rockefeller is trying to reinvent the entire non profit field.
Iteration, prototyping - philanthropy is being remade into a new thing called social innovation. In the process, design is being challenged once again. To shift the frame from business to society may be the way from preventing it from turning into the new orthodoxy. This will create new design tools, new methods, and new ideas.
Health, politics - this is the next frontier for design. Work done in civic, non profits, today is an investment for design for tomorrow. It may push design's own creativity forward. There's already a new innovation institution called DNGO - Design based NGO. It's in India. Why not DE? Design based education.
The polarity of design is between success and stagnation, and that can be altered by changing the frame of design, and moving it into other spaces, and seeking inspiration for design in other spaces, like the reservation. We will hear over the next few days of many ideas of polarity. For me, the most important polarity revolves around saving design from its own success, and for that, we need to go out our frame.
Half of this state is an Indian reservation. Go to their museums; spend some real time getting inspired by a great Navajo painter who has an exhibition there, a great potter, and go to Halo the body piercing shop that is now becoming an art gallery.
Design needs to evolve too; we need some crazy cool in our own field.

Marti Barletta
Designing for Women
I hold design in such esteem. Design is about making new products, but you guys make the world a better place ,and you make things work better, and you make things more affordable and accessible for everyone. There is, however, the business side of design too. Design differentiates the brand, and gives you something in the marketplace that will cause your product to stand out. You are asked to reduce cost, in order to build sales. But who is doing the buying?
Sometimes, people have lost touch of who is doing the buying - "the consumer", as if all are the same, or it's just an age difference. The person doing the buying, in most instances, is a female person. If you are partial to the belief that men and woman are different, then you need to act on it. Women deserve a special focus, because women do 55% of consumer electronics purchases, 80% of home improvement decisions, 52% of new vehicle purchases, 66% of computers.
A lot of these are typically considered "male categories", because men are more interested in these categories than woman. They find the technology categories fascinating. For the most part, the average woman is way less interested in technology than the average man is. Psychologists have all kinds of reasons why people get interested in these, but when you are first introduced to a category, the early adopters are almost always men. But after the bugs get worked out and the things actually work, you start to consider who you can actually sell to - and that's woman. Woman don't care how the things work at all, and they don't care about going up the learning curve. They want it to work and be reliable and that's where these categories are now.
Many of you may design business products, and it may not be high on your radar screen that woman are high on the B2B purchasing scale. Women own 41% of US companies, where a women has 50% ownership or later. That number is growing continuously, and women have been starting 2 out of 3 startups.
1 out of 7 employees in the United States works for a women business owner.
And on the corporate side, 49% of managers and administrative professionals are women; 53% of purchasing departments; and 58% of wholesale and retail buyers.
These are the people who are making decisions about buying office products and office supplies. So what are women looking for, and how can you make them happy?
Consider buying styles. Men decide up front, focus on essentials, and work by a process of elimination. Women work as a process of discovery, look at more options, add criteria, and decide at the end.
Prioritization vs. Maximization.
When you meet the expectations of women, you generally exceed the expectations of men; designing and marketing to women generally expands the appeal among men.
Consider that women split their time differently from men. 75% of woman 25-65 work outside the home and then work inside the home more than men do (shopping, chores, child care). These women aren't busy, they are "time starved".
Retailers are mystified by women shopping with children. Kids in tow - conveniences - consider strollers, parking, food and drinks, supervised play areas. IKEA leaned into that, and realized that the store should be accessible and more attractive than the competition.
What do women want that you might not have thought about before?
Consider: Easy to handle, easy to use single-handedly, easy to store, easy to clean, and easy to understand

femmeDEN
Design and Gender
Started when a client said they were having a hard time connecting with their female customers. Request a "few female designers" to help balance out the design team. The process was inspirational, and so the women began to talk about designing for gender and thinking about design in this way. It's now considered part of Smart Design's core values.
Smart Design was the pioneer in the universal design movement, designing the Oxo material. Moving away from that, away from Design for All, and now towards Understanding People: Baby Boomers, Stress, Disadvantaged.
Why is Gender Important?
Women have evolved from a powerless position to a powerful position. Women are embracing the differences between genders. Women are taking on new roles, and women are marrying later in life. They are spending more time living alone than they have previously, and are spending more time doing male tasks, and vica versa. Women are fixing computers, sinks, and doing DIY in the house. As women take on these new roles, they are adapting to new products that weren't necessarily designed for them explicitly. We've seen an oversimplified take on the women market.
So many projects come in the door intended to appeal to the needs of women, but they are designed for soccer moms. That's fine - that's a huge target, and they spend a lot of money, but just because you design for them doesn't mean you "get all women". Not all women relate to motherhood; with any stereotype, you run the risk of marginalizing some. Women are financially powerful, because they buy or influence 80% of goods and services.
Women make about 1 trillion dollars a year, but spend about 2 trillion dollars a year.
They also make up the world's 3rd largest economy.
While women buy 80% of goods, they make up about 15% of industrial designers. To capitalize on that market, we need to find ways to find the female perspective.
How to please a woman. Benefits, not features. The whole experience. Her body. Her lifecycle. How it makes her feel.

Bryan Nesbit
VP North American Design, GM
Leave your mark on the world.
Some of the things that are changing in our business; a lot's going on. I want to share some of that with you. My background - that's me and my sister, in my dad's 69 stingray. He refused to buy the four door. I had the privilege of going to Art Center, which cost a lot of money and took a long time to pay it back. 55,000 in financial aid debt by the time I graduated; 1990-1993. Couldn't find a job for months. Moved back in with the folks and sold computers over the phone; got a phone call from Chrysler. Wouldn't pay my ticket to interview, but they offered Bryan a job and he started working.
Chrysler Tech Center. On a run; not a part of Daimler. 1997 Chrysler CCV Concept. Archetype Research. Lead designer on the PT Cruiser. Phone call to run the tech center Chevy studio in Detroit. That's a big deal - that's a big brand; Worked on and oversaw a number of exteriors. Malibu, HHR, Saturn Sky. GM Design Europe, Frankfurt DE. Feb 2004 - June 2007. Objectives to consolidate engineering, and globalize a lot of things. Works council issues, and an exterior studio but no interior studio. Lots of issues. Made some progress. Worked on some great brands; opal - sold in the UK.
Opportunity to work on SAAB. Great qualities, but "we don't sell many of them". A great time to create the Saab studio, and a chance to design an entire brand, find some new signature cues. Global design headquarters - the tech campus. It's quite a nice place to work; own the capitol budget. The atmosphere has tremendous legacy. The automotive design world came out of this studio. 1927 LaSalle. First GM art and color vehicle. It becomes quite significant as you walk the hallways in there. Very fruitfull at the time.
1939 Buick Y
1999 Cadillac Evoq.
A way to examine a few ideas, promote brand, do some testing. 1999 Evoq.
Design is more than 1300 creative personnel. 2000 total global employees. It's a big office. It's in Detroit MI, but there are studios all around the world in the key markets. Working global, "it's just a joy". 6am meetings, 6pm meetings. It's a lot of communication, and with the different languages and timezones, it can be complex.
When great vehicle design is combined with perceived quality, it results in compelling exteriors, elegant functional interiors, and seamless fits and finishes. Global planning reports to Bob; he's a designer. He believes in artistic expression, and can create and achieve a compelling emotional reaction from a consumer. He understands the emotional appeal.
Things get siloed very quickly; Design, Engineering, and Manufacturing. When you sit in a car, your senses tell you things about the car. We can kind of recognize where the process broke down. When everything works well, it's obvious.
GM put design at the board, at a management and strategic level. It got design into an equal playing field with the rest of the organization. You have to interface with the organization, and it's kind of hard to do - you never have enough people to do it. So that's what we have to solve. The collaboration has been great, and that's essential.
Engineers were in charge of components, color and trim, and appearance. Now we can control our own destiny on the engineering output. That's a huge advantage for us, to really drive the organization and look at the tool, and figure out how to put out the part from the way we originally specked it.
The 2005 Malibu. It drives good; it has the emotional appeal of a cinderblock.
Look at that interior - it's like a joint venture with Rubbermaid.
Painful.
The 2008 Malibu. Under the new changes, we were able to control where we wanted to go. The average transaction price has gone up; same contented vehicle. From 81 days to turn, to 16.
It made a tremendous splash, and now the company appreciates design. Design is showing value through return. Redoing the Opel Vectra. Extruded; where's the interior studio? We might not have one.. It's over there in the corner. It's all the second tier designers, and no one wants to work on the interior, because those are the second class citizens. IT's the land of misfit toys.
You've got to be kidding me.
I took the organization, separated the interior designers and the exterior designers. Put the glam jobs in the old studio, took the components, color and trim - stacked them in the same space.
The 2009 Opel Insignia is the replacement for that.
Emerging markets; where people need to be thinking about. The customer is changing; I recognize this. I was reminded, GTA is racing. You google it today and it means grand theft auto. Milennial Mindset.
Managing the brand becomes a huge issue for us. We don't have a good track record of doing this; there's been a lot of bad decisions. Understanding how to build brand equity; the essence of the brands, understanding what happens in the market segmentation, and understanding demographics, and get a little more focus. Same target group? Do they read the same magazines? Do they eat in the same restaurants? Do they own the same cars?
Korean designers, Chinese designers all of the world that need to understand the brand. If we are designing the products in Korea, or Asia… we want to make sure there is understanding. The designer who just knows the brand better than anyone else doesn't cut it any more. A global brand studio helps manage that identity.
The Green Demographic? How will it break up in the future? That will be very important for our designers to understand. We invent our keycode on materials, so we understand the supplier vs. what's appropriate for the customer.
Moving from a mechanical system to an electronic system.. the battery packaging.

Valerie Jacobs
LPK
How do we define design for the greater good?

10. Aquaduct bike concept, by IDEO
9. Watercone. Turns bad water into potable.
8. Moneymaker irrigation pump. Makes land harvestable in dry seasons.
7. Sugarcane charcoal. Developed by d-lab at MIT.
6. Green cell, a universal battery concept.
5. Exco exco learning tablet, the second generation of olpc
4. Freedom HIV cellphone team
3. Anti-virus cap. Simple rubber cap, attached to an aluminum cap. Facilitates safe disposable of hazardous waste.
2. Wii fit.
1. Leapfrog family health book.

Hippo Roller.
Become the SF chapter project.
Community has been an incubator since Hippo Roller has been in existence, and they have six or seven different versions. They've been a part of the community for over 10 years. The social impact is starting to be tangible; one of the stories they tell is about how fetching water was traditionally done by women and children, but now the men are stepping up and it's more common for them to fetch the water. They've measured, over the last ten years, increased literacy rates in women, and more women are starting businesses because they don't have to stick around their house and fetch water three times a day.
Engineers without borders. Instead of making the materials in south Africa, produce the mold and ship that.
Take the product out of product design. Instructional manual on how to make your own water filter. Function vs. impact; instead of thinking about the immediate function and what the product looks like, think about how to put the design in the hands of the users in more immediate ways.
Learning from Approtech - appropriate technologies - fairly new form of engineering, but a lot of it overlaps with design principles. Starting to understand that it's not all that different than designing for the bottom of the pyramid. Make the user a codesigner, so there's always an element of user engagement and the object isn't fully functional until the user engages with it.
Bridging markets. Not just in profit, where you buy a luxury item and a small % of it funds a school or something, but bridging markets through an actual product. Whatever the toy looks like, the thing that is bridging the two markets is the item, or concept.
Design is the new microloan. It's a form of capitol. Microfinance has become fairly widespread, and it's pretty effective in giving people the amount they need to support themselves. The moneymaker pump, instead of a check, you give them a tool, that is a form of capitol and that tool enables the family or person in the same way that the check would.
Design is public health. Design is something we rely on, that can heal us. Applying design in the public health arena, for civic public health, as a way of thinking about design.

Nike. Trash Talk. Kasey Jarvis.
We weren't allowed to make a logo with three arrows; we had to have four. Leftover Night at the Factors; the design story of the Nike Trash Talk. I've got a bit of a dumpster diver streak in me. My wife's brother knew all the times that McDonalds would through away the burgers that had been sitting in the warmer too long.
In Vietnam, a facility that holds waste. When you train yourself to see waste, you see it everywhere. Fabric, tongues; scrap pieces can't be divided out from the foam, and it ends up in a mess.
Not all garbage in this process comes from trimming or flashing; when a company goes to a vendor and requests a specific color, that vendor has to run a certain quantity of the material in that color. Often, it's a large quantity of yardage that get thrown away.
Leather, rubber, synthetic leather, foam chunks, laminated foam: these are the big problem zones.
There's a direct connection between the leather and the cow hide: the scrap is waste.
GM announced last week that it would eliminate landfill use in 50% of their factories by 2010. Mostly metal scraps, but also down to the design center. You have a milling machine by your desk, and clay on a wood buck. Part of the new strategy - recycle the material.
Worn Again. A shoe company that takes surplus material and makes shoes out of them.
If you are paying a stitching operator to go crazy on little squares, it offsets the cost of the material you save. The patterns are computer-stitched; without this, the project wouldn't have happened. The bottom view shows the foam chunk midsole; a huge amount of scrap in midsole and foam. It doesn't feel like garbage, anymore - it just feels like something you are using for a cushion.
Steve Nash; one of the symptoms of innovation work, you get tons of ideas that can't make it through the system and to market. There were a few people that were scared, but the project pushed through.
Another innovation that came out of the process was to use boxes. At the factory, you make a product, and put it in a box. And then you put those boxes in a box. And then you put that in a box. Huge amount of waste in the high volume of boxes. Take the same material from the master outer container and include it in the shoebox.
Hang-tags. Threw out the tissue paper, and put chunks of master outer container and added a note.

Lorraine Justice
Director, School of Design
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Perceptions of China by a Westerner

There's a perception that China doesn't care about IP. In China, patents and IP are very important, and they take it very seriously. China will soon surpass the west for patent protection and IP security. They are creating a system for managing this; all of you will then need to file patents in China to get your work protected.
Early applications filed in China; Invention - 2002 - 39,806 patents; 2007 - 153,060. Utility - 2002: 92,166, 2007: 148,391; Design - 2002: 73,572, 2007: 253,675. And of the 253,675, 121,296 were granted.
There's a system in place, that's growing, in mainland China. People get it; they are starting to apply for design patents to protect their work in China. These are Chinese people applying for patents in China.
Priority Patent Areas: Traditional Chinese medicine; non-alcoholic drinks; food; Chinese input method (taking the Chinese language, and incorporating it into Technology. How do you work with the Chinese language); medicine; semiconductor; mobile communication; wireless transmission; tv systems.
Amendments to China's patent law; the year 2000 was the last time this changed.
The "Absolute novelty" test will be more strictly enforced, and it will be tougher to patent things. First file in China will be relaxed, but encouraged; Chinese people can now file in the US or Europe first. China presently lacks domestic core technology patents, and they are therefore streamlining the process for filing for these things. Bringing the law up to international standards.
Americans think that Chinese manufacturers are taking over the world; we've watched our companies take advantage of lower labor costs. The factories in China are evolving, and it's not an easy task. Many of the manufacturers who moved out of Hong Kong are having trouble. 10,000 out of 70,000 companies that moved across the river are going out of business. The five "unfriendlies" for doing business in the China for the US: the dropping of the US dollar, the increased labor costs and holidays (upgrading the quality of life for the workers), increased material costs, increased Chinese tariffs, and increased transportation costs.
The west says "China isn't creative", but China says "What cultural revolution?". China had a cultural revolution in the 60s and 70s, and took anyone who was educated or in the arts, and took them to the countryside, and made it incredibly difficult to do any work that wasn't government sponsored.
The new generation, however, is able to create from morning to night; entrepreneurs are starting their own businesses; it's very exciting to go to China and witness this. All of the education systems are being renovated. History goes up and down; the government shifts.
China says "Stay out of our human rights issues", but Americans say "Censorship! Abuse!".
China is so large that they do a lot of things to keep a harmonious society. Compare to the soviet union, which has been in constant turmoil; where does the right and wrong start? In the west, we like to argue our point; we like to push an issue, so we work against harmony.
The Chinese people have enjoyed a better life because of manufacturing, but the villages are decimated and tracks of land are taken from people.
Higher quality, patent produced products will likely use more designs and designers. But there will be less low-end manufacturing, which may mean that less people are employed. This is a chance for China to become unstable; the rural people have suffered greatly.
Less manufacturing means spreading wealth to poorer nations, like Vietnam, Cambodia, and South America. Manufacturers are moving to other countries - "manufacturing in China" is starting to evolve already.
Small businesses may suffer a lot if manufacturing leaves China, but China may then allow more product into China from other countries.

Xiangyang Xin
Chinese believe in doing their best and making the best of it; through believing in themselves. Tai Chi; yin and yang together.
Pearl River Delta Crisis, but it's not an issue for China as a whole.
China has an eco-nomic system. Scale and diversity allow China to build a self sustained system. China has no "Chinese market" - there are hundreds of markets, and each of them is as big as a small country.
Many people worry - will China become like the 90s Japanese economy, due to the change ratio of the currency? I don't think that will happen, just because China at first is less dependent on the American economy. It's not yet fully globalized; it's localized the whole economic system.
Ideological China; it's diverse. Communist, capitalist. Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Catholics, Christians.
The Chinese government is starting an initiative called "Building a Harmonious Society". It's about maintaining political order, towards a more open society with traditional values.
"Black cat, white cat, all that matters is that it catches mice". Deng Xiaoping.
Environmental problems in Chinese are shown in this slogan; the flexibility of Chinese, in principle, is that it's open to interpretation. It's about economic development; the mice may become economic development. Don't take Chinese things too seriously; it's about moving forward with time. It's about flexibility.
The Chinese government has become effective from its experiences of dealing with extreme external pressure, about human rights, about democracy. The government is efficient and effective.
There is a generational gap concerning openness and individualism; it's the same as what happened in the US. The oldest generations thing the younger generations are too open, too casual. At this moment, the US is more open compared to China; however, think about how quickly and vastly the Chinese have changed.
Sea Turtle, in China, is someone who is educated overseas and comes back to China. Confidence; global vision; flexibility, and adaptability. There is a general boost of self-confidence in the country.
China is repeating the mistakes Americans have made over the last 100 years. You need to examine China in its historical context. The rise and fall of Chinese dynasties - there is a history of huge rise and huge fall, and a repetitious manner of movement.
You go to China, you become Chinese.

Trend watching.
Purity. Rejecting pollutants at the personal, communal, and planetary levels. We crave clean in all its manifestations. Once purified, protecting these environments becomes our objective - building barriers around the delicate and divine.
Resource-centered design. The planet's resources are limited, and as we grow closer to using our last reserves, we must seek new solutions. Fossil fuels, water, and other natural resources are nor promised in abundance, and we must design accordingly. Water meter tap. New water meter taps act as speedometer to encourages users to reduce their water usage.
Online, offline blur. Our digital lives blur with reality in an increasingly fluid interchange of technology and humanity. Momofuku Ko.
Collaborating consumers. Unique and authentic, we celebrate our different skills and talents by working with each other for each other's benefit, rewarded with the satisfaction of our role whether novice or expert.
Higher power benefit. Weary of rat-race consumerism, we seek authentic experiences in our life and our products. We nurture our souls and turn our focus inward to the things that truly matter.
Customization. In the wake of mass production, we look for something special and unique that represents our personal style and build our identity. Crushpad; you can make your own wine. Sneakart.
Synthetic biology. Combining biology and engineering, synthetic biology is a burgeoning field that allows clients to design and build all new biological systems and functions by creating new genomes from scratch.
Nanotechnology.
RFID. Radio-frequency has become a powerful tool for remotely communicating identity and other small bits of information.
Kinetic power. Human powered systems are no longer a thing of the past, with an energy crisis at hand. Fun ways to power through movement lets users get a workout.

Black & White
Andrew Shapiro, Fitch
Director of Insights and Strategy, working across brand and product development studio. Innovation is something we do quite often. The crux of black and white with organizations is that it's a yes or no proposition: you either do it or you don't. What we've found is that it's not actually black and white, it's grey and murky.
Companies don't know why they are doing what they are doing, but it seems to be working. We don't know where we've been; there's very little knowledge that is carried forward to help justify where innovation is going. When you have to innovate, the knowledge might not be the right knowledge to take something to market. The process is quite blurry; people pay attention to specific parts, or don't, based on their bias. Innovation requires a disparate group of people, but they all have a bias. You all say you are trying to solve a problem with new thinking, or thinking out of the box, but everyone comes to the table with a bias. No one really wants to listen to each other; when the finance guys talk, my eyes glaze over. Numbers seem to make things important, but numbers don't make anything sell in the marketplace.
Consider the magnitude of overabundance, as it translates across categories. Let's say you make peanut butter and you want to innovate around peanut butter. You are already presented with too many options.
Which way to go? Instead of being black and white, it's quite grey. You always have to have some "true north", in order to have direction for your efforts. Even if it's vaguely phrased - let's explore "fresh", or what a soda or beverage can own.. How can you innovate around coffee at home?
Once you give people that direction, people have a tendency to run like hell.
The faster you chase your shadow, the more elusive it becomes. If I've given you some direction and you have your bias, you are never going to catch your shadow. The faster you run, you become your own worst enemy. You want to run through things, talk over other people, justify your perspective.
Slow down. Give it some further thought. Ideas are a dime a dozen; if I give you direction, come back with 100 ideas and one of them will be right. It's exhausting, and if you don't know what you are doing or why you are doing it, how do you know that ideas aren't more expensive?
You need to have a clear path. When you start out on something like this, it's going to be grey - you have to be comfortable with ambiguity, and you have to have a clear path. This is the idea of trying to get some true north, focus your efforts, and when you lose your way… you need to have something to go back to. You need to be able to extrapolate out what people are saying.
Consider the idea of innovation / gap of uncertainty / innovative.
Risk vs. Familiarity. The risk is the innovation side; you need to be willing to accept a lot of risk. Familiarity is more about innovative; it's familiar, but you've taken a new twist on it. It's where you start to waffle, between risk and familiar.
Consider the Newton; it captured what people wanted and needed, but the challenge was that they tried to make it so adaptable that it became its Achilles heal. It would learn how you wrote things, and become your personal digital assistant.
A "skin job" is still innovative, even when it isn't successful. This falls into the gap of uncertainty. You don't know why it's being presented to you.

Lauren Serota, Philip White (?)
IDSA
Opportunities for improving ecological performance
Identify wasted materials.
Identify wasted energy. Energy is wasted in many ways, including electricity use, thermal energy, transportation use. Examples - laundry, air conditioning, hot water use, lighting.
Implement greener technologies. Designers can study new technologies and actively work with companies and suppliers. LED lamps, cellulosic biofuels, windmills.
Extend product longevity. We can identify the amount of service that a product delivers and find alternatives that are economically viable. The opposite of planned obsolescence.
Understand user perceptions. Research perceptions about brands, and understand how they interact with and feel about greener products.
Opportunities to improve ecological performance through changing behaviors.
Design research is understanding the people that will use or buy what you make.
What do you want to learn? Buy, evolve, have ideas, use, transform, need ideas
Who? Groups - Individuals; How? Talk - Observe; What? Respond - create? Where - artificial, context? Consider a shop along; in context observation; self documentation; experiences and methods.
Method: Experience vs thing, Ideal vs Current
Make a process map, describing the steps in the process, and think about how they want the steps to be in an experience; Create an ideal package; work in teams. Create your ideal product.
Who are we going to talk to? What do they own? Where do they use it? Where do they live?

Culture/Counter-culture
Dan Formosa, PhD, Smart Design
A quick description of my background, coming from a US perspective of where I was born. Born in the 1950s; the age of the United States in 1950 and 1960, shrinking; on the wave of the baby boomers. When the baby boomers are growing up, there's lots of social changes going on; the 1950shad a lot of segregation in the US and in the south. Different forms of segregation, and then the civil rights movements. Equality among races. 1970 led to the feminist movement, equal rights for females. Lots of stuff happening in the 60s, and when I started Smart Design in 1980, we were all born around the same time.
People go through an era, and go through the same experience. Coming out of college in the 70s, ready to change the world. Protest, and unrest, and government is evil, and opposing forces. Came out of college with the idea of using design to change something, and design had a social impact, but in the 60s and 70s, design was about the thing; Smart was about focusing on people instead of the thing.
When we first started working, we had work with corningglass. Very early on, sitting around and waiting for work to come in; designed sunglasses. Sure, we'll design sunglasses, but we can't find any standards or dimensions on designing sunglasses, and we want these to work with as many people as possible. Ergonomic study of designing sunglasses, and measuring people's faces, but let's pull in methods from cognitive psychology; I may know how wide someone's head is, but I have no perception of what's too tight or too l;oose.
Put them all in a database; part of the reason we proposed this whole project is because we were young and fearless. Extremely successful; rather than fit 4 of 10, we were fitting 7 of 10. 85% of the population. Followed that train of thought, and thinking of design for everybody as a good idea. Coming up in the 80s, if we were designing scissors, we were thinking of right and left handed people. We created the first left handed pencil. The logo reads a certain direction. So when we meet people, we give them two pencils.
By the 1990s, we were designing kitchen tools for Oxo, and now we are expanding that to include universal design and inclusive design, but also looking at all aspects of social responsibility in design. Not only cognitive and physical, but also cultural issues, subcultural issues, gender issues, geographic issues, social, and the environment.
In coming through design and doing what we do now, may be much different than when we came out of college.
The idea of an "average customer"; that's interesting, but we don't care about the average person. We really need to know the extremes. Who's the tallest, shortest, weakest, etc - who are the people on the edges? We weren't using an average person, and we looked instead on actual real people at the edges. It's not a conglomerate; it's specific people to understand their issues or problems or challenges. Our definition of mainstream is the stud we are designing; we are trying to widen that margin.
Consider the US population of adults. In this case, I'm going from age 20 to 100. The babyboomers are starting to develop arthritis; a much larger percentage of older people may have arthritis, but we have much more people around the age of 50 or the late 40s, before you get an even distribution. The same is true with hearing problems; center for disease control has tracked this with many ailments, and they follow a similar pattern - it's not the older people that we are assisting, it's as many younger people and s older.
When we designed the oxo, it wasn't focused on age, it was focused on ability.
We talked to a group of people about daily activities in the house. Typically we don't do this in a group, but everyone in the photo (shown) is blind. Some are legally blind; talking to blind people about design is that they know a lot about design. They'll tell you about every click and curve and bump. Things that you as a designer don't even think about. If you've never talked to blind people about design, it can be truly eye opening.
Sandra has debilitating arthritis, but she really likes her RAZR phone.
Lauren, a self-imposed disability - long fingernails.
Look forward to 2011. The baby boomers will be entering their 60 or 65. How are we going to take care of those people?
These people don't look like your stereotypical old people; weekend bikers, Harley drivers. Three wheeled bikes; side cars. Little towns, and pay attention, and you see a lot of things that break stereotypes. Three females in a photo of a fire department.
Six real people. Rather than think about an average person or a persona or some stereotype of a person, let's look at six real people and include them through the entire design process. The six people have names and faces and we can call them to the office and bounce ideas off of them and send them home with prototypes at will. It's not imaginary.
Our discussions get very warm. We don't make assumptions; we speculate things, and then call the real person, and have them come in and see it or learn about it. We've identified a group of people, and in addition to what we normally do, we've followed through with this expert panel. When they get to phase 2 or 3, they become very design savvy. We can identify with these people personally.
I can relate to the six people much more than I can relate to an "average person" or a persona. My thought is that there are six billion people in the world. I'm not sure we need to make up another one to test our theories.
With 6 billion people in the world, if I'm going to talk to six people, then I'm talking to one one billionth of the world population when I'm designing something. That seems like a small amount, but at least I'm solving problems that six people like. It's a point of view.
Louie louie was recorded in 1963. Shindig; written by Richard Berry in 1957. It was written as an R&B song. Richard Berry, a song writer in LA. He got his inspiration from a recording done in the middle 50s by Rene Touzet, who had an orchestra that did a lot of cha cha. A latin theme. Rene adapted a song that was created a year earlier, and he did something a little funny with the cha cha beat, 1-2-1-2-3. He did El Loco Cha Cha. The crazy cha cha.
Another song from Chuck Berry, called Havana Moon. He's got a different beat, but consider the lyrics: Havana Moon, me all alone, me stand and wait, for boat to come. Chuck Berry is singing a sea chanty, and Richard Berry took that, and a song from Johnny Mercer, which is written form the point of view of a guy at a bar talking to a bar tender.
It was a few years later, in the northwest; it's always had a much different version of rock and roll than the rest of the country. A few years later, it started to be played at dances in the Seattle area, and the Portland area.
Rockin Robin Roberts and the Wailers. He does an amazingly great version. Let's give it to ‘em right now.
Paul Revere and the Raiders.
Kingsmen version. They were very young - 16 or 17. They were out of tune, and quickly set up their work, and did only one take, and the microphone was set to high, and the lead singer was wearing braces, and the engineer did the first take and said "fine, let's go with it". And that was the version that was released. The version is unintelligible.
The Paul Revere version was much more popular. But a rumor started to spread that the Kingsmen were singing obscene lyrics. Some kids printed out their version of what they suspected the actual lyrics are. Chuck Berry's version and in Richard Berry's version, the guy never gets the girl. In the obscene lyrics, the guy gets the girl.
That sheet started to get passed around, and every emerging baby boomer began to see it. It worked its way to schoolbuses and study halls, and every baby boomer who got it, treated it as a joke. They didn't think it was obscene lyrics, they just wanted to be bad. The governer of Indiana banned the song, and you cannot read a biography of the guy without reading that he's the guy who banned the song.
Schoolteachers would get a hold of the copy, and they sensed trouble from rock and roll, and they sensed change. A letter was sent to Robert Kennedy, who was the AG of the united states, by a parent. He sent it to J. Edgar Hoover, who personally got involved in the investigation of the song. They interviewed the record company, the kingsmen, Paul revere, and the attitude was that he was crazy, and nuts. They were defiant, they didn't want to give material to the FBI. They never learned the true singer of the album. This investigation by the FBI went on for 30 months.
The FBI was torn as to if this was the obscene version, and to every baby boomer entering their hormonal stage in life, this was a huge joke. The same way you taunt your parents or teachers, and now we are taunting the FBI, and we think the FBI is crazy. If the FBI cannot figure out the lyrics, then how can it be obscene?
A few months later, kennedy was killed, but they couldn't give us a lot of confidence.
The song has now been recorded 1500 times. It's been the state song for the state of Washington.
Mischief Maker Mary. How many people have been brand loyal over the last few years? How about switching brands? Seeing a rack of products from different brands, and having the item in front of you? Brands are losing their allure, and their meaning, because you don't need to depend on brand anymore. You have other things to depend on. You depend on Google instead. On Amazon, you find a review from people like Mischief Maker Mary, who wrote a review on Amazon. There are many people on the internet, giving their reviews, which is a human thing to do. Canon has 142,491 employees. Which should I depend on for the value of the product? I rely in MMM, because I come from a world where business is evil, and I trust a person I've never met over the trust of a brand.
Why don't we just call up the people writing the reviews and have them write the copy? We did a package that we were inspired by what Buck, and other people had to say.
Amazon and Google don't mean those companies, it means the power of the people that are giving me their real experience. Design isn't about the thing, it's about what those experiences actually are.