The Near Field Communications (NFC) Community Circle of MIT’s Enterprise Forum met this week to discuss the current and potential impact of NFC on health and wellness. An interesting cross-section of experts in the field, from developers to marketers, debated the relative success of NFC to date. Though there was a general belief that NFC will eventually make the most substantial in-roads in mobile consumer heath and wellness applications,  but there was also a very cautious optimism, as NFC has not taken off as quickly as many in the room may have liked. It was felt that NFC needs a “killer app” to make consumers aware of the value to them of NFC tags, without them necessarily knowing exactly how it works or why it works. Reference was made to the success of branding and marketing of the terms Bluetooth and GPS to the extent that they have become part of everyday vernacular with consumers understanding what benefit they bring to their devices. Another panelist pointed out that NFC is still a relatively new technology, more than a decade younger than RFID, which may help explain the less than stellar integration and adoption so far.

From the health and wellness perspective the emerging “Quantified Self” trend continues to gain momentum and is a busy space with numerous players. However, the examples of successful integration of NFC into medical solutions were not as extensive as one might have thought. One example of how NFC helps medical staff avoid medication errors was not enough to convince. One problem seems to be a lack of riveting, captivating use cases that differentiates NFC and data collection and response from more powerful Bluetooth connections, used by most of the more commercial players in field relying on people’s smartphones or the smart wristbands and watches that are flooding the market. All agree that in all scenarios data needs to be unobtrusively collected in real time. The higher the burden on the consumer to play a role in its collection the less likely they are to collect.

In the end, as one panelist put it, “adoption will be driven bottoms-up by making it magic for consumers”… for whom it is a solution. He outlined 5 factors that will contribute to this adoption cycle including “increased interest in wellness products and services, better security options, smartphone ubiquity, improvement in both passive and active NFC tags, and empowered developer ecosystems.” I’m sure there were more than a few in the room hoping that Apple might apply their magic touch, but leaving NFC out of the iPhone 5 caused a lot of disappointment.

Though NFC has a couple of advantages over Bluetooth, including speed of connection and reduced interference from other signals and devices, the identified uses seem very focused on one-way transactions, especially mobile payments but also security badges, runner’s race-day chips, and travel tickets. However, they have the characteristics of tactical, one-way services that can easily be satisfied in another way. I feel that the future will be in services that combine the best of Bluetooth and NFC to produce services people value.  As a standalone data service is NFC data sufficient to be fully smart about its tactics and engagement model such that it always relevant to individual consumers, because we know that different consumer personas are motivated by different things? Ultimately, whether we want to propel a purchase, the loss of a pound, or payment at the checkout, the consumer behavior we are trying to influence will come from a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, and the value it provides naturally and seamlessly integrated into lives. It will also need to be seamlessly integrated into other channels that provide related and similar services such that the consumer feels that it is a natural part of the consistent, seamless, and integrated service ecosystem.

In the literature on design, product development and innovation, the word ‘design’ refers to many things: a creative art, a phase of product development, a set of functional characteristics, an aesthetic quality, a profession, and more. In the lexicon of more and more companies, however, the word has come to denote the totality of activities and competencies that gather all relevant information and transform it into a new product or service.

Design is now understood as a core activity that confers competitive advantage by bringing to light the emotional meaning products and services have – or could have – for consumers, and by extracting the high value of such emotional connections. This evolution is creating the design-focused enterprise, an organization that uses consumer-centered product development to move quickly and effectively from intimate customer knowledge to successful product and service offerings.

Much has been written about design’s ability to increase productivity, product performance and the value of the emotional connection with customers, but little about design’s contribution to an overall better understanding of the consumer. There has been discussion of the role of consumer knowledge in driving innovation, but not of the practical techniques for letting consumers’ unspoken, often unconscious, needs and desires emerge and for infusing such insights into all functional teams.

Nevertheless, consumer-centered product design is an emerging best practice in many industries, particularly those characterized by practical products that hold no emotional appeal; in which competition is based on increasingly less profitable attempts to cut cost or improve performance; where once-distinctive products are becoming commoditized; or where there is little room left for product innovation.

Among these best practitioners, design is viewed as the art and science of putting all the pieces together – technical, financial, operational and emotional. As most companies already lavish quite a bit of expertise on the technical, financial and operational aspects of what they do, it is this equal focus on the emotional connection with customers that stands out as novel. This newly co-equal dimension influences and informs the others, producing new and unexpected results.

These companies still have strong technology, operations, marketing, research and manufacturing competencies, but these are guided by an organization-wide, shared understanding of who their customers are and how the design of their products or services can best shape the customer experience.

Traditional consumer research – surveys, focus groups, etc. – asks people what they want. However, while customers can reliably express their preferences for incremental improvements in existing products and services, they cannot reliably express their higher-order needs and aspirations, which may call for radical redesign or for entirely new offerings. Although these higher-order aspects are what form the basis of a customer’s emotional connections to any offering, the customer himself may deem them irrelevant, insignificant or even embarrassing, or may simply not be conscious of them.

Because traditional consumer research is unlikely to bring such insights to light, it often provides technical, marketing and operational departments with inadequate information and debatable strategic objectives, resulting in rejection by the marketplace. Design focused companies, on the other hand, use design research to glean such insights that help guide them to a profitable emotional connection with their customers.

For example, when Procter & Gamble sought to provide a better way to clean floors, it discovered that its customers did not wish for better mops but to have clean floors without mopping. P&G took the ‘mopless floor’ fantasy seriously and developed the very successful Swiffer line of dry and moist cleaning tools.

BMW found that drivers of its high-performance cars were not stressed by high-speed driving but by parking, so the company integrated proximity sensors and an acoustic signal to assist drivers in parking. Interestingly, BMW realized that a completely automatic system would have been an affront to the pride its customers take in their driving skills. It correctly determined which emotional connection to make and which one not to violate.

When Master Lock Co. learned that its customers were not as interested in its locks per se but on the possessions the locks protected, it switched tactics from selling padlocks as hardware to selling security for specific possessions. Similarly, Sunbeam Products Inc. (now known as American Household) discovered that people who bought its Coleman barbecues associated the brand with fond childhood memories of camping. The company changed the focus of its marketing from highlighting the product’s performance to reinforcing the pleasant memories it evokes.

Methods of design research

It has been shown that front-end activities, such as brainstorming, which precede the detailed design, prototyping, pilot production and manufacturing ramp-up of a new product, can powerfully influence the outcome and significantly determine downstream costs. But brainstorming and concurrent development have to be informed by customer values and aspirations. In a design-focused enterprise, the front-end activity is design research, a systematic process for understanding the consumer’s unexpressed needs and desires, then envisioning and testing new ways to meet them.

The best practice in design is to integrate people from different backgrounds into a design research team. For example, when Johnson Controls wanted to develop an electric room thermostat for hotels, the company assembled a design research team of technical consultants, architects, hotel managers, building managers, HVAC installers and hotel guests. The team’s task was to gain firsthand insight into the customer’s world and what specific products or services meant to them. Multidisciplinary teams are even more effective when the team is made up of multidisciplinary individuals who can mentally juggle the trade-offs among the competing goals of various disciplines. When ergonomics says one thing, the company culture says the opposite and customers say something else again, multidisciplinary individuals can integrate the three disparate sets of clues into an optimal solution.

In the cases we observed, design research teams started with a variety of ethnographic techniques, watching and recording what people do in real life. They followed consumers into stores to watch them buy padlocks, into their homes to watch them mop floors and even into their bathrooms (via videocamera) to watch them take showers. This provides an understanding of the environment in which the product will be used. For instance, by observing customers in their homes, Cambridge SoundWorks learned that men who buy premium audio systems like to display them in their living rooms, whereas women would rather hide them behind plants or furniture. In an attempt to appeal to both sexes, the company launched its Newton Series in 2001, which featured powerful speakers designed to blend in with living room furniture. It became the company’s most successful product up to that point.

Design research also employs psychophysiological techniques such as biofeedback, eye tracking, vocal analysis and facial coding to understand the emotions underlying observable behaviour. By correlating physiological characteristics such as heartrate, brainwave level, skin response or body position with a person’s preferences, researchers can design the offering to maximize the desired physical responses.

Brand personification is another technique used to make hidden values and emotions perceptible. When Master Lock asked consumers to associate their current classic padlock with a person, the name most often mentioned was John Wayne; when they were asked to associate it with another product, the frequent answer was a military Jeep. Asked with whom or what they equated Master Lock’s prototypes of innovative new concepts for padlocks, consumers most often named Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Humvee. When the company created a promotional campaign to launch the new locks, it was informed by these associations.

Testing prototypes with consumers is nothing new, but design researchers make sure to do so in a real-life context. Thus, Master Lock’s design research team observed customers using prototypes of the new padlocks on their own luggage, toolboxes, gun cases, garden gates and trailer hitches.

Methods of gathering data can be compared in terms of their degree of customer involvement. Some traditional methods, such as brainstorming, are entirely internal. Surveys involve consumers, but the consumers can only answer what they are asked and can only express what they consciously know. Focus groups allow more freedom of expression but still cannot probe the unconscious. Design research, by observing consumers buying and using products in real life with no external guidance, offers the highest possible consumer involvement. Skilled observers have a chance to see nonverbal evidence of unconscious feelings.

Skipping design research can be costly. For example, high-end German automobile manufacturers were stunned when U.S. customers would not buy cars without cup holders. While drinking coffee in the car seemed unthinkable to Europeans, it wouldn’t have taken much design research to learn how important it is to U.S. car buyers. The manufacturers, forced to retrofit, created some of the most complex, expensive, unreliable and least-user friendly cup holders ever produced.

Design research findings are not typically in the form of data and reports but are instead stories and characters, often captured on video. Such findings resemble and evoke real experience more powerfully than data and reports can, vividly conveying the de- sired emotional connections between people, products and services, and they help a company to triangulate these findings with appropriate technologies and economic objectives.

When the findings have been gathered, there are a number of techniques that help the researchers interpret them:

Issue mapping. Identifying all the stakeholders and decision influencers involved with ordering, stocking, displaying, promoting, buying, using, servicing and disposing of a product or a service helps to paint a fully dimensional picture of its impact and interaction with consumers and the marketplace.

Metaphors. Having consumers suggest similar products or scenarios, as Master Lock did, can help consumers express their emotional connection to a particular product, while stimulating researchers to think along new lines. A good metaphor may end up as part of the design to communicate the emotional connection to the consumer.

Consumer archetypes. Personifying the typical consumer can be enormously helpful in keeping everyone’s thinking focused on the emotional connection to consumers. The archetype can be a real person or a composite creation. For example, AMF Bowling Worldwide used archetypes to help make sense of an extremely broad potential target market for a major product development. Facing a mature market in the United States, the maker of equipment and furniture for the bowling alley industry set its sights on overseas markets, where bowling often has novelty and even significant prestige and where the penetration of bowling centers is still very low. AMF assumed that it needed to design for those markets specifically, and it embarked upon user-centered design research. However, the research revealed that regardless of market, the distinguishing characteristics among bowlers had to do with why they bowled: for competition, to perfect their game, for the joy of participation or for the sense of occasion. These archetypes allowed AMF to efficiently develop a product system that had global applicability.

Workflow mapping. The visual mapping of the steps an individual takes to complete a given activity has been a standard technique for 75 years, but it can reveal new insights and opportunities when combined with the other techniques listed here.

Storytelling. Creating storyboards, associating imagery and other techniques can be used to elicit feelings and aspirational insights from consumers.

Bulletin boards. By taping, pinning and hanging all sorts of objects and information related to a project on the walls of a meeting room, design research team members can immerse themselves in information. Being literally surrounded by inputs in a room can cause designers to make connections among elements that might have initially seemed unrelated.

Building design focus into the organization

Corporate strategy is often shaped by macrodata – industry trend analysis, competitive analysis, technology assessments, demographics – and carried out by specialists focused on quarter-to-quarter sales, technical invention, measurable performance and operational efficiency. These individuals are often in separate departments that do not communicate well with each other, and the voice of the customer is often drowned out by the voices of various departments. In contrast, the findings of design research become important tools for building organization-wide identification with the customers’ needs and aspirations, keeping everyone’s eyes on the same prize. As people develop, manufacture, stock or maintain a product, they are much more likely to keep in mind a real person who they’ve watched in a video washing his car, or putting her kids to bed, than on a page of market survey results.

At Master Lock, video ethnography, in-context interviews and early conceptual sketches and models were integrated into a presentation for the proposed new segmentation. This made the rationale for the resulting strategy far more tangible than any written description or statistical data could have done. Each market segment was represented by a consumer archetype: real people who the researchers had met and with whom people in R&D, manufacturing, sales and finance could naturally empathize.

Companies can use this technique to communicate their connection with customers to important outside stakeholders, from Walmart buyers to Wall Street investors. In a risky and unusual move, Master Lock shared its presentation and prototyping with selected mass-merchant buyers. By allowing Master Lock to ‘tell a complete story’, this approach won the buyers’ enthusiasm and collaboration, and it garnered the company valuable time during which key buyers agreed not to reduce their shelf space despite their declining market share.

Even with such vivid communication tools, it is necessary to continually repeat the message so that it sinks into the fabric of the organization. Once organization-wide empathy is achieved, however, every aspect of the organization can add value to the emotional connection. Not only can the traditional design areas of product, packaging, point of purchase, corporate communication and the Web site be coordinated to meet consumer needs and aspirations, but engineers can find ways to meet those needs and aspirations while still delivering function and performance.

In fact, implementing a design-inspired strategy tends to provoke some redesign of the company itself. Once Master Lock realized how much could be accomplished with its new approach, it took steps to embed consumer-centered product design at all levels. Rather than simply selling hardware to hardware buyers, the sales and marketing groups were reorganized and staffed to serve different market segments, such as automotive and recreation. Product, packaging, point of purchase, corporate communication and the Web site became coordinated, supporting the segmentation strategy with messages and visual languages appropriate to each consumer archetype. Engineering became responsible for increasing perceived value as well as actual performance. Manufacturing developed more flexible channels for getting more new products to market sooner without compromising quality or efficiency. The company also became more open to incorporating outside innovation that complemented its design-inspired strategy.

The successful practice of customer-centered product design varies from one design-focused company to another, but the companies we observed have many of the above-discussed best practices in common. They also all saw the value in, and had the capability of, making as many mistakes as possible in the front-end phase, when they could learn the most at the lowest risk and cost.

For example, Master Lock’s first foray into the automotive market was the production of an innovative steering-wheel lock. Although the company’s reading of the market potential was accurate, it misjudged the obstructive power of an entrenched competitor. Master Lock was able to quickly change course and pursue a new customer in the same segment that had already been identified by its existing design research – the trailer owner. With customer archetypes and video clips imparting to all parts of the company the common image of a consumer for whom the trailer means ‘freedom and security’, and whose worst fear is that the trailer might be stolen, Master Lock had enough focus and cohesion to rapidly develop and introduce a unique trailer lock. This successful entry into the automotive market gave Master Lock a position from which it was later able to successfully reintroduce its steering-wheel lock.

In closing

Design-focused companies don’t get everything right the first time, but they can make quick course corrections due to the depth of their customer insight and their techniques for rapidly and vividly conveying new ideas to all parts of the company in order to put that knowledge into action.

In a world in which consumers cannot always convey and may not always know what would delight them, design-focused companies are best equipped to glean the information through careful and imaginative observation, to respond accurately, quickly and flexibly and to define and lead rapidly-evolving markets.

This article was originally published in Rotman on Design: The Best on Design Thinking From Rotman Magazine (Rotman-UTP Publishing 2013).

May 13th’s Innovation Series from the MIT Enterprise Forum featured a panel discussion on the impact of big data on Healthcare in general and Pharma in particular. The panelists represented diverse backgrounds including academic research, large pharmaceuticals, and venture investment and proceeded to identify a series of challenges and opportunities manifest as a result of the data tsunami.

Pharma has always been in the data business. Without data no medicine would ever make it to market. The world of data has evolved and is reflected in what the panel termed the three V’s: Velocity, Volume, and Variability. In other words, data is received faster, is being gathered in great volumes, and has greater variability and thus greater challenges to analyze and apply. This new information landscape offers great opportunities for creativity and innovation in the processes of bringing new medicines to market and the management of people’s health but it is not without its challenges. The panel identified quite a number of these…

• With all of the sources of data contributing to the enormous volume of data …how do we identify the most useful data?
• What are the research questions we should be answering/asking?
• How do we integrate dispersed siloes of useful data?
• How do we use access to the large databases of information to establish hypotheses to test in clinical trials?
• How do we make sense of the data and simplify our information visualization and presentation?
• How do we make it actionable to tackle competitive challenges?
• How do we best manage issues of privacy and policy when managing great amounts of personal data?
• How do we simplify and standardize consent language and create portable and open consents?
• With consumers generating increasing amounts of personal data from multiple sources including wearable devices, social data, self-tracking apps, health records, and more, how might the consumer-as-patient be empowered to use their own data?
• Though pharmaceutical companies may have access to certain data, the consumer-patient still owns significant amount of useful data that could be smartly used if integrated with the other data piles. Can the patient be empowered as a data aggregator and have a measurable impact on the quality of their health?
• How might we integrate commercial information with scientific information in a meaningful way that has a positive impact on the patient?
• Finally, one of the greatest challenges is in human capital…how do we develop the next generation of data scientists that can drive data analysis to produce actionable information and knowledge?

Mike Dunkley from our Program Development team and a passionate follower of all things Healthcare had this to say: “My view on data is that data is meaningless unless information can be extracted and decisions can be made – therefore all data should be viewed within the hierarchy data>information>decisions.  A challenge in healthcare is the conflict between individual data privacy and the need for information, which comes as a result of aggregating patient data, i.e. patient data on its own may have little value unless it is able to be compared to data from other patients.  A great example is genomics – it’s possible to sequence your genome, but unless the data generated is compared across multiple genomes and associated with other (longitudinal) population health data, then there is little information to be gleaned.  This brings up the challenge of data provenance and interoperability of data records (EHRs).  So, data tsunami is a very good analogy – we have more data than we know what to do with.  Efficient and reliable aggregation and analysis of this data is where the value is.”

What’s interesting about the challenges discussed at the forum is that many are shared by just about every industry right now…not least the retail and financial services industries. Ultimately, the champions will be those that can connect the disparate sources of data and turn it into actions that not only improve business and but also the people’s lives they serve. Sometimes stepping away from the data, learning from real-life contexts, and finding synergies between the two can provide the trigger to jumpstart the innovation process.

The field of diagnostic testing is going through a quiet revolution. Healthcare reform’s emphasis on results-driven medicine has put a greater urgency on early and accurate diagnosis. At the same time, advances in technology are leading to new breakthroughs in research almost daily, increasing the opportunities for new clinical devices.

The reality, however, is that most of these new technologies fall by the wayside before they get to market. That’s because the way they are designed has not kept up with the times in order to meet the market’s demands for fast time-to-result, ease of use, and high degree of reliability.

Too often with new clinical diagnostic devices, biological assay and instrument are developed sequentially: first the R&D group develops an effective protocol for sample prep and biomarker detection, then Product Development designs a device or system to implement it. For lack of a better solution, the design often just automates what researchers in the lab were doing by hand and the device takes the form of a huge, bulky piece of equipment employing fluid-handling robots – often, not the most optimal solution for the actual environment of use.

A researcher’s primary objective may be to advance scientific understanding or to perfect the assay performance, while engineers may be pre-occupied with automation and regulatory compliance. The knowledge-gap between the two groups may simply be too big for one group to anticipate or question the requirements of the other and the lack of alignment of goals may not steer the development effectively. In order to get scientists and engineers working towards a common objective, it is necessary to bring in a third discipline – design – to establish the vision for the ideal product early in the process.

At Continuum, we call that ideal user experience the “lighthouse” — and make it the ultimate goal when we develop a diagnostic tool for a clinical setting. It’s important to define the long-term goal so you can think through the implications of your decisions early on in the process of development of the technology’ideally after you establish ‘proof of principle’ in the lab, but before you lock in any key architectural decisions. As the scientists in the lab meet the key forks in the road where they must make decisions on how to implement their assay, they can take into account the ideal experience of users in a clinical setting.

That development requires an understanding of several key factors, including where device will be used, the skill of the users, the time necessary for results, and the cost of the test. At the same time, the ideal experience represented by the “lighthouse” must be balanced by what is technically feasible. Depending on these factors, there must be a creative give-and-take that might sacrifice accuracy, portability, or up-front cost depending on the most successful solution for usability.

For example, when we worked with Daktari to create an HIV test for use primarily in rural sub-Saharan Africa, it was clear that fluorescent detection of CD4 cells was not suitable. Sensitive optics would never be rugged enough to survive transport in a backpack to remote villages. Instead, Daktari needed a solution that could be used at point of care by a relatively inexperienced clinician in sometimes difficult environments with high heat and humidity. Daktari understood that electrical detection of CD4 cells had the inherent robustness required for its intended application. Continuum engineers and designers used this robustness “lighthouse” to make smart architectural decisions for the device early on in the development of the assay ’ the result was a simple hand-held instrument with a unique disposable cartridge.

A similar process took place with the OraQuick rapid HIV test, which was approved for home use last year. To create a test that could be used quickly and easily in home by unskilled users, the parent company OraSure Technologies sacrificed some technical performance. It got to market because it successfully convinced the FDA that this solution was better than the “gold standard” because it would be used by people who would ordinarily not get tested at all, therefore increasing the number of people who could be diagnosed and treated, leading to a greater benefit to public health as a whole.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we worked with Raindance Technologies to develop the RainDrop digital PCR (polymerase chain reaction) system for use in cancer research, knowing that sensitivity at one-in-a-million levels of detection would be paramount. In this case our “lighthouse” was to produce a dramatically simpler and more reliable instrument without sacrificing performance. R&D and product development teams collaborated to simplify complex flow controls by putting more technological features into the consumable cartridge that contained the sample. This eliminated pipetting robots and tubes, creating a streamlined bench-top device that could be more accessible to cancer research labs worldwide.

As these examples show, while it may be expedient to treat R&D and product development as sequential steps, superior products can result from a collaborative approach guided by a clear view of market needs. The solutions that win are those where the technology is a good fit to the eventual application. That means establishing a “lighthouse” early in the process to guide researchers, designers and engineers toward a common vision of the ideal product.

This article was originally published in MedCity News.

Continuum co-founder Gianfranco Zaccai was featured on CNN International’s Connect The World discussing our partnership with Amos Winter and the MIT Mobility Lab to develop the revolutionary Leveraged Freedom Chair. You can watch the interview here.

The related article is also posted below.

Boston, MA (CNN) – Sometimes, implementing wide-reaching social change takes surprisingly few materials. With just a handful of bike gears, MIT professor Amos Winter is hoping to change the developing world forever.

Winter is the inventor of the Leveraged Freedom Chair (LFC). It is a low-cost wheelchair powered by two hand levers that function in a similar manner to gears on a bike. The higher you grab it, the more leverage you get when traversing over rough terrain like sand, mud, or unpaved road.

Grab down lower, and the machine can cruise along tarmac at five miles-an-hour. It is one of the most versatile wheelchairs on the market, and for the time being, it is aimed solely for disabled communities in the developing world.

“If you are a wheelchair user who lives in a rural area, there’s not really a good mobility aid that allows you to travel a long distance on many types of terrains, but is also small and maneuverable to use indoors. That is kind of what set the stage for creating the LFC,” says Winter.

It may seem like a simple premise, but the LFC has the potential to empower a community that, in poorer countries, can often feel disenfranchised.

“As this technology has grown and become a product, it’s been very fulfilling to see that not only can people ride off-road, but having that capability also lets them have a job, or go to school or fully participate in their community,” says Winter.

What makes the LFC a truly invaluable tool in low income communities is its sheer value for money. Traditionally, wheelchairs with the capability to go off-road clock in somewhere between $4,500 and $6,500, making them prohibitive to the rural communities that need them the most. The LFC, by comparison, costs $200.

The low price point, explains Winter, makes it a sexier sell to the non-profit organizations responsible for delivering these units to emerging markets.

“It had to be cheap enough to fit within the current provision and donation structures that already distribute wheelchairs,” he says. Furthermore, Winter recognized that to be of use to the developing world, it had to be built from parts that were easily accessible.

“The chair not only had to be repairable, but we wanted it robust,” he says. “We wanted it to have minimal parts that could break in the field, but if the parts do need servicing, they’re made from bike parts and they’re easily available.”

Winter’s inspiration for the LFC came about in 2005, when he spent a summer in Tanzania assessing wheelchair technology for a group of wheelchair organizations. He later started developing the technology as a graduate student at MIT.

“When we started the project, we were a team of gung-ho students who had this cool idea for the lever system. We made some prototypes and were excited about them and brought them abroad and people were like, ‘these are terrible. What were you thinking? You have no frame of reference of what it’s actually like to use a wheelchair everyday,’” he recalls. Over the next few years, he consulted continuously with wheelchair users, and went through several stages of trial and error before landing on the current model.

Winter is currently working with design consultancy firm Continuum on a version of the LFC for the first-world. In all likelihood, it will have more features than the original.

“In the developed world, because there is more disposable income, it’s possible to add additional functionality, things that simply are nice to have but not essential to have,” notes Gianfranco Zaccai, Continuum’s president. The more advanced (and likely more expensive) model, though, “can help support the developing world wheelchair,” he adds.

For Winter, however, the greatest implication of his invention is the platform it has given him to enact even more, farther-reaching change. In a few years, Winter has gone from MIT graduate to assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and director of the University’s Global Engineering and Research(GEAR) Lab, an enterprise that couples engineering and product design to solve real-world problems.

In addition to the LFC, he has delved into how to deliver low-cost prosthetics to poor countries, eco-efficient irrigation systems that enable small-scale farmers to get a higher crop yield and projects related to water purification.

“I am a total geek,” admits Winter. “I love engineering, I love innovation, and I love being able to work on problems that nobody else has solved before.”

Article originally published on CNN.com as part of the Blueprint series.

#tastemakers

It used to be that when you wanted sneakers, you bought them in your size and went on your way to play in the sandlot or whatever. Now, it’s all, “Running? Barefoot running? Wait, are these fair trade? What color is ‘me’? Should I buy them cheap online or from my sad local shoe store? Ah!! Decision fatigue!!!” The number of choices available to the average person and the importance of said choice in conveying a personal brand can result in a formerly mundane activity becoming a several-months-long research project. HOWEVER. There is hope. Where it used to be just Oprah helping her acolytes understand what they should buy with her “favorite things” lineup, today, content curation platforms are proliferating on the internet, helping to filter and sort every single thing in the world. We trust these curators because their collections are customized, authentic, and brand-agnostic – and they share our great taste.

“Shoppers are turning to these curated experiences to help filter the Internet’s overwhelming amount of content down to manageable collections of products centered around shared taste. Unless you know specifically what you want to buy (in which case, search is the weapon of choice), browsing curated collections can be the most interesting way to discover new products and retailers. As an example of the power of human curation, just compare the results of a Google search for gloves with the same search on Pinterest. Now ask yourself which search makes you want to buy something?” (Mashable)

“’Amazon.com was e-commerce 1.0—it was about being able to buy things online,’ he says. ‘Now we’re at the beginning stages of e-commerce 2.0. It’s about how you fundamentally change the way products are purchased. We’re creating new ways you buy things. It’s not about search. It’s about people selecting products for you’” (Entrepreneur).

“[Birchbox] costs $10 each month, which includes shipping. It is meant to help shoppers bedazzled by the dizzying selection of products that greets them upon entering a store like Sephora or Bloomingdale’s, said Katia Beauchamp, one of the founders of the company… ‘I think every woman needs a best friend who is a beauty editor to curate the clutter and find the best products for them,” Ms. Beauchamp said’” (NYTimes).

IMPLICATIONS

For the most part, when curators aren’t being paid, they can’t be controlled. A brand looking to generate online buzz better have a great product—and one that’s highly bloggable—to get showcased in these powerful collections.

image via AP/Sydney Morning Herald

In an age when brands are striving to be more honest and authentic—more and more are willing to go as far as publicly apologizing when they realize that they’ve made a decision that isn’t in line with their consumers’ wants and needs. We all remember the Netflix/Qwikster debacle a couple years ago, when Reed Hastings decided to make you choose between DVD or streaming. Or worse, pay for both. Potentially pinning you against the brand you had grown to love and hoping you’d adopt a new one. He ended up writing a lengthy explanation disguised as an apology.

Well, now there’s another company wishing they could turn back the clocks and are now begging for they’re customers to forgive them and come back… pretty please.

After rebranding to JCP and being all about straight talk and square deals, jcpenney has decided it better revert back to much of what it offered before and are hoping you’re willing to accept their sincerest of apologies—in the form of this 30 second spot. On primetime television, for everyone to see.

Are these apologies effective? It seems in Netflix’s case they’ve risen back to success after ditching the Qwikster brand and eventually offering some exclusive content in ‘House of Cards’ and …. cross your fingers … some new ‘Arrested Development’. Will jcpenney be able to bounce back as well and how much will it take?

The Design Management Institute’s European Conference wrapped up last Friday in Madrid. The conference theme focused on how design and innovation are contributing to new business models that are driving the renewal of our global economy and was attended by over 150 business, marketing, and design leaders from around the globe. (Twitter hashtag #dmimadrid).

On Day 1 Andy Goodman from Fjord delivered the opening keynote on how companies that commit to a “small investment and strategic focusing on improving service experiences in a more effective way to fight crisis economics, strengthen their brand and outcompete the cost cutters”. Bas van Abel, the founder and CEO of Fairphone, demonstrated his companies approach to the ethical sourcing, manufacture, and disposal of their small but growing smartphone business. There were two very interesting panel discussions…one on the future of transportation with leaders from Virgin Atlantic, Toyota, and Volkswagen and one on communications with reps from Telefonica, Orange, and once again, Bas from Fairphone. Dee from Virgin Atlantic discussed the integrated experience design of the Virgin service. Carole from Toyota discussed their Kansei Design team approach to emotional user experience design. Pamela Mead from Telefonica provided insight into their internal design process from insights to concepts to construction. Tuesday was wrapped up with a fascinating presentation by leaders from the city of Bilbao about how the city has transformed itself over the past 25 years, with strategic design playing a large role. A rapid review of 25 projects in 25 years demonstrated how that change has been propelled by much more than just the Frank Gehry-designed Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.

Day 2 got off to a great start with Simone Ahuja, the author of “Jugaad Innovation”, who gave an overview of the principles driving the Jugaad approach to faster, better, and cheaper innovation. In a nutshell, Jugaad can be regarded as design within extreme constraints. If you have seen the movie Apollo 13 and can remember the scene where a team of NASA engineers must design a new air carbon dioxide filter with only the objects available to the astronauts in the spacecraft…this is the spirit of Jugaad! Our friends at BBVA presented on their approach to the innovation of financial services. The video they shared on the caveman focus group (created by the Draft FCB agency) was hilarious. Javier Goyeneche, CEO of Ecoalf, showed how his innovative new company recycles bottles, tires, and fishing nets and creates a collection of fashionable jackets, t-shirts, shoes, and bags, which had many of the attendees heading to the company store just up the street on Calle de Hortaleza. Sue Siddall from Ideo discussed a new consumer need…the desire to be part of something bigger than themselves by making purchases with a purpose. Last but not least, Continuum’s own Chris Hosmer, who leads Continuum’s Shanghai office partnered with Gulay Ozkan to lead an interactive workshop sharing their experience with entrepreneurship and innovation in China and Turkey.

Michael Westcott, DMI’s new president, will be continuing this “conversation” on how design and innovation can drive economic renewal at the next conference in Santa Monica, CA from June 17 to June 19. I hope to see you there!

In this digital age, companies have become accustomed to capturing real-time customer data from websites and apps with the click of a mouse or tap of a finger. Nearly every interaction that a customer has on these digital platforms is logged in the form of 1’s and 0’s, making it cheap and easy for a designer to tweak a site’s interface and see almost instantaneously how that affects customers’ behaviors. In a physical service environment, however, obtaining that kind of rich quantitative customer experience data can be much more difficult. There, customer experiences are full of intangibles, with the sum-total of the experience made up of dozens of component parts: The texture of the floor, the level of lighting, the selection of music being played, the smells that pervade the space, the comfort of the seating, the way in which a server engages with you. All of these things must work in concert to evoke a feeling and inspire the behaviors that will ultimately drive business results.

The challenge with traditional quantitative metrics, however, is that they tend to focus on business outcomes – or Key Performance Indicators – that are useful in telling you that something is wrong, but often fail when it comes to explaining what aspect of a customer’s experience isn’t delivering. Similarly, customer experience surveys often miss the mark by capturing what a consumer thinks he does or feels, rather than what he actually does or feels. Even so, when a business is venturing on an expensive new project, it’s natural and desirable for it to want to quantify an experience in order to minimise risk and design the project to meet both business and customer needs. So how does a company go about getting the hard numbers it needs to refine its offerings?

When one of us (Tony) worked as an Imagineer at Disney, he and his colleagues built, tested and refined entire rides and shows inside warehouses to ensure they fully delivered on customer experience before they ever saw the light of day at a park. But not every company has the budget or resources of Disney. At the design and consulting firm Continuum, we have been pioneering the concept of “live labs,” designing affordable tools to measure the important elements of a customer experience and combine them in a holistic way. Our goal is to understand qualitatively which aspects of the overall customer experience are key drivers and then look for quantitative proxies that can give us a sense of how well these elements are delivering on the overall customer experience. These tools can be used to reduce risk and improve services, whether designing a new experience, maintaining an existing one, or auditing and refining an experience that is not functioning as it should.

Building New Experiences

The Boston-based restaurant chain Bertucci’s, which has served pasta and brick-oven pizzas to families for several decades, came to us looking to partner on creating a new restaurant concept that would appeal to the “Millennials” demographic. Together we named it “2ovens” and developed a different kind of experience around the needs of younger customers, who are more interested in hanging out in a fun, social environment and having the freedom to design their own dining experience as an alternative to the traditional. We knew that the physical make-up of the space would be key to succeeding in providing the best experience as well as meeting the business goals of the company. As a low-cost way of testing the concept, we built a full-size foam-core mock-up and brought in chefs, servers, and faux-customers to test its viability. The prototype taught the team important lessons, such as the importance of every seat being able to view the two wood-fired ovens that we identified as being one of our key experience drivers.

In order to actually test how the restaurant would work, however, our client went the next step by opening up a pilot restaurant in a Boston suburb as a live laboratory. There we were able to test the concept and make further changes before launching more widely. One important feature, for example, was “table turns”. With most restaurants, the goal is to turn over tables as quickly as possible to increase revenues, but with 2ovens we developed a concept in keeping with Millennials’ habits. We encouraged them to stay longer, continuing to eat and drink as they did. To facilitate this, we created a slot at the table to hold the menu so it would always be there for ordering. Because of the layout, however, some tables were not able to incorporate this feature. By analysing the data from the tables with and without menus, Bertucci’s is able to tell how this feature affects length of time spent and total revenues for tables, in order to see if both the company’s business goals and the goals for customer experience have been met. While the pilot restaurant has already vastly exceeded expectations—a great sign overall—we’ve also been able to qualitatively identify some aspects of the experience that have not been implemented effectively. By identifying and correcting these aspects of service design, the company will be better able to ensure the efficiency of its staff and the enjoyment of its customers when it opens more widely in the coming months.

Refining Existing Experiences 

While the 2ovens work allowed us to build a project from the ground up, often we are working to refine experiences that already exist, giving companies a set of tools to constantly monitor experiences to gradually improve them, or in some cases, completely re-tooling them to fix what isn’t working. When we worked with a global medical diagnostic firm to create a new service experience for blood testing, we found the actual test took only a few moments. However, customers perceived their wait time as being insufferably long due to the anxieties they had about the blood-drawing process, potential results, time available away from their job and paying for the test. By focusing on “Anxiety” as the key experience driver, the company worked to minimise anxieties by altering the layout of the space, the information available and the intake form, as well as installing an electronic queue that would allow patients to know where they stood in line. In order to capture the emotional aspects of the experience, they implemented a touchscreen survey at the end with a series of simple questions to understand how the wait time matched the patient’s expectations. Using that data, we were able to help the company make subtle changes in how representatives greeted people or seated patients, monitoring the effects on the experience in real-time to improve the experience overall.

Auditing Underperforming Experiences

We performed a more dramatic intervention for a major financial services company that wanted to better integrate customer service and consultation in their newly-formatted retail locations. Their existing space was designed with a traditional counter for transactions as well as a row of offices for consultation. In addition, they had installed a large video wall with LCD screens to advertise their latest service offerings. In order to understand how these services were being utilised, we analysed a day’s worth of security footage from multiple cameras around the space. We meticulously noted the demographics of customers, where they walked, and even where they looked inside the space in order to conduct a ‘heat map’ of the average customer’s experience. When we analysed this data, we found that despite our client’s design intent, the vast majority of customers were still using the transaction counter. Only 2% of people over the course of the entire day stepped into one of the fully staffed offices for a consultation. What’s more, not a single person went over to the video wall, or even looked at it over the course of the day. From those findings, we were able to dramatically redesign the service environment in order to more successfully achieve the company’s intended customer experience and business goals.

While these techniques are still in their early stages, we can see them being used more widely to rapidly prototype, test and refine customer experiences in a wide variety of physical spaces through market launch and beyond. This ‘live lab’ approach to customer experience can help to minimise risk and meet both customer and business needs by providing actionable insights that ensure the most critical components of customer experience are delivered upon at all times.

Originally published in Touchpoint Vol. 5 No. 1 (Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design is published by Service Design Network)

The Approach
Transparency builds trust. Trust leads to consumer loyalty and more collaborative supply chains. Underserved groups need more basic resources than information, but this may change as technology improves. Sharing relevant information that clarifies a company’s practices builds trust and loyalty.

Watchouts
Be sure to share information in a way that makes sense to consumers. Ranked the third greenest company in America by Newsweek, Sprint Nextel has a number of environmental practices that could differentiate them from their competitors. However, their accomplishments are hidden on their investor page and remain unnoticed by 83% of all consumers.

Case study: Cleaner Cleaners
S.C. Johnson voluntarily provides ingredient information for the company’s products through their “What’s Inside” program. This supports their familial branding and makes their products more trustworthy. How this has affected their brand equity is a closely guarded secret, but they continue this practice, which implies that they feel that the effort is justified. They have also received multiple awards from the EPA, Greenlist and other environmental transparency agencies for their efforts.

Case Study: Profitable Altruism
Johnson & Johnson needed to deal with the mysterious deaths of 7 people after consuming tainted Tylenol without destroying the reputation of their company and their most profitable product. They immediately alerted consumers across the nation, via the media, not to consume any type of Tylenol product until the extent of the tampering could be determined. They also recalled all Tylenol capsules from the market: approximately 22 million bottles of Tylenol, with a retail value of more than 100 million dollars. This move earned the trust and loyalty of the market. Tylenol reintroduced the product in a triple safety-sealed package and recovered swiftly from a drop of 80% market share. It is now one of the top selling over-the-counter drugs in this country.

Case Study: Empowering the Supply Chain
Sustainable Harvest is a Portland-based coffee importer that created a new business model based on transparency. Usually, farmers are in the dark about their place in the import process, and have little negotiating power. Sustainable Harvest creates market access and traceable supply chains for small farmers and involves suppliers in negotiations with the final buyer. This open and collaborative supply chain has strengthened the specialty coffee industry. Producers can earn higher incomes while roasters are assured a traceable, quality cup of coffee for their consumers.

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

#WhySI: Building businesses. Improving lives. Companies that master social innovation are poised for great growth. This month we’re presenting the best ways to help your company succeed at social innovation.

Once upon a time, shopping was simple. People drove to the store, viewed the selection at hand, decided what they wanted, and bought. Now, however, shoppers are confronted with an amazing array of channels through which they can research, browse, and purchase, engaging with both brands they know and those they don’t in increasingly complex ways.

In addition to brick-and-mortar stores, they are interacting with companies through web sites, mobile sites, mobile apps, social media, email, phone, online chat, video chat, discount coupon sites, and, if you can believe it, more. The customer journey they take from identifying a need to considering a product, using a new product, and becoming a loyal customer is no longer a linear path but rather a rollercoaster of parallel and intersecting lines and loops.

The emergence of all of these new channels and devices provides consumers with great flexibility in forming their shopping strategies — and, in theory at least, should be empowering. They can research it here, touch it there; compare it here, read review there; question here, get answers there; get personal recommendations here, get coupons there; deliver here; return there … the choices are endless.

Recent shop-alongs and observations of an internationally diverse group of shoppers on their path to purchasing products, however, have shown precisely the opposite. Shoppers are as overwhelmed by the extensive range of similar products and services as they are the range of channels through which the purchase may be influenced. Since most of them adopt new channels quite readily, it’s easy to find themselves suddenly out of their comfort zones.

The most common feelings resulting from the experience now are stress, frustration, alienation, uncertainty, and confusion. Where once shopping was therapy for people, now people need therapy to shop. The solution: Create a unified experience — crafting the system of interactions that form the customer’s experience of an organization and the company’s means of delivering it. Our research suggests four opportunity areas that get to the heart of customer behavior and motivation, on which companies should focus in order to deliver a great shopping service experiences.

• Generate and maintain confidence: Once shoppers have built sufficient confidence in the qualities of a product or service, they will be more likely to take the leap to purchase. Without that confidence, they will be more likely to delay or cancel the purchase. Companies can provide “confidence builders” along the shopping process to help bolster this feeling. For example, after customers have decided on which product they want and are completing their checkout process online, the lack of information about delivery costs or delivery times is a common confidence buster. They are more likely to abandon their cart and shift their attention to another retailer if companies don’t build confidence with clear and transparent information on shipping.

• Facilitate the power of influence: Knowing how diverse shoppers can be positively influenced can speed the path to purchase. Companies that are respected for their depth of knowledge of certain products can leverage that knowledge upfront to build consumer trust. For instance, Nikon’s USA web site provides extensive information for the camera enthusiast to understand whether or not a camera is the right one for them. The “Digitutor” contains engaging videos to understand how the camera works and an extensive sample of photos to show possible results — helping the shopper understand their particular needs and identify them with a specific product.

• Make channel transitions seamless: Shoppers get confused and frustrated by their inability to transition between channels that don’t work with one another. This can slow down the purchasing process or cause people to decide not to buy. One way to counter this problem is to take an omni-channel view of the experience and ensure seamless consistency within and across channels. Nordstrom is a pioneer in delivering a seamless omni-channel experience, being one of the first companies to integrate its online and offline inventories. Shoppers can purchase products online and pick them up or return them in stores, or order out-of-stock items online that are then shipped from a nearby store. In this way, the website and brick-and-mortar stores complement one another rather than compete.

• Deliver a customer experience that adjusts to your customer’s needs for knowledge: Shoppers enjoy discovering a new product or product attribute they did not know or expect, especially if they can relate to it on an emotional level. That discovery can empower and galvanize shoppers and encourage them to make a purchase. Understanding how a product or experience will resonate with consumers’ needs and building discoverability into the shopping experience is a great way to create moments of unexpected delight. Often, small attributes can offer a big bang: A cruise control that allows the driver to increase or decrease speed one mph at a time, an easy way to recycle a toothbrush, an automatic way to pay a bill — all speak to an inner emotional driver in the consumer. The safe driver, the concerned environmentalist, and the absent-minded financial planner, all will respond positively to discovering these unique and distinctive features.

Many companies today are focusing on getting on the underlying technology required to build an omni-channel organization. This is important. However, this effort needs to be complimented and supported by an over-arching customer-driven strategy that transforms how a company services its customers. This requires a deep understanding of customer needs and their preferred way of interacting with all of a company’s points of contact. Creating feelings of joy and confidence, rather than anxiety, will ensure that a consumer’s decision to purchase will be less circuitous and more fulfilling overall, and that shopping will be something they look forward to once again.

Article originally published by Chain Store Age.

Image from Flickr.

The price wars are on. It’s a vicious battlefield out there. With sites like Amazon and Overstock and the proliferation of showrooming — where consumers browse a physical store before buying an item online, presumably because it’s cheaper — consumers can find the lowest price for anything on their shopping list easily and quickly.

Retailers are scrambling — in panic mode — fixating on the dollars and sense calculation, so much so in fact, that they neglect other factors that are just as important.

The Approach
Different legal and governing structures have various advantages and disadvantages. Knowing these allows organizations to benefit society and the bottom line. Changing the operating structure can increase social benefits.

Watchouts
Different structures have different rules and restrictions to consider. B-corp status requires an evaluation of the business across many metrics and can impose constraints on your business.

Case study: The Best of Both
GOOGLE created a hybrid philanthropic organization, Google.org that has the ability to provide grants and invest in for-profit ventures. This structure allows them to experiment with socially minded projects without sacrificing the potential for returns. Google.org provides grants as a traditional nonprofit foundation and also invests in for-profit ventures that support their five initiatives. By 2008, they had invested almost one hundred million dollars. (image by: Robert Scoble)

Case study: Split Personality
Novo Nordisk split its shares between two entities to operate along their principles without sacrificing returns for their investors. A portion of the shares are traded on stock exchanges while the remaining shares are held by Novo A/S, an unlisted public limited liability company wholly owned by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The foundation shares carry the majority of voting rights, allowing Novo to legally make contributions to scientific, humanitarian and social progress. The company has thrived under this structure. Over the past decade, its stock has quintupled, with revenues of approximately $11.84 billion in 2011.

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

#WhySI: Building businesses. Improving lives. Companies that master social innovation are poised for great growth. This month we’re presenting the best ways to help your company succeed at social innovation.

The Approach
Helping the underserved usually has a cost associated with it. Wealthier groups can cover these costs so companies and organizations don’t have to bear the costs themselves. Partnering with willing patrons can help cover additional costs of services and products for underserved groups.

Watchouts
Subsidizers need to receive quality services for their money. The feel good story of helping people may or may not be sustainable over the long run.

Case study: Sharing a Common Vision
ARAVIND EYECARE HOSPITAL performs 350,000 eye operations each year, and has some of the most practiced surgeons in the world. Wealthy customers choose Aravind because of its reputation and pay a higher rate for high end accommodations. These fees subsidize the remaining 60% of patients who receive discounted (or free) surgeries, accompanied by lower cost lodging, transportation and food. Not only has this inclusive model provided much needed care to the poor, it has enabled the hospital to operate on a much higher volume of patients. This allows the hospital to continually refine its skills, methods, systems and equipment, thereby ensuring its position as the industry leader.  (image by: noir imp on Flickr)

The Approach
Treating workers well raises the status of employees and companies alike. If the competition is underpaying their workers, a higher wage is an incentive and motivates workers to work harder. Investment in worker welfare may also be an appealing differentiator among consumers. Paying a generous wage, even (and especially) when it isn’t necessary creates goodwill.

Watchouts
It is easier for independent, privately owned companies with very centralized decision-making to pay higher. Publicly traded companies that are obligated to maximize shareholder value may not have the fiscal freedom to offer higher wages.

Case study: A Commitment to Quality
In-N-Out is one of the few fast-food chains to pay all employees well over minimum wage. Because In-N-Out’s starting wage is nearly $3/hr more than that of their competitors, turnover is over half the industry average. In-N-Out sales in 2011 were $365 million, or about 1.8 million per restaurant about the same as the average McDonald’s sales, and higher than Burger King’s. In 2011, Consumer Reports conducted a survey covering consumers of 18 burger chains and found that In-N-Out was the overall favorite while McDonald’s was dead last.

The Approach
In this age of transparency, consumers want to know where their contribution is going. The more concrete and tangible that contribution is, the better they feel about their purchase. Creating an avenue to affect social impact spurs consumer action.

Watchouts
TOMS Shoes is making a killing on the tangibility of their buy one give one program. Unfortunately, they’ve come under fire for destabilizing local economies and robbing local shoe makers of jobs and markets.

Case study: It’s in the Mail
PRESERVE creates toothbrushes that are made from recycled yogurt containers. Once the toothbrushes have been used, consumers can return them to be recycled again. CONTINUUM designed minimal packaging that allows consumers to conveniently mail back their toothbrushes. Within three weeks of the Mail-Back Pack’s launch on Earth Day 2010 the product was outselling Preserve’s previous offerings by 45%.

Case study: You Pick, We Give
STARBUCKS introduced a program where they set aside money for nonprofits and engaged consumers to vote for their favorite. The program generated over 120,000 votes in 4 weeks. Consumers posted more than 500 organic tweets about the program and the company per day.

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

#WhySI: Building businesses. Improving lives. Companies that master social innovation are poised for great growth. This month we’re presenting the best ways to help your company succeed at social innovation.

The Approach

Underserved groups are sometimes limited in what they can access, buy, and do. These constraints result in solutions that serve the lowest common denominator, ultimately creating a more universally accessible solution. Developing innovation for underserved groups can lead to better improvements for everyone.

Watchouts
Underserved groups may have fewer resources – making the range of possible solutions more constrained and harder to generate.

Case study: Freedom for All
The Leveraged Freedom Chair is a wheelchair developed for disabled people in developing countries, allowing users to move up to 80% faster on flat ground and produce 51% higher torque on rough terrain than a conventional wheelchair. This expanded range of mobility is made possible by the chain and sprocket drivetrain of a standard bicycle working in conjunction with two extended push levers. This technology also proved useful to wheelchair users in the United States. Continuum transformed the chair into a premium outdoor product for users in industrialized countries. The Leveraged Freedom Chair serves as an example of a product that serves multiple markets and user needs.

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

Continuum Founder, President & Chief Design Officer has been selected to be on the industrial design jury of the 2013 Premio Quorum competition in Mexico. The event will take place on September 30, 2013.

The Approach
Businesses have the power to help people beyond donating money or creating targeted products. They can also help by providing job skills and empowering experiences. Job training can empower underserved groups while providing lower cost services.

Watchouts
Choose the production task to suit the limitations of the group you’re trying to serve. This tends to work better for nonprofits because they have access to a population and are willing to take on more risk to help further their mission.

Case study: From Treatment to Trained
BTS Communications is a nonprofit advertising and social media agency housed within Beit T’Shuvah, a drug treatment facility. BTS helps recovering addicts by providing internships as graphic designers, copywriters, web developers and marketers to build their skills and résumé. Because they are in training, the cost of their services is lower and they can offer reduced rates to their clients.

Case Study: Retail Therapy
UNILEVER Hindustan, Unilever’s Shakti Entrepreneurial Programme helps women in rural India set up small businesses as direct-to-consumer retailers. This equips women with business skills and a way out of poverty as well as creating a crucial new distribution channel for Unilever products in the large and fast-growing global market of low-spending consumers. This program enabled Unilever to distribute its products to a larger number of consumers, reaching 742 million people in 627,000 villages: 12% of the world. (image by: McKay Savage)

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

#WhySI: Building businesses. Improving lives. Companies that master social innovation are poised for great growth. Every day for a month we’re presenting the best ways to help your company succeed at social innovation.

The Approach
People are looking for meaning in their products. Tying products to a social cause provides differentiation in a crowded marketplace. In fact, 89% of people are more likely to buy from companies with cause-related arrangements. Allocating marketing dollars to a social cause can be more effective than traditional channels.

Watchouts
Be transparent and clear about where the money is going. Yoplait has been criticized for “pink-washing” because the marketing dollars were not ultimately spent on the specific cause.

Case study: The Power of Red
PRODUCT RED is a brand that is licensed to partner companies to raise money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. Corporations have spent over $195 million (since 2009) licensing the brand. One hundred percent of RED money goes to Global Fund HIV/AIDS grants on the ground in Africa, reaching 14 million people. Partners include, Apple, Beats, Bottletop, Bugaboo, Coca-Cola, Feed, Starbucks, and Tourneau. (image by: Jonathan McIntosh)

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

#WhySI: Building businesses. Improving lives. Companies that master social innovation are poised for great growth. This month we’re presenting the best ways to help your company succeed at social innovation.

The Approach
Often times modifying an existing product is a cost-effective way to reach a new market. The revised “new” product may only require a minor tweak in the design, distribution, staffing, manufacturing, or system. Adapting an existing product can help it gain share in underserved markets. We call this approach Increase Access.

Watchouts
Just because a product is successful in its current market doesn’t automatically mean that it will be desired in another. Make sure the product itself resonates with the needs of new potential markets.a

The Approach
Grave to Cradle refers to collecting discarded items to resell or reuse as manufacturing input. This approach works because discarded materials are a free resource. New contexts can both raise the materials’ value and cut costs. It’s also generally good for the environment to divert waste from landfills. The resulting positive consumer story can also make a product more desirable. 

Watchouts
Discarded items require some investment to procure and cleanse. It takes a creative mind and some good filters to find the right material for the right product. Ideally, the materials should speak to the story of the product.

Case study: One Man’s Trash…
Terracycle is a company that partners with corporations to accept their waste. It then converts the waste into products like backpacks, totes and pencil cases. They have diverted over 4 billion pieces of waste from landfills and profited from doing so. Over the past three years, the company has grown 329%. In 2010, their revenue reached $13.2 million. (image by: lolololori on Flickr)

Case study: No Ordinary Toothbrush
PRESERVE partners with companies like Stonyfield Farm to recycle their used #5 polypropylene plastic or yogurt cups (a plastic most community recycling programs do not accept). The program, called Gimme 5, also allows consumers to send in or drop off their #5 plastics at collection bins in Whole Foods grocery stores. Then Preserve sorts, cleans, tests, recycles and turns the plastic into new toothbrush and razor handles for consumers to enjoy. Once consumers are finished with their Preserve products, they can return them to the company to be recycled again. Preserve converts the used handles into plastic lumber for picnic tables and boardwalks, extending the plastic’s lifecycle to a third stage of reuse.

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

#WhySI: Building businesses. Improving lives. Companies that master social innovation are poised for great growth. This month we’re presenting the best ways to help your company succeed at social innovation.

Watch Sean Brennan discuss The #NXT Generation of Healthcare at the 2013 Healthcare Experience Design Conference in Boston.

The Approach
People trust the same things their friends or the experts trust. If you can build an authentic relationship with your consumers’ community, they will be much more likely to buy your product or service. Engaging local communities to endorse a product creates stronger ties. We call this approach Community Endorsement.

Watchouts
This doesn’t always lead to sales. You need to ensure that there’s a clear connection between the product and the values of the community that’s endorsing the product. Pepsi’s Refresh campaign encouraged people to post and vote for various community projects to receive funding. It failed because the proposed community projects weren’t related to their products and, after the campaign concluded consumers lost the connection to the brand.

Case study: Top Guns
GLOCK seeded desire for their guns by selling to police officers at a reduced rate. Glock’s market share among U.S. police departments rose to 70%. FBI Academy graduates and new DEA agents are issued Glocks as well. This positioned the gun as the experts’ weapon and its popularity in the non-police market rose significantly as a result.

Case study: Good Credit Scores
AMERICAN EXPRESS created Small Business Saturday, between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, to promote small local businesses. A searchable database of small Amex merchants allows consumers to find participating small businesses and helps to drive business by offering card users a $25 credit when shopping on that day. More than 100 million shoppers showed up to shop in 2011. The event’s Facebook tallied 2.6 million ‘likes’ and over 195,000 supportive tweets. Awareness rose from 37% to 65% in the second year. (image by: Jason Tester)

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

#WhySI: Building businesses. Improving lives. Companies that master social innovation are poised for great growth. This month we’re presenting the best ways to help your company succeed at social innovation.

The Approach

Employees are more loyal to companies that address their interests and needs. Oftentimes, the costs of the perks are tax-deductible, which means employees get the full value of the perk, while companies only pay for a fraction. A well-run employee benefits plan can reduce an organization’s costs by an average of 20%. Providing meaningful work and perks based on employee needs wins loyalty.

Watchouts
Make sure employees are aware of the perks offered. Research conducted by Unum found that employees who reported receiving quality benefit education were nearly twice as likely to say their employers care about their well-being, and 70% felt their work was valued. Among employees who said their benefit education was fair or poor, just 41% believed their work was valued.

Case study: Perks Work
AMERICAN APPAREL provides its employees with free long distance calls, health clinics and bike rentals, subsidized lunches and public transport, free onsite massages and ESL classes. These perks help the company retain some of the best workers in the industry and serve as a powerful brand differentiator. The Company reported that for the month ending June 30, 2012, total net sales increased 16% to $52.1 million.

Case study: Providing Meaningful Work
CONTINUUM helped UNITEDHEALTHCARE revamp the traditional call center model by assigning specific patients to each call center employee in their Sherpa program. This created a relationship between the call center worker and patient and made the call center worker’s job much more meaningful and fulfilling. They are exploring how to implement this program on a larger level.

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

#WhySI: Building businesses. Improving lives. Companies that master social innovation are poised for great growth. This month we’re presenting the best ways to help your company succeed at social innovation.

The Approach

In situations where a product may be to expensive for an one group to afford, it is possible to enlist the resources of another group. The Buy One, Give One approach increases the retail price in an affluent market to cover the costs of donating the same item to a person in need. This model is very intuitive and tangible. A person can really understand the benefits of the product because they are about to buy it for themselves.

Watchouts
Some consumers may be uninterested in helping out a fellow user. Ensure the benefits of the product or service can stand on their own and aren’t solely tied to the social cause.

Case study: Increasing Access to Technology
Millions of school children in developing nations have no access to computers. MIT Media Lab made the $100 laptop a reality through by creating a unique pricing structure. For $399, tech enthusiasts would purchase two laptops: one for themselves and another for a child in a developing nation. Over 80,000 people participated in the program in the first year.

Case study: Perfect Vision
WARBY PARKER could easily be perceived as a cheap eye glass manufacturer. But, their buy-one-give-one program gives people another reason to buy and feel cool. The company has spent little on marketing and relied heavily on word of mouth to generate interest and traffic. The CEO of WP said “unlike other companies that add social campaigns, this has been part of the mission from day one and one of the reasons why people respond to the Warby Parker brand.” The company launched in 2010 and has since scaled to 60 employees and grown 500%.

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

#WhySI: Building businesses. Improving lives. Companies that master social innovation are poised for great growth. This month we’re presenting the best ways to help your company succeed at social innovation.

#climatecontrol

Look out your window – lately the weather’s been CRAY. 2012 featured a number of extreme weather events, from SuperStorm Sandy to snowfall in the Middle East. Besides devastating communities and ruining infrastructure, these events have also served as a warning: the earth is getting warmer. At this point, it doesn’t matter who or what is to blame – but it’s clear we need to work to reduce emissions, prepare for dangerous climate conditions and even figure out how to prevent future warming from occurring. While geoengineering can feel like a comic-book answer to our problems, it won’t fix the behaviors that are causing this in the first place, and leads to the question: Will we really be willing to give up bacon* to save a few glaciers?

*“The trillions of farm animals around the world generate 18 percent of the emissions that are raising global temperatures, according to United Nations estimates, more even than from cars, buses and airplanes” (NYT).

“Nearly 4 out of 5 Americans now think temperatures are rising and that global warming will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds… Phil Adams, a retired freelance photographer from North Carolina, said he was “fairly cynical” about scientists and their theories. But he believes very much in climate change because of what he’s seen with his own eyes” (CSMonitor).

“‘Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,’ said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. ‘The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity’” (NYT).

“If we want to avoid large climate change we need to act now on greenhouse gases,” he said. “Global warming is not yet damaging, but if we do nothing in the coming years we will have more extreme events, droughts, storms and so on” (Columbia).

“In his September 6 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, President Obama — whose reticence about so much as mentioning global warming has flummoxed environmental activists — used the subject to launch an unexpected attack on his opponent. “Climate change is not a hoax,” the president declared. “More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They are a threat to our children’s future.” In the after-speech gabfest, Politico cited the moment as one of Obama’s top applause lines” (The Atlantic).

IMPLICATIONS
As climate change becomes less a problem for posterity and more a troubling reality, it’s time to tighten the belt on emissions for both consumers and companies. That’s if you want a belt in the future.

image via gunaxin

The Approach

Many underserved groups have needs that they are willing to spend money to fulfill. The trick is to find the right need and appropriate price. Understanding the problems of a specific group can help uncover new opportunities. We call this approach Resolve Unmet Needs.

Watchouts
Underserved groups can be tricky because if they were easy to serve, they would have been served already. Finding the right group may be hard. What are the untapped resources of this group? Have they just been overlooked?

Case study: Nourishing a Community
DANONE FOODS partnered with the GRAMEEN FOUNDATION to enable Bangladeshi women to start their own yogurt businesses. The program provides income to impoverished Bangladeshi women and gives Danone the ability to distribute in previously inaccessible markets. Both the women entrepreneurs and Danone have thrived despite tumultuous economic conditions. In two years, the number of women entrepreneurs more than tripled (from 270 to 821) and Danone expects to earn profits on its operations in 2013. (image by: McKay Savage)

At Continuum, our knowledge and tools are always evolving. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and any impactful social innovation examples you’ve seen. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for organizations and businesses to take on socially impactful work and practices that make a positive impact on people and business.

#WhySI: Building businesses. Improving lives. Companies that master social innovation are poised for great growth. This month we’re presenting the best ways to help your company succeed at social innovation.

In the month of April — in honor of Earth Day — Continuum is launching a special blog series that highlights how organizations can make a concerted focus around social innovation. The goal here is to shift the outdated and outmoded conception that social innovation means good for the world, but not good for business. In fact, there are definitive ways where these two ideas come together.

Here at Continuum, we created social innovation cards that we use to help our clients best understand how social innovation can benefit their business. Each card explores key social innovation concepts and case studies from Fortune 500 companies to local initiatives and startups. The card deck as a whole highlights some of the different ways that companies and organizations can practice social innovation without sacrificing their bottom line. In fact, social innovation can actually improve bottom line results by building stronger employee and customer relationships.

In this special series, we are bringing this tool from our projects and design thinking workshops to you.  We’ll be posting a new tip right from the deck every other day, so check back regularly all month long so you don’t miss the conversation.

Writing for brands is a lot like character writing. Both the content and the tone need to match the personality of the brand. Otherwise the words ring hollow or worst of all, bland. The most successful brands create content that feels and sounds natural. Like it’s coming from one person.

Even the simplest of messages can be branded successfully: “Hello” or even “Goodbuy.” (See what I did there? Thanks Target)

Word choice should be treated as a serious sport. It’s crucial in getting the tone of messaging right.

At the end of the day, messaging needs to convey a feeling. It makes a statement about who you are as a brand. And it’s helps brands connect with people on an emotional level.

Last week, Continuum kicked-off its second year of involvement with Healthbox, a heathcare-focused start-up incubator headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Boston and London. During the three-month program, Continuum will work as thought partners and coaches to the ten start-up companies accepted into the program.

While the companies address many facets of the healthcare market — from medical devices and diagnostics to behavior change and wellness offerings to administrative software solutions — they all need to understand their customers to achieve success. Continuum’s role will be to help the companies think holistically about the customers they’re serving, the businesses they’re creating, and the ecosystems in which they’ll be operating. We will help them think about influential stakeholders and their needs; practice effective customer interview tactics; and refine their value propositions based on consumer feedback. Ultimately, success will involve developing various entrepreneurial muscle groups in a balanced way — from compelling customer experiences to feasible operating models.

Continuum’s half-day workshop focused on the importance of going out into the field to get first-hand experience observing, interacting with, and understanding customers. The format was a mixture of presentation sections punctuated by interactive activities conducting close observations and articulating value propositions. When learning about customers, it’s not about asking people explicitly what they want, but rather hearing what they say, observing what they do, and noting the context in which they’re acting. Doing so can reveal discrepancies and patterns that can suggest compelling problems to be solved and opportunities for innovation. Effective consumer research involves exploring customers’ functional needs, but also considering the deeper emotions and unspoken values that inform their decisions and actions.

Innovating in healthcare is a complex undertaking. To help them chart clearer paths to success, the ten companies will interact with a network of advisors that Healthbox has assembled. The advisors will weigh in on relevant strategic, legal, regulatory, operating, and financial topics. Currently, the companies are participating in an intensive two-week healthcare “bootcamp.” Experts from various corners of the healthcare arena present tutorials in their areas of expertise. Hearing from different stakeholders — from payors and providers to healthcare IT personnel and hospital administrators — helps inform the decisions founders will make. At the close of the 3-month program, the entrepreneurs will introduce their companies at Innovation Day, an event that assembles entrepreneurs, VCs, angel investors, strategic advisers, and potential operating partners.

While a company’s day-to-day operations focus on optimization, innovation efforts depend upon exploration. Benefiting from both activities requires an ambidextrous approach that is not easy, yet has the potential to be richly rewarding. On Tuesday, a group of innovation leaders gathered at a Harvard Business School Association of Boston forum to discuss the challenges of encouraging and developing innovation capabilities. Moderated by Continuum CEO Harry West, the panel included:

• Ryan Armbruster, Vice President of Innovation Competency at United Health Group
• Tom Wood, serial entrepreneur and founding CEO of Insulet Corporation
• Lesley Mottla, Executive Vice President of Product and Enterprise at Zipcar

Representing organizations from start-ups to the Fortune 50, the panelists spent 90 minutes fielding questions from the audience and sharing on-the-ground tactics for fostering innovation. A few highlights:

Three kinds of innovation
The panel touched upon three kinds of innovation: market-based innovation; tech, or asset-based innovation; and needs-based innovation. They referenced some 5 to 10-year studies that suggest that needs-based innovation outperforms the other types.

Leaders are vital to making innovation work
Leaders play a critical role in helping innovation succeed at an organizational level. They need to knock down walls and open communication channels across department silos. Functional groups are often fragmented, or do not naturally have occasion to interact with each other. Leaders should serve as connective tissue that strengthens and supports the new organizational muscles that innovation efforts bring to life.

For example, United Health Group convenes an Innovation Council composed of divisional CEOs to review innovation projects. The group is responsible for lowering barriers, encouraging exploration and facilitating introductions across divisions and product lines.

Zipcar’s leadership emphasizes the idea that everyone in the organization is responsible for driving innovation. Leaders set an example and underscore their point with words and actions.

Tom Wood commented, “Even the most creative people, despite the best of intentions, live in their own boxes. We all do. Leaders need to think about how do you bring all of the boxes together so that they can benefit and help each other? It’s important for leaders to approach problems with a humble attitude to ensure that all of the right people end up around the table to tackle a problem.”

Creating an innovative culture involves giving permission to fail smartly
To create a culture where innovation can flourish, it’s important for leaders to encourage their teams to be open-minded, and not be afraid to fail. Leaders need to help their people explore by giving them permission to fail and to offer praise for experimentation. When failure happens, it is important to acknowledge it, assess what happened and then to be sure to learn from the experience. Learning is key to ensuring that the same mistakes aren’t repeated.

Tactically, leaders should make sure the appropriate incentives are in place to encourage experimentation. An emphasis on short-term, operational results can crush longer-term initiatives and lead only to incremental innovation and “playing it safe.” More disruptive ideas need space and time to breath, develop and mature before they are exposed to a company’s standard operating pressures. Individuals tasked with leading innovation efforts need to understand that their day-to-day priorities and ways to measure success should be different from standard projects. Innovation incentives and metrics should be designed to encourage such alternate approaches and longer-term thinking.

Drawing parallels between the Quality Movement and the Innovation Imperative
Referring to the Quality Movement’s evolution from fringe idea to standard operating procedure at most large companies, the panelists projected that companies would increasingly develop more robust innovation capabilities as the need for innovation-fueled growth intensifies. Human-centered design research methodologies, (e.g., ethnography, observation, prototyping), now provide a consistent language and consistent processes with which to develop more replicable and reliable innovation capabilities. Not everyone within an organization needs to be fluent in human-centered design, but having a nucleus of people who understand the methodology and speak the language would provide the basis for spreading in-house innovation skills.

Physical space (in addition to mental space) is important for innovation
Innovation relies on people for inspiration, but physical space also plays an important role. People need to be able to collaborate and share easily. Useful work spaces that permit casual conversations to occur, as well as create dedicated domains where project work can live in various visual formats, support those working on innovation efforts. Technology can help, but sometimes nothing beats in-person debates, discussions and brainstorming sessions.

With so much being reported from the design and innovation communities, we’ve decided to pull together some of the most compelling stories we’ve been reading each week. Keep an eye here for a round up of news every Friday.

Demand for Tailored Customer Experience Put Brand Loyalty at Risk, by Marisa Peacock

CMS Wire

Brand loyalty is certainly an important element of your marketing strategy, but new research shows that it’s trumped by experience.

Are Chief Innovation Officers Delivering Results?, by Robert B. Tucker

Innovation Excellence

Back in the mid-2000s, a new class of senior managers emerged at forward-thinking companies. Sometimes called chief innovation officers, or innovation catalysts, their job was to help their organization drive growth and transformation in a more systematic way. Fast-forward almost a decade and you can’t help but wonder: how’s it going?

How Patient Navigation Can Cut Costs and Save Lives, by David Balderson and Kaveh Safavi, M.D.

HBR Blog Network

With their expertise in handling patients’ needs and their understanding of the healthcare process, patient navigators can provide those answers and ensure that patients are getting the care they need.

As Smartphone Growth Slows, Carriers Turn To The Connected Car , by Christopher Versace

Forbes

For the first time ever this year, smartphones will outsell feature phones. That will put downward pressure on average selling prices for the devices and margins for device manufacturers. To make up for it, mobile carriers are targeting a new space.

4Moms’ Childcare Products: Sophisticated Designs Yield High Ease of Use

Core77

Why would a company that creates baby products have roboticists on staff? Well, check out what 4Moms’ Origami stroller can do.

Photo courtesy of Flickr

 #momandpopdotcom

The 5-cent candy prices may be gone, but the mom-and-pop-shop spirit is back in the rent-free space called the Internet. E-commerce startups like Etsy, Kickstarter, and Warby Parker are taking back the power from big box stores by cutting out the middleman, while the entrepreneurial spirit is rearing within hordes of DIY-ers. Without inventory, rent, or traditional advertising, consumers are able to connect directly with the products they want – while sticking their finger to the man.

“On some level the Etsy idea is not really techno-progressive at all. It’s nostalgic… Buying something from the person who made it is “the opposite of what Wal-Mart is right now: just this massively impersonal experience,” he told me earlier. “When you get an item from Etsy, there’s this whole history behind it. There’s a person behind it”” (NYT).

“Traditionally, designers have been very dependent on their few retail channels […] Retailers called the shots—they paid your mortgage or your rent. When those accounts go away, designers are no longer tied to these companies dictating how, when and at what price they sell your products. Suddenly people were free. They didn’t have to worry about stepping on anyone’s toes, because the big retail accounts are no longer big retail accounts. That’s a new phenomenon” (Entrepreneur).

“This sharing economy is based on people coming together to create their own markets (Airbnb), their own products, (Etsy), and their own currency (TimeBanks). It relies on shared needs, trust, and the belief that the group is stronger than the individual. This new shared market economy is being driven by a quiet revolution: the millions of Americans who no longer want to prop up our faltering economy with endless and thoughtless consumption” (The Atlantic).

IMPLICATIONS

Large companies: How can you enable and profit from the DIY spirit without getting directly involved?

There’s a battle for the wrist brewing with companies such as Apple, Samsung, Sony, and Nike all getting into the game with new products out or on the way, competing for this valuable piece of real estate on the body.

But the wrist isn’t new. Companies have tried and failed to bring technology to the wrist before with the Microsoft SPOT watch and Samsung’s SPH-WP10, which was a similar product. They never caught on because the human element was overlooked. These early ideas didn’t fit into people’s lives in a meaningful way. They were more about the technology leading the way without fully considering people’s needs. Similar to why the iPod was successful, these solutions need to consider the entire ecosystem of the product and how it can fit into people’s lives. Other MP3 players existed before the iPod but they weren’t nearly as successful.

Why the wrist? People don’t need to wear watches anymore, and there are really only a few places on the body to wear devices and Google Glass has already taken the face. Ergonomically, the wrist is a very easy place see and interact with a device. There’s also an ingrained behavior and acceptance to wearing things on your wrist.

For the health-related devices, it’s also nice that the wrist is a location that’s easy to see. Being in a visible location such as the wrist, it’s almost like a string around your finger reminding you to work out that day – or to at least take the stairs instead of the elevator. It also communicates an important message to the people around you that you care about your health.

An opportunity and challenge for a universally accepted wearable device is that it needs to appeal to a wide variety of consumers. Watches and jewelry are fashion and status items so these wrist-worn technology solutions need to keep that in mind. It probably won’t be like your iPhone where you can customize and personalize it by adding a case or a skin.

This is a very young category that’s waiting for someone to introduce a wrist-worn solution that gets it right. In order to win, it will need to have the right balance of useful functionality, fashion focus, and an experiential ecosystem.

Image source.

These things do matter (truly, they do), but you’ll miss a key ingredient of what makes certain brands truly remarkable if you only focus on the tangible aspects of brand creation and brand management.

Great brands always deliver the verbs, not just the nouns.

Just as it is with the people you meet in the real world, great brands know that their actions go a long way towards determining how you feel about them.

Maybe there isn’t much of a connection after all. (That soda is just sooo arrogant.)

Maybe you’ll just settle for being casual acquaintances. (I guess your trash bags are OK.)

Or is there a much deeper feeling of connection? (I love you, Lululemon yoga pants. Will you be mine?)

I recently made a trip down to Florida for work. Stayed at one of those very nice three star hotels that are all the rage these days. Went to my meeting. Flew back home to Boston. Everything went fine. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Until the following month, that is, when I got my statement from American Express. It turned out that the hotel billed me for a two-night stay. The problem is that I only stayed there for one night.

So, what do you do? Call the hotel and negotiate directly with them? Sure, if you don’t mind giving up your Saturday afternoon to haggle on the phone. Perhaps you enjoy a lovely brew of verbal jousting and football watching? I certainly don’t. Any way you slice it, it’s a task to be dreaded.

Instead, I did what I always do in situations like this.

I called American Express.

Explained my issue to them.

And then the representative said something that was music to my ears.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of it.”

And in those few words, American Express reaffirmed why they hold all of my credit card business.

While it may not be the hippest credit card brand around (it’s not). And its logo doesn’t earn many accolades from design aficionados (and there’s no reason why it should). They absolutely, consistently act in all the right ways.

Membership does indeed have its privileges.

In the past, mass advertising and mass market distribution dictated that the “best” design was the one with the broadest appeal to the masses. And we all know that broad appeal can often mean extracting most of the excitement out of a design solution. Sure, over the years things have become a bit more interesting as major brands began to offer their products in variations – different colors, materials, finishes and features that helped to differentiate a product you might find at Wal-Mart from the one at Bed, Bath and Beyond.  But in today’s world of choice, when a consumer’s purchase options includes everything from  Target to Fab, I believe there’s never been a greater opportunity to offer the consumer designs with personality. Designs that are meant to resonate with people’s functional values AND with their emotions and their personality. But then, the understandable pushback that I hear from clients is that too much design personality can be risky. Our clients are investing a lot of money in bringing a product to market and they want confirmation that they’re making the right bet that will appeal to a wide enough audience. “Too niche is too risky”, I often hear. So are designs with personality destined to be too niche, or can you create emotionally-compelling designs that will resonate with the personalities of many – resulting in a “mass success”, so to speak?

This is a challenge we’re exploring with our client Felix, a new tech accessories brand. The ultimate goal for Felix is to create accessories that improve the experience of using technology and make the user smile in the process. In order to stay true to the brand, we’re not extracting the excitement out of the designs when it comes to Felix . We’re creating designs with personality that, ideally, will appeal to a broad enough audience to be successful. But as we’ve explored different designs together, we sometimes arrive at concepts that have us question – is this too niche to be economically viable? And how can we know?

We could conduct months of consumer research, testing consumer response and purchase intent using sophisticated quant tools, such as BASES. But that’s expensive and time consuming. Instead, Felix came up with what you might expect from a start-up – a somewhat unorthodox idea. They decided to do a “market test” on Kickstarter. The beauty is, Kickstarter can give us more than purchase intent – it is a real life test of consumer response before you’ve made a full commitment to production.

This week, Felix is launching their first Kickstarter for a new docking station and stand called MonkeyOh. It’s a clever product that offers great functionality along with personality. Question is, will it resonate with enough people? And if it does, can it make the leap from Kickstarter to placement at a leading mass design channel, such as Target?  Take a look and weigh in with your pledge or a comment here: MonkeyOh Kickstarter.

Think of how many common expressions we use to talk about the significance of simply sitting down: “From where I sit …” before expressing a point of view. “Sit with it a moment …” while contemplating a decision. “Having a seat at the table …” to feel empowered. Where and how we sit has a lot to do with our psychological state of mind when interacting with other people. Even while many of our interactions these days are done staring at a computer screen, it’s still essential to do some face-to-face: an important client meeting, a doctor’s visit, even a dinner out with friends. In those cases, it’s important to have clear, unambiguous seating that helps us effectively relate to one another, and allows us to feel supported both physically and emotionally.

As designers at Continuum, we have done a lot of thinking about how seating can set the stage for personal interaction. Part of the equation is ergonomic–creating design that is comfortable, fits a body well, and will not lead to discomfort or injury over time. But equally important is the psychology of seating. Subtle changes in elements such as pitch, height, padding, and seating configuration can dramatically change a person’s mindset during an interaction–and even the interaction itself. Creating the “right seat” is paradoxically about moving people: to act, collaborate, make a decision, or transition within environments. As these examples show, in different situations, that can mean very different things:

The Good Deal Seat

When negotiating, it’s common to feel anxious about not getting the best deal–especially in a situation like a car dealership where customers fear they lack information to avoid being “taken for a ride.” In creating seating for the sales process for one major car company, we empowered customers by allowing them to sit forward and upright. Our research showed, perhaps counter-intuitively, that empowering customers actually causes them to stay longer in the dealership and be more likely to close a deal, creating a win for the company as well. It’s only when people feel intimidated that they regain control by leaving the situation. By creating an empowering experience, we help ensure they will return again to the dealership, and refer friends as well.

The Get-Well-Soon Seat

Nothing could be worse than feeling uncomfortable when you are sick. In helping design Herman Miller’s Nala chair for medical settings, we took care to create something that would remind patients of the comforts of home, rather than a cold institutional environment. In addition, we put the arms higher and more forward in order to allow patients experiencing pain or limited mobility to get in and out more easily, and incorporated a pneumatic control to adjust to an infinite number of inclines to maximize comfort. By making patients feel more independent, we help take away some of the fears and difficulties in a time when they are not feeling their best.

The Financial Confab Seat

In recent years, banking customers have become less dependent on the traditional bank teller and more confident managing their money for themselves online. Yet they still need professional financial advice and consultation. When we helped banking giant BBVA design a new service model for banking, we acknowledged this trend by creating circular “pods” where customers could sit side-by-side with a bank representative in a private space to review their finances. By allowing customers and representatives to see the same information on the same screen, we created a more collaborative environment. Customers can feel in control of their money, while at the same time, they can learn from the expertise of the bank employee in making the right financial decisions.

The Millennial Hot Seat

The Millennial generation is all about equality: flattening hierarchies and up-ending traditional formality with more free-form ways of interaction. In designing 2ovens, a restaurant by the national Italian chain Bertucci’s catering specifically to Millennials, we wanted to incorporate those values in the seating we chose. Instead of chairs, we used tall stools that put diners on the same level with servers so they can feel like they are hanging out together in a fun, open environment rather than “being served.” The stools also enable spontaneous interaction with other diners, allowing customers to catch glances across the room, to mingle with standing bar goers, and stand up themselves to make an expressive point. The overall effect is to create a high-energy social environment that offers Millennials the freedom to be themselves.

The New Office Chair Isn’t an Office Chair

While all of these forms of seating have their advantages in service environments, they also hold lessons for the office environment as well. Office chairs have traditionally been about status–think Gordon Gecko in his big padded office chair (or even the ultra-cool Hollywood exec in his Herman Miller Aeron chair). In today’s office, however, it’s become more important to stress communication and collaboration. The available seating should enable employees to shift between say, upright seat for typing, a comfortable couch for creative work, a round table for collaboration, or high stools to easily circulate in a working group. Creating a variety of seats for different work habits not only enhances productivity but also improves morale by making employees feel like they are able to operate at their maximum potential.

The common thread tying together all of these modes of seating is an understanding of the values and goals of the participants in an interaction. Once we understand where a person “sits” emotionally, we can design seating that helps to support them physically and psychologically–maximizing the productivity and enjoyment of the moment of sitting down with another person. At a time when our social interactions increasingly involve staring at screens, that may be more important than ever.

This article was originally published in Fast Company.

With so much being reported from the design and innovation communities, we’ve decided to pull together some of the most compelling stories we’ve been reading each week. Keep an eye here for a round up of news every Friday.

3 Ways To Make Wearable Tech Actually Wearable, by Jennifer Darmour

Fast Company Design

To gain widespread popularity, wearables have to be more than just functional and innovative. People have to want to wear them.

Phablet, Schmablet: Let’s Refocus on Real Innovation, By Melissa Thompson

Huff Post Tech

There is nothing extraordinarily innovative about Samsung’s new device, aside from the extravagant promotion by dancers donning top hats and the number “4″ on their tuxedoed-clad backs.

‘Serendipitous Interaction’ Key To Tech Firms’ Workplace Design, by Steve Henn National Public Radio

Google has spent a lot of time studying what makes workplaces innovative. The most important factor?  Casual interactions.

4 Daily Habits of Game-Changing Social Innovators, by Ashoka

Forbes

What are changemakers doing on a day-to-day basis, when not receiving MacArthur Genius Grants for their work? And could you be doing the same?

Photo by Mike Boehmer via Wikimedia Commons

Design conferences help guide practitioners to a better understanding of future trends because they’re a forum where we get to share our insights from being early adopters, trend setters, and creative producers. The biggest lesson from the recent Alldesign Istanbul Conference: First redesign your life, then design for others. Designers changed their focus from being life-saving, super-global heros helping the needy to being simple beings attentive to the basic needs of themselves first, and society second. Coming from different backgrounds, the speakers were communicating one shared message: stop and listen to your intuition.

In an ideal world, the creative journey takes a designer both on an inward journey where intuition is tapped, and an outward journey to the informative environment that she is surrounded with. In a constantly changing world where you’re trying to catch up with new markets and requirements, many designers find themselves rapidly producing and speeding either towards the inward or the outward direction, but rarely back and forth. As a result, either from a lack of intuition or attentive participation, creativity is missed out. Social scientists have been stressing a lot of issues related to our fast changing world and their impact on humans, but these issues had never been pointed out by designers. What distinguishes the message of designers from scientists is not the content, but the way the content is communicated. Possessing strong empathetic skills, designers can answer the need of the audience (this time a life lesson to conference attendees) by telling well-designed stories.

Alldesign 2013 showed that the design practice has shifted from producing as rapidly as our changing world to escaping from the flow in order to create both mental and physical sanctuaries. These sanctuaries differed from literal natural environments like bamboo settlements by John Hardy to mental trainings for happiness by Stefan Sagmeister.

Instead of talking about his beautiful jewelry and lifestyle collections, John Hardy decided to share his experience of building a natural and sustainable “Green School” in Bali. Built from locally produced bamboo and informed by locals, the school itself has become a great sustainable design project and a beautiful presentation material for a memorable life lesson.

Stefan Sagmeister had his road passing by Bali as well, not to build a school, but to sustain his happiness and pleasure of designing. He had been working on his provocative documentary The Happy Film, which showed ways of achieving happiness by doing certain exercises over and over again. His advice to the audience was to train their brains and teach themselves to be happy and to take some time off whenever needed. It was very interesting to see the super-productive designer leaving the arena to return with a happier and more productive mind than before.

Ron Arad’s way of stopping time, on the other hand, was through exploring ways of preserving a Fiat 500 and making it immortal like book-pressed flowers. The interesting thing about his journey was his choice of bringing a nostalgic element from the past, freezing it today, and preserving for the future. His work flexes between the past and future, almost opening a time tunnel that we can escape to whenever we feel detached from the overwhelming flow of our lives.

Whether caused by the selfish desire of immortality or just the need of tranquility, the designers’ ambition to share their life experiences was significant in this conference and their well-told stories were memorable life lessons.

Image from flickr.

Colin Shaw, CEO at Beyond Philosophy, recently wrote an article on LinkedIn questioning (doubting, even) the importance and power of journey mapping.

“…most journey mapping sucks! Most journey mapping just looks at the rational side of a Customer Experience and that is less than half of a person’s human experience. If you wish to map a Customer’s experience, then that is VERY different. By just using the word ‘experience’ means we should be looking at all the aspects that make up human experience when using journey mapping.”

You can read the full opinion here.

We disagree with Mr. Shaw. His argument seems to be largely semantic but it misses the big picture: journey maps must be customer-centric not organization centric. Thinking this way means considering the before and after as well as the rational and emotional components of an “experience” that will yield a robust and holistic framework. In our experience dealing with clients of all sizes the most important thing to keep in mind is that in the end a “whatever you call it” map is just a tool. It’s one that has become particularly trendy but often underutilized. Think of it not only as a generative research tool but as way of evaluating new ideas. A good journey map is like a recipe. Kind of like how most people who attempt to make a soufflé end up with a flat, fallen mess. It doesn’t mean that soufflés are a terrible thing—it’s just done poorly most of the time. The value and quality of the journey map lies with skills of the maker. And the fact of the matter is most are done poorly.

We all know how fast technology is changing these days. No sooner do we master a new device, it seems, than it becomes obsolete. While that rapid rate of change creates boundless new opportunities, few of us stop to think about the side effects it brings for designers, who are being tasked to create products to keep up with consumers’ expectations, needs, and aspirations.

Designing for this speed of change has become a challenge across every field, from consumer products to healthcare, but it is particularly difficult for fields that involve extensive capital and tooling or infrastructure. As Dominic Basulto recently wrote for the Washington Post, “With technology and business cycles moving so quickly, companies no longer have the luxury of waiting a year or more to release a product into the marketplace.”

In the face of those pressures, one way that designers can address that change is by adding flexibility that can address new or unknown user needs that develop over short and shorter timelines. Creating such ‘Product Elasticity’ can extend the lifespan of a product at the same time allowing it to be used in a greater variety of ways by larger groups of people.

A perfect example of this on the consumer product side is the Bugaboo stroller, which adapts to the ever-changing needs of parents and child. Its manufacturer took a system of parts and reduced them to a single flexible product. This product adapts: from mom’s needs to dad’s needs, from city to suburb, from walking to car, from baby to toddler to baby and toddler, from the pedestrian to celebrity style. It does this by converting from a car seat to a basinet to a stroller depending on the needs of the moment, without compromising function. More importantly the stroller adjusts to what parents wants, by integrating parenting into their lifestyles rather than the other way around. Here elasticity is present in the manipulation of the product itself, so the product is already able to adjust as needs change

While designing elasticity into products, it’s important not to go too far. Microsoft’s Surface computer/tablet is another product that appears to be designed with this type of thinking in mind. The Surface is trying to compete with the quintessential example of elasticity, the iPad, one device that can be used for purposes as varied as accessing medical records to playing Angry Birds. Although Microsoft and Apple’s approaches are very different from one another, the Microsoft Surface is neither laptop nor tablet but tries to be both by transforming physically to adjust to user’s situations, whereas the iPad transforms itself through content and to some extent peripherals. It will be interesting to see what methodology will win. So far it does not look like the Microsoft Surface is faring too well, but it is early in its launch and the jury is still out.

It isn’t only in the realm of consumer products where elasticity can be useful. As new technology and procedures innovate the health care industry, they outpaced the ability of the infrastructure to keep up. Continuum helped design the Herman Miller Compass hospital room system with that awareness of change in mind. The modular furniture system of interchangeable components allows hospital and outpatient facilities to change to accommodate. Flexibility was critical but the patient’s experience remained central to the design.

The world is not slowing down, yet physical products have to contend with real-world physical limitations, which includes manufacturing lead times and capital expenses that limit how fast companies can adjust their products. Designing products that can adapt and evolve to the needs of consumers and the pace of technology can give companies the chance to produce quality products that work for the long haul without compromising the changing demands of consumer experience.

Image from Bugaboo website

With so much being reported from the design and innovation communities, we’ve decided to pull together some of the most compelling stories we’ve been reading each week. Keep an eye here for a round up of news every Friday.

Apple Needs Us To Want The iWatch, And Design Is How It Will Make That Happen, by Anthony Wing Kosner

Forbes

Unlike the rest of the luxury watch industry that can make all kinds of custom lines for people with different tastes and different sized wrists, Apple will need to make a fairly neutral canvas upon which customizations can be applied with software.

Facebook’s New Look Can’t Conceal its Old Problems, by Kevin Kelleher

CNN Money

Facebook’s new news feed makes some welcome cosmetic. But it doesn’t go very far in addressing the social network’s deeper issues.

How Serious Play Leads To Breakthrough Innovation, by Bruce Nussbaum

Co.Design

Using Continuum as an example, Bruce Nussbaum’s new book Creative Intelligence argues that building a space away from normal activity, where people trust each other and agree to behave by a different set of rituals, is key to enhancing a team’s creative capability.

Does ‘Big Data’ Mean the Demise of the Expert — And Intuition?

Wired

As big data transforms our lives — optimizing, improving, making more efficient, and capturing benefits — what role is left for intuition, faith, uncertainty, and originality?

Photo courtesy of Flickr

Hospital environments are stressful scenes: blaring alarms, beeping machines, busy monitors, and endless tubes and wires all vie for doctors’ and nurses’ attention and overload their senses. “Alarm fatigue,” the phenomenon whereby health professionals get overwhelmed by and ignore the constant cacophony of alarm sirens has become a national problem. One study at Johns Hopkins Hospital found staff were exposed to nearly 1,000 alarms a day’one every 90 seconds. That overload of information takes its toll mentally on practitioners, and medically on patients. A Boston Globe report found that in a five-year period, at least 200 deaths were linked to a failure to respond to alarms, and a survey of doctors and nurses by ECRI Institute identified alarm fatigue as the number one safety concern facing hospitals.

The hospitals, doctors’ organizations and the Food and Drug Administration have all focused on tackling the problem and information overload in general, both through technological fixes, such as reviewing medical devices in order to weed out unneeded alarms, and through behavioral changes, such as increasing training and putting procedures in place to institute more breaks for staff.

While these changes are part of the necessary response, the problem of medical information overload can also be overcome by design. Alarm fatigue is only one part of the equation; equally important asreducing the overall amount of information is designing a hospital environment that allows the information to be more easily synthesized and interpreted so that health workers can focus on what is truly important. At Continuum, a global design and innovation consultancy, we have partnered with many different medical device firms to design more sanity and efficiency into the hospital setting. We have found that in order to do that, medical designers must keep in mind three principles:

1. Hierarchy
2. Differentiation
3. Redundancy

Hierarchy 
In a medical environment where seconds can count in making proper diagnostic decisions, whatever information is most important needs to stick out most. That must be done by creating hierarchies that cognitively make sense, at the same time allowing users to dig for supplemental information when it is needed. For example, Continuum helped design the Mindray V series monitor, the first monitor that features a vertically oriented, portrait-style display, which shows the most important information in larger, bolder fonts, and less critical information in smaller, lighter typeface. Fonts and colors were evaluated for legibility and clarity at greater distances. The concise, easy-to-read format allows the viewer to interpret a patient’s condition and respond more rapidly, and makes efficient use of the available space in crowded patient rooms where space is at a premium.

Differentiation
Differentiating alarms by pitch and pattern can help identify which is a warning, which is a critical event, and which is an indication of a properly functioning device. But alarm notifications are only part of the equation in creating more safety and efficiency in a medical environment. A 2009 report by the FDA found hundreds of cases of accidental deaths in hospitals from missed tubing connections’such as connecting an external feeding tube to a tracheal connection or an IV. Those events can’t be entirely blamed on health worker negligence’with dozens of tubes in a hospital room that all look alike, it can be extremely difficult in a fast-paced hospital environment to find the right one. Continuum has worked on projects to address the differentiation issues that the nonprofit Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) and FDA have made a priority. Good design of differentiation can be the difference between life and death.

Redundancy
Different people learn in different ways. Having devices that convey the same information simultaneously through sight, sound, and touch can ensure proper messages are delivered. For example, in the Mindray V monitor, LED alarm lights in the rim surrounding the display remain hidden when not needed, but illuminate when an alarm event is triggered. When that happens, the device posts an alarm message within the respective information parameter on the screen to which the alarm pertains, focusing the user’s attention to where it is needed most urgently. We have also created redundancy on other devices we’ve helped create for the hospital environment, for example, by differentiating buttons on a medical device using different lights, icons, and tactile shape to ensure correct use.

All of these techniques are important in helping manage medical information in a hospital setting. Just as important is that they are integrated into a comprehensive system that holistically helps doctors and nurses make sense of the information in real time. Using all of these techniques will not necessarily reduce the amount of information flying around a busy hospital environment, but it will help health professionals better use and manage the information ’ leading to better healthcare.

This article was originally published in MedCity News.

Image from flickr.

Over the course of every design practitioners career there are days when one comes across authors and their books that act as intellectual catalysts to spark new ways of thinking about how one approaches design. I’d like to introduce you to three such books on the subject of design management…all with one thing in common. They are co-authored (with other colleagues) by Rachel Cooper and Margaret Bruce. These are not new books, with publishing dates ranging from 1995 to 2002 but their message is still potently relevant today. I suggest that they are ideal primers to inspire the strategic designer in all of us. I also believe that they are fundamental to any business strategist trying to understand how to better incorporate design into driving business innovation and to any strategic design manager seeking to drive the design organization that will underpin it.

The first is “The Design Agenda” by Rachel Cooper and Mike Press. Published in 1995 it is one of the first books dedicated to describing and defining “design management”. What I have always appreciated about design management is its dedication to thinking holistically about how both design fits within the organization and also how customers experience its manifestation. The book explores the concept of total design and the experience associated with that and also looks at the total design management landscape from its role informing corporate strategy, then design strategy, and finally actual design management. It digs into fundamentals including thoughts on the value of design, corporate design strategies, design organizations, and design audits. It concludes with a comprehensive table that summarizes what the design management “agenda” should be in terms of actions (planning, organizing, implementing, and evaluating) and the roles people play at various levels of the organization.

The second book is entitled “Marketing and Design Management” by Margaret Bruce and Rachel Cooper. Published in 1997 it is a collection of essays exploring the relationship between design and marketing, case studies on successful partnerships, and followed by the republishing of four “seminal papers”. The latter are must-reads for all strategic designers. Peter Gorb’s “Silent Design” refers to “non-designers, such as marketing managers, who make decisions that affect design” and how “defining the role of silent designers and recognizing their impact on design” is a crucial responsibility of every design manager. The other excellent piece is “Design: a powerful but neglected strategic tool” by Philip Kotler and Alexander Rath. As the authors point out, what is interesting about the case for design as made here is that a well-known marketing expert is making it. This collection of essays is still valuable today as the relationship between design and marketing continues to evolve as we respond to the challenges to our respective disciplines being triggered by the digital age.

Last but not least is “Design in Business: Strategic Innovation Through Design” by Margaret Bruce and John Bessant. Published by the UK Design Council in 2002 the book is divided in to 4 sections. Section 1 explores design definitions and design management processes. Section 2 takes on the challenge of integrated design management with a particular lens on the relationships between design and strategy, marketing, operations, organization design, and finance. This is the heart of the book and is inspiring in its holistic and integrated view of how design drives innovation within an organization. It provides great inspiration to help designers communicate the value of design to diverse stakeholders and sets the foundation for effective collaboration. Recent discussions on the relationship of business and design thinking practices could benefit from a look at the insights presented here. The book closes by looking to the future…how might we improve the design process and how can we better look to the future to inform our strategies for design and its role in business.

Margaret Bruce is currently Pro Vice-Chancellor at the University of Central Lancashire and Professor Rachel Cooper is Director of the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA).

References:

Cooper, R. & Press, M. (1995) The Design Agenda: A Guide to Successful Design Management. John Wiley & Sons

Bruce, M. & Cooper, R. (1997) Marketing and Design Management. International Thomson Business Press.

Bruce, M. & Bessant, J. (2002) Design in Business: Strategic Innovation Through Design. Design Council. Financial Times/Prentice Hall. Pearson Education.

“Nostalgia for a simpler time when people had fewer choices, perhaps, can help anchor modern consumers in a shifting world. Objects that refer to the past bring with them a sense of authenticity that is not found in digital solutions. The food we eat, the music we listen to, the objects we buy—we all look for craftsmanship.” —M. Astella Saw, Lifestyle Journalist

In many of the projects we have been conducting here at Continuum—whether investigating trends in the kitchen, people’s lawn care habits, or their attitudes towards new technologies—we have repetitively come across a widespread sense of nostalgia for the past.

The research we’ve undertaken suggests designers and companies have interpreted this phenomenon in different ways. Some of them mask new products with a distinctive taste that aspires to be reminiscent of an earlier time. Their products, communications with customers, and service environments are evocative of styles that have historically been proven successful—therefore benefitting from “universal awareness, latent affection, and retro coolness” [1]. Others seem to refer to the past by drawing on a “genuinely useful” [2] spare design. They create this by reducing a product’s functions to just a few tasks, while still operating with the highest performance. By reducing technology and using high-quality craftsmanship and natural materials, they inspire a feeling of authenticity. The shapes, textures, and colors all tell us familiar stories of a mythical era, during which everything that surrounded us was simple and cozy.

Both these interpretations have apparently gained large approval among modern consumers. But why are products that awake our past remembrances so appealing? What makes us so eager to seek them out?

Nostalgia for the Good Ol’ Days is itself not a new phenomenon, but these days it seems omnipresent. We have cyclically witnessed it in the car industry (e.g. the new Cinquecento, Mini Cooper, VW Beetle), advertising, fashion, music and film industry, food trends (e.g. Grom) and social media (e.g. Facebook).  However, it has not been in the spotlight as subject of formal open discussion. As recent studies also point out [3], design researchers have too often disregarded the importance of nostalgia. Possibly the imperative that designers should constantly be contemporary and create new revolutionary experiences has induced them to turn away from it.

Although associated at times with the negative feeling of loss, nostalgia results in an overall pleasurable event because it provides an “aesthetic and emotional experience of meaning” [3]. It is said to occur through a retrieval of personal meaningful memories, which, filtered through time, are romanticized, softened and perceived therefore as delightful—as something better than the present condition. Moreover, experiencing nostalgia provides positive sensations of stability and belonging, which enhance people’s general well-being [4].

Because of these implications, designing for nostalgic experiences can be a very successful strategy. If designers carefully introduce evocative elements in new contexts, they can simultaneously provide both originality and continuity. In addition, the emotional bond these products trigger can generate a strong attachment, which can increase their endurance and make them more sustainable over time. On the other hand, it must be also stressed that if nostalgia is wrongly employed, it can encourage rejection for change, idealization of the past, and cause consequent discontent [3].

Given the large success that nostalgic communications and products are gaining among consumers, does this mean that we are inevitably heading towards a future of re-mixed phenomena? Not necessarily. While both of the strategies companies have employed to evoke nostalgia may suggest lack of imagination, their future success depends upon their ability to exploit our heritage cautiously, and offer the necessary human dimension by reinventing the way they connect to our collective imagination. Thus, they can provide that glimpse of ‘authenticity’ that people today look for and value. We are not just consumers. People today have become very informed, demanding, and extremely skeptical experts, who cannot be deceived for long by recycled refrains. Any future-facing design project needs to take this into account.

Even those brands, products, and experiences built upon the most innovative and revolutionary technologies should be able to render the shared values and familiarity that nostalgia provides.  In that way, they offer people the necessary reassurance to fantasize about the future.

[1]”Back to the future” (2012), Viewpoint 27, pg.78
[2]“ Out of the Ordinary”(2012), Viewpoint 26, pg. 1
[3]Xue, H., & Wolley, M. (2009) Collective memory and Nostalgia: a new market perspective on affective design strategy for the Chinese market. Paper presented at the IASDR 2009, South Korea.
Xue, H., & Wolley, M. (2011).The Charm of Memory: examining nostalgic experience from a design perspective. Paper presented at the IASDR 2011, The Netherlands.
[4]Rutherford, J., Shaw E.H. (2011).What was old is new again: the history of nostalgia as a buying motive in consumption behavior, US.

The tangible success of design has propelled business schools around the world to innovate their MBA programs by introducing courses on design thinking as a valuable complement to traditional analytical business thinking. This has the potential to create friction between strategic designers and business strategists and begs the question: Will designers lose design strategy to business strategists learning design thinking?

In discussing this issue with colleagues, I’ve found that many of us in the design community have become somewhat defensive and protective about the unique qualifications we possess and quick to point out the essential differences between the two practices. It’s too simple to just call it a right-brain, left-brain divide, but the fact is designers do tend to think very differently than business people. No matter how many design classes business students take, they are still business students receiving a business education–they can’t learn design in a semester any more than a designer can learn to be a businessperson by taking a few MBA electives. These courses do not enable them to develop unique capabilities that can generate business transformation by design, such as the ability to reflect the customer voice through design research and analysis, to visualize and communicate complex information, or to create, test, and evaluate advanced prototypes. This takes a design education, followed by experience, focus, and maturity.

As valid as these concerns are, however, I think they are only half the story. Designers are missing the opportunity presented by this positive perception of design’s influence on good business. To balance the initiative of our progressive business colleagues, designers must educate themselves on the pertinent aspects of business strategy in order to meet halfway and collaborate on the outcome. Those with ambition to be more intentionally strategic about their work must expand their notion of what it means to be a designer, beyond a focus on the craft and design-award competitions, to take a more holistic view of how their designs will actually be received in the marketplace. In fact, design schools should take a page from their B-school colleagues and introduce their own courses to teach these skills to designers to ensure they will play a role in that process.

At the end of the day, designers create products and services to be used, if not create real and lasting differences in people’s lives. Understanding how design drives business success is not only helpful but also essential for the designer in order to be successful in creating the innovations he or she wants to make. An ability to speak the language of finance and marketing will only empower designers in their discussions to argue strategically for the features in their designs they feel are important.

Design agencies don’t own creativity, but they do have the ability to take an idea and make it real. Showing the real value of naturally integrating strategy and design through creativity is the future, and those designers motivated to develop that skill are poised to succeed in it. It is not about a world where designers do their thing and MBAs do theirs, but rather where both recognize and value the power of a successful collaboration, built on solid communication, that brings the strengths of business and design thinking together to drive business innovation by design.

This article was originally published in Fast Company.

Image from Flickr.

We have had so much fun watching your videos and decoding your tweets! We were impressed by the wealth of creativity, thoughtfulness, and progressive ideas you shared with us about what you envisioned a doctor’s appointment may look like in 2033.

With no further ado, we are pleased to announce the winners of two passes to the 2013 Healthcare Experience Design Conference:

• @EricJonash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaGx9WFFYoA&feature=youtu.be
  We liked how Eric brought a patient story and the health system to life through a simple short story. He introduces us to “Frank,” explaining how the combination of casual consultation with his physicians/health coaches, self tracking, and an online community allows him to take “ownership of his health.”
• @GregBerney: “Constant body scans auto-alert MD that pt needs to be seen before symptoms experienced. Triage via Skype quickens visit”
  While many people focus on patients use of technology, we liked that Greg envisions a time when physicians will use technology to be prescient, giving them the ability to be more proactive in monitoring, reaching out to, and caring for patients remotely.

Don’t fret if you don’t see your name here, we can still help you save $200 on your HxD pass! Use promo code “Exclusive” to get an exclusive rate of $575. We hope you’ll join us in Boston on March 25^th to be part of the change design ignites.

With so much being reported from the design and innovation communities, we’ve decided to pull together some of the most compelling stories we’ve been reading each week. Keep an eye here for a round up of news every Friday.

Invest in Your Customers More Than Your Brand, by Michael Schrage

HBR Blog Network

The overwhelming majority of advertising/promotion/marketing/branding investments and expenditures most organizations make today are more about “selling things” than “helping customers.” What do you think customers find more appealing?

Chinese may have edge in emerging market dash for smartphones, by Paul Sandle and Harro Ten Wolde

Reuters

The next billion people to connect to the Internet in developing countries will do so largely via smartphones, prompting a battle that could favor low-price Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE over market leaders Samsung and Apple.

Does Innovation Only Happen In The Office?, by Cari Sommer

Forbes

Many are calling Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban working from home odd for a Silicon Valley innovator and a huge step backwards for the workplace. Experts weigh in on how important face-to-face interaction is for innovation.

Is sequestration the innovation opportunity America has been waiting for?, by Emi Kolawole

The Washington Post

Sequestration could go by another name: Disruption.