SWITCH TO: Continuum Advanced Systems

Mobility Beyond pavement Amos Winter, PhD of MIT Mobility Lab shares the Leverage Freedom Chair story and his commitment to the disabled in developing nations

 
Wheelchairs bring the gift of mobility to millions of disabled individuals, until rough terrain gets in the way. What if we could give people even more flexibility regardless of nature’s conditions? Continuum helped MIT’s Mobility Lab envision the next generation of the Leveraged Freedom Chair, a high-performance version that is funding the original prototype designed to help the disabled in developing countries. read more

Global Practice, Local Experience

 
Since Gianfranco Zaccai cofounded its Boston office in 1983, Continuum has grown into one of the giants of the design world. The consultancy, which won last year’s National Design Award for product design, has added four offices (in Los Angeles, Milan, Seoul, and Shanghai). In addition to designing some very high-volume consumer goods—if you use a Swiffer, you have Continuum to thank—Zaccai’s team has taken on systemic problems in the fields of social design and health care, including Daktari, a low-cost AIDS testing kit for southern Africa, and the Insulet Omnipod, which helps diabetics administer medication. Recently, Metropolis’s assistant editor, Avinash Rajagopal, spoke to Zaccai about Continuum’s long journey and why he thinks design should model itself on theater. read more

The Keys For Keeping Your Brand Relevant In The Post-Occupy Era

 
Americans no longer yearn for bigger and better, argue Continuum strategists Susan Lee and Jenny Liang. Here are three keys to creating products and services that evoke the new American dream. read more

Part 2: Service Design Thinking and the Innovation of Financial Services

 
In a recent blog in response to the excellent 2010 book entitled “Service Design Thinking” (Stickdorn/Schneider 2010) I noted that this was the first qualifier of design thinking, as least that I had witnessed at the time, that spoke to how design thinking might be applied to a specific design practice. I also noted that the sky was the limit as to how design practitioners could take design thinking tools and methods and apply them to their own area of practice. “Service Design Thinking” does an excellent job of just this mash-up. The key elements of an integrated service design and design thinking approach to the creation of new business service/product interactions can be outlined as follows: read more

Patrick Whitney Visits Continuum

 

Continuum welcomed Patrick Whitney, the Dean of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, to our Boston studio. We are always excited to host thought leaders in the field of design to talk about innovation and design thinking. read more

Part 1: Service Design Thinking and the Innovation of Financial Services

 
Recent turmoil in the financial services industry has lead many consumers to question how they manage their financial lives, both now and for the long-term.  The global recession has compounded the sense of unease consumers feel about entrusting financial services providers with managing and safeguarding the financial fruit of their labors. Trust is at an all-time low. read more

CES Show Highlights from CES Show 2012

 
read more

Your Front Line Employees are Your Brand. Do you Hire the Right Ones? Here are Four Tips on How to Motivate and Retain Talent

Image
 
Frontline employees--the people behind the counter, on the phone, in the cloud, and walking the floor--possess a large measure of control over the customer experience. read more

Just Add Water Selling a Concentrate Version of Your Product can Save and Help the Environment Millions

Image
 
Walk the aisles of your local supermarket and consider all the shelves devoted to liquid products—not just beverages, but the number of food, cleaning, and personal care items that have a liquid component. Now think about how much that liquid weighs, where it came from, and how much energy it took to get it to your store.

read more

The Future of Healthcare Design Five Takeaways From This Year’s Mayo Clinic Conference

  • By: Roderick McMullen
  • Posted On:11.24.2011
Image
 
Every year, the biggest ideas in health care are presented at the Mayo Clinic’s Transform conference in Rochester, Minnesota. I was there this year to present a pre-conference workshop with a Continuum colleague on everyday creativity, and another pair of Continuum designers gave a main-stage talk entitled, “Patient Centricity: A design identity crisis.” Also on the lineup were John Hockenberry and Roger Martin, bigwigs from J+J and GE Healthcare, and practitioners from the top-tier design and innovation firms. Many cutting-edge ideas were presented, along with some spirited debate on the hot topics of delivering care and the role of technology.

read more

The Time is Now for Concentrates Current economic and environmental concerns make these products more attractive

 
Here are five consumer trends that suggest concentrates have the potential to capture consumers’ attention once again.
read more

Design Makes Social Change Harry West at Tedx Madrid

 
"Harry West, designer and CEO of Continuum, an innovation consultancy company with offices around the world, explains why commerce is a very powerful leverage when we speak about social innovation. For a designer, to improve just a little a product, for example a diaper for the chinese market, that will be used by millions, and make it cheaper too, is a first great step for a real social change. Same thing for financial products that in Latin America will be able to improve life of women, really." Tedx Madrid

read more

Prototyping China: Living in Beta

Shanghai, China
 

Continuum has been doing work in China for 15 years, mostly focused on China as a consumer 
market. Our multinational clients have been 
betting on China’s emerging consumers as a key 
to their companies’ growth agendas since the 
early 1990s. But working with China as a client market had been sporadic. A few years ago, we 
decided it was time for Continuum to begin a 
deliberate expansion into the mainland.

 

read more

Kill the Office of Innovation What it really takes to create a thriving innovation capacity within an organization

  • By: Elisa O'Donnell
  • Posted On:06.29.2011
Image
 
The focus on innovation in the corporate world today has spawned a new organizational group: The Office of Innovation. With a charter of driving innovation into the heart of the organization, the logic is sound: If innovation is important, then there should be a core group of people who are accountable and responsible for it. After all, this is how other important functions, like finance and marketing, are handled. This makes sense. 
read more

In Pursuit of the Perfect, We're Overdesigning Our Lives How much attention to design is too much?

 

Looking into the refrigerator in a home in Lima, Peru I realized that I didn't recognize anything. Nothing was labeled: there were no brands. Different types of food were arrayed on plates or in bags. Consumerism had certainly reached this town -- there was a refrigerator, but the reach of consumerism was not as deep as it is in the United States.

read more

One Way to Innovate Tedx Talk - Finding small ways to make people's lives just a little bit better

 
Goals, Passions, Contradictions and Old Clothes - Harry West talks about innovation at TedxOrangeCoast. read more

Women Dominate The Global Market Place; Here Are 5 Keys To Reaching Them Here's what works (and what doesn't) when selling to this large, but surprisingly often ignored group of consumers.

 

Women are the next global emerging market.

Their economic power is truly revolutionary, representing the largest market opportunity in the world. Just look at the numbers: Women control 65 percent of global spending and more than 80 percent of U.S. spending. By 2014, the World Bank predicts that the global income of women will grow by more than $5 trillion. In both emerging markets and developed nations, women’s power of influence extends well beyond the traditional roles of family and education to government, business, and the environment.

read more

What We've Lost With Anonymous Designs Like The Kindle Accustomed to showing off his reading tastes with book covers, Harry West bemoans the anonymity of his Kindle.

 
Emily Dickinson is disturbing me. It seems that whenever I pick up my Kindle, there she is staring back at me. And when I think of the thousands of other readers with the identical Kindle and the identical screen saver I feel diminished. I have nothing against Emily Dickinson, but I am reading David Mitchell. The different covers of the books I used to read, with their different typefaces, designs, and colors, added to the richness of my life and connected me to others. I want to show off what I am reading; it is one of the ways I express myself.
read more

In Our Information Age, Secrecy Is Sexy. Four steps toward adding a mysterious allure to branding efforts.

 
We live in a culture of oversharing. We broadcast our every thought, opinion, and move as Facebook updates or tweets. There’s tremendous pride in being the first of your friends to post a good link or to start a popular thread.
This information has value; it's become a new form of currency traded over sites like YouTube, Yelp, and on countless blogs. When someone is the first to share a new restaurant, pop-up store, video or blog, they build "social wealth." For those lacking in real currency, the Internet offers rich rewards--anyone can achieve a new type of influential status as being "in the know."
read more

What Wayne Gretzky Can Teach Us About Fixing Our Health-Care System In getting doctors to adapt to new medical technology, designers can learn a lot from the ice hockey legend.

 
The mandatory implementation of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is primarily affecting the older generation of physicians, who didn’t grow up with computers.These doctors aren’t used to interacting with a big screen between them and their patients, and the technology hasn’t been designed to be user-friendly.
Some doctors will spring in to action and get on board with the EMR system, as the government will begin levying fines on medical practices where physicians don’t. But others will quit altogether, and we’ll lose an unknown percentage of our top medical talent.
read more

Think You Want to Innovate? Think again. Why some companies should not build a culture of innovation.

  • By: Elisa O'Donnell
  • Posted On:04.25.2011
Image
 
The need for innovation has never been more widely recognized and embraced in the corporate world
today. Given the rapid pace of change in almost every business sector, the future of a company is largely dependent on its ability to flex this creative muscle. The directive often translates into immense pressure on leaders to build a robust culture of innovation, where teams within the organization create big ideas and bring them to life in a way that radically impacts the business.
read more

Design Thinking and the Mortgage Bubble Continuum tackles the mortgage disclosure form and how telling the narrative of a home purchase played a decisive role in its design.

 
Continuum tackles the mortgage disclosure form—and how telling the narrative of a home purchase played a decisive role in its design.
read more

Designing for Failure Planning for setbacks leads to successful behavior change

Image
 
When people make changes in their lives, whether it is flossing their teeth or quitting smoking, they will have setbacks. And when they do, it is easy to let that setback turn into a pattern of failure. While going a day without flossing isn’t a catastrophe, there is still an opportunity to help someone get back on track. Weight Watchers has flex points that can be used on one massive chocolate binge. In the case of smoking cessation, we can help the desperate need for one cigarette remain just that: one cigarette. We can design for that setback so it doesn’t turn into an entire pack of cigarettes. Design for resilience is being realistic that setbacks will happen, and creating safe ways to fail and bounce back.

read more

The Whole Her Learn how to connect with women beyond her purse to "The Whole Her"

Image
 
Women's global power in the marketplace is growing exponentially. Learn how she works and connect beyond the purse, to "The Whole Her".

“The Whole Her” is our new series on women’s global power in the marketplace read more

Innovation from the Trenches

Image
 
What one staffer learned about innovation from spending a day as a cadet at West Point.
read more

The Future of Microfinance The talent gap in middle management

 
Microfinance has emerged as one of the leading solutions to poverty. There are roughly 1,200 microfinance organizations in the world serving 72 million people—primarily poor women who had previously lacked access to formal financial services to help them create a better future for their families. Our project is based in India, the largest and fastest growing market for microfinance in the world.
read more

Designed to Be Loved What's better than quality?

Image
 

As people become increasingly accustomed to products that look good and work well, market-leading companies and their design teams will have to provide something more: Well-designed customer experiences that combine emotional attachment, shared values, sensual delight, meaning, magic, and a touch of mystery. In short, love. The global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi has put its finger on this competitive advantage by stating that the future belongs to products and services with “lovemarks”—emotional connections that go beyond brand loyalty. 

read more

Hospital of One Part 1: Delivering Optimism

Image
 
The healthcare landscape is rapidly changing. Chronic illness has become the true burden on the healthcare system — accounting for over 75 percent of national health expenditures. To combat this systemic strain, the treatment of chronic and long-term care is being transferring out of hospitals and clinics and into the home. More than 65 million people provide care for a chronically ill, disabled, or aged family member or friend. This movement from the centralized to remote care of individuals is transforming the home environment into what we’ve termed a “Hospital of One.” This shift has major implications for patients, caregivers, and the industries who serve them. read more

How Do You See Green? Understanding consumer logic around sustainability

Image
 
How do consumers think about sustainability and the environment? How do these topics influence their purchase decisions? How do they evaluate what is “right”? read more

Sustaining Change A new way to design for healthy behaviors

Image
 
Changing our ingrained behavior—taking medications, eating better and exercising, saving for retirement—is hard for nearly everyone. Most of us need help. Just about every behavior change category teems with programs and products trying to help. But most of these programs fail in the long-term. People revert to prior habits and behaviors. read more

Feeling the Freedom How one little device changed millions of people's lives

Image
 
Affecting more than 24 million people in the United States alone, diabetes is a daunting and relentless disease that can be treated, but never fully controlled. Providing freedom from it is a challenge both noble and audacious. In 2000, Continuum, in partnership with Insulet, embarked on just this mission.
read more

Going Global without Losing Your Cool Finding worldwide success by incorporating local flavor

Image
 
I travel a lot and often find myself scouring airport shops for something special to bring to my friends and business associates in different parts of the world. Except for local food and crafts, I mostly find that global companies are selling the same products everywhere! But when a product becomes a global success, available everywhere to everyone, can it still be truly special to anyone?
read more

Embracing Complexity How keeping it complicated is good for business

Image
 
When I was a young designer working for a biomedical company, I kept finding myself in the same predicament. I would collect all the data I could from the experts: scientists, doctors, engineers, marketers, and manufacturers. Most importantly, I would visit hospitals and laboratories to see firsthand what everyone—from the department head to the patient to the cleaning person—actually did, not just what the experts reported. Over and over, I reached a point where I couldn’t process anymore information and feelings I had about the problem at hand. I would have to stop thinking about it altogether.
read more

Bigger Isn't Better What's in and what's out with the Gen Y consumer

Image
 
It’s been our country’s mantra for many generations. The promise of prosperity for our people—to do better than the generation that has preceded us—is part of the American dream and connected to our national ethos. Look at housing. Two decades ago, a respectable ranch used to be just fine, whereas up until the stock market crash of ’09, owning your very own McMansion was practically de rigueur. What we want, and expect, has grown bigger with every generation. read more