Hasta La Ideas

Hubert Schlafly, one of the inventors of the original Teleprompter, died last week at the age of 91. In the late ’40s or early ’50s (accounts conflict), Schlafly was working as a technical expert for 20th Century Fox. During his tenure, soap opera actor Fred Barton requested lines of dialogue be printed large and hung in various locations around the set, as the pace of shooting often outpaced the actors’ ability to memorize new dialogue. Barton, Schlafly and Fox manager Irving Berlin Kahn subsequently collaborated to produce the world’s first Teleprompter, a hand-cranked scroll printed with dialogue that folded up into a suitcase, albeit one that weighed 40 pounds.

The Teleprompter has since evolved into the one-way glass projection device we see politicians speaking into. Schlafly got out of the business in the 1960s and soon invented the cable box. An article on Schlafly in Notre Dame Magazine (presumably his alma mater) contains his interesting take on inventions, which could easily be applied to product design:

[Schlafly’s] fond of saying there are three phases to all inventions:

“One is the wild-eyed guy who has an idea, sees a need and has the technical background two address it.

“Two is finding sufficient financial backing to create something that might be marketable.

“And three is when everybody looks at it and says, ‘Anybody could have done that.'”

(more…)

Maybe it’s just us, but isn’t it always sort of a strange feeling when you learn that a bunch of companies are owned by a huge conglomerate you’ve likely never heard of before? We’re not talking about something like Proctor & Gamble here or the like, but more along the lines of Golden Gate Capital, who owns big portions of companies ranging from Eddie Bauer to Macaroni Grill to J.Jill. We say this because of the news that the firm TPG Capital has joined in the fight to purchase designer Jimmy Choo‘s brand away from TowerBrook Capital (also owner, among others, of liquor retailer BevMo!). TPG will now be competing to own Choo with Jones Group (another gigantic firm who owns everything from Gloria Vanderbilt to Nine West) and a pairing between Bahrain’s Investcorp and the Labelux Group out of Germany. TPG, as you may or many not know, took over J. Crew last month, and already have huge stakes, if not outright ownership, in companies like Neiman Marcus, Harrah’s, and the Spanish broadcasting network, Univision. So who’s new corporate family will Choo join? And does it matter, considering there’s probably some even larger company that owns all these smaller company-owning behemoths? The only thing we know for certain is this: we should have gone to business school.

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Another month and still little change in the American Institute of Architect‘s Architecture Billings Index. Last month you might recall, the Index moved up less than a point from the month prior, taking it up to 50.6 (anything above 50 indicates an increase in billings and, more generally, growth within the industry). This month, there’s been hardly any movement at all, as it dipped down just one tenth of a percent, to 50.5. So there’s a slight dip, but there’s still very minor growth there, being above 50 as it as, and there has also been an increase in inquiries for new projects, so it seems safe to call it a draw. Here’s from the AIA’s resident man of numbers:

“Currently, architecture firms are essentially caught swimming upstream in a situation where demand is not falling back into the negative territory, but also not exhibiting the same pace of increases seen at the end of 2010,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA. “The range of conditions reported continues to span a very wide spectrum with some firms reporting an improving business environment and even ramping up staffing, while others continue to operate in survival mode. The catalyst for a more robust recovery is likely financing, with stronger growth occurring only when lending institutions begin approving credit for construction projects with much greater regularity.”

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Since we seem to be on a woes-of-architecture kick this morning, let’s just keep going. So, the question to kick this post off is: if you have a major complaint several years after a company has decided to split up and change its name, who exactly are you supposed to sue? Such is the question being asked by the Polk County Board of Supervisors in Des Moines, Iowa, who have decided to file suit against mega-firm HOK Sport over issues it’s had with “breach of contract and alleged design problems” with the Iowa Events Center it designed for the county. The only trick is that HOK Sport doesn’t exist anymore. It spun off from its parent company, HOK, just over two years ago, renaming itself Populous in the process. But it was originally hired by Polk County when it was still a part of HOK. We believe that the county is likely going after Populous, as we’re assuming that all liability went with the company as it split off from its original parent, but it’s a little difficult tricky to tell, as Archinect points out here. Regardless of who they’re after, the county wants $5 million to fix the problems with the building, which was completed in 2005.

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We start the morning off with two interesting design-based lawsuits. The first comes from the seemingly litigious-happy shoe company, Christian Louboutin. As you might remember, last week the company filed suit against Yves Saint Laurent over pairs of shoes that company was selling that featured red soles Louboutin considered too close to their own iconic (and trademarked) signature trait. Now they’re at it again, as the company has now filed a very similar suit against the French arm of the Brazilian label Carmen Steffens. In their own defense, the label says it has using multi-colored soles since 1996, “long before Mr Louboutin red soles were registered as a trademark in the U.S. in 2008.” Meanwhile, outside of this newly sparked shoe design battle, the label Coach has filed suit against Jo-Ann Fabrics. Their issue is with a particular fabric (the “Blizzard Fleece Fabric-Oo Geo”) sold by the crafts retailer that they believe looks too similar to Coach’s use of its patterned cacophony of its stretched out, serifed “C” logo. The suit demands that Jo-Ann quit selling the pattern and pay somewhere north of $2 million in damages. So far it looks like the fabric retailer is taking the matter seriously, as the product is still listed on their site, but now with a note: “Sorry, this item is no longer available.”

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