Hasta La Ideas

If “Consumption” is about the moment of acquisition, “Unconsumption” simply describes everything after that.

Unconsumption means the accomplishment of properly recycling your old cellphone, rather than the guilt of letting it sit in a drawer.

Check out Rob Walker’s Unconsumption (some great definitions of the term on the right column), and then hop over to their new Wiki, “with a focus on links and tips for fixing it, making it last, repurposing it, getting rid of it responsibly. (Whatever ‘it’ may be.)”

This could be great.

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The next speaker in the David H. Liu Lecture Series in Design at Stanford is Alex Wipperfürth.

The talk will be at 8:00pm on Thursday, May 21st, 2009. It will be in (Braun Hall, Building 320) in Room 105 at Stanford University. Hope to see you there!

Wipperfürth is a partner at Dial House in San Francisco. He is the author of Brand Hijack, and upcoming books, The Co-Creation Myth and The Fringe Manifesto. Dial House is part think-tank and part creative hot shop. The client list is diverse: from fringe (Napster, Doc Martens, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Jones Soda, Red Stripe, Altoids) to cutting edge (Current TV, New Yorker Magazine) to blue chip (Diageo, IBM, P&G/Clorox, Toyota, Coca-Cola). Projects range from innovative strategy, innovative research, meaningful creative expressions with DIY production to brand innovation. In earlier work, Wipperfürth had interviewed actual cult members and people in "consumer cults" (like Apple or Harley-Davidson fanatics) and made fascinating insights about their similarities.

After a drawn-out sale of its assets in bankruptcy court, and a glimmer of hope for a turnaround at the hands of private equity firm Patriarch Partners, Polaroid is now officially in the hands of Gordon Brothers Brands and Hilco Consumer Capital, whose other portfolio brands include recent retail-sector casualties The Sharper Image and Linens n’ Things. For $88 million, the liquidation firms acquired the Polaroid brand, along with the company’s intellectual property and inventory. Now it’s onto what Scott Hardy, Polaroid’s newly named president, describes as a “full-scale global licensing and distribution strategy for wholesale, direct-to-retail, and e-commerce businesses.” We’re not exactly sure what that means, but we hope it doesn’t end, à la Pierre Cardin, in Polaroid-brand duty-free cigarettes and tears. In a statement announcing the deal closing, the new owners were enthusiastic about the potential to slap the Polaroid name on everything from digital photo frames to portable DVD players. They also noted their plan to maintain Polaroid’s Minnesota headquarters along with the majority of its Minnesota-based employees.

(Photo: Ritchard Ton. See more of his work on Flickr.)

Previously on UnBeige:

A special issue of the Journal of Business Strategy on ‘The practice of innovation: design in process’, is now available.

“There is a great deal of energetic discussion about why design innovation has become critical for the success and growth of businesses today and experts in business management are discussing ways to think about design as a key strategic advantage. This special issue of JBS, edited by Vijay Kumar of the Illinois Institute of Design, brings together experts from many fields to discuss how design innovation can be successfully practiced through adopting formalized design processes. The papers come from innovators in fields as diverse as healthcare, digital products, software, telecommunications, space planning, web services, city planning, and education.”

>> Table of contents

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Letter logo legal battle alert! The latest lawsuit? Gucci, the garish crown jewel in PPR’s vast retail empire, is suing Guess? No really, try and guess. That’s right, in a case that has the potential for some good old-fashioned “Who’s on first?“-style laughs, the defendant is Guess?, Inc., the designer denim pioneer turned lifestyle brand that we stopped paying much attention to when it signed up Paris Hilton as the face of its Marciano line.

In a complaint filed yesterday in Manhattan federal court, Gucci accused Guess? of knocking off Gucci-trademarked designs—including a green and red stripe, a repeated interlocking GG mark, and a stylized G mark (like those pictured on the fetching Guess? belts above)—in an effort to “Gucci-ize” its product line. Also, it’s a conspiracy! According to PPR, the Guess? products are “part of a sophisticated and elaborate scheme to target Gucci, to create products that are similar in appearance to the most popular and best-known Gucci products.” In addition to unspecified money damages, Gucci is seeking a court order that bars Guess? from using the disputed designs and wants Guess? to destroy all existing items that bear the allegedly infringing marks. Guess?, which reported net revenue of $2.09 billion for the fiscal year that ended January 31, has yet to comment publicly on the suit.