Hasta La Ideas

Featured Forum Topic of the Day:
Can a single brand sustain multiple consumer groups?
by PackageID in the branding iron

So I was in a meeting today and there was a discussion around taking one of our brands and a question came up if we could hit a lower age group as well as our current demographic. It currently is marketed towards mid aged adults and they would like to target late teen early 20’s with out a brand extension or new candy product. Is this possible? do any of you know of a brand that has done this?

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The Sydney Design Festival, which takes place in the first half of August, is now in its 13th year. Though this international design event revolves around the Powerhouse Museum, many offsite events promoting independent designers are staged throughout the city. Donald Corey was on site at Launch Pad, Workshopped, and the Object Gallery and shares his experience with us in the Core77 Galleries.

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Featured Forum Topic of the Day:
Generation M
by ip_wirelessly in general design discussion

I think this Manifesto sums up quite well the angst most Designers feel: “Dear Old People Who Run the World, my generation would like to break up with you. Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world—and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences. You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce. You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy—everywhere. You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people—not just banks. You wanted shareholder value—built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage…

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Fat David by Scholz & Friends, Hamburg, Germany

Lately I’ve been unusually cranky: It may be the frustrations of a difficult marketplace where economic adversity forces one to tolerate the otherwise intolerable. It may be the extra hours of summer sunlight here in the Pacific Northwest, which brings about an initial euphoria that can descend into mania. But with a gnawing conviction, I’ve come to believe that this crankiness is the physiological manifestation of an uneasy realization: there is too much opinion in the world and precious little fact. For the past two months I’ve found my idle thoughts converging on three disjointed but persistent topics: food, information and society. With time these three topics have paired themselves off into a set of relatively stable couplings: Food and Information, Information and Production, and Production and Society.

Cheap Tasty and Vacant
A few months back I was at a conference in Portland where one of the speakers made reference to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, reframing the title as In Defense of Product. I was so taken by the idea that I walked out of the conference, crossed the street to Powel’s and bought a copy. I wont go into a lengthy explanation of that book here, but for those who haven’t read it, Pollan’s book builds upon his eater’s manifesto: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Within this straightforward statement resides an insight relevant to any contemporary consumer dynamic: scale your consumption to a level that’s sustainable. I explored the potential implications of this manifesto for product designers in a recent post entitled Featurism is Fat: Lessons on consumerism from the organic food movement. What’s particularly intriguing in Pollan’s book is the back-story he builds around nutritional science. Throughout the book Pollan describes how the mass marketing of foods in terms of nutritional value helped industrial agriculture productize produce, ultimately reaching its zenith in an American diet that is chemically rich but nutritionally vacant.

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Final design by Mason Pfau

UI Touchscreen design for a netbook aimed at tweens

I’m a professor at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), where I’ve taught Interaction Design (IxD) in the Industrial Design department for two quarters now. One of the things that attracted me to SCAD was the high number of corporate sponsored classes there—companies often approach SCAD with a project they feel would benefit from a student perspective. Usually, we then take the project and restructure an existing class that maps to the sponsor’s goals and objectives. I truly believe that projects grounded in reality are more compelling educationally, as they provide truer constraints for the students.

Last quarter I had the privilege of teaching a class sponsored by Freescale Semiconductor. Freescale produces computer chips in various categories—the market segment that approached us was the mobile market, whose chips are used in many of the cellphones and other mobile products in high circulation today, including Blackberry and Asus. Specifically, Freescale makes an architecture of CPUs known as ARM. Significantly different from the Intel x86 architecture CPUs that run almost all desktop, laptop and netbook class personal computing systems, ARM attempts to compete against Intel’s ATOM CPU chipset. Atom is currently being used in two classes of devices: the netbook (like the HP Mini and Asus Eeee Pc) and Mobile Internet Devices (MID). ARM differs from the Intel Atom in that it runs cooler (saving space because they don’t need a fan), uses less power (offering extended battery life or a smaller battery), and can’t run Microsoft Windows. All three of these qualities offer both industrial design and interaction design opportunities.

Freescale conducted extensive research with existing non-Windows netbooks and learned that both the user interface and form factor issues co-mingle in these devices. They approached our industrial design department and asked us to work on concepts that address these issues for specific markets: tweens, teens and soccer moms.

There were two sponsored courses that participated in this project. My class was a graduate introduction to interactive product design while the other course was a 4th year undergraduate studio on professional practice and process taught by Professor Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness. What follows is our class’ process for developing the initial framework and vision for a new graphical user interface to run on top of an existing operating system (like Linux) that can take advantage of an ARM CPU chipset on something akin to a netbook or a smartbook. Though this case study will focus on the work of my class, there was much collaboration between the two courses’ students, influencing the final outcomes of both.

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