Although Thomas Thwaites is a masters graduate of the Royal College of Art Design Interactions, and considers himself a Designer (of a more speculative sort), it seems to me that he’s just a very curious fellow.

My thought is that Thomas’ toaster building project illustrates two main truths:

1) As a civilization with a variety of cultures, we’re all slave to existing technology. Our knowledge is technology dependent.  Go ahead, try building a toaster from scratch. Try and build anything from scratch for that matter; how about a tooth brush or a pencil?

Allen Kay‘s definition of Technology: anything that wasn’t around when you were born.

2) The second and in my opinion the more salient point is, that while we may not be able to build a pencil from scratch, we can find something with which we can draw; we can toast bread, and we can clean our teeth. All of this can be done if we remain creative at the core.

It’s easy to be obsessed with building a toaster and forget that all we need is toasted bread.

Alex Bogusky

Big Buzz Kevin Kelly interviews Alex Bogusky about FrearLESS Cottage and his vision for the next “thing”.

Alex is a designer. That is how he started his career and used design thinking to become one of the most influential ad men of the last 20 years.

In this interview Alex talks about Design Thinking, the trend toward transparency (as opposed to proprietary or secrecy) as a power base, and “Triple Bottom Line” capitalism: People, Planet, Profit.

Something well designed is compelling; we are drawn to its efficiency, effectiveness, elegance, beauty, and often it’s cleverness and humor. You’re a designer when you arrange your clothes in an order that gets you out the door faster in the morning, or when you plan a route to the office.

Then why is “design thinking” so hard for so many to understand?

In my view it’s because we have a tendency to think things more complicated than they are; the enigmatic isn’t routinely unpacked but rather labeled something else or believed to be something we understand easier or perhaps ignored completely. Maybe we find the easiest remedy for complexity is to go to the end result and call it design: an iPod, Ferrari, or the elegant kitchen utensil.

Great designers design great things from information architecture to artifacts for living, but the truly great designer finds the right problem to solve that makes a difference and connects emotionally to the end user. They advance humanity by forward thinking with the support of observation and research, empathy for the end user and serendipity in the process.

I put together this 13 minute video with the help of 5 great design thinkers; Matt Munoz, David Burney, John Loftin, Jonathan Opp and Todd Coats.  In it they help us to understand design thinking.

To paraphrase David Burney in this video: Design is a way of life. Designers find solutions to the right problems through the balance of science, analytics, and math + art, spirit and intuition.

[Via Wikipedia:]

Design thinking is a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result.^[1] It is the essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success. Unlike analytical thinking, design thinking is a creative process based around the “building up” of ideas. There are no judgments early on in design thinking. This eliminates the fear of failure and encourages maximum input and participation in the ideation and prototype phases.

When was the last time you surprised yourself creatively?

I recall a conversation with my Dad when I was 18; I simply couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to go to night clubs with friends because as I said then, “you never know what’s going to happen”.  His answer, “I think that’s just youth son, night club surprises don’t come frequently enough for me anymore.”

It’s no surprise that I’m not flummoxed by this as I was.  The scarcity of surprises increases with experience, or perhaps it’s a more accurate notion that surprises so abundant  progressively cease to surprise.

Which is it, scarcity or abundance? It’s essentially a scarcity shift. It’s as though we reside at the nightclub we once visited for the occasional surprise but now  it feels relatively ordinary as we live with noise and abundance; abundance that has created a shift in surprise scarcity.

I work with very talented groups regularly, but one particular encounter survives in me.  Out of nowhere our client said while viewing the daily images: “it always astounds me how you guys make ordinary things look extraordinary.”  It was true, the concept was potentially boring but not when we were done. We transformed it by tweaking the original concept so it had the likelihood of being extraordinary.

In another time, our finished photo was the scarcity we leveraged; today the finished-photo-value-curve points down.  Neither is a recorded song as valuable as a live performance; it’s hard to make a comfortable living selling your recordings so the performance had better be good.

In general, the scarcity shift is away from creative artifacts and toward creative performance. Can you establish the culture that creates, create the moment worth photographing, stage a performance that affects, or design the product that markets itself? What remains constant is that which begets great fishing not merely fish.

That enigmatic black box once so priceless to the creative supplier no longer serves us well.  No longer hidden behind a curtain, the value is what reliably turns the ordinary into extraordinary surprises.  Adding your value to the process should yield the performance surprises; it surpasses the original artifact expectation.

My point is a tweak away from “exceed expectations” but significantly so.  I believe scarcity is shifting toward those who not only exceed expectations but change the original expectations in surprising ways.  It’s because of new economic – we can find it when we want it -  abundance that the scarcity of extraordinary surprise is shifting upstream to creativity of performance and away from creativity of artifacts.

If you’re a creativity supplier be very proud of your steady revenue in the face of change. Either you’re a positioning genius in an unstable market or it just may be the quiet before a bigger storm.

Scott Anthony for the Harvard Business Review writes how flat yet steady revenue might, in the face of disruption, help category leaders ignore even the most obvious need for change. CD sales in the mid 90’s, Newspaper Revenues, or photographic film sales are solid examples of change snubbing categories.  Another example of an organization disregarding change – yet much less surprising – is the USPS sited in an article in the Economist titled: Hoping for Deliverance.

Market positioning is difficult under the best of circumstances and the sole proprietor may have neither the time nor inclination to react even if they’re trend aware. Professional photographers are an especially hard hit group. It was nearly impossible to avoid flat footing the need for dramatic change.  As a group they’re finally mostly aware yet a large number remain bemused about how deep the change will go and its affects, same goes for the advertising industry.

For the last couple years I’ve been thinking about my work in terms of big “D” and little “d” where big “D” is discovery and little “d” is delivery.  Discover your motivation, your unique blend of expertise, and the problems to be solved.  Delivery is the how your discovery fits onto a business model. Sound like “design thinking” – yeah, it should.

It’s been an ongoing process that, thus far, pivots on motivation and passion.  I’ve been taking inventory with questions like these:

1.  Where is my work passion rooted; What do I find exciting?

2.  What are the relevant experiences and skills bordering the excitement?

3.  Among my collected experience / skill inventory, what is uniquely mine?

4.  What value can I offer based on my inventory?

5.  What values are uniquely mine that will not change?

6.  What is the value proposition of my work?

Basic ? Remedial? Yes but it’s easy to lose track of #1 and if you do, #6 will eventually  suck.  It’s a process that was probably switched to auto pilot in early career but certainly if I stayed more cognoscente it would have lead to fewer wrong turns.

What’s at the core of your offering?  You’re a musician but aren’t you also a performer? I’m a commercial photographer but I’m also a visual artist.  If you’re an auto maker aren’t you also a transportation company?  I make these distinctions because they are roots oriented.  Buggy whip manufacturers were in the in the motivation business.  Photographic trends lose relevance but visual art will always move people.

Get the point? Find passion’s root, get back in touch with what you offer, hold onto what won’t change and rappel from there. Good advice for the USPS don’t you think?

Reference Permission To Suck Manifesto:

Law #6.    Your creativity is about your heart, not their surface. Creativity is your world view filtered through your talent. It’s your passion, experience, expertise, inspiration and your rules that drive you to create wonderful things that you’re destined to hate because they’re not good enough, and others are open to admire because they couldn’t do it.



There’s no faulting authentic cause marketing.   Doing the right thing by committing funds is inspiring.  A perfect example is the Ronald McDonald House supporting families of hospitalized children.  It represents everything we’d like a corporation to do with their profits: give some back to the community that buys the product.  All positive public relations are genuinely well deserved.

Pepsi Refresh feels similar.  The soft drink company uses the internet to field ideas and award favorites monthly with large sums of cash to finance a cause.  Excellent.  Spread the love and the goodness of a brand.  The Publicity is good; the causes are great and they used new social networking techniques to make it even more powerful – awesome.  Much better than a one run Superbowl networks 30 sec. spot.

Let’s take a moment to sincerely thank them for this approach.  Honest – no sarcasm intended but it’s hard to write this stuff without it sounding that way.

OK – that said, let me risk more by sounding overly cynical and ask about statistics regarding ROI for cause marketing.  It must be impossible to measure.  Maybe it’s not necessary to measure.  Building a brand by making members of a cause and their benefactors love it, how can that fail?  Pay it forward, right? Everyone will love Pepsi and buy their product because they’re doing the right thing. [Well, that’s a little sarcastic]

While Pepsi’s approach was inspired, it feels like a dead end and outside the brand to me.  Each cause is individually separate and disconnected from anything to do with Pepsi as a refreshment maker other than cash outlay, a brand mark, and a slogan.

I think about those times my parents gave me money for college.  I am eternally grateful but that’s not why I love them.  I also received a partial scholarship from someone but I’d have to go back and dig through papers to find out whom… I forget.  In fact, attach strings to payments and recipients may get resentful: a girlfriend’s Dad once offered $1000 to her for quitting cigarettes – you can guess how that turned out.

A better approach would be to create a product that inspired it’s own cause and its own marketing.  Let’s pretend Pepsi Co. created a delicious tablet that, when dropped in water would give a day’s worth of nutrition in a thirst quenching drink while simultaneously clearing foul water of harmful bacteria.

• The tablet tasted better than sports drinks of the wealthiest fit minded communities.
• The tablets are so effective that it could be distributed to earthquake victims in Haiti and Chile to help solve drinking water shortages.
• Pepsi would be marketing the same tablet everywhere; one which would give 50% profits to groups dedicated to quench the thirst of the world.  [Insert Pepsi Refresh cause marketing here].
• Track profits from areas of the globe and where they go through online mapping – create a competition between shopping segments – who can generate more thirst quenching for drought stricken areas.
• Perhaps a live video feeds from the areas being helped or of people buying the product that will be shipped to the truly thirsty.

These thoughts are incomplete and raw but I think you get the idea.  Everything from the product to the financing to the cause and the outcome are all Pepsi.  The product is the marketing and everything to do with it perpetuates the brand and its thirst quenching essence.  It offers consumers something genuinely healthy to purchase and one that did good tangible things across the globe as well as an opportunity to pick up another Pepsi products sold next to the tablet while at the store.

I know, I know,  the tablet may be a technological fantasy but something isn’t that would fit the scheme.  I’m just sayin’ – Pepsi is doing good stuff but I think they missed an opportunity on this one.

Design thinking goes mainstream – this video gives a behind the scene look at the Business Week awards for best designs.

(via Business Week)

IDEA 2009 Gold Award Winners

Over 30 products were given the top award in the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) 2009, organized by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). These ranged from innovative heavy-duty equipment to complex medical systems. The emphasis was on creating an appropriately user-friendly experience, whether that user is a veteran warehousing professional or a seasoned clinician. The Best in Show title was awarded to a company that is working hard to exorcise its past demons: Nike (NKE) won for its Trash Talk basketball shoe, made entirely from recycled materials.

Go here to see slides of the winners and go here for Business Week’s 27 most influential Designers.