New Florence. New Renaissance.

Ideo's David Kelley

The legendary David Kelley of Ideo shares his background, philosophy and more in this Fortune (sub required) interview

"By 1991 our clients were asking for an integrated offering of design and engineering, and we were collaborating with two firms to fulfill that demand. Merging with them was the best way to help our clients. We had an all-company contest to come up with a name, and we all resonated with the word "idea." "Ideo" was a prefix, and we toyed around with calling ourselves Ideo-Space, and other words that sounded like ideology, but IDEO stuck on its own.

We have a methodology called "design thinking" that results in innovation from a human point of view, and the companies that were willing to take risks gave us a chance. One of the IDEO designs I'm most proud of is the Heartstream portable defibrillator, which we did in 1996. We designed it so that a naive user could pull it off the wall and listen to instructions on how to save a patient's life.

As time passed, we moved from product work to what I call services, experiences, and environment. In the early '90s companies started asking us how to help transform and design their organizations to foster greater innovation. We call it organizational design. Our biggest project now is transforming the education system of the country of Peru. We're designing new schools, the curriculum, and making sure the finances work."

Infor-Art

Every visit I make to an Infor faciility - as in the NY HQ earlier this year - or event - as in Inforum this  week, I am blown away by the aesthetics in every aspect of its operations. The excellent taste of CEO Charles Phillips and creativity of executives like Chip Coyle and Marc Scibelli and the imprint of the captive agency, Hook and Loop is pervasive:

The NY HQ - the stunning lobby

The Innovation Hub at Inforum - the white couches spread around the event provided a nice contrast to the Infor logo reds

The growing ads at major airports

The User Experience of the software

The broader role of Hook and Loop, the captive agency

Photo Credits: Infor

Continuum’s “Experiental Modeling” for service businesses

For Spain’s second-largest bank, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), designers built a full-size, 11,000-square-foot mockup of a bank lobby entirely out of foam that paved the way for changes in six branches from Barcelona to Atlanta (more are expected to be renovated this year). For the owner of the 93-restaurant chain Bertucci’s, Continuum designers studied the way millennials go out to eat, and designed a new eatery to have smaller plates in a more social setting. The new restaurant, 2ovens (in photo below) has appeared in two locations so far, with more arriving this year. The kitchens at 2ovens are equipped with only two handmade brick ovens that create a hearth-like atmosphere.

Continuum’s biggest project is its reimagination of the lobbies of 1,243 Holiday Inns, which resulted in a more social space where kids play video games on large-screen TVs, businesspeople check e-mail on kiosks near the bar, and vacationers socialize. As with the Spanish bank, Continuum built a foam model of its Holiday Inn lobby of the future, tested by everyone from general managers to chefs. At the first site where the design has been implemented, in Duluth, Ga., beverage sales rose 36 percent, while food revenue grew 25 percent. “The bar and food areas are intentionally more cramped than in other hotel lobbies,” says Craig LaRosa, Continuum’s design lead. He believes that if people bump against each other, it precipitates a friendly conversation among strangers, lightening the mood and encouraging guests to sit down for a drink.

The Continuum process is more akin to crowdsourcing than handing down a singular vision from a single gifted designer or workaholic CEO.

BusinessWeek

Photo Credit of 2Ovens

Ansys: Complex simulations

The company’s staff of more than 2,400, including 600 Ph.D.s, has created algorithms that mirror the laws of physics, allowing Ansys programs to model virtually anything (including how a Head racket bends when hitting a ball) Ninety-six of the 100 biggest industrial companies, and 40,000 customers in all, use Ansys technology to evaluate product mater-ials and durability. Experienced engineers who once had to produce dozens of mock-ups to arrive at a final product now need a handful at most, saving time and money. Work from computer-aided design (CAD) applications can be fed into the simulation software.The software grew out of work done decades ago within the nuclear research group at Westinghouse Electric, which needed a way to model how reactors would withstand stress and unforeseen events such as earthquakes.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Wraparound design for iPhone?

ZDNet on recent Apple patent filing

The aim of the new design is to make use of "unused space" which is typical with any current mobile device, extending functionality to both the back and the sides of a gadget. Therefore, Apple may be considering the use of curved screens and a flexible display which not only is touch-responsive, but makes use of the surface on both sides of a future iPhone.

The patent proposes that touch replace buttons entirely -- and a coating could be added to the display to reduce smudge marks and keep the gadget looking pretty. As an example, the application says that "Instead of the hold button a multi touch gesture along one of the sides could instead act as a method of locking and unlocking the hold function."

The new design relies heavily on flexible display technology, but in order to limit the possibility of damage, the patent describes the phone as being incased in glass -- bent into a conical shape, but serving as protection in case you drop your gadget.

Making eBooks interactive

Inkling, started by Matt MacInnis, a former marketing manager at Apple, gives publishers a way to digitize and upgrade some of their highest-margin books without creating an app for each title. The San Francisco-based startup’s new Habitat software platform, released on Feb. 12 after a private beta test, allows publishers to add high-resolution photos, audible pronunciations of wine varietals, or videos that show how to cut an avocado. “Inkling is going at a unique, high-end interactive experience that you won’t find on many of those other platforms,” says Jerome Grant, chief learning officer for the education division at Pearson, an Inkling investor.

The company has teamed up with publishers including Pearson, McGraw-Hill (MHP), and Wolters Kluwer to try to gain ground in the U.S. e-book market, which Forrester Research (FORR) projects will reach $13.6 billion by 2017. Inkling will take a royalty of at least 30 percent from every sale.

Inkling is focused on textbooks, how-to guides, and cookbooks rather than novels. “We’re not interested in pumping a bunch of text files into our platform,” MacInnis says. Consumers can buy Inkling books on the Google search results page (through Inkling’s payment platform), from Inkling’s website, or from another publisher’s online store. The books are readable through the Inkling app on the iPad, iPhone, and computers. On Android devices, users have to access the books through the Web browser.

BusinessWeek

Photo Credit of an Inkling book Global History of Architecture

Campuses: The Valley's Next Design Frontier

It seems Apple’s (AAPL) design-obsessed co-founder may have another enduring legacy besides the trendsetting gadgets his company produces. Since Jobs presented plans for new headquarters shaped like a giant spaceship (photo below) to the Cupertino City Council two years ago, several other cash-flush tech companies, including Facebook (FB), Google (GOOG), Samsung Electronics, and Nvidia (NVDA), have released blueprints for monumental new campuses. Although each appears to be its own unique architectural wonder—not surprising considering the high-wattage talent tapped for these projects—they all share an eco-consciousness that could become the most distinctive feature of this new West Coast aesthetic.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Yves Behar – a serial designer

Born in Switzerland and educated at the Arts Center College of Design, in Pasadena, Calif., Béhar, 45, has worked on a wide range of projects. These include the recent rebranding of Nivea, the global skin care and shampoo giant owned by German conglomerate Beiersdorf; the Sodastream Source, a new model of the home seltzer maker; and the $100 XO “One Child Per Laptop” computer, with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, which first won him broad acclaim in 2008. In 13 years since Béhar has founded Fuseproject, he’s emerged as something more than the sum of his projects, too. Along with Apple’s Jony Ive, he has become the face of the idea that designers can be entrepreneurs as surely as Silicon Valley engineers can—and, moreover, are essential to business growth

Bloomberg Businessweek

Jawbone, Miller Heiman, GE - his string of projects keeps going. In a really interesting interview below he describes how Design went from not being respected by technology vendors to a critical function

 

The mind of a gamer

Nice interview with Bryan Neider, COO of Electronic Arts Labels via the McKinsey Quarterly (sub required) on how they get close to the gaming consumer

“We have marketing teams looking at consumer blogs and social media, providing demos and playable betas to customers and getting feedback that is immediately played back for the development team to incorporate changes. However, the challenge is that parts of the gaming audience are pretty vocal—they either really like a game or they really don’t like it. The trick is to find ways to get feedback from the lion’s share of the audience that is generally silent and make sure we’re giving these people what they want.

One important way to do this is to build telemetry into our games. When players log in, they are asked whether they permit us to use the telemetrics of, for example, their handheld device, to communicate information from their game back to us. Many do. This is a critical tool because it permits us to watch real game playing so that we can understand quite objectively when something is working and when it isn’t.

In addition, online tools allow consumers to direct their feedback to us at different points in a game and after it so that we can filter the feedback into our products. The feedback format needs to be open-ended and nonintrusive—players don’t like feedback requests at critical moments of game play. It’s very important that gaming audiences around the world want to engage with us because tastes differ and a game has to be tailored to preferences in different markets: for example, the China version of a fight game would include more martial arts and less shooting than the US version.”

Photo Credit: Electronic Arts

My Micro NY

At less than 400 feet, the winning design of New York's adAPT NYC contest isn't the roomiest spot. But “My Micro NY," as the design is called, still manages to squeeze in some coveted amenities, including 10-foot-high ceilings and Juliet balconies.

The judges were impressed enough with the proposal to give the team--made up of Monadnock Development LLC, Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation, and the firm nARCHITECTS--the opportunity to create a building, composed of 55 "micro-units." The micro-units will be between 250 and 370 square feet, and 40 percent of them will be designated for "affordable" housing. It'll even be Manhattan's first multi-unit building made with modular construction.

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