The Social Tattoo Project seemed to be quite a popular link we shared recently. It’s a pretty nutty idea – but has good intentions behind it. Basically, they have a bunch of volunteers who will get the most popular cause tattooed somewhere on their body. Check out the video below for a full explanation. Needless to say it raises a lot of questions…

Next up, a slightly less….extreme story. Diet Coke (or Coke Light as it’s also known – not sure why) packaging was on the receiving end of a make-over by Turner Duckworth. It’s rather beautiful, we think, but is (for now) a limited edition.

IKEA once again make it to our best-of with their Man Land, essentially a play area for bored husbands and boyfriends. With TV, Space Invaders, an Xbox, sofas and other games, I don’t think it should be restricted to the male species…

This video game in a box from Teague Labs was genius. A perfect mix of old and new school, it’d please anyone. Maybe not as portable as an iPhone or even a Gameboy, but still just as fun (OK maybe not but the novelty value makes it just as cool).

If you’re anything like us, you love LEGO (if you call the bricks ‘LEGOs’, close your browser and never come back), and you love Kickstarter. Imagine the two combined. That’s pretty much what Cuusoo is – a platform for LEGO ideas that, with enough votes, will get made. I’m rooting for the DeLorean! Check out the blog for updates.

The Nissan Leaf gives us a brilliantly interactive way to discover the car. Walk around it, sit in it, hear more about what you want to hear about – give it a go. Even non-car people should be impressed!

So that’s it for the next 14 days. We’re off early tomorrow morning, so stay tuned to either Twitter or Facebook to stay up to date with our antics work in Madrid!

Adios!

This was the question posed to a handful of leading international companies, and it was there answers to this question that would form the 4-hour conference at The Danish Design Center. It sounded pretty interesting, and it didn’t disappoint.
We were treated to talks from Alice Rawsthorn, Design Critic from the International Herald Tribune; Clive Van Heerden, Senior Director at Philips Design – Design Probes; Francois Lenfant, Manger of Global Product Design, Developed Markets, GE Healthcare; and David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council UK.

Although each had their own particular spin there was a very evident dominant theme – and we don’t just mean design.

Designing for people, for humanity, is what these companies see as the future of design. As Francois put it, GE Healthcare’s designers’ ultimate goal is human benefit – what better goal can there be?

It was clear to see how designers are being involved in societal aspects today – they’re being recognised as beneficial for governments – even the UK Cabinet has a behavioural insights team. Designers are no longer just called in to make a leaflet look pretty and fold the right way, they are used, as David Kessler said, to nudge social behaviour and encourage changes within society, changes which focus on the fundamental ways we work, play, and live. By focusing on user-centric solutions the hope is that problems we witness in society today can be totally avoided in the future – even before they even begin.

The sobering fact presented to us by Clive was that 70% of populations will live in cities by 2050, highlighting the immense urban sprawl we’ll soon be facing. The way today’s comparatively small cities function, from power plants to water treatments, just won’t work in the future. Bu it’s not just industrial processes and solutions that will have to be redesigned – it’s just as much how society will function and cope with such a huge amount of people being crammed into urban spaces – not to mention the millions of youths that feel neglected by governments and the rest of society. This is where designers can make a difference. They can be involved in entire projects, from start to finish, projects that involve, empower and enrich, projects that range from a closed loop toilet water treatment process to youth projects.

Examples during the conference were;

Studio H

Studio H is a high school design/build curriculum for rural community benefit. Based in Bertie County in North Carolina (the poorest county with one in three children living in poverty and only 27% of 3rd-8th grade students passing the state standard for both English and maths), the one-year programme is offered to Junior-year students and provides college credit, a summer job, and a hands-on opportunity to build real-world projects for the community.

Loops by Participate

Loops is a project involving young people who are typically regarded as trouble by society and the media. They are locked in to their communities and never have a chance to break free from the downward spiral they are so often caught up in. Loops is a social enterprise that aims to expand young people’s purpose and possibility. Piloting in 2009, and now going live in 2 locations, Croydon and Brighton, it is now preparing to roll out nationally.

FARM: shop

As part of a council supported project to help regenerate parts of Dalston, FARM: shop is a groundbreaking urban agriculture centre which will include a community café, an events venue, and workspace, and will offer fresh produce directly traceable to a farm or grown in the shop itself.

It was fascinating and incredibly encouraging to realise these themes were running through every talk regardless what sector or country they were from. Design and society is a theme we’ve touched upon here in this blog in regards to Denmark and there are many, many other initiatives going on around the world – not least in the UK.

They say design can’t save the world, that it can only help, but if these projects and this passion were anything to go by, we’d say design can come pretty damn close.

“Change before you have to.” Jack Welch, ex-CEO GE

We’ve recently become partners with the Danish Red Cross, a partnership we’re proud of, and we’re sure will produce some great work. We’ve donated a total of 5000 working hours to be used over the next 3 years on projects.

We’ve already held one workshop with them which took place around Christmas 2009 and as a result of that, we found our first project goal; to double last year’s result of money collected. Challenges have been identified, and ideas brainstormed, and the project is now taking shape.

This type of cooperation is new to us at Designit, and it’s proving to be an exciting opportunity to use our entire creative palette and crisscross all of our different competencies, in new and inspiring combinations. By increasing the focus on companies’ social awareness and responsibility we hope the initiative will spread.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment in the design community about whether or not design can change the world. We think it can. Sure, it might not do it directly, but it can certainly help. From simple tools to healthcare, from instructional guides to education, design can play a part in making life better for people around the world.

Below you can see some photos from our workshop. With a seriously good chunk of Designit working away all day on it, you can be sure we came up with some great ideas and proposals on how we can help the Red Cross achieve their target.

We had a couple of projects on display there, one showcasing our digital communication work as a part of new midwife practices, and a conceptual case for Odense Hospital, reimagining it as a patient hotel concept. While it was great to have Designit represented at the event, it was also the perfect opportunity to hear where others believed design was heading. And boy were we inspired, and happy.

Strategic design has been making headlines all over the place recently, from the ‘creativity crisis’ in American schools to the Danish national design strategy, and as yesterday proved, it’s a bit of a worldwide movement.

We were lucky enough to hear from Chris Luebkeman (Director for Global Foresight and Innovation, Arup), Christian Bason (Director of Innovation, Mindlab), Chris Hacker (Chief Design Officer, Johnson & Johnson), Mikkel B. Rasmussen (European Director at ReD), and Josephine Green (speaker and consultant). Each and every one of them gave inspiring and insightful presentations on how society is changing irrevocably, and how as a result, design and creative processes must be incorporated into just about everything, from packaging to organisational mindsets.

Design thinking has been around for sometime but in the last few years we’ve seen it become a bit of a trend. No wonder really. We are moving out of the economic, mechanistic worldview we’ve had since the industrial revolution and beginning to recognise this flat, social, communal, socio-ecological world we now find ourselves in. Design, a creative, chaotic process, clearly stands as an innovative way through which organisations and businesses can grab a little creativity. The problem here is that through the implementation of design thinking, or any creative processes, through all the management and administration that must be crossed, much of the failures, chaos and mess that creativity thrives on is lost. It’s removed, or minimised to ensure efficiency so that the creative process or design thinking you are left with isn’t anything similar to that you started with.

Today, design thinking – as a term – is on the way out. While we still need this overall mindset (of that there is no doubt!) what we do need to do is to leave behind our hierarchies, our traditional organisational structures, our linear processes that stifle creativity and innovation. We need to focus on the bottom of the pyramid – there shouldn’t even be a pyramid. As Josephine Green put it, we should all be pancakes.

In the socio-ecological world we find ourselves in, the focus is now on the social and the community, and solutions to problems in this world can be found in the social and the community. The focus today is on community needs and social solutions. Solutions which can be found through open collaboration, multiple stakeholders, multidisciplinary innovation, and co-creation.

Co-creation is what Designit does. It has always, from day one, formed the basis of what we do. We believe in user-led innovation – meeting and interacting with those people who have the problem or need on their turf, and including them in the whole process. We don’t have the answer. Our clients don’t have the answer. The consumers don’t have the answer. It’s only by coming together and collaborating that we can find solutions.

Designit believes in collective creativity and we will always believe in collective creativity.

We were one of the businesses the institute asked to come along and present ourselves and all that we do to the attendees. So we did! Our little stand gathered a lot of attention, and it was great to meet so many interested in Designit. From people asking what they could do to work at Designit, to people who had heard about our super innovation calendar and wanted one, to people who wanted to hear more about how we work – we covered all the bases.

Here is our desk looking very smart;

Our wall – or fortress – of calendars, built by Ida Marie;

I was convinced that someone (me) would knock it over but no-one (I) I didn’t, amazingly.

We were lucky to be nestled in a corner, which meant that we were pretty eye-catching with all our yellow and black! Super stuff.

“How does it work?”

Our calendars got everywhere! Look;

And our invitations to our tablet event got in bags;

And we got busy.

Woohoo! A great afternoon.

Here are some pictures from the office.



I’m also meeting everyone. About 60 new faces and names, which I’ll do my very best to remember, but…. Well, ‘oi’ works in many languages, let’s just leave it at that. Very nice lot here in Aarhus, and they even have their very own Englishwoman holding up the front. We’re everywhere, we are. Here is a picture of some happy Designits. Work hard, play hard.

In these boxes are our books! Woohoo! So to anyone who wanted one – they’ll be with you soon.

Well that’s it for now. Just a little ‘hello’ from Aarhus. Hopefully one day I can do the same thing for every office. You know, eat their cake, that kind of thing.

Until then!

After 15 years of design research as a growing and now dominating force within the business of developing products and services of real value for the consumer, the question about what’s next is beginning to rise.

As the power and methods of design research is becoming known by everybody who wants be sure to make money in a world of ‘more products faster’, it is obvious that we all need to find the next tool or weapon in the battle to develop the next big thing, before the competition.

Here’s my bet, and I’ll be blogging a bit about that for a while, because I think it is explosive… Corporate Collective Creativity. With design research as a standard process we need to look for a new creative potential to release. We believe that potential could easily be the vast research and innovation resources that exists within every company – but that usually stays largely untapped due to a variety of organisational, psychological and even physical reasons.

Most senior designers have years of experience with being two things: design developers – and facilitators of processes that synthesizes the right framework for the innovation work. Almost always painfully ignorant to the specific project designers gather information from the market and from inside the client’s organisation … where they often find many of the answers already – inside the organisation, right under the client’s nose, usually, though, well hidden or just not actively seeking to become of value. Simply because the organization does not recognize the value or is able to facilitate it.

If the corporate world can learn to activate and cultivate the vast research and innovation resources inside their organisation, the speed and precision of development can be seriously increased. We believe they can learn that from us and our colleagues in the design business.

Or you can discuss or vote others’ eco-effective ideas closer to production. Even improve them to gain co-ownership. Unlike other community-based idea sites, such as Dell’s ideastorm or Starbucks’ mystarbucksidea Quirky shares profits with you if your product vision makes it to production. 12 cents in your pocket for every dollar your product makes.

So, what are you waiting for? Experience the power of co-creation and crowd-sourcing before you try it out in your own business.

My new design thrill is time. After 17 years of designing, it’s occurred to me that companies continually fail to consider one important parameter: time factor. Put simply, this is the amount of time a user is willing to spend on your product, service or communication solution before they give up and walk away.

Take this American billboard, for example. It may not be pretty, but it sure as hell works.

Why? Its design acknowledges the fact that people only have a split second to get the message. A two-word eye-catching question against a brightly coloured background attracts your attention in a flash and quickly communicates the product.

It competes hands down against the hundreds of other billboards in the city, which demand as much as 10 seconds from passers by. Just a thought … Check out Thinkaboutit for more reflections on the design time factor.

At a seminar in Copenhagen the other day, Joe Pine from Strategic Horizons told about ‘services you didn’t ask for’ which triggered some thoughts on service experiences in general.

At Designit we’re currently quite focused on the global trend towards self-service and DIY. Self-service – in most cases – actually also happens to be something you didn’t ask for, and rather insisted on not having. But new divisions of labour between service provider and service buyer are here to stay, so it might be worth thinking about!

All sectors and markets experience a shift in user behaviour and service perception towards a preference for self-service and DIY. Not only for user but also for service provider this means new opportunities.

Even ‘mission critical’ industries like health care will become self-care in a couple of years from now. Take prescription drug vending machines for example. Chance is, that we’ll end up prefer self-service. And be surprised how self-service-capable we are – at least if the self-service experience is well designed and with user-capabilities in mind.

Within DIY activities the trend also shifts and creates new markets. Have a look at these two examples. Why not source back your typical DIY tasks (if you are a male) to a service provider. Here is the EasyCarWash offer reinventing carwash experience: Park your car at work, book a wash and enjoy a hand-washed car when you leave the office. A standard car wash consumes minimal water and costs approximately €15 so its benefits are both economical and environmental!

Or book a multi-handyman on the internet and get all the stuff done that used to require serious DIY-skills or two or three different professions + coordination. We tried it and it works! Next thing, I guess, will be a mobile hairdresser in the Copenhagen office saving time and probably cost too.

New, reinvented ‘service agreements’ between the service giver and service taker is the future. These new services are services that you did’nt ask for, but end up loving them and recommend them to your friends. Their logic is irresistible – and that’s why they’ll grow and change the game in the sector.

So, all you big established service providers with dated business and service concepts – rethink, get into the new game – or loose it!