Matter/Anti-Matter

In the digital age we can send texts and pics to anyone, anywhere, instantly. But how might we share feelings? Through our feet, obviously. For GOOD Magazine's Inventions video series, frog's VP of Creative Robert Fabricant, imagines a new kind of shoe that can take you anywhere.

Forgive this self-serving plug but I think this is worth sharing: My colleague, Frog Design founder and former CEO, Hartmut Esslinger, has written his first book, and it is available in stores now: A Fine Line - How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business. Part autobiography, part how-to innovation guide, part outlook to the future of design, A Fine Line is "a must-read for designers and business people alike" (Satjiv Chahil, senior vice president, Hewlett-Packard).

A Fine Line offers a step-by-step overview of the innovation process -- from targeting goals to shepherding new products and services to the marketplace -- in order to reveal how to arrive at an authentic human design that connects strongly with consumers. With a unique perspective, rich stories, and a global mindset, Hartmut Esslinger explores business solutions that are environmentally sustainable and contribute to an enduring global economy.

Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital, in his foreword, said it all: "Hartmut's book contains the ruminations of a man who has devoted his life to the challenge of marrying the aesthetic with the functional while standing firm against the deadening forces of mediocrity. His work shows that taste can triumph, design and production can be soul-mates, and the eye of an individual can shape a product and a company. The idea that finely designed products can change the fate of companies while also becoming our indispensable companions is a message that millions of us owe to Hartmut."

You can find the table of contents, sample chapters, testimonials, and videos on http://www.afinelinebook.com

And here are some excerpts from a video interview with Hartmut:

Famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Internet entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki offers a colorful interview with Frog Design founder and legendary designer Hartmut Esslinger. Hartmut discusses his philosophy on design and his new book "A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business," to be published in June by Jossey-Bass. Hartmut talks about how Steve Job’s brain works and why the world’s richest companies continue to put out “crappy” products. Hartmut also reveals his top 10 best and worst products of all time.

Here's the article: The Inside Scoop on Design: Ten Questions with Hartmut Esslinger. 

(Source: Open Forum)

By Nick de la Mare, Associate Creative Director, frog design

There's a saying I remember from when I worked in advertising: "nothing kills a bad product faster than a good ad." That seemed to make a lot of sense when I heard it, but the more I look back I realize that it's defining things so narrowly as to be absurd. What IS a product anyway? A service-based thing like a house cleaner or a mechanic? A single-minded tool like a cup or hammer? Something digital and deeply nebulous like a Wi-Fi network? And what does "kill" mean in a world of constant innovation and updates in both successful and unsuccessful products? To compound that, what role does traditional advertising have to play anyway, especially as word-of-mouth is becoming the TRUE definer of success for so many products.

We're now in a place where production costs are down and competition is up, products are networked into systems, and getting the actual thing into users hands is becoming more important than telling them how cool it could be for them to try it. More and more we're letting people form opinions of their own, and changing the product to better fit those opinions. Brands are alive and sales channels are as elastic as the products themselves. The desire to get product out to individuals and then iterate based on incoming data goes by many names; perpetual beta, direct sampling, open-source, etc., etc., but all adhere to the same core thesis, as Brian Collins puts it: "The singular is often the universal. The more an experience matters, the faster the word goes out in a zillion-channel world."

What does this do to traditional advertising and top-down branding? For one thing you're seeing more and more ad and brand agencies getting into the product game, and that scares the hell out of the traditional players. Carl Alviani wrote an interesting article about it a few months ago in which he states:

"Ad agencies designing products has a sort of apocalyptic ring to it for many traditional ID folks, who may bristle at the idea of product design as just another way of getting people excited about buying. The small mound of moral high ground product designers have seized for themselves over the years is largely composed of statements about making things work better, last longer, offer more relevance. If that makes them sell better, goes the argument, then great, but don't think for a moment that market appeal is the primary motive; that's what ad agencies do. This breeds wariness, and while it might have some justification, it's also a little beside the point: the marketing landscape has shifted dramatically since the claim was first made."

That queasy feeling of reaching too far into the marketing world extends beyond the insecurities of traditional ID'ers. What happens when marketing and product converge; does that change the very essence or power of a product? Does it become more superficial, designed to impress for an instant rather than live with the user for long periods of time? Is superficiality and the short attention span taking over the world? Are we doomed to a Wall-E or Idiocracy like future? Well, perhaps traditional product designers shouldn't be so scared, or better yet, perhaps they're scared of the wrong thing.

Just as the newspaper world was blindsided by digital (the original fear being short-form articles and color in print ala. USA Today), the product design world is about to get a smack-down. It's not from any singular new innovation, but more from the multitude of them. As consumers we're at a tipping point where we no longer need brands or other top-down entities to mediate our experiences for us. In an impersonal world we crave conversation and for the first time we can conduct those conversations with the things we use; whether that comes in the form of constant updates that simulate the back and forth of person-to-person dialog, or through communication between objects where we act as the intermediaries. Strength doesn't come from singular many-to-one messages anymore, it's user-defined, one-to-one and elastic.

Again Brian Collins, "Now, even the best-crafted messages are attenuating to the vanishing-point. Media have subdivided into capillaries, too numerous and often too narrow to measure." Apply those words to a product and you get the Apple App Store; fundamentally a tool used as an opportunity to present the essence of a company in bite-sized pieces, each designed and defined by users for users.

Last word goes to Russell Davis, who pretty much sums it up:

"The point I'm groping towards is that as objects informationalize communication channels are getting built in. And there are ways of doing this that are mass, cheap and easy. Printing. Paper. Ink. RFID. And cleverer phones will be the perfect things to interact with these clever objects. This is what advertising and marketing and media people really need to get afraid of. All this web stuff is going to look like a picnic compared to the horrors that will be dealt to the agency and media businesses when every product has a communications channel built right in. And I suspect it's a channel that most brand-owners will feel a lot more comfortable with. Marketing/advertising was always a necessary evil for most businesses. And  Something bolted onto the culture. And they've never liked ITV. And having to do all this social networking stuff gives most of them the willies. But integrating communication and information into the product is something they can get behind quickly and easily.

I think. I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this but I think it's interesting. I think there's a whole model here that integrates the conversation into the stuff, creating a much more natural relationship between people and things, with much less mediation in the middle."

Amen.

In a great essay for Core 77 ("Stepmothers of Invention: Branding Firms Enter the Industrial Design Fray"), Carl Alviani describes a trend that has been emerging for a while now: Not only do digital agencies like R/GA enter the branding domain, branding, marcom, and advertising firms also round out their services portfolio by adding product design capabilities. Alviani expects that "a lot more branding firms will be hiring product designers over the next few years, just as ID firms hired lots of media and identity specialists a decade back (and continue to do)." John Winsor director of strategy in product innovation at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, an ad agency which now bills itself as a "factory," reckons that "Product is the ultimate communication tool. To me, branding and ID are different sides of the same coin. We're both satisfying the needs of the customer."

And indeed, Alviani observes that "In the last few decades, 'product' has become a word that can describe a toothbrush, a piece of software, or an advertising campaign with equal justification, and this trend of metaphor-as-synonym shows no signs of slowing."

But he does not just simply buy into the song of creative discipline convergence. His view is much more nuanced. While he acknowledges that "branding agencies are just as good candidates for performing product design explorations as design firms at this point," Alviani questions whether real break-through innovation will ever originate from branding firms: "When we look for examples of 'authentic,' 'innovative' design, (...) we're almost always looking at a different sort of team. The current poster children of innovation-spawned market success--the Wii, the iPhone, the Flip video camera--emerged from large groups of researchers, designers, engineers, programmers and manufacturing specialists who worked together for a long time, and knew both their brand and the applicable technologies intimately. This type of work cannot be emulated by assembling a team or hiring an agency and handing them a brand bible, no matter how good they are at their jobs."

For the most part I would agree with his conviction that it's one thing to tell the story (even across different technologies and consumer touch points), but a very different thing to create it. Branding firms may consider product design simply as a means of brand extension. But then again, what is chicken, what is egg? I remember how Eric Feng, Chief Technical Officer at Hulu, emphasized in a presentation at the Milken Conference that it was critical for them to start with a clear understanding of what the Hulu brand should stand for -- long before they drafted even a rough concept of the actual product.

Definitely Techcrunch material: Can there be a trendier start-up than a site called Blippr that provides "micro-product reviews"?

With its 160-character length limit, the site replicates microblogging sites, and there are good reasons to assume that this format translates well to product reviews, as David Binkowski writes.

I saw the Royal Ballet of Flanders perform William Forsythe's "Impressing the Czar" last week at the Rose Theatre in New York. It was a mesmerizing experience: a demonstration of the possibilities of the human body and its bold orchestration as part of a stampeding, Dionysian collective.

As I followed the breathtaking, ultra-structuralist choreography, especially the acclaimed "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" part, I couldn't help but draw parallels to other high-performing teams: Why, I wondered, can't businesses (and governments, for that matter) accomplish the same level of perfection? What is it they lack compared to world-class ballet ensembles (and world-class orchestras)? Why are business organizations so often so dysfunctional? Why do the regimen and the elevated standards of consistent, superior performance that apply to ballet and orchestra not seem to translate to the world of business?

Sure, one difference is that art-performing ensembles execute creativity, whereas business teams need to be creative before and when they execute. Innovation is a key ingredient of their successful performance. But still, the operational rigor and prowess that has long been a calling card of companies like GE -- has that become a nostalgic idea in the work-life balanced world of millennials? Do commitment and attention to detail still matter? Is perfection a desirable goal at all in the accelerated economy of permanent beta?

Without wanting to romanticize, there is something romantic about the stories of Tiger Woods practicing his swings for hours every day in front of a mirror, violinists playing the same note over and over again until they reach perfection, and ballerinas sacrificing their bodies for someone else's imagination.

Today's young professionals seem skeptical about this kind of work ethic: For them, good is good enough. They are committing themselves to doing good and living well rather than living up to a vague concept of excellence. Most of them are not interested in sacrifice and excess and would rather save themselves. But for what?

On the occasion of Independence Day, Steve Rubel reflects on the growing independence of knowledge workers in the network economy and predicts the rise of "Digital Nomads:"

"If you spend as much time on the road as I do, you're likely to run into Digital Nomads. This sector of the workforce includes both independents and corporate workers. They use web-based tools like Twitter, wikis, Google Docs, social networks and Skype to collaborate and work wherever, whenever and however they want.

(...)

The reality is that many of the tools that workers need to do their jobs are becoming free or low cost. This extends into verticals as well. For example the Google Ad Planner, which launched last week, theoretically could allow anyone to become a nomadic media planner.

Digital Nomads are growing in numbers and they will create ripples. This trend will accelerate use of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace. Over time, this may slow the efficacy of email marketing and accelerate the reliance on social media engagement.

However, it goes deeper than that. If you don't allow your employees to become nomadic, they may do so and even compete against you in the process."

I have a piece of advice for those who bemoan the lack of knowledge-sharing in their organizations: Make tacit knowledge explicit. Externalize expertise and experiences across all functions, from the office manager to the executive team.

How? Make it mandatory for every employee to keep an internal blog and post at least once per week. Depending on their role, employees can blog about customer experiences, sales tactics, strategy, product improvements, organizational design, competitors, market trends, and even gossip. Potential productivity losses are outweighed by the value of knowledge that is being generated and shared.

And what is productivity anyway these days? "Productivity (...) is exactly the wrong thing to care about in the new economy," writes Kevin Kelly in his Maxims for the Network Economy: "In the coming era, doing the exactly right next thing is far more fruitful than doing the same thing twice."

Blogging helps identify the right thing. If you turn your organization into a writing organization, it will become readable and thus more knowledgeable.