TV is broken. It needs design thinking. Don’t blame Kim, Khloe and Kourtney. When it comes to the current state of TV, the Kardashians and others of their narrative ilk are neither the culmination nor the cause. Like Gigolos, Coal, Jail, Cops, Real Housewives, The Ultimate Fighter and Pawn Stars, their second generation of so-called [...]

Is J. Jonah Jameson calling the shots on the theater scene, or what? An article in The New York Times reports that the producers of the Broadway musical, Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark, recently held focus groups to figure out why critics had largely panned the show. I’m no fan of focus groups, but [...]

In a recent blog post, Grant McCracken suggests it is the job of designers to conduct provocation and innovation through pie. He points to Project M as the source of this uniquely American metaphor with its Pie + Conversation = Ideas/Ideas + Design = Positive Change equation. As a first step towards ideas that better [...]

In a business culture of innovation, there are some things you should never hear: Seeing is believing. Who feels it knows it. A picture is worth a thousand words. Humans love idioms, those catchy little phrases that make the world seem so much more simple than it really is. Like GPS systems programmed through tradition [...]

I hate the word “consumer.” But I’m not sure what to do with it. It drives me crazy when clients talk about “the consumer” like they’re some kind of other species out there foraging for nuts and berries in Wal-Mart, Rite Aid or the shopping malls of America. If only they could find the perfect [...]

We’ve been running ethnographic projects at Idea Couture since go. Almost three years ago, when I first joined what was then a five-person team on the fifth floor of our building, I was jettisoned into the field on a CPG project designed to examine the role of the kitchen in people’s lives. Since then – [...]

Product or service design to introduce new or tweak existing sales is one thing. Service-cum-experience design for the purpose of encouraging healing and transformation is another. A brief article on Fast Company details some inspiring ethnography+ methods that informed Astorino’s design of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. To get the full scoop, make sure you [...]

When it comes to product, service or marketing design, following the bell curve can sometimes lead you astray. This is certainly the case for businesses and brands courting the highly coveted, often elusive consumer category known as early adopters. Early adopters are typically described as curious, adventurous consumers who buy first, talk fast and spread [...]

A recent article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describing how consumer feedback (or lack of it) impacts the design of cars once again reinforces how ethnographic studies trump focus groups in concept development and testing. It points out that the 2010 Ford Taurus and Buick LaCrosse were designed with input from ethnographic studies. That’s a step [...]

Last year around this time they redesigned the cans. Millions of dollars in the making, the result, as many critics loudly announced when it first dropped, is a flop – little more than a played-out font from 2004. A while back they redesigned Tropicana. Also in the making range of millions of dollars, the result, [...]