The Clever Little Bag by Puma

Recently Puma announced the Clever Little Bag that will reduce their environmental footprint. As a shoelover, a shoebox is not only an environment problem but a space saving issue that involves all shoelovers who live in small condos. The Clever Little Bag not only solves the bigger problem at hand such as sustainability and carbon emission but it also reduces cluster in everyone’s home.

The R3 Green experiment by Petz Scholtus and Sergio Carratala

I stumbled upon this article on ReadyMade magazine and its about a Spanish couple in Barcelona who turned their own home into a green experiment. The couple used as many recycled materials as they could to create a carbon neutral home that follows the 3R principles: Reduce, Recycle, Respect. One of the coolest things in their apartment is the Wine Crate cabinets in the kitchen. You can follow the instruction and make one yourself with this check list.

Obsessive Consumption by Kate Bingaman-Burt
Obsessive Consumption started out as an art project by Kate Bingaman and it’s a project that I have been following for a few years. Kate, the artist, started out by creating a personal record of what she buys everyday and she draws out credit card statements for every single item she buys. The collection of drawings is getting bigger and bigger and she has finally started a blog to document this project. Why is this project green you ask? The drawings of what we consume serve as a reminder for all of us to think twice about how much we consume on this planet and by looking at the colourful drawings of these consumptions you are able to reflect on your own. When everyone is doing it- that’s a good starting point for reducing waste.

Happy Earth Day!

A retailer’s primary role may be that of curator and tastemaker, but that doesn’t mean that the crowds can’t pitch in to help. Modcloth is a Pittsburgh-based online retailer that sells affordable, independent designer women’s fashion. With a recently launched initiative called Be the Buyer, ModCloth encourages its customers to help choose which items to take into production, effectively turning a customer into a virtual member of their buying team. E-commerce functionality + community participation = We-Commerce, and it’s a very efficient method of building both brand awareness and driving advocacy.

The retailer was founded by Eric and Susan Gregg Koger, a husband-wife team who are recent graduates of Carnegie Mellon University. Susan says, “Our customers know our brand best. They’re trendsetters, and we really want to take this opportunity to listen to them, and produce and sell items that they want to see on our site”. This is keen acknowledgment of brand ownership and the value of really letting the voice of the customer be heard — insights not always recognized by more established marketers. There are some designs that the owners think will be hits, but the designer can only put them into production and at a sell-able price if they’re made in a large quantity. As a small company, it’s difficult for ModCloth to make big inventory commitments without knowing if customer demand is necessarily in alignment with the owners’ tastes in style.

ModCloth’s crowd-sourced voting process is reminiscent of t-shirt retailer, Threadless. While t-shirts are almost a commodity from a manufacturing perspective, ModCloth sells dresses, shirts, jackets and skirts that are more complicated to produce. And this is where the virtual buyers come in.

ModCloth’s fans currently have 65 designs to vote on by selecting an item, then choosing whether to “Pick it” or “Skip It”, along with the option of submitting amplifying commentary each design, and to share their voting decisions on Facebook and Twitter, turning the voting process into a useful marketing tool for ModCloth. If a design is taken into production, customers who voted for it receive email notifications as soon as it’s available, allowing them to be the first to buy and wear it. Winning designs will normally be for sale a few weeks after voting ends.

This isn’t the only way that ModCloth involves their shoppers – periodically they invite customers to become fashion writers through their Name It and Win It contests, and features on their website, like reviews and ratings, equal even more involvement. Susan thought it would be wonderful for customers everywhere to get a chance to become a virtual buyer, which was the inspiration for Be the Buyer.

While the concept won’t work for every retailer or manufacturer, it’s definitely one that many could benefit from: by making customers feel more involved, by taking some of the guesswork out of buying decisions, and by empowering customers via social media channels to drive brand awareness and capture customer sentiment and insights. We-commerce initiatives like Be the Buyer are allowing savvy merchants to drive active engagements with their customers that can efficiently drive loyalty, advocacy, and truly meaningful relationships based on that participation.

Catering trucks and street food don’t have the best reputations–most have been known as “roach coaches”, and with good reason.   In the past, you could count on food trucks to serve up suspect tuna salad on stale white bread with limp lettuce and coffee so strong it could strip the paint off your car.  Today’s trucks, however, take a much different approach.  The new breed of  “food trucks” are not just stale sandwiches and greasy gut bomb burritos,  but are often mobile extensions of established restaurants.  Once the haunt of blue collar workers on a coffee or lunch break, food trucks now are attracting a new generation of technocrats in places like LA, New York, Portland, San Francisco and Austin who track and share the locations of the trucks via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and text messages.

Dan Delaney is a Brooklyn-based entrepreneur who has combined his abundant passion for fine foods and mobile dining with video production and social media with a web-series/podcast that takes the viewers across a tour of the US and reviews the best in portable cuisine. Check out VendrTV at http://vendr.tv/ or via iTunes, where you can download a podcast at vender.tv/itunes.   So you can watch a review of mobile dining on your mobile device.

Here he reviews Let’s Be Frank, a mobile restaurant not far from my neighborhood in San Francisco that serves local, grass fed beef and pork hot dogs and sausages.

The high volume efficiency of the cubed containers reduces costs as well as carbon emissions by better space utilization during transportation and storage, a substantial improvement beyond traditional shaped plastic bottles. Additional environmental benefits are gained from using readily recyclable plastic materials, like HDPE and PP, and development is ongoing for the use of renewable materials. It can serve as a powerful marketing platform for the introduction of new brands and products.

Marks & Spencer just opened a store on Nanjing Xi Lu, replacing a Muji. Both are established brands in their home country (UK and Japan) and both manufacture and package their own products. Both have a similar product approach in terms of keeping things simple but are different in their design approach. Marks & Spencer is not exactly an exciting retail experience and Muji has far better product design and presentation from functionality to aesthetics. Muji is not doing that well here, as it requires a level of sophistication to appreciate it whereas Marks & Spencer is basically selling British quality and this will win in the short term.

Distribution has always been the greatest hurdle for retailers. The opening of the wholesale sector should lead to major improvements in the distribution environment, but there is a big gap. Strategies that successful foreign enterprises have employed to overcome distribution barriers include developing their infrastructures or partnering with the locals, and both has unique challenges.

In 10 years, its retail sector has been transformed from a simple and inefficient distribution system to a much more complex and highly competitive market-oriented economy. The new retail economy in many ways resembles the contemporary retail economy in the US. It is also exhibiting significant differences with Chinese characteristics but I think eventually it will move towards a different direction. Shanghai and the rest of China is currently suffering from some kind of “Brand Fatigue” as consumers are slowly becoming more sophisticated. The trust and prestige issues carry very different meaning here in China. We are still 5-10 years away from a more predictable consumer behavior and the market evolves.

Coordinating colors can be completely confounding. Do the curtains match the carpet? Will the backsplash compliment the dishes? Is the bedding in-sync with the bedroom walls? To attempt to answer these difficult décor questions, most consumers rely on collecting piles of fabric swatches, paint chips, magazine clippings and even a favorite plate or bowl to mix and match them until the secret of personal style is finally revealed. Then, the challenge truly begins: braving a series of separate stores across the city to actually find those items that, in theory and from that pile, really do work together to conjure color coordination. Failure is frequent, and usually by a hue or two.

Color Concierge By Crate & Barrel solves this challenge by packing the style skills of a professional interior designer into a single, easy to use iPhone application. With reliable, robust and dynamic brainpower, it uses intelligent logic driven by color theory, an archive of best practices and pattern recognition of user activities to take a photo of a room or item, extract the color palette, refine color harmonies and generate the perfect product combinations. Then, to make shopping easier, it acquires instant product details, displays color and fabric options, receives smart recommendations from other brands that align to your project and personality, and accesses special offers available only through Color Concierge.

Design changes are a reaction to pressure. This is true of both evolutionary design and human design.  In a completely stable system (of which there’s no such thing), there is no pressure to make design changes. In today’s chaotic environment, there’s a bigger demand for designer for change.  Expect to see more B-school program on design and innovation.
Design is essentially a rational, logical, sequential process intended to solve problems or initiate change in man-made things and in nature. The process begins with the identification and analysis of a problem or need and proceeds through a structured sequence in which information is researched, ideas explored and evaluated until the optimum solution to the problem or need is devised. The problem is in the traditional process (many still practice it today), the work of the expert in the process was often compartmentalized, each having little, if any input in matters which fell outside the boundaries of their specific domains. Thus, participants explored their ideas unilaterally, with one or another participant, through virtue of their “expertise”, imposing constraints upon all others. As they pass the bucket, the product designer has veto on matters to do functionality; the engineer has veto on technology and the human factor in usability.

Look back at the years of the Bauhaus movement when they attempted to knit the design process into a coherent whole. Students were encouraged to study design in a way that was both total and detailed. That is, designers were expected to balance all the considerations that came to bear upon the design of particular artifacts, systems and overall environments. As a result, design quickly evolved into a closed activity – an activity in which all but the designers themselves had little, if any valid input on questions of base materials etc. That was the birth of the multi-disciplinary designer.

Design is important for any organization but not many organizations get it. This includes Google. Bowman, former visual design lead of Goggle accuses the company’s culture of relying too much on numbers, to the point where creativity suffers. According to Bowman, “Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better,” he writes. “I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.”

Created by Richard Shed,  “The Good Design Manifesto” in London is a collection of 100 brief responses from industry experts to the question “What is good design?”  Here are a few of them:
Good design…
…makes ordinary people’s life more meaningful. (Lavrans Lovrie, Livework)
…brings the intelligence of nature together with man’s production capabilities. (Jonathan Prestwich)
…is finding new places where what we can dream meets what we can make happen. (John Miller and Anna Hart, Mark)
…is no longer about 20th century debates around form or function. Good design will ensure we got a future on this planet.
…is sooo boring. We need GREAT design: Vision. Humanity. Sex. Death. Art. Love. (Richard Eisermann)

Image Source: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HwdkdfjE8Tk/SLY90CTrO6I/AAAAAAAAAeM/YTTydMbcX5U/s400/Coke_Butler.jpg; http://www.modernclassicsdirect.co.uk/imagesstatic/big/breuer/Wassily%20Chair.gif

Packaging, contests, games, recipes, online portals, prizes and product information make CPGs more fun than fresh. Able to transform assembled ingredients into brand experiences, they’re often used as tricky tools to distract consumers from the fact that what’s inside the box is anything but fresh obsessed and rarely the healthiest choice possible. But with more consumers becoming increasingly concerned about the contents of their kitchens, what’s inside their purchases and where they came from, fruits and vegetables could take the fun out of fake food forever. All they need is a little brand innovation.

Idea Couture’s first book, No One Works Here, is diet-free. For over-bloated brands and businesses, that means there’s no quick and easy way to shed those unwanted pounds. Instead, for organizations addicted to gobbling up profits at the expense of customers, it offers a step-by-step guide to new the sustainability. Big shifts come in small, incremental ideas. One of ours explores how Waitrose, Britain’s leading supermarket, could nurture nature with a little design, experience and communication idea.

Waitrose Fresh Stamps is a line of organic fruits and vegetables that utilize laser-etching technology to enhance the experience of purchasing, preparing and eating produce. An innovation in customer communication and co-creation, it transforms fresh food into a tasty media hub by making every surface, skin and peel a canvas for artistic expression, consumer information and brand exploration.

Customers can pick and choose from four ways to make their fruits and vegetables even more fresh: recipes that present new and exciting ways to use the tastiest ingredients at home; origins maps promote local farmers and greater transparency regarding imported produce; nutritional facts detail the vitamins and describe the health benefits; and cutting templates make slicing and dicing more fun. In addition to differentiating one of the highest traffic areas in the grocery store, a prominently placed unique URL takes customers directly to a web page specific to the fruit or vegetable where videos, photos and interactive features link customers to Waitrose, its sister companies and its burgeoning media properties.

Case Study: Food Scavenger
If you could write anything on your apple what would it be? Well for starters maybe a date, so you know how much longer your Golden Delicious will last in your fridge. But think of the opportunities for marketing. Create a product scavenger hunt in the produce section. You could create recipes that would be handed out to customers when then enter, but products are simply numbered. How to you create the perfect fruit salad? 1+3+5+8=YUM!  This could lead to further collaborations with other producers, creating recipes that are brand specific. You could develop an online competition for say, the best apple crisp and the winning recipe would be printed right on the apples. As you can see, the possibilities are endless. Mega Bonus? You will never get up to the checkout and be faced with a look of confusion because the fruits to picked just happen to be missing the all important product code.

“Sorry, but the models you have chosen have different attributes and cannot be compared.  Please change your selection and try again.”

My first thought was, “Seriously?  Of course they have different attributes… That’s why I wanted to compare them!”  Don’t get me wrong, I understand the challenge—the comparison table doesn’t really work if the products don’t have any similar attributes to compare, but come on!  It’s not like I’m trying to compare a DVD player to a washing machine.  These were all products listed under the same category and it would be perfectly reasonable for a consumer to be deciding between these options.

My second thought was, “OK, the error message provides no help whatsoever in helping me fix the issue.”  Ideally, the message would tell me which of the products are comparable with each other.  If you’re not going to let me compare all of my options, would it be too hard to tell me which products you’re going to allow me to compare?

All that said, the biggest missed opportunity here is a feature that guides prospective purchasers to a product that’s best for them.  One quote I hear all the time in usability tests: “Why doesn’t it just tell me what to do!?”  With a little bit of consumer research, we could identify the key factors influencing their audience’s buying decision and build a tool that helps guide users to one (or a few) option(s) that would best meet their needs.  The tool wouldn’t be used by everyone, but it would certainly be appreciated by folks who are looking for a recommendation that’s relevant to them.

There is no value in overwhelming users with choices, and then not providing help to narrow the list.

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Service design is an innovative and emerging discipline. I am not referring to the older definition of it in the manufacturing and hospitality industries.  Today, almost every business is a service business. How service companies bring innovation to life largely depends on how they define themselves. Pure services cover a wide range and heterogeneous fields. These range from low volume retailing to highly interactive digital interfaces. Don’t dismiss the high volume retail environment and technologically enabled activities like telecommunications, utilities, banking and insurance.

An example would be ING. Trying to define what a virtual bank would look like was not a simple task for ING DIRECT.  How do you get wary consumers who expect vaults and teller cages to trust a virtual bank?  The key is to design for the mind and the senses. Today’s businesses need to consider their emotional relationship with their customers as a key component of their value proposition. Designing a compelling customer experience enables this relationship. ING DIRECT sells a unique (and super simple) range of products and engages the customer in a unique way, creating the opportunity for a trust engagement as well as, ultimately, customer acquisition. There were so many customer barriers to overcome and address.

Another example is LG. They make and sell appliances. Now you can drag your dirty laundry over to the hip Canal St Martin neighborhood to wash it at the LG WashBar. The concept is unique: buy a drink at the bar and get free access to the upstairs “apartment” where you can do your laundry—washing powder comes free too!—browse books from the library, watch movies, and check your e-mails at the two free wireless hotspots. It’s a great place to hang out. The feel is cozy minimalist design meeting a high-tech appliance aesthetic. There’s even a dance floor downstairs for DJ nights. Fresh clothes and Saturday night dancing?…sounds good to me. The plan is to open up 15 across France.

So how does service innovation happen? It begins with gathering insights including goals and paths, prototyping the working experience and evidencing. Next, is service blueprinting. It all comes down to three things: Creating compelling user benefits, optimize based on the separability of the service nature and making sensible automation/human trade-offs. Develop Compelling User Benefits. Understand what type of benefit/value a service innovation can provide. Is this innovation an important core benefit or a new way of delivering an existing benefit? Examples are Cirque du Soleil (new core benefit), Netflix mail order DVD rental (new benefit), Blockbuster’s self-destruct DVD in 48 hours (new benefit) and Ford’s latest use of radar-based active safety technology linked to satellites (new benefit). Optimize based on the separability of the service. Is this innovation for a service that is produced and consumed simultaneously? Examples are Telemedicine (create separable services), Blackberry (mostly inseparable services), Enterprise Car Rental (create inseparable services) or iTunes (create inseparable services).

Model the service economics and making trade-offs. Customers are expensive. Dealing with them costs money. Putting them through a speech recognition application to offload calls saves money but lowers the quality of the experience. Each year, call centers implement new technologies that can take over the functions previously handled by people. Why then are customers so unhappy, if we expect call centers to implement technology that will make customers happy and provide them faster service? Simple, because technology does not equal quality customer service.

Take Nintendo Wii’s Glucoboy as an example. A game compatible with the Game Boy Advance or DS Lite, was launched in Australia on World Diabetes Day. The Glucoboy makes monitoring and achieving blood sugar goals fun. Whenever a user performs a glucose test, points are awarded which allows the user to unlock games. More points are awarded if the user’s blood sugar falls within the specified goals. The points may be spent in the game or on the GRIP online community. Users post their scores to the GRIP community to see who has the best scores in a town, country, and in the world. Nintendo has plenty of opportunities to create new benefits (and revenue) through service designs.

The Nintendo idea was created by Paul Wessel who noticed that his 9-year-old son would constantly lose his glucose monitor but not his Game Boy. Mr. Wessel states,  “That moment, five years ago, design was about the creation of beautiful and usable objects. Human has a similar project, using service design, when they pioneer the use of games for health industry. The idea is to create ways for people of all ages to improve their health and well-being through the use of video game technology. Expect to see more service design innovation when healthcare and gaming crossover.”

Today, it is additionally and increasingly thought to be a valid approach to problems related to, well, anything – be it global warming, poor transportation or social issues. What differentiates the designers’ way to solve societal problems from that of other professionals’? The essence of design still lies in the quest for aesthetic, functional as well as sensorial experiences, that appeal to and help societies. To design is to make the problem-solving a matter of the heart as much as rationality. While engineers can make banks efficient, designers can make customers happy. Efficiency and happiness are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, many businesses today act as if they are. They will be surprised who service designers can change that.

Image Source: http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/02/27/how-to-not-put-on-your-earrings/; http://www.linkdesign.nl/assets/Image/P_ING/ING_WEB_01.gif; http://trendwatching.com/trends/brand-spaces.htm; http://www.spbwhatsup.com/images/cirque.jpg; http://reviews.cnet.com/i/bto/20080227/Wii.jpg