HK’s International Symposium on Product Design and Innovation

The conference “Designing Slow Life” on 24-25 March in Lahti, Finland brings together international experts of design, service design and wellness to talk about and develop services under the main theme of better, slower and more meaningful life.

The conference aims at collecting visions of how design practices and methods can be more powerfully used when developing services and practices under the Slow Life theme. Service design is the newest and most interesting area of multidisciplinary design. The

The challenge is to develop multidisciplinary know-how, methods for service as well as service-product analyses and development. The Slow Life conference will try to solve how to develop our surroundings in future in order to support slower life. What kind of multidisciplinary know-how is needed to do this and what kind of new business can be evolved to this area?

The conference highlights current topics of Slow Life themes through examples from both academic research and end-user point of view. The aim is to combine know-how from design and wellness areas in order to share and create new information.

via SDN

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Over the past couple of days, there’s been a flurry of information coming from our live-blogging team at The Big Rethink, The Economist’s Redesigning Business Summit. To make it easier for you to navigate, we’ve rounded up all their reports in one handy place.

In chronological order:

The Big Rethink: Introducing the Core77 team

Ready for a big rethink?

The Big Rethink: Designing around what consumers want (ethical underwear)

The Big Rethink: Four visions of the world tomorrow, and how to shape your company around them

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The Boisbuchet summer 2010 workshop schedule has just been released. From everything we’ve heard, the experience comes highly recommended—after all, what could be better than spending six to ten days on a country estate in the Southwest of France with Maarten Baas, the Campana Brothers, Tomoko Azumi or Dan Formosa?

Above, a shot of the castle and a scene from the a 2009 workshop on toys and games: participants navigated a 2d maze by looking into a mirror mounted inside their helmet. (photo by Caroline Linder).

These always fill up fast, so take your pick and register!

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Jonathan Salem Baskin, author of Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, describes himself as a Chief Heretic. He started out challenging the idea that customer centricity was a new idea. “Did we build western civilisation by accident? Have we not been listening to our customers?”

Jonathan counsels us against the idea of the crowd running things. It is dumb that companies like Ford and Microsoft listen to customers and utilise that listening answering the customers’ wants directly.

Jonathan wants to present us with new ideas for what customer centricity might mean, and explain what we need to do from a design and brand perspective.

Recognise we’re all customers:
We’re not passive consumers but potentially active purchasers. If you’re not selling something to your employees they are less likely to be loyal. If you’re not selling to customers they really aren’t your customers. If you’re not selling you’re just talking.

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Terry Back, Partner at Grant Thornton shared some new research with our audience. Conducted over the last six months, in conduction with the Economist, the research surveyed 450 top executives from UK and Irish companies about their business models.

How resilient has your business model been in recent downturn?

• Extreme resilient 21%
• Moderately resilient 64
• Not very resilient 12%
• Not at all resilient 4%

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Or… ‘How you can lead in an uncertain future by using design to find new ways to compete.’

Craig Sams, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Carbon Gold and Founder and President of Green & Black’s, provided the last contribution on Thursday’s schedule.

After a day of head-spinning thinking outside of the box, down-with-the-kids talk, juggling of buzzwords and multiple diagnoses of the current state of affairs, it was nice to be reminded in the closing presentation that a bit of old-fashioned entrepreneurial spirit isn’t necessarily evil. And equally that without an eye on sustainability all other endeavours are pointless.

Craig Sams concluded his address with a neat litany of ‘f’s that have dominated his professional mission and career: food, farming, fish, forestry, fair trade, future for our grandchildren. His obsession is with the processes around our food system. He has devoted his working life to rethinking agriculture. Having been born into the man-made catastrophe of a Nebraskan dustbowl in the 1940s, this determination is perhaps not surprising.

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Roberto Verganti: Changing the rules of competition by radically innovating what things mean

Roberto is Professor of Management and innovation at Politecnico di Milano and author of Design-driven Innovation He talked to us about the importance of meaning. Meaning as a way of innovating. First up is an example of a company that looked to innovate a lamp. There have been many lamp redesigns but very quickly these can be copied, most are now on sale in copy form in IKEA. In Roberto’s example the company changed it’s emphasis and decided to use light to make people feel better. This led them to redesign the whole way light was displayed in a room.

He follows up with the well known example of the Wii reinventing computer gaming away from the virtual and towards the real – real movement, real exercise and real sociability. Another example followed, Fiat have created a post-recessionary car, a small car that can fold down into a bed.

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We’ve sent a brilliant team to The Big Rethink: The Economist’s Redesigning Business Summit, happening now in London. Introducing Jocelyn Bailey and Richard Sedley, who are live-blogging the event, and Kevin McCullagh, who’s writing the recap.

Jocelyn Bailey runs the Associate Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group, an interest group of MPs and peers that exists to keep the cause of good design on the Parliamentary agenda. After studying Architecture at Cambridge, she worked for Nissen Adams architects, the London Design Festival, and Blueprint magazine. She loves writing, has her own blog, and has just completed a major piece of research for the Parliamentary Group on the subject of design in the service of the public sector.

Richard Sedley is Customer Engagement Director at the UK digital agencies cScape and author of the book ‘Winners and Losers in a Troubled Economy: How to Engage Customers Online to Gain Competitive Advantage’. He is also Course Director for Social Media at the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Kevin is the founder of Plan, a product strategy consultancy based in London. While at Plan and in his previous position as Director of Seymour Powell Foresight, he has consulted to design, marketing and R&D departments of brands including: Ford, HP, Mars, Nokia, Orange, O2, Psion, Samsung, Shell, Unilever and Yamaha. His background spans design, marketing, engineering and social forecasting; and he writes, speaks, and curates conferences on design, business, technology and society.

We’ll leave the rest to them!

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Ron Arad’s I.P.C.O (Inverted Pinhole Camera Obscura), 2001

Guest post by Victoria Kirk Owal

To make it as a designer in London in the ’80s, you had to pretend you knew what you were doing when you really didn’t. This was the central message from Thursday’s panel discussion at the Barbican Center in London between Ron Arad, Katharine Hamnett and Rolf Fehlbaum, moderated by Deyan Sudjic of London’s Design Museum. It accompanies Restless, Arad’s first major survey in the UK, showing through May 16.

The conversation focused on the designers’ career paths rather than the shift from readymade to industrial production, the suggested topic. The designers recalled their individual journeys to creative and professional success in a time when London’s design scene was diffuse and less sophisticated than it is today. Fehlbaum contributed his perspective on the growth of their respective design talents and the expansion of London’s pool of designers.

Several memorable themes emerged:

The role of constraints in creativity
Ron and Katharine both recalled a strong desire to liberate themselves from norms, practice design without marketing constraints, and answer their own briefs. The real constraints lay in the capabilities of mass production and, in Katharine’s case, the need to stay commercially viable to pay the bills without compromising creative vision. Ron was working within the creative and technical constraints that he set for himself, which gave him unprecedented autonomy and room to experiment.

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Maryland Institute College of Art celebrates Spanish design with a panel discussion that features graphic artists Ferran Mitjans and Oriol Armengou of Toormix, a graphic design studio based in Barcelona; Nacho Carbonell, a Spanish furniture designer whose furniture is featured here; and Vicente Guallart, a Barcelona-based architect who restores and builds internationally with focuses on nature and new technologies.

The event is sponsored by the Embassy of Spain with the Spain-USA Foundation as part of the program Preview Spain: Arts & Culture ‘10. The month-long celebration of Spanish design showcases some of Spain’s young, award-winning designers and architects. Designer from Toormix will also be holding workshops with MICA’s Graphic Design MFA program.

If you cannot make it to tonight’s presentation, check on the Society of Spain’s website to find out about other events happening in Washington DC through June, 2010.

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