Can you measure innovation?

Today, Fast Company’s Co. Design published an article by Paul Valerio, Principal of Insights at Method (which is currently doing a whole series of articles for Co. Design). The article is called “Eight Things Stand-Up Comedy Teaches Us About Innovation” and is a delightfully tongue-in-cheek comparison between successful product innovation and stand-up comedy. In Valerio’s words, “Innovation, like comedy, is a messy, often counter-intuitive business. It’s an iterative loop of creation, feedback, revision, rejection, and creation again. Used correctly, research fuels the understanding that leads to real breakthroughs. In the wrong hands, it all but assures the death of originality.”

I believe in the value of market research and focus groups, but I also know that the best designers have excellent design intuition. You only need to remind me of the recent Tropicana rebrand and failed packaging for me to concede that research isn’t as reliable as we’d like it to be. Valerio makes this fact all the more clear by pointing out that the opposite is also true: “Herman Miller’s Aeron chair and the Seinfeld pilot bombed in research” despite both being huge successes with consumers when introduced into the market.

Herman Miller’s Aeron chair, a huge success despite poor results in preliminary consumer research testing

All that said, I still believe in research and – even more importantly – in documentation of your successful innovations. Whether it’s visitorship and membership rates, community responses and user satisfaction feedback, or how much graffiti appears on a newly built structure, clients are already trying to measure the return on their design investments (see “Prove Your Design Has Value” published January 3, 2011 in Architect magazine). In my opinion, it’s definitely time for designers to start regularly including a diversity of metrics in their project documentation as well.

Aurthur Buxton shows us the five most common colors in 28 of Van Gogh’s paintings, by relative percentage: one not-so-soft metric for starting to understand these paintings (plus it’s a great piece of art on its own)

March 3′s daily design idea is while it’s unclear how to measure innovation, measuring the effects and performance of your work is more straightforward (and it will help create credible support for your innovative-ness). So ladies and gentlemen, start your measuring!

“Planned obsolescence with conviction.”

I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful and thought-provoking lunch with Andrew Losowsky and his friend Matt today. One of the many topics we covered was the trend of creative businesses striving more and more for greater accountability and overall awareness of their products’ lifespans.

While my knee jerk reaction in this arena is to promote investment into more expensive and longer lasting products, I was fascinated to hear about Nike’s ultra-light Mayfly Men’s Running Shoe. The shoes only last for 100 km, or roughly 62 miles. At that point, you send the shoes back to Nike to be recycled instead of dumping them in the trash, as would be the case with other short-lived products like batteries or disposable razors. So the shoes have a deliberately short lifespan (a design strategy usually called “planned obsolescence”) but waste relatively little resources, except possibly those from shipping.

Thanks to BERG London for posting about their experience with the Mayfly shoes, and to Andrew for tipping me off to it. All photos from Flickr user moleitau (aka BERG principal Matt Jones).

February 11′s daily design idea is even the best eco-friendly products must come to an end. Let’s hope that more and more used products can be handled like the Mayfly shoes!

Telling it like it is.

I’m a big fan of efficiency in the design process, but straight-shooting creative geniuses seem to be few and far between. To honor the ones that do exist, here are some fun examples of to-the-point creativity and design:

1. State of the Obvious (S/O/T/O)
State of the Obvious is a collection of apparel and products is by Mash Creative, a British branding and design studio. The line’s visual identity is based on extraordinarily direct communication, a rather underrepresented approach in most consumer markets right now. Pieces from the S/O/T/O collection are available to buy from: www.magmabooks.com, www.counter-objects.co.uk, and www.blanka.co.uk.

2. Bad British Architecture
Here on Daily Design Idea, I like to share and celebrate successes in the design world (as well as information and ideas that could lead to more successes!), but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t get a kick out of Bad British Architecture, written (semi-)anonymously by a blogger who proclaims “I hate how noone ever talks about how bad British architecture really is. I hate the bastards who make these buildings. So here I am, taking the piss out of them.” I don’t always agree with BBA, but the writing is pretty hysterical. The most recent project featured (which, from the pictures, does seem rather bad) is The Blade by Sheppard Robson.

image via Flickr user kpmarek

3. Good Fucking Design Advice
The site’s motto is “Because sometimes, being your own worst critic is not enough.” It’s literally just pages of tough love and funny-cause-it’s-true advice. And if all the f-bombs feel a bit intense, you could always try switching to “Family Fucking Friendly” mode.

December 17′s daily design idea is don’t let your work get over-designed or overly complicated. Check Occam’s razor for more along those lines.

The hours.

If you found the “Clock for Night Owl” by designer Tiancheng Luo interesting but too tricky to read, check out these other clever but right-side-up clock designs:

clockwise from top:
1. Asterisk Clock by George Nelson
2. RE-VINYL Clock in Paris style by Pavel Sidorenko
3. Hand In Hand Clock by Yenwen Tseng
4. This Clock by Barnaby Tuke and Studio Special
5. (Il)legale clock by Denis Guidone for Nava (which adjusts for daylight savings time with a simple tilt of the clock rather than by a tedious wind)

November 19′s daily design idea is have some fun with function. These five clocks are just a small handful of great examples!

National Design Award Design

Re-blogged from HOW blog.
Written by Megan Patrick.
Originally posted October 14, 2010.
Copyright 2010 F+W Media, Inc.

“When Smart Design accepts their 2010 National Design Award for Product Design tonight, they’ll be accepting a trophy that they designed. How cool is that?”

>> October 14′s daily design idea is let yourself design for yourself (indirectly, if you must).

Large copies of children’s furniture?

Product designer Jesper K. Thomsen describes Play, his recent line of modern children’s furniture, by explaining that “Children’s furniture must be for children, rather than small copies of adult furniture.” I immediately thought of several postings from Unhappy Hipsters, where the captions frequently describe the children as victims of modern design.

“No time to marvel at his sheer luck: Larry just ran.”

I also personally know several design-sensitive adults who, on the flip side, wish they could escape the responsibility of “grown-up” aesthetics (and get themselves some oversized children’s furniture). Luckily there are a few high end designers that get that. The Los Angeles Times recently reported on some “downright playful” pieces at this year’s Milan Design Week, including a tiki-inspired storage unit by the Campana brothers. I’m a longtime fan of their Corallo Chair, and I had a huge smile when I first saw their Banquete Chair, which comes in a variety of stuffed animal designs.

the Campana brothers’ Banquete Chair in Panda

April 26′s daily design idea is even modern adults deserve some whimsy in their environments.

Cities on the rocks.

Absolut vodka has a history of iconic advertising – my new favorite is the Doing Things Differently commercial – and they’ve recently started bringing back their late 80′s Cities Campaign on a whole new (drinkable) level. Cities like New Orleans and Boston now have their own brands of Absolut, with city-specific flavors to boot. With over half the world’s population living in cities now, that’s potentially a lot of city pride (and a lot of vodka).

April 11′s daily design idea is how would you articulate the flavors of your city?