Sunday March 14, 2011
So what do mean by a Design orientation, glad you asked. Let's thumb thru the list of 50 Most Innovative Companies in the latest issue of Fast Company Magazine.
Fashion
A 50 year old American female, Angela Ahrendts, has re energized, yes, the 155 year old British brand of Burberry, now with $2 billion in sales. Her Creative Design Director helped.
www.burberry.com
Someone got the bright idea of paying a mere $5 M I think it was for the still recognized but moribund brand name of PUMA, bingo, now on display at your local Cantera High Roller Shopping Mall. The point here is that one could not start from scratch and begin to get any national recognition of a name for $5M.
www.puma.com
Innovation
I am still not quite sure what Foursquare does, but it partners to promote products, think, Let's go Shopping
www.foursquare.com
And, no I don't play Farmville, but millions of other people do. At Zynga and I quote, 'we can access every activity in any given hour in Farmville, we recorded 3 billion neighborhood connections.'
By the way, Why don't we have what zygna has? We are not using the information in our IT system to our benefit. Amazon knows what we buy from them and then makes more suggestions, why don't we know who is using what resources at our school? I can give specific examples but not here.
www.zynga.com
hmm, notice how the zynga screen looks like the google screen, no accident I bet
Groupon
Coupons have been around forever but this nerd guy Andrew Mason with zero business education has turned it into a big business, rumored IPO to follow
www.groupon.com
Advertising
Wieden Kennedy, don't know the name, well I bet you know the commercial!
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=old+spice+commercial&aq=0
this series of Old Spice videos was the hit of the year, again an old brand with a new campaign, think burberry and puma, has had over 20 million viewers, nice gig for the ex football player Isaiah as well
The Art of Design
'Nobody makes data accessible and beautiful like '
www.stamendesign.co
Mission - use data visualization techniques to make information on crucial scientific topics accessible to all
Good design is not a single issue construct, it is all about a way of thinking. Steve Jobs wanted the original Apple Mac to look like a cuisinart, it did. Ferrari still uses Pininfarina to style its one of a kind I gotta have one automobiles, what is it about a pininfarina design that makes it different from say a nissan?
Whether we are talking hair styles, car styles, or shoe styles or computer design (the latest macs have the computer embedded behind the gorgeous 27 inch screen by the way, less clutter)
good design is a way of thinking about products better adapted for human use.
Pepsico is webcasting the SXSW events this year.
http://www.pepsico.com/
This used to require NBC, now a soda pop company can do it, okay so it's a BIG soda pop company but notice they NBC earnings are still shrinking.
The ad company thought of a new way to sell an old product, Old Spice I mean how innovative is deodorent, but used a new technology, You tube, to promote it, then bypassed the expensive superbowl spots but bought phrases on the net the next day that would cause this video to come up in super bowl ad searcheswithout paying the superbowl prices, bingo, ad campaign of the year without the superbowl price.
Now that is good design thinking. No other school in San Antonio has a program with a Design Orientation. People are available to teach such ideas inconjunction with the SW School of Art and Design for example. There is a much larger art community in SA than most realize.
This is also a great fit for the bio med high tech in our area. Consider what prosthetics have done to improve lives in just the last few years. So I can see linking with prosthetic design, art design, improved artificial dentures, all sorts of ideas as the six million dollar man begins to take shape.
Well didn't want anyone to think I was goofing off during spring break...
I thought four square was a game we played when we were young!
Posted by: Sue Griffin | March 13, 2011 at 02:17 PM