While the convergence of interconnected technologies was a big hit, it was also great to see so many Essential clients at CES 2012. Altec Lansing was there, showcasing a series of cool wireless speaker products designed by Essential. The Altec speakers were part of a timely resurgence of high quality audio that was evident across exhibitors at the show. Two examples that stood out in particular were the Apple Airplay® based inAir5000 speaker, which seamlessly streams content from your preferred iOS ecosystem and the LIVE Wi-Fi Music System that extends the audio experience to the cloud or home network. The concept for both products is based around a new soft minimal design language that seeks to connect high quality audio experiences that comfortably fit and respond to the situations and environments of use. Each received extremely positive reviews for performance and design. The InAir 5000 also picked up a CES Innovations award. Both products will be launched this spring.

Altec showcased other products designed by our team over the last year. The IMT 630 extends the new design language to the docking category in a super portable dock for the iPod and iPhone. The overall impression of the new products was one of heightened sophistication and connectivity to Altec Lansing’s audio heritage. A newly revamped booth at CES helped round out the overall positive impression of the brand.  

 The landscape of CES is changing. The nature of new innovation at CES has shifted from blockbuster physical products to a focus on making online and mobile entertainment experiences faster, more efficient, more organized and more visual.

Beyond the trajectory of connected technology, there were few groundbreaking innovations on display at the 2012 show. Take TV’s for example. When flat screens first launched, it was one of the biggest stories at CES. It was truly about who would have the biggest and thinnest screen. Although large OLED displays, and improved 3-D TV technologies are cool, it’s clear that the real innovation is now in the way entertainment experiences are converging into one unified ecosystem of services and applications.

The theme of interconnectedness and convergence is driving three big innovation spaces:

1. Digital Health and Wellbeing

CES now includes a growing component devoted to rapidly evolving connected health solutions. At the 2012 show, these ranged from solutions like the Fibit Aria Wi-Fi Scale or the Valencell biometric data tracker, which monitors users’ physiological data through an ear piece. In the fitness and wellbeing category, there was a range of product solutions devoted to monitoring users’ fitness or tracking progress through participant competition.  Companies like Nike and Motorola have seized the opportunity, with products like the Fuelband and MOTOACTV, which further illustrate the momentum in this space. For example, Motorola’s MOTOACTIV uses Bluetooth technology to allow users to enjoy a workout and then monitor performance directly on the device and online at the MOTOACTV Training Portal.

More importantly, large healthcare providers, like United Healthcare, now see CES as an opportunity to showcase a portfolio of mobile and online connected health solutions that begin to indicate how interconnected solutions will become an everyday component of our healthcare experience.

2. Connected Home

For several years now, interconnected technologies have been making an increased impact on the way we live at home. From security to entertainment, and from energy management to the way we connect with the world, all of these technologies are being ubiquitously integrated into the digital and physical “wiring” of our home environment.  Managing and monitoring everything that surrounds our living environment can now be tracked as easily from the other side of the world as it is in an individual room. The most compelling solutions surround the way we bring more efficiency to our homes.

 Integrating connected technologies in the home environment requires a high level of human connection and sensitivity to the user’s environment,  both from a usability standpoint, as well as an emotional standpoint. One of the challenges is going to be how we, as designers, ensure technology and information do not overwhelm users.

3. Mobility

CES has also seen an increase in convergence of technology and information within the automotive space. This year, the momentum continued with several major automotive brands, such as Ford, Mercedes, and GM, showcasing a range of entertainment technologies and display methodologies that focused on on-board screens and content delivery. These automakers are providing consumers with an integrated vessel, guiding, entertaining and even managing their personal wellbeing.

The integrated vessel was best showcased by Ford, who is marrying healthcare and mobility through its partnership with mobile health company WellDoc. Ford displayed an in-car health system that monitors the driver for issues such as congestive heart failure, asthma and diabetes. The system uses the Ford SYNC^® connectivity technologies to connect data from cloud-based services

Expect the areas of digital health, connected home and mobility to not only continue to grow in their own right, but also to see a rapid acceleration in the interconnectedness between these segments as the cloud continues to provide an immediate channel for convergence.

Exciting news! Creative Mornings has finally arrived to Boston. The monthly breakfast lecture series for creative types is the brainchild of blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg – also known as “Swiss Miss”. Hundreds of design buffs attend Creative Mornings every month, in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Zurich. Armed with caffeine and a PowerPoint, designers, artists, photographers and writers from all over come to hear the unique perspectives of fellow professionals in the industry.

I'm happy to annouce that our very own Richard Watson was asked to present for the sold-out, inaugural Boston event. Richard described his own discovery and path to design, including his beginnings of living on a farm in Wensleydale, England to becoming a business owner in Boston.

If you aren't a morning person, or you were put on the waiting list, Creative Mornings posts video to its website. They have an impressive archive of lectures to checkout and Richard’s talk was posted just this week:

The Wharton Marketing Conference serves as a forum for the marketing community within and beyond Wharton, providing access to the latest trends and research in the field. The 8th Annual Marketing Conference will bring approximately 500 faculty, students and leading experts from the marketing field together under the theme “The Evolution of Marketing: New Decade, New Advances.” At this year's conference, Richard Watson will be leading a discussion on how non-CPG companies are engaging consumers in innovative ways. Top-level executives and managers from IBM, American Express, Microsoft, SAP and Pfizer will be weighing in on the topic.

On a recent trip to New York I managed to make it over to the ICF Center to see the world premier of the new documentary Eames: The Architect and The Painter. The film was very well done, touching on all aspects of Charles and Ray's career, both achievements and failures. I could really appreciate Eames drive for developing the best creative solution no matter the cost. An example noted in the film was the Mathmatica exhibition for IBM. The project was quoted for $150K went 100% over budget and the Eames studio covered the overage. Their passion to create and discover made the "office feel more like a design playground than a workspace." Most designers (including myself) credit the Eames for their innovations in furniture, but this film showed the multifaceted nature of their studio's work in a truly inspiring way.

When this film comes to the MFA in December our design team, avid Eames fans will be making a trip over to see it. Feel free to join us on our inspiring Eames outing. Visit First Run Features to see when the film will be showing in your area.

Here is a brief synopsis from the films website.

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life – from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age – has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, 

Somehow I have a reputation for being really girly and totally into pink. Like Hello Kitty style. But that's a complete falacy. I'm actually 100% completely devoted to yellow. Well, mostly yellow. There's also that perfect shade of really dark plum purple, and a creamy vanilla white and a solid dusky black and...well lets say my world is never monochromatic.

But that's why I'm in the Color Marketing Group. So I can go to conferences and geek out about color and trends for 3 days. Not only did I get to meet a lot of really interesting people in a whole range of color and design related industries* but I also helped shaped the color forecast for 2013!

So yellow is happening. Big time. Wait for it. 

*Did you ever wonder who got to name paint colors? Because I always have and I finally got to meet someone who does! Kind of a rockstar moment for me, but could just be because I'm a color dork like that.

Using social media as a tool to generate insights and innovation can be generative, or it can bog you down in mounds of data with no effective or resourceful way to do meaningful analysis. This was my biggest takeaway from the MIT Enterprise Forum panel From Social Insights to Social Innovation. The panelists included Betsy Aoki (Bing), Ekaterina Walter (Intel), Nathaniel Perez (SapientNitro), Marcus Nelson (Salesforce), and moderated by Francois Gossieaux (Human 1.0), and was peppered with social media anecdotes, a few swear words and a slight air of cyncism. Maybe cynicism is a strong word, but I walked away with the sense that in using social media for innovation, we're putting the cart before the horse. We're celebrating a solution to a problem that isn't quite understood.

 The panelists at the MIT Enterprise Forum's discussion From Social Insights to Social Business Innovation, September 21, 2011

Skepticism

The problem we are trying to solve is that we need to come up with great ideas faster, and these ideas need to be beautiful and more in-tune with consumers (because consumers are getting more thoughtful about design). Social media has played a key role in certain facets of product development and redesign. For instance, Betsy Aoki gave the example of eliciting user feedback through social media streams to help fix bugs in initial launches of Xbox Live. However, when the conversation came down to using social media for the purposes of innovation, we got some great one-liners like:

If you pay people $100 to give you ideas, you will get ideas worth $100.

It's death by committee...if you get a lot of ideas, you're going to get a lot of stupid ones you need to weed out.

Social media for innovation is, in its simplest form, an opportunistic use of a well-established and genius appratus for bringing people together. There is already a captive audience that has selected to rally behind your brand (friended you on Facebook, etc.), and to many marketing/design/user experience folks, it seems wasteful to ignore this captive audience. However, social media for the purposes of driving innovation is forgetting one of its foundational principles: the element of surprise! Maybe I'm biased, but I'm all about contextual research, which attempts to seek out those surprises that we could never get through a structured entity that opens the floodgates to data points (not real insights or great ideas). The biggest challenge to the panel is figuring out what to measure in the plethora of data they get through social media. As of right now, what they know they can measure is engagement (how many times people talk about the brand, engage with the Facebook page, etc.) But in terms of sifting through data to find ideas, it's still nebulous. 

Innovation or marketing ploy?

The panel briefly touched on some more successful attempts to reach into the crowd to get good ideas. I won't name names, but some big corporations with newfound interests in sustainability and responsible design have been using social media to reach out, pleading with customers that they need help solving 'big problem x.' Come to find out, many of these pleas have nothing to do with any arm of that corporation that deals with innovation, rather, they are just big marketing campaigns. This plea is just a way to get consumers ramped up behind the brand's new messaging and to test the waters for launching new ideas already created internally. Sneaky, huh? According to the panel, what makes engagement with these faux-innovation initiatives so successful is the fact that they have a dedicated purpose, often use a platform that reaches out to people full of good ideas and have boundaries (deadlines, rules). Sadly, many of these faux-innovation intiatives end up hitting a wall because they were created for the sole purpose of delivering a message, not implementing the crowd-sourced ideas.

So what's the big lesson? Is social media useless when it comes to gathering meaningful insights that could lead to innovation? I'm not yet convinced of its utility. But I do think we should stick with what we know about social media for now: it's a great way to get people to like your brand and want to get to know you. It's very human.

A side note...

As an aside, in this discussion, there was a lot of reference to 'early man' as an explanation for much of the social behavior that we've identified as interesting to design around. For example, the claim that "we humans love status and power" is interpreted from the archaic descriptive social behavior of "seeking out better mates and better food." We love to assert these claims because it gives us permission to be self-defeatist about our 'baser' pursuits. Does saying that we love status and power therefore allow us to pursue status and power with the same zeal that early man would toward better mates and food? I just wonder what's the point of looking backward to explain the contemporary, and possibly inform the future. It's just bad science: we define who we are today by looking at the past. But since we didn't live in the past, we can only understand the past if we've defined it...we're defining something which is based on something that's defined. 

We recently returned from a great IDSA conference in New Orleans, our team had the opportunity to hear from many influential speakers on the topic of Community. On the opening day we heard about “Attitudes and Behaviors”, which explored in depth, ever shifting consumer behaviors.

One of the keynote speakers Aaron Zinman, co-founder of Boston-based Empirical LLC, showed some great and influential projects that aim to capture digital traces of users as they traverse the web. His work uses systems to aggregate and mine these traces, to expose both the individual and the community.

A sample of these projects include Defuse and Personas.

Defuse creates and illustrates data portraits of New York Times readers by tracking their comments and positions.  uses the content of the New York Times comments section to track user's comments and information associated with their positions. 

 Defuse is a new method for navigating and participating in online discussions. It generates data portraits of users and groups based upon their digital footprints.

Personas, now on display at the MIT Museum, takes a name entered by the user and characterizes that person based on information it finds on the web. See our own Richard Watson characterized below. 

Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Tools like Defuse have the potential to help understand a broad range of consumers. The traces of users' interactions can help generate findings that can be incorporated in the design process and drive potential design solutions.

Stay tuned for more interesting finds from our trip to the 2011 IDSA conference.

Starting today, Coda a brand new player in the EV market will be creating a whole new car shopping experience for consumers as it opens its first flagship "store" at Century City shopping center in LA. Made entirely of eco-friendly and recycled materials, this store will allow consumers to interact with the brand, the product and the category with these four spaces: 

* The EV Bar: An interactive learning area with computers and tablets for consumers to touch, feel, play and design custom vehicles.
* The Technology Display: Which will feature displays of the CODA sedan technology, including batteries, shifters and other components
* A Test Drive Counter: Where customers can sign up for test drives
* The Test Drive Center: Below the store in a parking garage, customers can test drive the car for the ultimate dealership experience

 From a marketing and design perspective, Coda does a great job at creating end user engagement, while increasing awareness for electric vehicles and new technology.

I'm looking forward to seeing what this business model will do to the traditional car dealership in the future.

Copenhagen‘s 2nd International Design Week starts on September 1.
The Kvæsthusmolen will be the main exhibition area throughout the event. There, a show will present the finalist projects of this year’s INDEX: Award, a prize for products and design concepts to improve people's life.

There will also be exhibitions, conferences, talks and guided architecture tours will take place in the building of The Royal Danish Playhouse, as well as all over Copenhagen.

The official opening will take place at the Kvæsthusmolen at 6.30 p.m. All over the city, “Think Human” projects will be displayed to the public through September 6.


For more information go to www.copenhagendesignweek.com