My recent post about brand layering reminded me of something Kevin Fong mentioned at the ID Design Strategy conference. Companies like Polaroid and Westinghouse are now renting out their brands to other manufacturers, while the parent company puts an ironic layer of marketing frosting on top: “You can be sure… if it’s a Westinghouse.” Um, apparently we can’t. Click through to the small appliance category and the mask comes off, a giant list of “Salton Brands” (not “Salton Products” mind you).

With brand layering, brand renting, and consumers taking the situation literally into their own hands, an authentic brand backed by an authentic company will be a rare and valuable asset. My current client has two offices full of authentic people doing authentic work under an authentic-but-little-known name, they’re feeling the pressure to grow, and the pure marketing path (as opposed to marketing great work) tempts them. It’s easy to talk about doing the right thing and focusing on the customer, but the reality — even in “good” companies — is much messier, requiring thoughtful conversation within the organization of how the products and processes on the drawing board will change the way they are perceived.

Last Saturday I sauntered into Urban Outfitters to see what they were selling these days. Their inventory is pretty edgy and feels like a bellweather of what fashion is moving from the lead users to everyone else.

I was drawn to this line of relaxed suit jackets, which mix business and design in a way you might think I’d want them mixed. The line is called Urban Renewal (a house brand?) and which — according to the tags — might be vintage clothing, might be new, and/or might be modified somehow…

Some of the jackets had added stiching patterns or an ’80s iron-on or patch on the back. On this particular specimen, the jacket was vintage and simply rebranded, which is only appropriate as the original was created by Needle Craft for another company called Good Friends of Athens, Tennessee. Notice how Urban Renewal leaves the original label inside…

It was only $59, so I had half a mind to buy it and add my own layer of branding to it. But, now inspired, I instead headed for the vintage store where I found a mint DKNY suit jacket for $15. After spending another $10 in funky buttons at the sewing store and a half hour of sewing, I had a Noise Between Stations brand jacket. The customer-made approach was more fun, an exercise in play, and saved me $35.

Lawrence Lessig’s recent speech, Clearing the Air About Open Source actually focuses more on the war between innovators and those that profit by impeding innovation: lawyers, lobbyists, and the companies that employ them. He illustrates how the courts are used to litigate companies into bankruptcy, how companies like Microsoft are hiring boatloads of lawyers to use the reality of patent law to fend off open source, and how on the macro level it is countries who are making decisions about patent law and software investments to further their interests.

Most importantly, he points out that these arguments are rarely framed as threats to innovation, but that they need to be to protect innovation. You can see his influence on the EFF’s website.

During the Q&A he offers some specific ways the open source community can fight this war, e.g. by supporting political points of view that both embrace liberal (allow innovators to compete against BigCo) and conservative (stop government from meddling in the market) points of view. Still, he paints a dire picture for anyone building software from the OS to the application layer, and I’m glad I’m not in that business.

I was exposed to the ISEW by Josephine Green of Philips at the ID Design Strategy conference. She struck me as the female John Thakara: highly intelligent and morally scolding, and dropping in your lap the challenge of solving the problems she just convinced you are vitally important.

To understand how ISEW differs from, say, measuring GDP, first look at them graphed together:

Then read the description:

The ISEW is one of the most advanced attempts to create an indicator of economic welfare. It is an attempt to measure the portion of economic activity which delivers genuine increases in our quality of life – in one sense ‘quality’ economic activity. For example, it makes a subtraction for air pollution caused by economic activity, and makes an addition to count unpaid household labour — such as cleaning or child-minding. It also covers areas such as income inequality, other environmental damage, and depletion of environmental assets.

And hear how the proponents respond to criticism:

Some commentators say that the use of such ‘non-statistical’ judgements invalidates the utility of ISEW. However, this is even more of a problem for GDP when it is used as an indicator of progress — for its own value judgement is that these adjustments be set at zero.

In the past you might have gotten traction with a name like ISEW, but I’d like to see it reframed — possibly with the help of the Longview Institute — into an idea progressive political candidates can run on. For now, we can all start chipping away at the use of GDP.

Now online are the presentation visuals from the recent Design Strategy conference at the Institute of Design.

Terry just taught me clean washing greenwashing, which is when a company smears on the energy-efficient PR while continuing their old inefficient ways.

And now there’s hygrid, a hybrid of electricity from the grid and rolling your own.

I recently had a good conversation with Sara Beckman of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Comparing what MBA students do in relation to designers, it’s hard to identify what skills they’re missing — other than hard skills like illustration — that designers have. What business students learn in courses like product development is surprisingly similar to product development that designers learn. Sara’s students even do ethnographic studies and build personas.

And in my experience, it’s easier for business people to make the leap into business design activities than designers. Maybe it’s because business is a broader base of training, or because it doesn’t focus on the design of artifacts.

But, business people sometimes have deficiencies in two areas: empathy and abductive thinking. Some designers also lack empathy, unfortunately. But designers can’t get far without the ability to create new ideas. I think designers (and other creative people) are good at generating ideas because they’re allowed to be silly (not because they have a monopoly on the right side of the brain). Silliness leads to new ideas, whether the goal is silly ideas or just new ideas. It’s hard for business people to be simultaneously silly and fiscally responsible; we traditionally view these qualities in opposition. This is a fundamental challenge in business design: how to help clients perceive the potential benefits when they’re used to looking for business rigor or creativity, not both together?

In design language, silliness is often termed play. In Managing as Designing Boland and Collopy describe play:

An open, liquid design process involves playing with ideas, alternatives, and elements of the design. The design emerges through playful interaction with materials, models, and alternatives being considered. Playing with meanings, implications, and purposes of a design project can lead to emergence of unexpected insights or discoveries that can be opportunistically included in the project.

Augusto Grillo writes,

It is play that sparks creativity, creating contexts in which freedom, gratuitousness and passion produce their fecundating action.

Play fascinates and absorbs to the point of making us infinitely repeat our attempts to improve our performance, to create new paths, new ways to arrive, in our case, to the ‘right’ product, the most suitable solutions.

It is in this sense that play can enrich the design process, and that the concept of playfulness in design may justify more exhaustive study in this research area.

We may conclude that ‘play’, so necessary in that it precedes and gives rise to the creative act, like beauty, will save the world.

When Grillo says play compels us to “infinitely repeat our attempts to improve our performance” I’m reminded of the instructional power of play.

Martin Fisher

Martin is co-founder of Kickstart (formerly Approtec), an organization designing products for the bottom of the pyramid. As opposed to C.K. Prahalad who tends to describe the poor as consumers (see sachet marketing), Martin views the poor as investors. I met him at the ID Design Strategy conference this past week where he told me, “everyone has the same basic need: a way to make money.” So Kickstart researches what the poor in Africa need to make money. Because subsistence farming is common, Kickstart designed a pump that allows farmers to irrigate crops using nearby streams or wells, dramatically increasing crop output and helping the poor enter the middle class. They’ve created other products to help the poor create bricks, hay bales, cooking oil, and so on. By designing inexpensive products and selling them, it ensures the technology finds its way into the hands of people who will use it, a model sustainable beyond charity.

If design is our attempt to ‘change existing situations into preferred ones‘ then Martin was the best designer at the conference.

I’m hesitant to offer a definition of design thinking because there’s probably no one definition everyone could agree on, as with design and its many sub-genres. But after hearing more and more people having trouble referencing it I figured a half-baked blog post couldn’t hurt. I’m reminded of how Lao Tzu said “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao” yet still managed to write a book about it.

Design thinking is…

• Collaborative, especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement
• Abductive, inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems
• Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk
• Personal, considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved
• Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages
• Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions

I’m sure one could play with the language and categorization to find more or less characteristics, but I’m happy with just those six.

I finally met the lovely and vivacious Niti Bhan at the ID Design Strategy conference. She gave me one of her hilarious business cards and I discovered she has a blog, check it out.

Stephen Johnson @ TED Salon

Stephen Johnson’s new book, Everything Bad is Good for You is getting warm reviews, particularly from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. Listening to him tonight, I particularly liked his comparison of video game levels to the concept of flow (though he didn’t use that term). Games progressively get harder, so we’re always challenged just beyond the point of our abilities, a brilliant way to structure an educational experience.

Recycled paper products

Even my tiny Manhattan food market now sports two different brands of recycled paper products.

Annie’s has grown from one product (organic macaroni and cheese) to 80, fueling a $34 million company. The Organic Trade Association estimates the $12.25 billion organic food market will double by 2008, assuming an 18.4% annual growth rate (WSJ, March 29, 2005). With a $20 million investment from Solera Capital, Annie’s (and others on the same growth curve) can expand exponentially.

A recent edition of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition focused on the use of sustainable building products, hybrid cars, and efficient appliances.

Nike’s Considered line eliminates waste & toxics, uses less energy to produce, and reduces waste at the end of the product’s life.