..:: belblog ::..

3 days of international speakers , local designers, architects and Italian masters at the BODW 2007 in Hong Kong, a forum titled “Asia’s leading event on innovation, design and brand”.

So much knowledge has been shared during these three days, but the most important is the feeling of friendship and collaboration that an event like this brings to the Hong Kong and China design scene.

The first day’s highlight was the presentation by Marc Newson. He started reviewing his work, paying attention to aviation related projects like the space-plane for Astrium [ video ]. As he doesn’t like to talk about design topics, he decided to talk about himself, fare enough considering the self-centered-design process he applies in his projects. Marc Newson likes to design products as a whole, taking care of all decisions and designing all the accessories that will surround the designed product. He said that “as a designer, you should design all that comes with the product, you must control all the story. Because if others do it, they can ruin your design.”. He thinks that the projects where many people are involved taking decisions, lead to mediocre results. That’s why his products have that strong personality and consistency.

The second day of the BODW started with Tom Dixon who defined his furniture as “modern britishness”. He asked the design community not to re-design things that are over-designed, he suggested designers should work on products where design isn’t used wisely, like the sex toys industry.
He also reminded us that the biggest threat of a designer is: “talking too much and doing too few” regarding the recent exponential increase of design events and conferences all over the world.

The inspiring highlight of the day was the presentation of SizeChina project, an anthropometric digital database of the Chinese heads and faces. Very useful stuff if you want to design helmets and glassware for china market ;), because Asian skulls are rounder than the western ones, (some Chinese snowboarders get headaches when using helmets designed using western based ergonomic data because the helmet presses their heads).

From the third and last day, I underline the talk of the architect Michele De Lucchi; he gave the most poetic of all the presentations. He presented all his clients: Mr. Experimentation, Mr. Craftsmanship, Mrs. Nature, Mr.Industry, Mr. Market (a very tough client), Mr. Dimension and Mr. Proportion (very playful clients) Mr. Space (a very demanding client, because space is air and air is what keep us alive) and Mr.Conscience.
De Lucchi said that “the role of the artist in ancient times was to show the beauty of nature to humans, so, the role of designers is to bring the beauty of industry to humanity”.
Maybe it was his dense and long beard, maybe his paused talking tone, but it was like listening a wonderful tale full of experience, and wisdom advises.

The BODW forum ended with Ms. Zaha Hadid, who presented the new building for the School of Design of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, a double tower that reminded me to a pack of instant noodles… but she didn’t mentioned anything regarding her source of inspiration.

The overall impression of the event is that Hong Kong and China are doing really great catching up with international design standards. But local OEMs should believe and invest more in design and start their own brands in order to move ahead.

Italy, as a partner country of BODW 2007, spread that great and inspiring typically Italian passion for details in objects and spaces.
Next year partner country will be The Netherlands, with the theme: “open minds”
(oops,,,, it is the same motto used in the last Singapore Design Festival…)

look carefully to this beautiful color…

do you like it?
what a pity, you can’t use it because soon it will be copyrighted!

…this might sound scary, but there’s part of true behind the joke:

The German telecom company T-Mobile is claiming the color magenta! We have to stop them! T-Mobile started suing Dutch companies which use magenta in print and commercial campaigns. They already sued Compello and they are urging “Slam FM” and “100% NL” to quit using magenta as well!

to fight back, Kasper Kuijpers from stijlfigurant have created a site called “reclaim magenta”
go and save it!

I’m aware that companies / brands take very seriously the “colour issue”, and graphic designers go crazy if something is not printed with the exactly pantone colo they choose to express the brand values…
so, it is normal to see corporative stationery, staff uniforms and interior decoration match a certain color palette,

but today when I was walking in TST, a wonderfully crowded area in Hong Kong, I saw that SASA, a beauty and perfume chain-store is bringing the color-religion ones step forward.
In their logistics processes, they use those standard plastic boxes used for storage and transport, and they have them all in Pink!!!

The truth is that it really matches the whole brand appearance and it looks cool.
Normally other shops might be a bit ashame of showing their back-end logistic processes to the public, but SASA boxes look so cool and branded that I felt I wanted one for myself.

today I was invited to the “Digital Lifestyle Show“,
an event that pretends:

• To provide a platform for pilot projects to showcase their creative concepts and commercial values
• To establish cooperative relationship with leading companies in Digital Lifestyle products to enable long-term partnerships in the future endeavors of Digital Lifestyle development
• To enhance cohesion and engagement of the core industry alliances and experts through a common vision, transfer of new technological concepts, and inspirations for inter-company collaboration
• To raise public awareness about the value and competitive edges of Hong Kong to become the key driver for Digital Lifestyle development in Asia

Themed “Enjoying our Lives with Technology”, the exhibition is staging about 20 award-winning and state-of-arts projects from PolyU, Hong Kong Baptist University and leading companies in Digital Lifestyle development. The Show enables visitors to experience futuristic digital lifestyle at a mock-up residential setting furnished with interesting innovations and technologies. It is hoped that the exhibition will inspire new products and innovative concepts, enable efficiency of our lives, and, most importantly stimulate futuristic thinking for blending the best of technology with the best of life.”

Basically consisted in a fancy and pretentious house (Bel-Air N8) stuffed with digital media projects from School of Design and commercial products from the event sponsors.

Two things that called my attention are:

1) “The Interactive Dome
A cool semi sphere that acts as a dome-shaped projection surface with multi-touch capabilities.
done by Dr.Clifford Choy form the School of Design, PolyU HK.
In this exhibit, they turn the Interactive Dome into an interactive globe for visualizing geographical information. The Earth is projected onto this dome-shaped surface. Users can turn the globe with their hands, and can zoom into a specific portion of the globe.
yeah! very fun to use, but a bit flickering… needs a bit more work, but the concept is really interesting.

like this project? check this other one from a Carnegie Mellon team that back in 2004 made an inflatable 360 dome that functioned like a mini-planetarium for gaming fun…

2) “Fallen Angels”
A project done by Hung Kueng and imhk lab
it consists in an installation with a screen and a webcam that runs a software that simulates dropping objects falling on a moving body.

I could explain the details, but better take a look at this video

 

..the beginning of the end.

Today’s keynote speaker was Steven Kyffin, from Phililps Design.
His main point was that philips design wants to be connected with the research community.
*that’s why his talk was titled “Creative Consortium“.

He introduced us the TO:DO:SO (technology objectives : design objectives : strategy objectives) approach used in Philip’s visionary projects through the (y2006) “lifestyle home” project. scenario 01 / scenario 02 / scenario 03

The point of this approach is that they involved all the research departments in Philips to conduct this project, and besides the cool concepts and personas they developed, the results remained unused by Philips’s business units
The reason is that the ideas generated were too big, and nobody knew how to start to implement them! And this generated so much frustration in both ends (design/business) that Philips Design decided to change its whole approach.

Their clients want to know it all, (of course) but in small digestive pieces…
So, they started the i-engine (idea engine). Aiming to do smaller things, and use the know-how they generate to develop ideas and pack them in a “business” way, so their clients can “buy it or not”.

So, instead of selling “the time to generate ideas”, they are selling the idea itself.
They jumped from solving problems asked by the clients, to giving solutions proactivelly.

Now they are working on Probes and media mediators.

Next>
Later on I snipped in to 3 sessions talking about the role of “design support organizations“… nothing new here. An Australian guy started saying that Australia does not really need product design because they don’t produce things, but they need communication design to help sell the imported goods…. (easy approach I think). Another guy presented a comparative study of design promotion organizations between Japan, Korea, Germany and UK. The insight is that even if most of those organizations are government-related, there’s still room for private organizations like the Design Center of Toyama and the Design Center Stuttgart that they are making money while promoting design. Cool!

Next>
ecoDesign and Sustainability
Unfortunately, two speakers didn’t show up :(, they were supposed to talk about “A problematic Approach of the Science of Sustainable Design” and “Glocal Product Design”… really a pity.
Who showed up, but virtually, was Marc Richardson from Monash University.
He talked about “Re-Design: Design for reassembly“, as part of the Veil project being done at the Eco Innovation Lab.
His main point is that a new profession could arise called “re-designer” whose paractice would be to design products with alternative life components to be assembled locally… (read more here)…

Design products with long time components
and short time recycling
this means: make products that don’t last too much (like the ipod), but make them with components that can be re-used in another cycle of production or even in another products.

He used Xerox and Freitag to exemplify re-design….
I wonder if Isn’t there any other product / company to talk about????
Almost all the eco-talks use the same examples!, I’m tired of hearing the same.

*I highlight the fact that he made the presentation via webcam, (to reduce his carbon-footprint he said)… This situation added a layer of weirdness to the session, specially when an anthropologist from the public wanted to ask him a question regarding the “loss of personal interaction when designing through internet”, and the speaker could not listen her clearly… so she had to lean towards the laptop and speak her question next to the mic, and the presenter was looking her through the screen… it really reminded me to the Max Headroom show

The next presentation was made by a Taiwanese guy who spent 1 year researching “the sustainable value of urban design” to came up with the conclusion that rich people don’t care about energy saving because they can pay for it…. [wtf! nothing surprises me at this point…]

Another eco-sustainability talk was made by a Korean Phd student under the title of “A Study on the Guideline for Analyzing Eco Design Value System and Establishing Product Design Strategy”. Pretty interesting but too academic for my taste, I can’t visualize a busy practitioning designer dealing with such theoretical unpractical information in his/her daily working projects.

from 3Rs : Reduce, Reuse , Recycle
to 4 Ls: Low(impact), Less(resources), Long(lifespan), Last(shared)

The day ends here, if you want more,
wait 2 years and head to Seul for the iasdr2009

day 1 / day 2 / day 3 / day 4

…The third day starts to be repetitive,

The morning session started with the keynote from Kun-Pyo Lee from Kiast on Culture-centered Interaction Design.
He introduced the issue of cultural differences through a set of fun and inspiring images like the ones used in 2005 by HSBC in their ad campaigns.

“in cultural issues, there’s no right or wrong, there are only differences”.

Then, he went through all the typical levels of knowledge of any given experience and product, using an iceberg picture (10/90)…

1. the visible / objective
2. the subjective / hard to find
3. the subconscious / taken for granted

He also pointed out the missconception between Culture and Tradition,
saying that culture is something dynamic and designers should avoid tradition/past when designing…

Next > I had hight expectations for a talk titled “Developing and Testing a Methodology for Designing for Intuitive Interaction“… but what I got was a superfluous talk on how a team developed during 2 years a method to design intuitive interacitons like putting ATM-like buttons on a microwave…
And they tested it and the conclusion was that the tool to make intuitive and usable interfaces was, in fact, difficult to use… The ironic point is that they tested the tool using a “old school” questionnaire among “only” 17 people…..

Next > Yankee Lee form RCA talked about “Designer’s Social Responsibility” and exposed 3 new roles for the design professional:

1. design educator (develop tools for non-designers)
2. design facilitator (help people/communities design)
3. design generator (knowledge transfer)

Next > have you heard of BOP?
yes, you gessed it right, it is the Base Of the Pyramid,
A talk from a guy from TuDelft showed us some examples of it. (It reminded me the “design for the other 90%” exhibition)…

…Nothing new, he just spread that message “hey, is not only that those poor people need design, we can do it and make profit!”
I was expecting something more deep, sincerely. bad face for TuDelft

Next > The afternoon keynote speaker, Kees Dorst, with his talk on “Patterns & Methods in Design” came to say that design research academia are missing the point only focusing on methods, because methods are part of “process”, and process is only a part of the whole “design”.
Somehow he got it right, I agree on that.
But then, he continued describing the “profession”, by talking about design expertise and design practice…

Here I felt a bit disappointed.. I could take his talk and substitute the workd “designer” for “plumber” and it would make 100% sense… (you can try it in the above slide)
…so I think it was too generalist and not adding knowledge to the pool.

Next > I closed the day by listening to Jasper van Kuijk talking about “After sales information as feedback” (aka: customer service with a twist)
The main point is to enable/embed feedback and tracking channels for users to communicate their likes and dislikes of a given product to the manufacturer. (yes, like that annoying windows pop up), but with in a wide range of consumer electronics. They even mentioned to put a kind of “Black Box” into the devices so the company can “track” what the user is doing at any time… Hey Big Brother, that’s for you!

Today’s learning:

Korea is doing great in Design Research,
Designers need to reinvent themselves (again)

The talk I deliberately skipped:

“A Comparison on Circle-drawing Tasks between the Non-sighted People”

day 1 / day 2 / day 3 / day 4

This morning I was a bit disappointed when I was listening Surya Vanka from microsoft presenting his keynote “Seeing the World through Our Users’ Eyes” because he started to talk about “user experience” using the tiring examples of Starbucks and iPod… it sounded so “yesterday”. But he managed to keep me engaged when he said that when doing user research for the new MsOffice, they had more than 1.6 billion data… wow! He was talking about the new challenges of design research: pace, scale and diversity.

Later on, a paper called “Nine Sources of Product Emotion” presented by P Desmet from TuDelft made me worried about the health of design research….
When he was presenting the research outputs and the final design (a meal-set-tray for the KLM airlines) he quoted the “user experience connected to the emotion” of this design to be:

“this new design lets you explore how to eat your breakfast by yourself”

Yeah! that’s brilliant… </irony>

Dan Formosa, from SmartDesignWroldwide, presented a paper on “Design, Emotion and How People Think”.

The highlight (apart from his knowledge dissemination on applied user research done in the private sector) was a software called ThinkMap. A pretty cool tool (from the same guys behind the “Visual Thesaurus“) that anyone related to design research should know and use.

Keep in mind:

Design profession is converging while the world is diverging:
Professions are overlaping and user’s differences are increasing.
[by: P Chomowicz]

Embarrassing moment:

One presenter showed a graph and used nice bubbled 3D balls to illustrate his findings…
During the Q/A, a guy from the audience pointed out that designers should be specially careful about the “data accuracy” when visualizing and “beautifying” data, because when representing data in 3D all is multiplied exponentially.
[The presenter was showing something visually 54 times bigger than the data figures]

day 1 / day 2 / day 3 / day 4

Today kicked off the second by-annual conference of “The International Association of Societies of Design Research“, titled “Emerging Tends in Design Research“. in Hong Kong.

It can be defined as an academic orgy of research papers.
All they did is: “I show you mine to you and you show me yours”

Talks, keynotes and presentations were happening nonstop from 9:00 to 19:00, in 5 different venues.

today the discussions were organized around:
Collaboration / Culture / Perception / Education / Process / History
*impossible to follow everything. I faced the paradox of choice

Highlight:
T. Franqueira wen talking about social innovation and creative communities to reshape the urban lives…

the question:
“how can these projects make profit?”

the answer:
“they don’t make profit, they make benefit”
that’s the difference between the economic or the social approach.

day 1 / day 2 / day 3 / day 4

Understanding a brand as a tool to communicate the information related to a company, product or service to the consumers / users, I could define a brand as a magic-mirror that takes input from the consumer’s culture and embodies it into a message that creates associations and expectations among a product, the culture I define it as the environment where the message is spread, and the aesthetics as the language used to materialize this communication.

*photo from Mladen Penev

Brands communicate values, ideas, personalities and behaviours that can be found on the consumer’s culture. Aesthetics translate the values and cultural abstractions into defined messages.

The relation between brands and culture is a symbiosis, where both feed from each other.

*The graphic below illustrates the relations among brands, culture, consumer and aesthetics.

*Be Competitive
*Be Innovative (not just creative)
*Be Forward
*Be Honest
*Be Fearless
*Be Collaborative
*Be Connected (to culture and influences)
*Be Fun
*Be Global
*Be Unexpected
*Be Strong
*Be Authentic

> words taken from John Jay, Executive Creative Director & Partner at Wieden + Kennedy

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