..:: 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.

..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.

Bernat Cuni wraps up his correspondence with a report on the third and final day of BODW 2006:

The last day of BODW started with a presentation from Joe Ferry of Virgin Atlantic Airways. He explained how their USD$60 million redesign of Virgin’s Upper Class Cabin transformed the flying experience. Joe admitted that Virgin often seeks help from design consultancies in order to challenge the company’s design team.
Later on, ECCO Design’s principal Eric Chan noted that 80% of the features on an office chair are used only 20% of the time, then further emphasized the importance of searching for “global language” and the “Asian Luxury,” unfortunately with little detail.

After a power-networking lunch break with enthused designers and manufacturers, the session resumed with a poetic Yung Ho Chang presenting his works surrounding inside/outside space relations in architecture. Takashi Sugimoto from Super Potato followed with a criticism on the globalization of aesthetics and reclaimed the importance of small and local expressions and trends. He stated that the significance of any design is the atmosphere it creates and the emotions it evokes in people, rather than merely its shape. To illustrate this concept, Takashi discussed the relationship between humans and nature, and the beauty of ordinary things created by ordinary people–the “un-designed beauty” (like the houses built some centuries ago for example).

Christopher Frayling from RCA expressed his belief that design is moving toward center stage to become a major player in the economy. He also shared his vision of “how a school of design should be.” After a short and interesting review of European design education history, he concluded that a desirable design school should be like an agency of partitioning professionals, plus a research institute, and that it should stimulate the creative economy, holding a strong focus on designing for the people. He laid out some requirements for desirable students as well. They should engage themselves with the world to be aware of cultural diversity and have an attitude of driving their own agendas. They should be excited by the unpredictable and believe in the possibilities of the future.

Business of Design Week 2006 ended with a presentation from Pininfarina, highlighting the signature styling, engineering and manufacturing applied to their latest concept cars, the Nido and the Maserati Birdcage.

The hall got suddenly emptied as the last speaker barely had a chance to wrap up. Attendees quickly said their goodbyes and thank you’s. Here in in Hong Kong, everything moves fast!

This morning of the second day of BODW commenced with a colorful presentation of patterns and cuts by fashion/textile designer Zandra Rhodes. A real pick-me-up highlight was Ron Arad’s boisterous and inspirational presentation, showing early chair designs to his latest hotel designs. His experiment-oriented process of designing served as a reminder that quantity of ideas is not so much of a concern as, knowing which the good ones are. There are a myriad of creative and skilled professionals, but the world lacks an equal number of good clients.

The afternoon session focused on “Brand, Product and Technology”, kicking off with Peter Zec, of ICSID, that design needs to communicate its value in a more pragmatic way. He explained that there is no real definition on how much money a company should invest in product development, however other professions, like the advertising community, use a fixed budget and still gain credibility. In turn, design should do the same in order to have more credibility. Later on, Martin Darbyside from Tangerine gave a similar talk, illustrating his points with examples of in-depth projects such as the successful Club World sleeper seat. After a coffee break, came the grand finale for the day, where Jin Kim from LG Electronics revealed the design process encompassing their hit Chocolate cell phone, spiced up with nice trend-maps, early sketches and color palettes.

The Innovation and Design Expo was a bit less than packed today–perhaps because Hong Kong is a perpetually busy city. But we were there to excitedly discover some weird stuff in the Inventors Section, like an ashtray that keeps a forgotten cigarette lit for 2 hours, allowing the smoker to resume smoking after the time had passed. We also enjoyed conversing with the folks at the “Smart Boutique”, who showcased an RFID based system (developed by PolyU and Schmidtrfid) of sensors and a visual database that allows “go” to a shop, choose items of clothing, and then try them on–omplete with suggestions and service.

Today also marked the announcement of the 2006 Design for Asia winners. The images above and below represent a few products from the winning companies including Apple, Banyan Tree, Integration Co., Lane Crawford, LG, Nigata Industrial, Odaku Electric Railway Co., Samsung, Thann-Oryza, BenQ, Shunde, Daka Development, House of Three, Philips, Traxon Technologies, Anothermountainman, and Steelcase.

Designer and researcher Bernat Cuni is attending this week’s Business Of Design Week conference in Hong Kong. He sent in this dispatch:

In the heart of busy Hong Kong, the crowded BODW 2006 kicked off today, under the heading “Brand, Design, Innovation”. The plenary session opened with an inspiring John Sorrell explaining the human, economic and environment impacts of bad design. He used examples from the UK, and encouraged everyone to join a campaign against bad design by sending pictures and thoughts to Cabe (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment).

The second speaker was Bill Moggridge, who focused his talk on the power of design for business by showing work done at Ideo, while promoting his book and website Designing Interactions. He used various examples of design problems and solutions, a highlight being a video where a consumer spends 23 minutes to buy a drink from her cell phone!

Later on, a non-stop-talking Karim Rashid took the stage to convince the audience about the democratization of design, explaining that design shapes business and that the physical reality needs a push by designers in creating new behaviours. He also talked about the New-Casualism, where consumers are more creative and informed, and products should fit this behaviour.

After the lunch break (western-style coffeshops were full of attendees while local restaurants had hardly any designers eating there), the “Luxury Goods” session started with a speech by Trussardi on how to innovate by expanding a business, from a glove makers to Italian fashion leaders. Five floors below, the “Museum, Leisure & Culture” session was going with discussions on the benefits, problems and economic impact of large-scale architecture and landscape design projects in Hong Kong.

Another event coinciding with the BODW conference is the Innovation and Design Expo, also held in Hong Kong. Among some mainland China “innovations” like a computer case with “fake fishes” on the side we found a lot of local design agencies and design school booths. Some nice findings are MilkDesign, who have a nice collection of home products, and SwedenDesign, a combo of 3 Swedish design companies based in Hong Kong.