Launched in 1994, Icebreaker was the first company in the world to develop a merino wool layering system for the outdoors. It was also the first outdoor apparel company in the world to source merino directly from growers, a system it began in 1997. Icebreaker merino clothing for the outdoors, technical sports and lifestyle includes underwear, mid layer garments, outerwear, socks and accessories for men, women and children. Icebreaker is based in Wellington, New Zealand, and is sold in more than 3000 stores in 43 countries.
You have to be tough to survive in New Zealand's Southern Alps. With scorching summers and freezing winters, the glacier-carved mountain range is a harsh, inaccessible environment—and possibly the last place you'd expect to find a sheep.
But the sheep that survive on the Southern Alps aren't run-of-the mill lowland sheep. They're merino sheep: hardy alpine animals with a coat that insulated in summer, breathes in summer, and is exceptionally soft and lightweight.
In 1994, Icebreaker's founder, Jeremy Moon was given a prototype t-shirt made from merino wool. It was soft, sensual and lustrous—nothing like the itchy, scratchy wool he'd grown up with. It was also machine washable, easy care and naturally resistant to odor.
The discovery inspired Jeremy to create an entirely new category around this new product: merino outdoor apparel. Icebreaker merino garments and accessories for the outdoors, technical sports and lifestyle are now sold in more than 3000 stores in 43 countries.
From Microns to Marathons
My introduction to the brand came in 1994, when Jeremy sponsored my adventure racing team. To be honest, I was skeptical—the stuff he gave us looked far too nice to race in.
After a couple of days of non-stop running, cycling and hiking, the river started rising. People were being rescued by helicopter. My team was the first out, and when we crossed the river there were TV crews waiting to interview us.
By the time I got to the transition point, I was so cold in my polypropylene layers that I was on the verge of hypothermia. I had my doubts about Icebreaker merino, but they were my only dry clothes so I decided to give them a try.
What immediately struck me was the warmth. Icebreaker merino is warm when wet, so I stayed warm even though the rain was still falling.
Adventure races are all about survival—you have to stay warm, keep your nutrition up, and protect your feet from blisters. After that, it's a mental game. I told everyone in my team how warm I was, so by the time the race ended two days later all of us were wearing our Icebreaker layers. We'd been converted.
Creating a New Icebreaker
Before we can even start designing a new garment, we think about the person who is going to use it. We think about think about whether the garment will be a base layer, a mid layer or an outer layer, and what activity it's going to be used for. This exploration helps us formulate the necessary properties for the yarn, the fabric and, finally, the garment itself.
We write a brief with specifications for the type of yarn we'll need, and that influences our sourcing. Merino fibers are ultra fine—much finer than the fibers of traditional wool—which is why our merino is so soft and non-itch. It's very lightweight and feels more like silk against the skin than wool.
Merino fibers usually range from 13–25 microns, which is about one-third the thickness of a human hair. The smaller the micron, the finer the wool (in comparison, wool fibers from traditional lowland sheep are usually 35–45 microns).
Once we've decided on the type of yarn, we brief on what sort of fabric we need to construct. For example, it could be a lightweight garment made of eyelet fabric for running, or one of our Realfleece brushed fleece mid layers for wearing outdoors in cold weather.
Finally, we do a briefing on the garment itself. This is when we talk about potential enhancements to the garment, such as increased freedom of motion or laminations to make a garment windproof and rainproof. We'll think about what season it's likely to be worn in.
Icebreaker is a layering system, so we'll ask ourselves how every new garment will work when it's worn with other Icebreaker layers.
In October, 2008, Medicare—the United States' government program that pays 40% of the nation's hospital bills—decided to stop covering hospital failures. This meant that a litany of preventable mistakes, including treatments resulting from surgical errors, patient accidents and infections, were now the financial responsibility of the hospital. As a result, medical accidents went from being a source of hospital revenue to a massive financial drain. The good news is that medical institutions were finally forced into the business of disease prevention, at least once people were in their care.
What can be done to prevent costly medical mistakes? The hospital reform with the greatest potential is also the easiest to implement, at least in theory. According to the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths statistics, hospital acquired infections kill more people in America than AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined. Furthermore, the vast majority of the patients that acquire such infections in hospitals—and more than 5 percent of patients do—get them from the hands of health care providers. Thankfully, hospitals have become increasingly concerned with hand hygiene. The dirty hands of doctors and nurses aren't just gross—they are an extremely expensive and potentially fatal act of carelessness. Hospital staffers, in order to follow protocol, need to wash their hands hundreds of times a day. Their failure to follow protocol perfectly is their personal responsibility but non-compliance on such a broad scale is also a failure of the medical system that creates the rules and environment that lead non-compliance.
The medical industry's acknowledgment of hand hygiene as a systemic problem has led to the establishment and growing influence of Infection Control and Prevention Units. For Infection Control and Prevention, solving handwashing takes the form of cheeky posters of doctors reminding everyone to wash their hands, developing inane training videos demonstrating how to properly wash your hands and implementing incentive programs where health care workers reward each other with certificates when they observe a co-workers consistent compliance. In the hospital where I have focused my research, these certificates were returned unused.
One increasingly popular but misguided program has to been to implement paternalistic monitoring of nurses and other providers, who are forced to undergo increasing levels of surveillance. Whether it is video monitoring systems borrowed from meat manufacturing plants or sensor systems that read the alcohol content on hands, staff are cajoled into changing their behavior by receiving real time feedback combined with their fear that their personal compliance level is now public knowledge. There is no carrot—there is only a stick.
Despite growing desperation, few designers have bothered to do much of anything that might make washing or sanitizing hands more appealing. A recent scientific study pointed to "perceived busyness" as one of the primary deterrents to compliance. But this only demonstrates the silliness of current reforms. After all, if followed literally, the prescribed protocol for hand cleaning would require so much of the health care workers time that they wouldn't actually be able to perform the rest of their job. During a recent observation, nurses were consistently walking from supply closets to narcotic storage bins to patients rooms with their hands full. How, then, can they follow protocol and wash their hands correctly when they enter the room? Are monitoring systems supposed to solve these problems? Or are we merely putting increased strain on an already stressed population without offering any design solutions?
Ento is a roadmap for introducing edible insects to the Western diet. It is the outcome of a project undertaken by a team of four postgraduate students from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London who wanted to tackle the growing issue of food supply in an increasingly hungry world. Motivated by the failings of the livestock industry, as well as the environmental and nutritional benefits of insects, the team wanted to see how this provocative new food source could be introduced to Western diets. The project is about driving cultural change through understanding human perceptions, using strategic design thinking, as well as through creating innovative and compelling experiences.
Why eat insects? As postgraduate design students, our team wanted to tackle the issue of sustainability with an innovative design-driven approach. We first came across the idea of eating insects when researching solutions to global food security. Food demand is accelerating, and agricultural productivity cannot keep up. By 2050 global demand is set to double to 40 giga-calories per day, and much of this increase will be due to demand for meat.
The livestock industry is notoriously resource-hungry, consuming a third of all crops and requiring 70% of agricultural land. It also accounts for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, through production, transport and animal digestive gas.
It is against this backdrop that edible insects offer an exciting alternative. They are extremely efficient at turning feed into meat and can be farmed at a very high density. This means that their embodied energy is low—a tenth of that of beef cattle—and that at high volumes they are very cost efficient. Taking their nutritional benefits into consideration as well, it is easy to understand why the UN, the EU, and the Dutch government are some of the major players investigating the potential of edible insects.
But despite the fact that a lot of people taking this idea very seriously, most of the research to date has focused on the supply side. We realized that there was an opportunity to address one of biggest obstacles on the demand side: acceptance.
Currently there is a major cultural taboo against eating insects. The idea of eating insects is generally imagined to be dirty, gooey and unsafe. None of these preconceptions are true, but it doesn't change the fact that edible insects are certainly not seen as an exciting future food! We realized that changing these beliefs would be a major challenge.
In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1–4, Core77 will be bringing you a preview of this year's event. Follow us as we chat with keynote speakers, presenters and workshop leaders to give you a sneak peek at some of the ideas and issues to be addressed at this year's conference. Come by and say hello to us at the Coroflot Connects recruiting event and don't miss out on our live coverage as we report from the ground in Dublin!
In our third installment of this year's Interaction12 IxDA Conference preview, Kate Ertmann, Partner at ADi, gives a preview of her upcoming presentation on Ethnographic Animation by sharing some of the foundational ideas and processes behind using animation as a tool for business and design.
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Ethnographic Animation is fact-based animation. It's social science storytelling.
In the world of ethnography, ethnographers are aiming to describe the nature of their subjects. And in the world of ethnography, as it is related to product development, the study is usually around people who are encountering a challenge of some sort in their everyday life that may be resolved by a new product. So ethnographers go out in the field, research humans in their natural environment—which may very well be their living room, kitchen or observing them while they shop in a store—and gather the data of people's behavior, challenges or processes in particular situations. How do you clean under that couch? How do you hold that spoon that you usually use for eating your cereal if you want to, on other occasions, mix some cake batter with it? When that bucket becomes heavy, how do you pick it up to get it from point A to point B?
In the past, capturing live video has been a way to capture this data. Yet when you show that video to other people, be it an engineer, a developer, a peer at a partner agency or even a focus group, you run into the challenge that the viewer naturally starts observing the extraneous items in the 'scene.' The viewer may think, "That doesn't look like my family's living room," "But my grandmother is younger than that grandmother," or the viewer may tune out immediately because the video you show is from a study in a typical household in Taipei, and you live in South Dakota. It's interesting what observations we unconsciously make when we deem something unrelated to our world.
So, once that information is gathered, what do you do with that data? You might create a spreadsheet and try to find common points across the data. Or, maybe you took pictures documenting the study's actions and you make a visual to share with your colleagues in the ideation stage of the process.
That's great—and all of those things can take you into the visualization stage where your development team may brainstorm and make sense of the information that you have gathered...and then what? Do you start sketching? Sketching what? The tools that the subjects were touching, using, playing with?
Or do you go to the virtual prototype stage, where your focus is—now—on the product itself, and you've now, essentially, put your human behavior studies into purgatory till you think to unearth them later in some group discussion months down the road.
After over 40 years of pioneering work in the Life Science industry, a multidisciplinary design team at Ergonomidesign put together their take on the future for the Health Care industry. Their challenge was to envision the future and develop possible solutions for the world to test, use and reflect on. The outcome has generated many discussions, both in the Design and Life Science industries as well as with politicians and policymakers in the European Union.
This article describes how Ergonomidesign developed a vision of the future for Life Sciences and how this served as a guide as their designers prototyped how we might manage our own health and interact with doctors, family and other medical professionals and services in the year 2015.
An Integrated Future of Health Care in the Year 2015
In 2009 Ergonomidesign's strategists and futuring experts set out to analyze macro, life science, social and technology trends set ten to twenty years out. We knew that health care was changing and that we could be a part of shaping the future. We also knew that people were seamlessly integrating technologies into their day-to-day activities, social lives and health care management. What we needed was a clear vision about how different the future should or could be.
Trends suggested that by the year 2015, desktop computers as we know them today, will be relics of the past. Rapid advances in screen technology and the diminishing size of microprocessors will make it possible to invent new archetypes for the computer, coupled with new gestural and semantic languages. In an age of ubiquitous computing, our walls, tables and other elements in our environment will become platforms for us to interact on. It will involve access to information, and exchange and generation of data. Most importantly, these interactions will involve people connecting with people in the most serendipitous ways, through a system that is constantly aware and always connected, if desired.
Our research suggested that as we move towards the future of health care, people will increasingly need to feel involved and in control of their own health. People will also need tools to help them collaborate closely with health care providers, doctors and other people they trust to help them manage their health.
Our strategic work resulted in an eco-system that described the Integrated Future of Health Care in the year 2015 with the patient at the center of all activities, services, devices and products.
Our strategic work resulted in an eco-system that described the Integrated Future of Health Care in the year 2015 with the patient at the center of all activities, services, devices and products.
Bringing the Vision to Life
The vision needed to be grounded in the experiences of real patients. We introduced two characters that were assigned lifestyles and diseases as we tried to highlight potential real life scenarios. Throughout the entire design process, we leveraged the real world needs as we developed a service solution that would be as seamless, natural and effective as possible.
The two characters Hanna and Bernhard.
To tangibly visualize our characters and a glimpse of the future, the team developed the eco-system described in the Integrated Future of Health Care into an application for the Microsoft Surface platform (Surface application). This technology was chosen for its unique ability to invite people into interactions and conversations around the display. Representing a future smart surface, it also provided our team with the opportunity to explore natural user interfaces (NUI) and at the same time challenged the team to design for a full 360-degree interaction and multi-input, multi-user collaboration.
An early sketch of the application for Microsoft Surface.
Our aim was to illustrate the body as a container of biometric data. The simple act of placing your hand on 'a table' or any other type of smart surface, triggered an enlightened experience, e.g. you will be able to share and compare your biometric data with people you trust, subscribe to personalized treatment software and also have easy and constant access to your health care professionals.
It is often the case in interaction design that the best solutions simply get out of the way, allowing the user to achieve their goal and get on with their life. With Google Maps, this is certainly the desired outcome. Geographic navigation and search should be smooth, efficient, and ultimately straightforward. When this is successful and the product works as it should, the nuances and details behind these experiences can often go unnoticed, written off as algorithmically derived and invisible.
Since its launch in 2004, Google Maps has come a long way from its relatively simple beginnings as a simple pannable and zoomable road map of the United States and United Kingdom. Today we display business and transit networks, three dimensional cities, natural terrain, and much more. It is a map that serves pedestrians, motorists, tourists and locals alike. Soon it was not only used it as a "clean" map for wayfinding and browsing but also as a base for overlays, search results, directions, and personal customization—with sources from all over the web. In the same vein as Google's mission, we are organizing the world's information in a geographic context.
The work and evolution behind this ambitious undertaking is a combination of design vision, product strategy, engineering prowess, and ethnographic and usability research. Our User Experience team comprises a small group of designers, researchers and prototypers in offices around the globe. The research and experience gained in these diverse locations give us insights into real-world usage and help us better serve the needs of our users.
The breadth of our collective work, whether it's anything from helping a local business connect more meaningfully with their customers to helping you find your gate at the airport on time, is harmonized by our common goal to deliver a more complete picture of the Earth. From its roadways and cities to weather patterns and natural wonders, our team is attempting to capture the complexity and variance of these multiple systems in a product that just about anyone can use.
To accomplish this vision, we work in our studios flipping between sketchbooks and whiteboards, Photoshop and Fireworks, visualizing user scenarios and creating new design concepts quickly and in high-fidelity. We complement this process by hacking rendering specs and tweaking Javascript to produce interactive demos. Occasionally, we will even turn to programs like Apple Keynote and Adobe After Effects to quickly demonstrate interactive transitions and animations. These lightweight models give us the ability to test and experiment with highly interactive designs without demanding the resources of a full engineering team. As the design process continues, these prototypes (and static design mocks) are crucial in our early "cafe" usability studies where we often walk a user through a single-outcome user "journey" (e.g. getting directions or finding a hotel).
A snapshot of Google Maps' design evolution 2009 (top) - 2011 (bottom). click for more information.
Synthesizing all of this information in an approachable and aesthetically pleasing way carried obvious challenges. As the product grew and evolved, the map varied widely from one country to another, and the universal familiarity and usability that made Google Maps a success was being undermined by complexity and "feature creep." To better understand which of these variances were useful, we audited the map styles, colors, and iconography of maps all over the world with the help of local users. We examined the leading online and offline mapping providers in each country, in addition to researching local physical signage and wayfinding. This undertaking provided us with a look at mapping as a local exercise—with cultural, ethnic, and region-specific quirks and nuances.
Our global cartography audit in progress.
With this research in mind, we came to the realization that there was little consistency between this collection of maps and no real indication of a common "correct" palette for color and style rendering. By unifying and simplifying our own Google color palette down from hundreds to a small handful of colors, we were able to produce an experience that provided familiarity and uniformity as you browse the world.
A sampling of our color palette studies and refinement.
Corporate sustainability has become such a catchphrase in recent times that you'd think the business world had single-handedly reversed climate change, fostered world-leading social cohesion, obliterated third world poverty and the impending food crisis! The scary thing is the plethora of product, services or businesses marketed without any context or objective science to be 'natural,' 'efficient' or you guessed it...'sustainable.' In reality, we find that the majority of corporate clients engaging the Centre for Design (CfD) are somewhat baffled about the how, what, where, when and who of sustainability. That's why we have started using a combination of streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) techniques and collaborative design thinking to develop context-specific sustainability strategies. This process is now referred to by CfD as the Double Diamond method of LCA and Design Thinking (Figure 1), and appropriates the design process of convergent and divergent thinking presented by the UK Design Council (2005).
Figure 1 - The Double diamond method of LCA and Design Thinking (click for larger image)
In a previous article for Core77, we looked at the power of streamlined LCA in identifying the ecological impacts prospectively; retrospective LCA has been utilised as an objective scientific method to identify environmental impacts widely within the corporate sector. The Double Diamond method utilises streamlined LCA as a tool to address impact areas, prior to focusing on more articulate sustainable design solutions. The key challenge that this new process attempts to address is the large gap between the seemingly unsurmountable scale of unsustainability and initiatives employed by your average John Smith to reduce their own ecological impact. For example, "if every Australian household switched to renewable energy and stopped driving their cars tomorrow, total household emissions would decline by only about 18%" (Dey, Berger et al. 2007, p. 291), what of the remaining 82% of emissions?
A major aged care provider in Australia, Uniting Church Aged Care (UAC), approached CfD in 2010 to help design sustainability across the business, a perfect base to launch the Double Diamond method to explore the relationship between ecological impacts and daily operations prior to proposing a 'Sustainability Opportunities' design.
What are the Impacts in an Aged Care Context? First, we attempted to identify all potential global warming impacts that could occur in the delivery of aged care with LCA. The impacts were estimated using 'Input/Output' LCA . The organisation's accounts from the previous year for one aged care site were categorised into economic sectors that can then be attributed to an environmental impact. The functional unit to measure the environmental impact was 'One bed-day to a certified standard of care' with a system boundary excluding capital infrastructure. The results of the LCA estimated that each bed day of care emits 42.8kg CO2-eq global warming impacts, the carbon dioxide equivalent impacts from various greenhouse gases. This estimate is equivalent to 26 trees required to absorb the greenhouse gas emissions per resident per year. The distribution of impacts is shown in Figure 2, electricity and gas contributed almost half (49%) with food as the second highest driver (40%).
Figure 2 - Drivers of climate change impacts per bed day to a certified standard of care
What Practices Matter Most? The convergent interpretation of the LCA identified environmental impact hotspots, highlighting a Pareto like principle in that 25.2% of the UAC expenditure (electricity and meat consumption) account for 62% of the global warming impact. In the interpretation a move was made from scientific data to day-to-day practices. This transitioned to three themes:
1. Capital purchasing decisions - procurement of appliances and capital 2. Thermal comfort - providing comfort through heating and cooling 3. Food and diet - nutrition to menu planning and meal preparation
UAC's initial key concerns were highly visual such as paper use, disposable rubber gloves or the high number of incontinent pads (3% of the global warming impact). LCA identified areas previously not considered such as food (40% of the global warming impact) that had a far greater impact.
We are now face to face with wicked problems. Childhood obesity, climate change, aging population, literacy—the scope, implications and rate of change of today's critical problems make them unlike anything we have faced before. Solutions to these wicked problems have the potential to change the way we live in the world.
To even begin to address such issues, we need people and organizations with the ability to innovate. Expertise in health care, education, and energy are not enough. Neither are superb analytical and creative thinking skills. Motivation, informed by beliefs in ability, is the critical ingredient we often ignore. Without believing in our ability to develop and implement innovative solutions that can address the world's challenges, we will not even act.
The ability to act is tied to a belief that it is possible to do so. Without a firm belief in our potential to develop and implement innovative solutions that can address these wicked challenges, what we call innovation self-efficacy, good or even great ideas are of no use at all.
What is innovation self-efficacy? And how do we develop these beliefs?
Innovation is the intentional implementation of novel and useful processes, products, or procedures designed to benefit society. Despite anticipated benefits, innovation work can be unpredictable, controversial, and in competition with current courses of action. Innovators must develop, modify, and implement ideas while navigating ambiguous problem contexts, overcoming setbacks, and persisting through uncertainty. Innovation self-efficacy is our belief in our ability to take part in these types of actions. Innovation self-efficacy and innovative action are mutually reinforcing. Positive feedback from innovative action builds confidence, which leads to more innovation behavior.
Innovation Self-efficacy ↔ Innovation Action
Building on Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura's framework, innovation self-efficacy develops in three primary ways: Social persuasion (being told you can do it), Vicarious learning (watching others do it), and Mastery experience (doing it).
While trying to find where to watch my beloved Pats last season after relocating to the West Coast I found the 506, a site that curates interactive Google maps of TV markets for various American sports. I rediscovered the site earlier this week via kottke and took another look.
However practical these maps may be in helping you navigate television on Sundays, they are concurrently acute cultural and possibly even ethnic cartographies.
Looking closely at a few regions for this upcoming week's FOX games you can begin to see the method and design that goes into promoting specific teams to particularly loyal or interested regions:
The Mid Atlantic, where most local teams are playing on CBS this week is a jigsaw puzzle. The Dallas-San Francisco match up is being aired in New York City & Philadelphia, possibly a nod to the camaraderie between SF and NYC or maybe a holdover from Dallas' bygone reputation as "America's Team." Meanwhile, a little further south, the local Washington Redskins are barely penetrating the Mason-Dixon line, a potential reminder that Washington is a Southern city.
Five years ago I had an epiphany while I was ironing my shirt. I found myself wondering why it was that my ironing spray had to come in such a big bottle? Why couldn't it come with a concentrate I could dilute myself in one integrated bottle, not two separate containers? In fact, why didn't all of my household goods couldn't come in a more sensible, compact concentrate mixing system. The solution I saw in my mind was an integrated bottle built for mixing concentrates.
One morning in April I opened The New York Times to find the article "As Consumers Cut Spending, 'Green' Products Lose Allure" by Stephanie Clifford and Andrew Martin. The crux of the article was that consumers are not willing to pay more for 'green' products, especially in hard times.
As a green products entrepreneur, I believe they shouldn't have to. Consumers can be green and save money, we just have to design better products so they can do both.
Spurred on by my ironing epiphany I went digging in the patent universe to see what ideas were out there; I wanted to know if an integrated bottle system already existed. It didn't. I saw that Arm and Hammer had come out with an "Essentials" line in 2008 that consisted of an empty bottle with two packages of cleaner concentrate shrink wrapped to the bottle. Although its intentions were admirable, it did not offer the consumer the integrated approach to mixing concentrates and reducing packaging waste that I was thinking of. I knew then that I had to fundamentally rethink what a bottle should look like and what purpose it should serve.
What we thought was missing was a bottle platform that was built specifically for concentrates and was reusable. If we had that, then we wouldn't have to ship water all around the country in disposable bottles. I wanted to develop a reusable bottle based on a system of dispensing concentrates to cut down on plastic waste, promote reusability, and reduce the associated environmental toll of shipping excess water all around the country. I wanted to create a smarter bottle.
What drove my design for Replenish was the desire to re-imagine what the design for a bottle and container should be. To ever move forward, we needed a new design and a fresh approach that could cut out the wastefulness I saw throughout the system, provide an environmentally sound alternative to conventional, pre-mixed cleaners and save consumers money. My goal was to completely reinvent the system to be designed for lesser impact and lower waste.
William McDonough's and Michael Braungart's Cradle to Cradle philosophy came to be my guiding light, so it was only natural that I approached McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), their green chemistry firm, to put Cradle to Cradle principles to use in building Replenish. I wanted to design a product made with materials with life cycles that are safe for human health and the environment.
The Replenish bottle is built to last for years, not months, the cleaning solution itself can return safely to the environment, and the concentrate pods are easily recyclable, making it easy to collect and recover the value of these materials following their use.
Gobug is an interactive toy designed to facilitate an inclusive social learning experience for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. However, individuals of all ages and abilities are welcome to join, play and learn.
Click for full-sized images!
The basics
Gobug is designed to move around on a ground surface at the control of the users. Up to two or three children can play with the toy simultaneously. Each user takes ownership of one controller. These controllers work in conjunction; each user points his/her remote in a direction, and the Gobug moves in the combined direction of the active controllers. For example, if there are two users and each has the controller pointed straight ahead, the Gobug will go straight ahead. However, if one user points the controller straight to the left, and the other points straight ahead, the Gobug will move at a forty-five degree angle (the intermediate direction). The more in sync the controllers are, in the same pointed direction, the faster Gobug moves.
Visual Watch is a time management and an image recognition tool designed specifically for people with Autism.
The Visual Watch concept tackles two issues. Sense/Management of Time and it also creates a more mobile image recognition system that uses digital rather than physical flashcards.
With this product, my goal is to increase autistic children's communication abilities and ultimately to ensure better inclusion into society.
Austin Center for Design has just completed its first year of classes, and student teams have created progressive entrepreneurial models for affecting positive change in the world around them. After spending 24 weeks immersed in the problem of homelessness, the following businesses have emerged:
Patient Nudge
After observing the limited time and resources case workers have to manage an increasingly large at-risk population, Ryan Hubbard and Christina Tran developed an online compliance and persistence tool. This tool—Patient Nudge—allows a care provider to automatically check in with a large population via SMS, aggregate results into compelling visualizations, and identify outliers in the data.
Getting TDK as a client was like winning the lottery.
I'd like to say that design teams at Ziba form an instant emotional connection with every client we have, but that's rarely true. The process of connecting is usually complicated. We're always analyzing brands, trying to get what they're about and find the core values that will influence our designs. It's a lot of work.
But with TDK we knew right away, on a gut level. The designers on the project team grew up in the '80s and early '90s, so the name brought a flood of memories, of unwrapping a fresh cassette in front of the stereo, crafting a mixtape for some road trip, some friend, some girl. Or listening to Get the Led Out on 97.9 at 10 pm, waiting to hit record on that one song and complete the Led Zeppelin collection. We knew it was about music and sharing, and a tangible, tactile listening experience. We also knew that modern listening isn't tactile at all and that TDK has the most badass logo ever.
TDK hasn't enjoyed that kind of day-to-day cultural presence in the digital era. They made the world's best cassette tapes, but cassette tapes got replaced by CDs, CDs by DVDs and today even DVDs are fading away. To a bunch of former mixtape junkies it felt like the biggest well of untapped potential ever. Cassettes were storage media, but they were also containers that held your passion for music. If TDK wanted to move their brand forward, they needed something that brought that passion to the modern listener.
The Cost of Digital Modern music is digital, and most of us are fine with that. It lets you grab a song from the other side of the planet in 30 seconds, and fit 10,000 of them in your pocket. Nobody really regrets that ability, but it does have its costs.
Midway through the project we spent a few weeks visiting urban male listeners in Berlin, Sydney, Tokyo, San Francisco and Manchester -- music-obsessed cities. The guys we talked to weren't necessarily musicians, but they had huge collections and loved listening to music and talking about it, more than just about anything. We called them Music Prophets.
Despite owning thousands of hours of music, Music Prophets are the first to admit they rarely sit down and really listen to it. This sense of detachment and semi-nostalgia showed up in interview after interview -- no one actually wished they lived in the '80s, but they missed the purity of experience you got out of analog. Even guys in their early 20s, too young to have recorded an actual mixtape, would talk about how unsatisfactory digital listening was.
We saw related evidence everywhere: kids on the street riding fixies, collecting vinyl, printing their own T-shirts -- doing things the hard way, because it connects them with the experience and with other people. Music used to be harder to get and harder to play, but because of that we celebrated it. We listened out loud.
Analog was great because it was social, and because you could touch it. You couldn't bundle a bunch of functions into a single screen back then, so everything was switches and knobs. You got this direct connection with the act of playing your music, whether it was carefully laying the needle on the spinning platter, or turning the weighted volume knob, or hearing the "thunk" when the tape drive engaged.
Boombox interface image: CC Flickr user Joseph Robertson
But it was also a pain. Anyone remember the confusing Tape Selector switch on your boombox? Metal II? Dolby EX? 35 different equalizer settings? As playback got more advanced there was more to control, and most analog interfaces were a complete mess. This is where the hierarchy and contextual control of digital really helps. Nearly anyone can figure out an iPod and most of the technology that connects to it.
TDK could be the first brand to bridge the gap between the good parts of analog and digital. Something warm and tactile but also precise and flexible. Over the course of our research we'd covered a whiteboard with images of analog and digital interfaces. Eventually we cleared a little space in the middle, wrote down the term "Digi-Log" and went from there.
Most able-bodied folks probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about how people with disabilities navigate the world, particularly in developing countries. However, Amos Winter did, and still does. Winter, a recent PhD graduate from the MIT department of Mechanical Engineering, went to Tanzania as part of his work in 2005. He wanted to understand how people who needed wheelchairs got around and how well current wheelchair technology met peoples' mobility needs. Winter's work was part of an internship with Whirlwind Wheelchair International, a group that designs wheelchairs in developing countries. He learned that people in wheelchairs often just didn't get where they needed to go.
In fact, according to the Wheelchair Foundation, it is estimated that the number of people who need wheelchairs will increase by 22 percent over the next 10 years, with the greatest need existing in developing countries. And USAID estimates that 20 million people in the developing world need a wheelchair.
For instance, wheelchair-accessible buildings and roads are rare in countries like Tanzania. Beyond that, individuals must overcome narrow doorways, steep hills, bumpy, muddy roads and long distances to destinations like school -- often upwards of two to three miles. All of these issues combined make it virtually impossible to get anywhere with a conventional wheelchair. Beyond that, they were too expensive for individuals who often can't work due to their disability, or make about $1/day if they do work.
Hand-powered tricycles were the other existing option in developing countries. But they're too large for indoor use and too heavy to maneuver over rough terrain.
In Winter's mind, the chair he wanted to create would offer individuals: + Independence - the ability to live with as little assistance as possible + Empowerment - the ability to get to where they want to go, when they want to go + Access - the mobility that allows them to access resources and employment when these things won't come to them + Affordability - a tool that's at a price that they're able to afford
Core77 was proud to work with Aava Mobile to create two distinct design invitational challenges. In the first phase, we combed through the 200,00+ portfolios on our site Coroflot.com to find the 5 most creative thinkers and sketchers in the world of consumer products. Each created sets of scenarios articulating the potential use-case scenarios of the mobile device. The second phase challenged one of the phase 1 participants as well as an additional designer to create more refined, rendered concepts closer to production pieces rather than blue-sky concepts. Both of the designers took the challenge seriously (and with delight) delivering incredible work that was both rigorous and imaginative. Core77 could not have been happier with the results, and we are gratified to continue making strong connections between designers and manufacturers.
As a celebration of the success of phase 2, we are publishing the case studies from each of the designers to share some of their learnings from this design invitational. Alberto Villareal, Creative Director of the Mexico City-based design firm AGENT shares his process below.
Aava Mobile, a Finnish company founded in 2009 by a team of engineering wizards who built an open-source mobile device platform, asked AGENT to design their latest smart phone.
Alberto Villarreal, the Creative Director of Mexico City-based firm AGENT explains their design approach: "We focused on making it simple, but with a twist."
Left - TWIST, by Alberto Villareal and AGENT / Right - Blackbox, by Thomas Valcke
Core77 was proud to work with Aava Mobile to create two distinct design invitational challenges. In the first phase, we combed through the 200,000+ portfolios on our site Coroflot.com to find the 5 most creative thinkers and sketchers in the world of consumer products. Each created sets of scenarios articulating the potential use-case scenarios of the mobile device. The second phase challenged one of the phase 1 participants as well as an additional designer to create more refined, rendered concepts closer to production pieces rather than blue-sky concepts. Both of the designers took the challenge seriously (and with delight) delivering incredible work that was both rigorous and imaginative. Core77 could not have been happier with the results, and we are gratified to continue making strong connections between designers and manufacturers.
As a celebration of the success of phase 2, we are publishing the case studies from each of the designers to share some of their learnings from this design invitational.
Lessons Learned From Listening During one of my recent workshops, I was stunned by the nurses' reactions when I asked them what changes in their routine would make their lives easier. After an awkward silence--I thought I had inadvertently misspoken--one nurse replied, "Nobody really asks us that."
As designer/researchers at Mayo Clinic's Center for Innovation (CFI), we provide a forum and voice for collaboration and participatory creation. Being embedded designers affords incredible access to patients and providers. For one "deep-dive" activity, designers interviewed over 30 patients in the patient cafeteria. We can shadow providers to glimpse into their day-in-the-life. We are able to understand first-hand what happens during a patient examination. I will always remember one of my first patient exam observations when a physician told a ninety-seven-year-old woman that she had a polyp in her colon. I remember how her two granddaughters, who had accompanied her, reacted with the possibility of their grandmother having cancer. I remember how the grandmother used humor to mask her fear while asking a myriad of questions about the future, and how the physician gently touched her hand and said, "we'll cross that bridge when we get there."
Although rich and necessary information, user-centered research is not always welcomed or easy to corral in spite of being embedded in the institution. In wanting shiny new products and services, we move too quickly. This is a story about the lessons learned when we set aside our assumptions and slow down to listen and understand the needs of people.
MILAN 2012: SALONE INTERNAZIONALE DEL MOBILE
MILAN 2012: SATELLITE EXHIBITIONS
MILAN 2012: BRERA DESIGN DISTRICT
VENTURA LAMBRATE 2012
Images and Article by Rachel Lehrer
click to enlarge
Our strategic work resulted in an eco-system that described the Integrated Future of Health Care in the year 2015 with the patient at the center of all activities, services, devices and products. 
The two characters Hanna and Bernhard. 
An early sketch of the application for Microsoft Surface.
Our global cartography audit in progress.
A sampling of our color palette studies and refinement.
Figure 2 - Drivers of climate change impacts per bed day to a certified standard of care
TDK Life On Record
Boombox interface image: CC Flickr user Joseph Robertson
Left - TWIST, by Alberto Villareal and AGENT / Right - Blackbox, by Thomas Valcke
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