Fashion in electronics -- electronics in fashion at ELKOM

OK, I just remembered to take my notes from my laptop from the session we participated. Here's some text that was worth writing down, understandable and somehow connected to our course.

SUUNTO

Fashion in sports: functionality with design

Relevant functionality and design

"To stand out but no too much", important especially women with fashionable products

Professional gear/tools matter, passion -> design and materials are important

Three important factors were presented for product developement:

- Design thinking: courage for disruptive innovation, bravery

- Emotion: people's needs and desires, build character into products

- Interpreter: From invention to innovation

At least the first bullet rings (disrupive innovation) a bell. The second is about the social side of the innovation (Jacobs 2007). Well, the third bullet is about the well-known path onwards from invention.

The there was some case examples:

Kill your own product icon (diving: Stinger)

Outdoor instrument (Vector)

Core (Vector product family), stronger style, succesful

Keys for success:

- User insight collection (multi-disciplinary teams!)

- Close interaction with marketing, product management, R&D teams and manufacturing

- Iterative working methods

And then some:

Lifetime vs. fashionability

Annual cycles with 'women's products'

Distributed products

Web based solution, sharing coming

VERTU

How to create a new category?

Then something about the current economical state of the world:

Growth of discount and value segement, AND growth of premium and luxury markets

Long-term prospects for the luxury markets remain strong

Then back to the beginning:

Vision to create a (product) category: brings other players as well

Key success factors: brand positioning, etc.

hand made, materials

products that are loved may have a long lifetime

design is critical

Sell in luxury street (?) so that customers understand the value

GENELEC

Role of design in the corporate image strong

But however, the firm is strong in professional audio scene

Technological requirement is a must

Shape of the boxes came from physics along the years (not from industrial design originally!)

Then, the developement of the current product line:

In 1987: good performance, but different shapes, not congruent resemblance

Bring in people from outside:

Harri Koskinen (HK, a Finnish designer) remembered the 80's shapes of the speakers

New models starting 2000, by HK

"Why did you stop the previous models", from the field...

Obviously:

Design and marketing

Advertisement campaign, visual messages strong

What is design thinking?

At the ELKOM fair last week in the luxury electronics seminar, we briefly entered into a discussion about the role of design in technology. I tried to make the point that design is not fundamentally different from engineering and both could be considered as a constrained optimization problem. The gentleman from Vertu emphasized that it is important not to solve a very narrow design problem that may not generalize very well.

Here is a TED talk I watched in which the speaker attempts to describe the kinds of principles that go into innovative designs and urges designers to think big.

Design Factory 1.10.2009

Excursion to Design Factory

When: Thursday 1.10.2009
Time: 10:00
Where: Here

After the going around the Factory we can have a lunch and have a discussion about our work related to BitBang course. If you have some literature allready related to "creating a flourishing innovation climate", please bring it with you!?
I hope that Design Factory will create some ideas about "innovation climate". Of course innovation climate can be more about mental state, rather than some building with nice colours on the walls. But, I think it can help. :)

Pauli, testing this blog same time..

How to approach the subject of innovation?

I am rather pleased that we picked this topic as the notion of creativity and what engenders creativity is one of my personal favourites at the moment.

In an attempt to dive right in, here are three angles to approach the subject innovation: the management angle, the psychological angle (theories of motivation) and the social philosophy angle.

For a management approach, I found this rather old piece (1996) published in the R&D Innovator Magazine. Basically, the author attempts to paramterize and study (using a survey) what are the most important aspects in the work environment that foster innovation.

For another management approach, here is another blog post by the London based Finnish thinker Cecila Weckstrom on how to lead creative people.

Here is a TED talk by a failed lawyer Dan Pink, who takes a more psychological approach and asks the question: what is it that creative people feel most rewarded by?

For a very broad sociological approach, you may be interested in the wonderfully eloquent, Swiss-born English writer Alain de Botton and his thoughts on the pleasures and sorrows of work.

Welcome!

A warm welcome to the blog authors in no particular order: Antti, Pauli, Ali, Marja, Aira, Ming and Olli: Tervetuloa!

I'm assuming that all of you have to some extent participated either actively or passively in the blogosphere. Nervertheless, I will begin from the beginning. This post is mostly a how-to manual for the contributors to this blog. It is intended as a non-exhaustive set of guidelines for effective categorization of content, uniformity of visual and writing styles, effective searchability etc.

Getting Started

The basic structure of this blog is as follows. It contains a central frame, consisting of ‘posts’ which are articles of varied length, written by (usually one of the) authors of the blog. Posts are arranged in reverse chronological order, contain a time-stamp, a byline, and a link to its comments page. In addition to a central frame, the blog also contains a frame to the left, which consists of several widgets that serve to summarize the blog. Examples of widgets include: a search form, links to a post-archive, a tag cloud, a category list, an author list, a blogroll, a list of recent comments, an admin panel etc. Currently I have left the default settings as is, but please feel free to suggest or add your own widgets as the blog evolves!

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Each post must be filed under one or more labels, for effective organization of information. Readers of the blog can selectively read posts filed under a particular label.

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Linking and Embedding

While writing a new post, which is closely related to a previous post, it is important to mention the previous post, and link it in your post for the sake of continuity and credit attribution, especially in case the previous post was written by a different author.

While writing a post to share a link, please write a short 2-3 line summary of the message, and then present or embed a link/image/video etc. rather than simply presenting the link itself. For aesthetic reasons, please hyperlink to a relevant keyword in your summary, rather than pasting the URL as-is.

For example, instead of saying:

Hey guys, check out this new exciting blog http://innovationclimate.blogspot.com/

please say:

Hey guys, check out this new exciting blog about innovation. It seems to be a group blog based in Helsinki and writing mostly about how to create a welcoming climate for innovation.

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I humbly recommend an essay by Paul Graham titled “How to Disagree“. In this essay, he presents a taxonomy of disagreements, and notes several common cognitive biases in argument.