Informed Design has moved!
Check out Pivot’s brand-spankin’ new site and blog at www.pivotdesigngroup.com
Happy Holidays!
December brings the beginning of a busy holiday season and the end of a good year. This December we decided to celebrate the festivities and reflect on the past year with some of our favourite people by opening our doors on winter solstice for an intimate gathering. We popped pop corn, sipped on eggnog and enjoyed each other’s company with the Kinect and gestural play.
Mobile Observation – King & Yonge
Why are we so distracted by our devices? What is so important that we can’t wait until we get to the office or home to retrieve our message? I am just as guilty as anyone to the amount of attention I give my iPhone 4. It spends more time in proximity to my body than my wife or children. So what gets me is how distracted we get in our day with our devices. Is it self-importance… a true business need… a social need? Is it for directions, music/entertainment, or finding a restaurant… or does this small electronic device fill a void and give us exactly what we’re missing?
Oh what a night!
Pivot’s first event was a real success! On Tuesday, November 16th we hosted our first design mixer. We worked with Rob Curedale and the Design Foundation to round up designers in the greater toronto area to meet and discuss the topic of Design Research. We had designers from Architecture, Academia, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, UX, Social Media, and many other fields come out to join us.
Design & Trust – Research, Capabilities & Accreditation
We recently accepted an assignment from a client who wanted to rebrand and redesign a corporate website. As a first step, we began by researching the project —defining the customer base and conducting interviews to determine what users want in terms of site features, styles and emotions. The users said they wanted the new site to convey a sense of warmth and trustworthiness.
As we sat down to develop the creative, we carefully selected colours and graphics that reflected the feedback. But just before we completed the project, the client’s project leader told us the team had doubts about our proposal. Why? The leader had solicited opinions from co-workers, friends and family members. Their feedback: the colors were too pale, the illustrations inappropriate for the industry.
Repairing is recycling - fixing the planet
Who’d want to tear apart an industrial design thing of beauty like the new Apple MacBook Air? As it turns out, fixit.com does. In fact, fixit’s experts dismantle (and thus reconstruct) technology all the time, using a well documented step-by-step method. They’ve reverse engineered everything from Nokia phones to Xbox, cars, cameras and even toasters. Today, they dissected a Google TV. The raw power implicit infixit.com’s mission is that the site enables individuals to repair their own stuff, increase the life-span of consumer products, and thus reduce the flow of e-trash into landfills. The fixit.com community also has a contributors’ platform where users can earn badges for being “tear-down citizens.” By offering free repair manuals and access to rare parts, fixit lives its mission to “fix the planet.” Check out how they live their core purpose and links to the harvesting of e-junk in Asia:
Design Fiction - Creative play & imagining the future today
“You never change things by fighting the existing model. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
The pioneering American computer scientist Alan Kay observed, famously, that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” In that spirit, he devised the Dynabook, a tablet-like prototype of what would later become the laptop and other recent innovations in mobile computing. The Dynabook, however, never existed as anything other than an idea of how to bring computing to children.
The Value of Design
A large Canadian institution retained us to design a new channel, which would serve as an umbrella for a series of smaller sub-applications. Our research indicated that a vibrant, multi-colored palette would allow their customers to relate to the institution on a more personal level, thus encouraging a stronger brand relationship with the institution. When we presented the concept to our key contacts at the organization, they loved the proposal. The financial institution’s branding committee, however, was dubious because we had strayed from the established corporate colour scheme. Even though we had presented an evidence-based case to demonstrate how our design innovation would benefit the business, they remained tied to the institution’s arguably over-standardized brand book.
In such cases, how do we, as designers, set aside our feelings and opinions and demonstrate the broad value of design?
Who are you designing for?
Design research emphasizes the user or customer as the source of inspiration for innovation. Only through that research can we discover who our customers are, what they do and what they want.
However, so many products and services lose their intended audience simply because the creators did not take the measures to act on that fundamental research concept. Instead, they become internally focused based on static methods that may capture the intellectual and rational thinking of consumers, but do little to capture those persons’ thoughts at the experiential level.
More often than not, when we approach a design project, we quickly discover that missing link. Companies may think they know WHAT their audience is, HOW their clients are, WHO their customers and users are, but they are often wide of the mark because they simply haven’t acquired the right feedback.
City of london logo proposal UK-based graphic designer, illustrator, comic artist and the man behind device fonts Brian Hughes, logo proposal for the city of london. The idea for his logo pulls on Milton Glaser’s heart from ‘I (heart) NY’, The RAF symbol which along with being british represents fashion and Carnaby street cool, and is combined with the name ‘London’ and the union jack.
