This article first appeared on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network.

Design is a service, not a magic spell. There are designers who do it well, and those who do it poorly; some produce profitable outcomes, and some waste money. More and more companies view design as an important strategic element of their business and are seeking partners to help them understand how it can help. If you’re setting out to do so, you’ll need to confront uncertainty about how to get the most value from the investment and carefully consider what you’re setting out to achieve. An effective client-partner relationship arrives at solutions that aren’t just creative, but useful. The following considerations will help the design you buy yield results that are actionable and effective.

Understand your need. Designers are problem solvers, and this worldview has enabled them to move from the world of making objects into the world of defining strategy and influencing consumer behavior. A designer can provide you with beautiful forms, but can also help you frame the problem, understand your consumer, and identify ways forward. The most successful relationships start with intention and truthfulness, with the client assessing exactly what they need from design and then seeking out a partner who fits where they are in the process. Clients who don’t do this waste tremendous capital engaging design firms that specialize in tactical solutions to solve strategic problems, and vice-versa — Arnell famously failed to capture Tropicana’s brand heritage when it took the orange-impaled-by-straw off the carton, and parent company Pepsi was forced to revert to the old packaging.

Engage constantly. Even the most effective design team will eventually get on a plane and go home. You, on the other hand, are in for the long haul. It’s your job to pour what you know into the project and travel with the team: think of it as an equal partnership. The outcomes will only work in the long term if both sides combine their expertise into a rich body of shared experience and understanding. Ziba’s service innovation and retail design work with Umpqua Bank, for example, continues to be relevant and productive years after it was completed, with the bank adding dozens of branches and tens of billions in holdings. This reflects the Umpqua team’s investment during the design process, as well as CEO Ray Davis’s continued efforts to champion its results.

Address your biases. Design can be messy, and it doesn’t pull punches. The design team you partner with will believe you hired them as outside experts, and use this position to push you and challenge assumptions. They may debate or call into question foundational aspects of your business, or propose and discard radical hypotheses in a single conversation. You and your team must prepare to recognize your biases and be willing to break them. Other writers on HBR have delved into the topic of understanding bias extensively in the past, and it’s a critical driver of successful design outcomes. Only this degree of self-awareness, combined with meaningful openness can deliver solutions that are both effective and able to function in your organization.

Understand your capacity to act. A good design partner will push you beyond your comfort zone, in a way that produces amazing, energizing new ideas. Once you’ve reached consensus on which idea to activate, it is critical to push the pause button and honestly assess whether your organization is able to execute the chosen solution. Hopefully, you’ve already done some of this work up front. You should understand the solution’s cultural impact, its technological and operational feasibility, and its viability in your business. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble have written at length on the challenges of execution in their book, The Other Side of Innovation. If your organization cannot execute the solution because it’s unable to make necessary changes, then it’s the solution that needs to be adjusted, at least in the short term. This may frustrate your design partner, but don’t let it be an excuse to back down or walk away. Respect their engagement and effort, and ask them to help you mold the solution into something you can activate.

Successful design outcomes require intentional beginnings, consistent work throughout, and rigorous maintenance following delivery. Don’t expect that simply hiring a design partner will magically unlock new revenue streams and markets. Understand your competencies, set clear goals, and hire a partner whose skills align with your desired success. Design done right will still feel like work, but with intention applied — especially at the beginning of the process — the results should be worth it.

This article was first published in the spring 2013 issue of Design Management Review.

Design, like most creative acts, is a team sport, not a solo one. The talent of the individual is important, as are the tools at her disposal, but the classic image of the lone inventor, slaving away at the drawing board in a silent studio, is thoroughly outdated, if it was ever true in the first place. Even “rock star” designers, celebrated for their unique creative vision, typically work in the company of dozens of collaborators. And all of them can tell you that true creative fire comes from the friction between them, not their individual genius.

This is why the greatest predictor of a design project’s success is not the capability of its team members, but the quality of relationships between them. If the designers, engineers, researchers, managers and clients on a project are able to share ideas openly and react constructively, they’ll do good work. If they’re not, no amount of expertise will save them. This makes collaboration hugely important to creative professionals, and the best way we’ve found to enable it is play.

Although there’s no better collaborative tool, play is widely misunderstood in both the business and design worlds. It’s often dismissed as immature and fruitless, perhaps because we used to play spontaneously as kids. But we did a lot of other things as kids too, like eating, sleeping and showing concern for one another. These are all instinctive, necessary activities, and play is no different. It’s how we worked together as children, to figure out the world around us, and it’s still the best way to figure out unknown things as grown-ups. It’s a pity more adults don’t take it seriously.

Perhaps the best example of creative play in the modern design process is brainstorming, an activity that’s been bread and butter to designers for decades, yet has come under attack in the business press lately. Properly executed, a brainstorm can generate ideas by the dozen, many of which would never otherwise come to light. That makes it as useful in developing a user profile as envisioning a new line of products. A poorly executed brainstorm is a colossal waste of time, filled with long awkward silences, and streams of useless or redundant ideas. Brainstorming is a game, and like any game, it needs rules to be valuable.

Brainstorming is a game, and it needs rules to be valuable.

When we run workshops in the early stages of a new client project, they often center on highly structured brainstorms and other creative games. One of the most common has us presenting our client counterparts with a half-completed customer profile, and asking them to describe a day in that customer’s life. As the session continues, the client has to answer questions and react to situations from the customer’s perspective, even if it means having a 52 year old CEO pretend to be his 15 year old daughter. It’s a ridiculous situation, but that’s part of its value: by placing someone in a slightly uncomfortable position, but within a predictable framework, insights are possible that couldn’t be reached any other way. In the example mentioned here, it generates consumer understanding with very real uses in business planning, but it also opens crucial paths of communication between the CEO, the designers and the client team who will eventually implement the project.

Effective creative play is hard work, and when brainstorms and other games fail to yield good insights, or build open relationships, it’s almost always because the organizers didn’t grasp the complexity of the task. The variety of games that can apply to design problems is endless, but the characteristics that make them effective are very predictable. There are five, in fact, and they must be present, whether it’s a brainstorm, a role play, or something more exotic.

Clear Rules
My first boss, Richard Seymour of London’s Seymour-Powell, was fond of saying “give me the freedom of a tightly defined brief.” He was expressing something that most designers would agree with, that a clear set of guidelines improves creative thinking by giving it focus. This runs counter to the popular notion that creativity needs freedom, but it’s true nonetheless; understanding what is and is not fair game for exploration makes the designer’s job easier and more productive.

My first boss was fond of saying “give me the freedom of a tightly defined brief.”

If a design project is to benefit from creative play, it must start with a useful set of constraints. Defining which technologies it will use is a good place to start, as is knowing the target user and the environment in which it must operate. If I know that a new line of audio equipment is aimed at global urban males in their 20s and 30s, for example, and needs to support social rather than solo listening, I can start generating ideas immediately, rather than getting lost in abstract discussions about the future of music. Brand is a critical constraint too, providing the team with a set of values that their eventual solution must convey.

But beyond just constraining the outcome, the play process itself needs to be well-structured, in a way that provokes creative thought. An “unpacking” exercise is one example of how this works; it’s something we used on a recent toothbrush project for a major health and cosmetics company. The designers had already identified four target user types, and come up with an idealized toothbrush for each of them, highlighting the characteristics they valued: High Performance, Luxurious, Invigorating, Sensual and so on. But the client needed a more flexible design toolkit that would allow them to keep developing the line over the next few years.

So instead of simply discussing the differences between the four directions, we brought in a box full of product and material samples, from corkscrews and pocket knives to scraps of fabric and plastic laminate. Working together with our client counterparts, we matched each toothbrush design with the objects that best reflected its characteristics: its shape, its color and texture, what it’s made of, how it feels in the hand. Then we took the toothbrushes away and assigned each of the samples to one of the user types, resulting in a set of four design toolkits that could be used by designers as they extended the product lines.

The structure of this unpacking process not only allowed us to create a valuable reference tool for the client, it also gave everyone involved a shared language for talking about the project, all the way through to completion. No unstructured conversation or explanatory PowerPoint deck can achieve that kind of result.

Engaging Stimulus
Think about a game you liked to play growing up. Whether it’s chess, Monopoly, poker or something more obscure, chances are it begins with a set of pieces or cards, and possibly a game board. These objects define the edges and actions in the game, and give players something to react to and start manipulating. Contrast this with a bad brainstorm, which has none of those things: typically, it’s just a randomly selected group of people in an empty room, given nothing to react to, and told to come up with some new ideas. The discrepancy between these two situations is the reason why design studios are typically filled with printed images, pages from magazines, material and product samples, and dozens of other seemingly random 2D and 3D props.

Stimulus is necessary because designers rarely design for ourselves, so we need things that help us imagine the world of an unfamiliar user or customer. In the best circumstances we might build out an entire room to mimic the daily experience of the fictional customer, but it’s more likely we’d work on a smaller scale, laying out the contents of her handbag, or constructing a detailed schedule of her day—anything that evokes, at the gut level, what she faces, craves and aspires to.

More than just setting context, stimuli can also push our thinking out of existing ruts.

But more than just setting context, stimuli can also push our thinking out of existing ruts. If we had to design the next generation of diapers, for example, we might bring in a box full of high performance fabrics used in athletic goods. Presented with a material, the human brain is practically obligated to start imagining uses for it, so it’s very likely this will lead to solutions we wouldn’t otherwise find.

Stimulus can also mean finding the right tool for expression. That toothbrush project eventually came to a point where the research was complete and the design language was defined, but we needed to finalize the details. Paper sketching was no longer detailed enough, and 3D CAD was too time-consuming, so we tried something called a “form storm.” A team of Ziba and client designers gathered around a large table, piled with blanks: rough toothbrush-like shapes carved from medium density foam, with very little detail. Taking up rasps, files and razor knives, we started carving different forms into the foam, testing how it felt to grasp them, and how they reflected the attributes we’d already defined. Passing them around the table, we could learn from each other’s models, come up with our own variants, or even start modifying someone else’s work. By the end of the day we had close to a hundred different models: physical shapes we could hold in our hands and have real conversations about. This simply wouldn’t have been possible with a 2D sketch or a CAD model.

We’ve also used stimulus successfully in something we call “the soup can game.” Rather than simply describe an idea for a new product or service, participants are given a soup can with the label removed, and asked to make their own, labeling the can as if it “contained” their new concept. The simplified, benefit-oriented nature of a soup label puts participants in a completely different mindset, giving them an excuse to talk about ideas from a consumer experience point of view, rather than a technical or business one. It works beautifully because it combines an unexpected task with a familiar format: we’ve all bought soup, and we know that the label talks about how it tastes and what’s in it, not the esoteric details of its production.

Uncertain Outcome
Part of what makes a game good is that you don’t know who’s going to win, or how, and this kind of uncertainty is important for designers too. In a brainstorm, you can provide stimulus and constrain the outcome, but you can’t predict it, and you shouldn’t try. Maintaining a suspension of judgement is key: everyone goes into a project with some idea of what the solution will be at the end, and they’re almost always wrong. Keeping the game focused on the goal, without knowing exactly how it will be achieved is a tricky balance to maintain, but it’s what keeps the exploration creative.

Last year we joined bicycle builders from across the country in a design-and-build challenge called Oregon Manifest, which sought to create “the ultimate utility bike.” We were paired with a local bike builder, and given a clear set of criteria: the resulting bike had to carry cargo, offer integrated locks and lighting, and be accessible to a wide range of riders. Yet despite these constraints, over 50 different competitors (including two other top design consultancies, IDEO and Fuseproject) came up with dramatically different results. Fuseproject built a trike, IDEO’s entry had electric assist, and ours featured an innovative folding sidecar for added cargo capacity. One hallmark of a good design game is that it’s structured enough to ensure a valuable outcome, but open enough for endless variation.

Intelligent Leadership
It’s probably clear at this point that “play” in the context of design is a lot more structured than simply doodling on a page. So it should be no surprise that our games usually involve some type of leader. This role incorporates elements of both referee and moderator, and often makes the difference between productive play and an unfocused mess. In the example of the brainstorm, an experienced and capable leader knows that it should be noisy and active, with universal participation, so he works to draw out the reluctant brainstormers (my former boss called this the “no Buddha” rule), and extend contributions with follow-up questions. Brainstorms need to stay focused on a set of goals too, so the leader nudges discussion back to them if it strays too far.

An effective leader also frames up the game, explaining why it’s being played and providing challenge and stimulus throughout the activity. Ziba’s director of Consumer Insights and Trends has a penchant for introducing unexpected stimuli in the middle of a design game, usually to great effect. One of his favorites is called “brand slam”, in which a series of cards with the logos of well-known brands are laid out, face down, then revealed at key moments in a concept exploration. If a team is trying to come up with new ideas for precision power tools, for example, he might turn over a card with a swoosh on it and challenge them to describe a line of tools as designed by Nike. This could be followed by BMW or Audi, then Starbucks or Facebook. None of these exercises will individually yield the perfect final design, but a smart leader can use them as prompts to continually move the creative conversation into new territory, where innovation has a chance to reveal itself.

A Good Game
Despite all of these rules, and the designer’s obsession with functional play, at the end of the day a game still has to be fun. Think of it this way: when are you more likely to communicate openly, and propose an unproven but promising concept—when you’re having fun, or when you’re doing chores? The joy of a good game puts you in an incredibly productive mindset, especially for generating ideas, and it’s the job of any brainstorm or workshop organizer to make that happen.

Last year, Ziba was approached by the plastics company Eastman to conduct a design challenge that explored the possibilities of a new “superhero” material called Tritan. The kickoff was fairly straightforward, with Eastman’s technologists providing a download on the plastic’s exceptional density, glass-like clarity, moldability and so on: the constraints we had to work in. They also provided stimulus, in the form of numerous material samples, and existing products that used it. Then we directed our designers—about 30 people, with backgrounds ranging from industrial design to consumer research to digital interface—to play with these samples, intensely, for the next couple of hours. There was pizza, lots of sketching, and plenty of banging Tritan wine glasses on countertops to test their strength and resilience.

Usually we find clients are open to these activities, and just need the game’s formal structure to provide the opportunity.

Eastman’s technical experts later told us that they saw more new ideas of what to do with their material in those first few hours than in the previous three years they’d spent developing it. The project that came out of that collaboration (a whiskey flask called the Topo) was a dramatic success at showing off the material, but more important, the relationship that it established between Eastman and Ziba continues to this day.

Effective Play is Good Business
The characteristics of good play described here don’t have to be limited to sketch sessions or prototyping exercises, of course. Anywhere better communication and creativity are needed—most business environments, in other words—can benefit from the principles of high-quality play.

Consider the experience of a new employee in your organization. Treating their first few days as a game, with stimuli, constraints, a moderator and an unknown outcome leads to a very different experience than treating it like a course to be completed, or worse, not considering it at all. A structured play approach might turn the employee on-boarding process into a series of discovery tasks, a new kind of employee handbook that requires activity from the new hire, or an officially designated leader whose job it is to present the new hire with people or ideas to respond to, at just the right time.

We’ve also had great success using structured play to foster better communication between different teams within a client organization. Play-oriented workshops feature prominently in the kick-off portion of many Ziba design projects, and feedback from most of our clients indicates that it’s just as valuable for internal sharing as for helping us learn about their strengths and challenges. This can be as simple as getting the marketing, management and engineering teams to work together on a common task, or as involved as challenging executives to run through a day in the life of a customer-facing employee. Usually we find clients are open to such activities—even enthusiastic about them—and just needed the game’s formal structure to provide the opportunity.

The good news is, you don’t need a design agency in order to play. Whether they run a Fortune 100 company or work double shifts on a factory floor, everyone knows how to play, and everyone understands instinctively that we communicate better when we do. Play is how we grew up and how we learned, and given the right environment and a little bit of structure, it’s how we can start solving problems more creatively, right now.

In late 2012, we gathered Ziba’s lead designers, researchers and creative directors together to look back at the year’s most important insights — the crucial discoveries about how consumers behave, technologies change and markets shift. Throughout 2013, we’re sharing one of them each month, through the words and images of the Zibites who know them best.

More than just a means of entertaining ourselves, narrative is how we understand the world and make decisions. Each of us is the leading character in the stories we tell ourselves, and we use these as a framework for organizing the messages we receive. Narrative is also how we remember: a story out of chronological order is nearly impossible to remember, but information that has a beginning, middle and end becomes something we can own, embrace and share.

Start thinking in stories.
2013 is when brands start actively listening to their customers’ stories, and figuring out how they can play a supporting role. It’s also the year they begin to tell their own, linking together their most important messages to form a coherent, memorable whole.

On a hot summer afternoon, a young family is out in a farm field, picking strawberries and placing them carefully onto flats. Their backs are sore and their clothes are stained with sweat, yet they’re happily working away, anticipating the moment when they’ll load their flats into the car and drive away. When it comes time to pay on the way out, they’ll do so happily, despite the fact that they’re spending nearly as much as they would have on identical berries at a supermarket close to home. The U-Pick berry farm where this scene plays out represents a business model that’s been embraced by consumers for decades, but it defies the traditional laws of commerce. Why would anyone choose to do something themselves that a reasonably priced professional could do faster and at far greater convenience?

Convenience was once king, but it’s losing ground to experiences controlled by the customer.

The shift in commercial roles at play here has plenty to teach the business world at large, and lately, the business world has been learning. Whether picking berries, banking, renting a car, or repairing a motorcycle, customers are seeking greater influence in an increasing variety of commercial interactions, even if it means spending more money or dealing with inconvenience. Where convenience and expertise were once king, they’re losing ground to experiences that the customer can control. Organizations that found past success by offering to do our work for us now defend their worth by pointing to specialized abilities, technologies, tools, and information—things they were once the only ones to possess. But as customers gain access to those same tools and information, they’ve become more empowered to close the gaps between themselves and services—gaps that they often see as artificial creations of those companies.

This shift can pose a threat. Companies that are reluctant to redesign the experiences they provide may find customers seizing control, whether they like it or not. Some of the world’s biggest retailers have watched their customers, in just a few years, turn formerly profitable stores into staffed display rooms, browsing electronics and housewares in real life before making their purchases online. The practice of showrooming is now so commonplace that this once novel term has become an integral part of the modern retail lexicon.

4 industries reshaped by self-service.
Other companies see the shift as an opportunity, and take advantage of the fact that customers who wield more influence are also willing to assume more responsibility. Florida-based PODS, for example, transformed the moving and storage business in the early 2000s by offering customers a new kind of service in which they call the shots . . . and take the risks. Before PODS, house moving was largely a company-controlled experience: Customers paid a fortune for full-service movers, or they rented a truck and scrambled to complete the move on their own, within a time frame dictated by the rental agency. PODS disrupted the industry by finding a middle ground, offering to handle the moving, but giving customers control over the process. Now the customer defines an extended window of time for pickup, takes care of the very personal process of packing and securing the contents, and leaves the specialized portion of the move—actually transporting the contents—to the professionals. PODS, in turn, steps back, giving up control of certain activities and placing responsibility for proper packing on the customer. By actively limiting their own role, PODS seized a large part of the moving market, and nearly every other major moving company has followed suit with a similar service.

More established companies have used the opportunity to redefine their role. The utility company San Diego Gas and Electric has spent the last few years transforming its customer relationships into partnerships, where they support subscribers in their quest to reduce their environmental impact. Besides answering billing questions, its call center employees also give advice on how to reduce energy consumption, taking advantage of the wealth of energy usage data they’ve already collected. SDG&E also fosters partnerships with local private companies that can help customers use that data to further improve energy efficiency. The increased staff training and active partner-seeking are both ways in which SDG&E has stepped up, and customers have responded by embracing it with the kind of enthusiasm rarely expressed toward utilities.

By expanding its role from mechanic to coach, motomethod has expanded its customer base.

Car and motorcycle repair was once a stronghold of DIY expertise, with car ownership in the ’50s and ’60s often demanding familiarity with the basics of car mechanics. As motor vehicles have gotten more complex, though, they’ve also tended to discourage owner maintenance—a trend that a small number of mechanic shops have started to push back against, with notable success. MotoMethod, a motorcycle repair shop in Vancouver, BC, now offers repair bays and tools to customers who want to perform their own repairs, as well as advice and diagnostic services by the hour. By expanding its role from mechanic to coach and facilitator, MotoMethod has expanded its customer base and range of offerings, which now include monthly repair-bay memberships. It’s also given customers the option of taking more control over the process, turning a straightforward service interaction into an opportunity to reduce costs, explore a hobby, and learn new skills.

Health care is looking at a similar shift. Traditionally, the doctor was the primary source of health-related information for each patient, but increasingly, health-care companies are empowering patients to find their own answers, by letting them track and review their own test results and connecting them with knowledgeable peers. MyChart, a recently launched web- and phone-based tool, makes it dramatically more convenient for patients to access medical information and communicate with health-care professionals. Along with other transparency-enhancing policies, this technology helps move customers closer to the center of a health conversation in which they were once passive listeners, while encouraging them to take more responsibility for the outcome.

Each of these transformations starts with an acknowledgement that customers want more influence in the interaction, and are savvy enough to exert that influence even if it’s not offered (just ask any victim of showrooming). Where customer relationships were once defined through marketing, today’s customers increasingly demand control over the offerings themselves and may rebel if what they experience doesn’t match what marketing promised. It’s not just a theory—Ziba’s clients regularly ask for service design support as they try to transform these relationships, to ensure that the control they’re granting customers doesn’t sacrifice the quality of their offering, or dissolve the identity they’ve built over the years.

A cultural experiment.
So where do these insights lead companies in the near future? Avis Car Rental’s recent acquisition of Zipcar makes for an excellent test case: a large, well-established company based on a traditional service model, purchasing a smaller, younger company that’s literally handing the keys to its customers. Zipcar may have earned early notoriety for pioneering short-term car rental in North America, but its growth and popularity are much more a result of its customer experience—one that places influence and responsibility in the hands of the consumer.

Most analysts predict one of two things: Either Avis will squash Zipcar’s customer-centered culture, or Zipcar will teach Avis a thing or two about relinquishing control. Many of the small moments that make Zipcar’s experience so great—the transparency of knowing what car you’re getting and at what cost, the ability to book and modify via mobile app, the ease of unlocking and driving away—could easily translate to the traditional rental market. Imagine picking out a car via smartphone while waiting for your luggage, then walking to the rental lot and driving off. There’s no need for long lines, insurance forms, and sales associates trying to upsell you on the spot, and Zipcar is proof.

Most customers are still unsatisfied with their ability to define brand relationships.

A lack of intention is not what holds companies like Avis back. All successful organizations pay attention to customers’ needs, but the revolution in customer control requires more than just addressing their pain points. What’s needed today is a new, brand-specific definition of the customer relationship, based on an honest understanding of their expectations for influence. Customers have never been so empowered to talk—to companies and to each other—and companies have never been so eager to solicit feedback.

But don’t think for a moment that this is sufficient. Through thousands of hours of observation and interviews, we’ve found that most customers are still unsatisfied with their ability to define brand relationships, and that few organizations are committed to meeting this need. The few proactive ones that have—the U-Pick berry farms of tomorrow—are building some of the most robust relationships in the market.

In late 2012, we gathered Ziba’s lead designers, researchers and creative directors together to look back at the year’s most important insights — the crucial discoveries about how consumers behave, technologies change and markets shift. Throughout 2013, we’re sharing one of them each month, through the words and images of the Zibites who know them best.

Freemium pricing models and digital services are detaching the price of things from the cost of producing them. And while this gives companies more leeway in their business models, it raises a question: how do you determine a product’s intrinsic worth? Increasingly, it’s the idea behind the product, and the philosophy of the brand that created it. If two competitors spend equal amounts on production, the one whose ideals resonate with the target market is the more valuable.

Your values are a competitive advantage.

2013 is when mainstream brands start asking serious questions about their philosophy and values. Knowing what you stand for and conveying that to the world is no longer an intellectual exercise for the touchy-feely fringes. It’s a necessity.

In late 2012, we gathered Ziba’s lead designers, researchers and creative directors together to look back at the year’s most important insights — the crucial discoveries about how consumers behave, technologies change and markets shift. Throughout 2013, we’re sharing one of them each month, through the words and images of the Zibites who know them best.

Sales of LP records have quadrupled since 2007. It’s a powerful reminder that convenience isn’t the only thing people care about. Music, like video and telecommunications, reached a digital/analog split long ago, and digital won because it’s cheaper, faster and more convenient. But analog persists, in part because of nostalgia, but also because technologies like film, print and vinyl reflect the people and processes that made them, forming an emotional connection that digital can’t match.

Stop worrying about the contradictions.

2013 will not be the year that analog displaces digital, nor will any other year. But it will be the year when mainstream consumers start to embrace “outdated” technologies along with cutting edge ones. A brand that can seamlessly straddle the divide makes far more sense to them.

In late 2012, we gathered Ziba’s lead designers, researchers and creative directors together to look back at the year’s most important insights — the crucial discoveries about how consumers behave, technologies change and markets shift. Throughout 2013, we’re sharing one of them each month, through the words and images of the Zibites who know them best.

The crucial element in any customer experience is still people, no matter how much technology has transformed the landscape. The sales associate, the courier, the flight attendant or the service agent—in many ways these are your most important, best informed people. The larger an organization, the more it relies on the thousand tiny decisions its front line employees make on a daily basis. And listening to their collected wisdom is more important than ever.

Listen, learn and enable.

Taking full advantage of that ground-level expertise means fostering better communication, and putting resources in the hands of those who face your customers. Technology in 2013 will focus on helping employees do more, more intelligently, and the wisest organizations will invest in this wholeheartedly.

—

In late 2012, we gathered Ziba’s lead designers, researchers and creative directors together to look back at the year’s most important insights — the crucial discoveries about how consumers behave, technologies change and markets shift. Throughout 2013, we’re sharing one of them each month, through the words and images of the Zibites who know them best.

Our understanding of how we decide has evolved dramatically over the past 20 years, and it paints a messy picture. Rather than logical conclusions based on clear needs and preferences, choices are often just the slim visible portion of a rowdy internal struggle, pitting conflicting ideas and beliefs against each other. Even our most certain conclusions turn out to be stories we create after the fact, convincing ourselves that we’ve preferred chocolate to vanilla all along.

Be OK with the chaos.

The smartest organizations in 2013 will embrace this conflict, and acknowledge the complexity in their customers’ minds. This means services that let you be predictable one day and impulsive the next, and products that appeal to values that once seemed in conflict: eco + luxury, traditional + playful, retro + hyper-modern.

We talk a lot about success through innovation, but what about the failures? Motorola was once one of the most innovative and successful technology companies on earth; now they’ve faded into near irrelevance. SONY pioneered and dominated an entire industry, but now struggles to keep step with smaller, less experienced competitors. In both cases, the problem is not a lack of innovation, but the wrong kind of innovation, for the time and the market.

In this 10 minute talk delivered at the 2012 TEDx Orange Coast, Ziba founder Sohrab Vossoughi makes the case for appropriate innovation. In today’s rapidly shifting world, he argues, the most successful companies are those who continually monitor their efforts, to ensure they’re relevant to their market, and well-matched to their own innovation space.

This article was first published on Fast Company’s Co.Design blog.

A fiddler, a mandolin player, and a guitarist meet in a corner of a small pub, exchange some words of greeting and begin to tune and warm up their instruments. After a minute of tentative plucking and a few short riffs, they erupt into performance, playing a complex tune at breakneck speed in nearly perfect synchronization. On the one hand, this is completely unremarkable: just a typical bluegrass jam between experienced musicians who have done this dozens or hundreds of times. On the other, it’s an extraordinary lesson in the kind of effective creative collaboration that has eluded modern business for decades.

Consider what’s going on here. These are three experts with very different creative skills, yet they’re communicating on the fly with total precision. They build on one another’s ideas and pursue a variety of approaches to a theme while trading off leadership and support roles. It’s exactly the sort of interaction large organizations spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to enable in their project teams, often without success. But even more remarkable is that these players have never performed together—or even met—until just now. What they’ve got that most companies don’t is a strong, clearly articulated shared culture, exemplified by a set of universal melodies called standards, some with roots going back centuries. Knowing these tunes is the cost of entry to a jam session, and while it might seem constrictive to build an entire musical genre around just a couple hundred songs, standards allow for incredible flexibility.

So what does a non-musical entity,
like a business, “sound like”?

There’s a growing consensus in both business and design that creative collaboration isn’t just crucial to innovation but a prerequisite to a good customer experience. Publications talk at length about the need to get diverse employees to work together, but they haven’t reached agreement on how it actually happens. For every pundit suggesting constant communication, there’s another espousing the value of private time. Better collaboration might come from more frequent meetings or fewer meetings; from stronger leadership or greater freedom; from mutual support or constructive argument. The result has been an abundance of superficial, ineffective solutions. Companies send employees on team-building exercises to the local rock climbing gym, or trick out offices with foosball and ping-pong tables. But the real answer can be found in developing a corporate culture informed by a set of clear standards.

In bluegrass, the process of learning standards teaches basic information like terminology and structure, and pre-answers hundreds of complex questions about tempo, chord progression, and other matters of sound and style. The guitarist, fiddler, and mandolinist above are able to skip the preliminaries and jump straight into creative exploration, relying on their sophisticated shared understanding. All three of them know what it’s supposed to sound like, which frees them to explore what it could sound like.

So what does a non-musical entity, like a business, “sound like”?

Companies like Costco, Patagonia, and Virgin Atlantic are famous for the distinct, integrated brand experiences they offer, winning the loyalty of customers. But a firm that tries to emulate Costco’s business model, for example, or Virgin’s cheeky marketing tone, is missing the point entirely. It’s as if a classical guitarist tried to play bluegrass by donning a cowboy hat and re-tuning her guitar.

The obstacles to smart collaboration
tend to fall away once everyone shares
a precise understanding of what they’re trying to achieve.

Costco is able to offer an integrated experience, largely because of the internal collaboration that its shared culture enables. Costco’s “standards” include its famous 14% rule (no product is marked up more than 14% over wholesale) and its whimsical pairings of high- and low-end products (Cartier watches alongside ten-pound bags of snack mix). For employees, learning about them teaches a clear set of values: deliver unparalleled quality to customer and always treat them fairly. Maintain a sense of humor and play. Fulfill emotional needs as well as pragmatic ones. This enables collaboration by getting preliminary questions out of the way. When everyone knows that fairness is paramount, it’s not a subject of debate. The chord progressions in Bill Monroe’s classic “Blue Moon of Kentucky” aren’t up for debate, either, and that lets our three musicians get on with the serious business of playing it well.

Patagonia’s standards include an embrace of solo outdoor sports and an unflinching dedication to environmentalism. To the customer, this manifests in the photography and copy in Patagonia’s ads, catalogs, and stores, and in unique initiatives like its “Buy Less” campaign on Black Friday, and the Common Threads program, aimed at helping customers buy and sell their used apparel. Bold actions like these set the brand apart, but implementing them depends on a lot of people agreeing on some risky ideas. When they’re bound by a shared culture, though, reaching that agreement is far more possible. This is more than just a mission statement. It’s a set of values that have been established so firmly for so long that they aren’t even a topic of discussion. They simply are.

Conversations go very differently in an organization that has defined its culture that well. The obstacles to smart collaboration—incongruous assumptions, excessive vagueness, endless pre-meetings to “get everyone on the same page”—tend to fall away once everyone shares a precise understanding of what they’re trying to achieve. They enjoy the luxury of having faith in one another’s motives and knowledge, which reduces wariness and streamlines communication.

The difficulty, of course, is finding the courage to be that precise.

For an organization that’s repeatedly failed in its attempts at more effective collaboration, it may be time to look more closely at why the company exists in the first place. What is it trying to achieve, beyond just making money? What do most employees already agree is valuable, beyond just getting the job done? What, in other words, does it sound like? And once some clear decisions have been made (and lesser alternatives abandoned), how is that culture communicated to every employee, every single day?

The difficulty, of course, is finding the courage to be that precise. Bluegrass arose because a handful of musicians in the 1940s adapted shared threads of traditional Appalachian music to fit a new style of playing. It was an act of creative leadership but also of close listening and deep familiarity—musical styles don’t form in a vacuum and neither does culture. Whether musical or organizational, shared culture cannot be invented and imposed.

It must first be learned, augmented, and distilled, and that takes a form of leadership that’s rare in large organizations. Corporate leaders tend to compare themselves to teachers, military commanders, or, yes, conductors. And they’re not wrong, but they are missing a crucial component. If creative collaboration is important to what a company does, then the leaders have to do more than lead. They also have to know how to play.

—

This article was first published on Fast Company’s Co.Design blog with the title How Companies Like Amazon Use Big Data to Make You Love Them .

Last month, I talked to Amazon customer service about my malfunctioning Kindle, and it was great. Thirty seconds after putting in a service request on Amazon’s website, my phone rang, and the woman on the other end—let’s call her Barbara—greeted me by name and said, “I understand that you have a problem with your Kindle.” We resolved my problem in under two minutes, we got to skip the part where I carefully spell out my last name and address, and she didn’t try to upsell me on anything. After nearly a decade of ordering stuff from Amazon, I never loved the company as much as I did at that moment.

I’d never loved the company as much
as I did at that moment.

Remember, this was a customer-service call, so I was fully prepared for it to suck. Like most American consumers, my experience with service interactions is largely negative, whether it’s on the phone, in the murky depths of a commerce site, or in the aisles of an electronics store. I’m accustomed to the company being in control, and for our communication to be cold, scripted, and inhumane. Barbara’s congenial but no-nonsense approach was part of what made this experience different, but more important, she had access to exactly the right data about me, and that made the favorable exchange possible. The fact is, Amazon has been collecting my information for years—not just addresses and payment information but the identity of everything I’ve ever bought or even looked at. And while dozens of other companies do that, too, Amazon’s doing something remarkable with theirs. They’re using that data to build our relationship.

The most useful data set in the world.
Big Data has gotten a lot of attention over the past 18 months as retail, manufacturing, and technology companies realize the gold mines they’re sitting on and rush to scour them for competitive advantage. Nearly all of this discussion, though, revolves around consumer trends, marketing guidance, new product planning, and other market-level insights. When McKinsey wrote its omnibus report on Big Data last year, the consulting company identified five different ways it can be used to create value, but only one of those methods mentions customers at all, and then only in terms of improved segmentation. The Wall Street Journal outlines several business success stories in its Big Data blog series, but it focuses almost entirely on smarter market visualization, better process maps, and other efficiency enhancers. Efficiency is a worthwhile goal, but from a customer’s perspective, data has far more power at the personal level.

Perhaps the only business and marketing topic that’s been talked about more than Big Data recently is the evolution of brand relationships into two-way conversations. Now that consumers have seen what social media and mass customization are capable of, they increasingly expect this kind of personalization in their communication with favored brands, not just a passive role absorbing marketing messages. Combine this insight with the rise of Big Data, and you have a clear mandate: In order for interactions to feel individualized and human, they must be well informed. That makes data about the customer you’re talking to right now the most useful data of all.

In order for interactions to feel individualized and human, they must
be well informed.

Technically, this is hard to do. Amazon has grown large while staying fairly consistent as an organization, but most big companies got big through acquisition, and that makes synchronizing data a massive chore. Getting targeted information in front of the person who’s dealing with an individual customer, or designing for one, is still a low priority. Customer service in its various forms is still treated as an expense to be minimized, not an opportunity to be developed.

Service designers know that the opposite is true. When a customer calls the support number, sends an email, or talks to a store employee, he is initiating a conversation. You have his undivided attention, even if he’s annoyed, and that makes it a crucial brand-defining moment. He’s hoping for a conversation, but bracing for an ordeal. He knows you’ve collected information on him for your own purposes and wondering why you don’t do something useful with it. Not useful to you—useful to him.

Synchronized data is worth the expense because it’s a hallmark of human interactions. If I talk to a friend and they keep asking me for information I know they already have, I have a right to get irritated. In the age of Big Data, I hold brands to the same standards. The few that meet those standards earn my trust and loyalty. But if you’re hoping to use personal data successfully, there are a few things you have to get right.

1. Give your employees the right tools.
I have no idea what Barbara was looking at on her screen when she called me up, but it gave her the information she needed about me in a matter of seconds. Someone designed the tool that delivered it and made sure she had access to it. Despite your internal divisions, I as a customer have only one relationship with your brand, and it has to be seamless. That’s what makes information tools so vital. They transfer data that’s been collected automatically or through form-filling into the personal realm, allowing us to get the awkward, impersonal, corporate conversation out of the way, and make way for the human one. The rise of portable platforms makes this possible for designers and store employees, too, not just the headset-wearing call-center folks.

2. Let the customer know you know. Then listen.
When I meet an old acquaintance at a party, she remembers my name and asks one or two questions about things we discussed last time we spoke. The fact that she remembers establishes rapport; the fact that she doesn’t list out every bit of information she possesses makes me feel comfortable. Without even thinking about it, humans are very good at conveying just the right amount of information in personal conversation.

Companies need to do the same. When I spoke with Barbara at Amazon, she had access to plenty of data, but only referenced what was necessary, starting with my name and the problem I was trying to solve. It quickly disarmed my self-defense instinct and made me comfortable referencing facts we knew in common but hadn’t explicitly stated. “Can you send it to the Northeast Ninth Avenue address?” I asked when we got to shipping options, even though I hadn’t asked if she had it on file. “Sure,” she said, and I smiled.

In the future, customers will expect these sorts of interactions.

3. Give the customer a sense of control.
Many of us have read the story of Target’s uncanny ability to recognize a customer’s pregnancy based on her purchasing habits. At first frightening, this revelation sounds reasonable on further review, but no less creepy. Target quickly learned to get nuanced about using this insight. To avoid upsetting these customers (and their parents), they now send them flyers customized to include just a few coupons for prenatal necessities, mixed in with a random assortment of others.

That’s a partial solution at best. In the future, smart retailers will be more transparent about their data-gathering efforts and use the results more appropriately. They’ll give customers more options for controlling how much they share and how that information gets applied. Regardless of who gathered it, customers still see it as their data. They expect to be treated like the owners.

The power of being known.
There’s a quiet race going on right now among brands to form customer relationships that earn loyalty in the face of increasing competition, and personal data is the surest way there. Brands like Zappos, Netflix, and Amazon are already showing the power of such an approach. Not only does smart data use empower you to treat customers as individuals, it does so without invoking many of the fixed expenses associated with improved service. Good data support doesn’t require a vastly expanded workforce, or even a new type of employee—these are conversations that people already know how to have.

But imagine the benefits if you get it right. An auto mechanic who’s smart about data could tell you that your fan belt is due for a change in 2,500 miles and suggest doing it today to save future labor costs. An airline that knows more than just your frequent flier number could propose a seat based on your past selections, offer discounted upgrades tailored to your preferences, and let flight attendants know you prefer tomato juice to orange juice in the morning—even if you’re just flying coach. If they’re really paying attention, they could even learn whether or not to offer you an upsell, and in which categories to do it.

As long as they’re given transparency and control, consumers are becoming quite comfortable with these kinds of interactions. In the future, they’ll expect them. When that happens, the question won’t be “How much do you know about me?” but “What are you going to do with what you’ve found?”

—

This article was first published on Fast Company’s Co.Design blog, under the title 3 Things Every Company Can Do to Stay Off Customers’ Sh*t Lists.

My sister-in-law maintains a list on her smartphone of companies she vows never to patronize again. She calls it her “shit list.” It includes big national brands and small local companies, and spans restaurants, hotels, Internet providers, airlines, retailers—practically any business with a service component. And she’s not alone. Practically everyone has a shit list of some sort, whether mental or recorded, and the incidents that get companies onto these lists have one thing in common: They’re nearly always preventable.

Research shows that replacing a dissatisfied customer costs six to seven times as much as retaining a satisfied one, yet many companies have elaborate justifications for continuing to irritate their customers in defiance of economic logic. Instead of taking advantage of the potential for increased profit by keeping customers happy, they maintain a “leaky bucket” approach, spending endlessly to replace those that leave.

Replacing a dissatisfied customer costs six to seven times as much as retaining a satisfied one.

The shit list isn’t going away. In fact, consumer expectations are making it easier to land there than ever. We’ve come to expect all of our in-store shopping to be as intuitive as the Apple Store, our information searches to be as easy and relevant as Google, our customer service to be as responsive as Zappos, and our technology interactions to be as seamless as Zipcar. Part of this is because modern consumers interact with so many services in such rapid succession. If you’re traveling, you might pass through the hands of a dozen service providers in just a few hours, including airline, airport, rental car company, Yelp, restaurant, hotel, credit-card company, and Facebook. This proximity prompts continual comparison.

The rise of startups and the freemium model—by which basic services are offered for free—is also pushing expectations. New entrants into the service marketplace, encouraged by the plummeting cost of starting a business (especially online), are exposing customers to more options at little or no cost, raising the bar for every service within a category. If a major player is getting part of their service experience wrong, you can virtually guarantee that a smaller one will come along to fix it for them.

We don’t compare our blender with our iPad, but we’re happy to compare our health care provider with a hotel chain.

At the other end of the spectrum, large companies have gotten better at incorporating multiple services into a single platform. Expedia lets you book flights, hotels, cars, transfers, and entertainment from a single interface. Facebook can be used for everything from instant messaging and photo sharing to business promotion and event planning. But the consumer’s expectations of service quality are tied to the platform, not the service: If I buy a game or product through Facebook, I still expect the experience to feel like Facebook.

We don’t typically compare our blender with our iPad, but we’re quite happy to compare our health care provider with a hotel chain. Services from different sectors increasingly compete in our minds: “My gym should offer a mileage program like an airline,” we think, or, “This airline should offer a personal progress app like my gym.” As we jump from one to another, the company that fails to reach this newly raised bar stands out, making good service design the crucial defense against the shit list.

Staying off of it doesn’t have to mean beating the world’s greatest service providers. But brands that earn loyalty and love through services tend to take the following approach:

Acknowledge A Bigger Universe Of Competitors
Your customers engage with dozens of services, and the more you know about them, the better. You can assume that your website, for example, is being compared with aspects of Amazon, Google, Facebook, iTunes, and a major travel website at the very least. You should evaluate your service touchpoints with this in mind—your customers certainly are.

Seek Out Comparable Experiences
Beyond the immediate service portfolio, it’s also important to find services that address the same customer needs as yours does. What’s your real value to users? Security? Flexibility? Personalization? You need to start looking at services that deliver those experiences well, even if they’re in a market sector far removed from your own.

Blur The Lines
Just as customers are applying expectations from other categories, you’re allowed to look outside for ideas, too. Some of the greatest service innovations come not from inventing something new but applying principles from successful players in an unrelated category. The key to making this work—and one of a service designer’s most crucial tasks—is to spot similarities in service expectations despite category differences, and translate the successful approach to a new context.

In practice, this “creative theft” approach requires both innovation and adaptation. AirBnB transformed the vacation home rental market, first by providing a better user experience for renters, then helping to turn homeowners into better small entrepreneurs. eBay had done something similar a few years earlier through its University Learning Center, turning casual sellers into smart businesspeople by posting videos and tutorials on everything from shipping logistics to writing product descriptions.

On a flattened playing field, customers expect service innovation as well as delivery.

AirBnB’s sister site, tv.airbnb.com, provides a service similar to the ULC, but in a way that’s relevant to its unique user base. The word choice in each tutorial, the topics that are covered, and even the lighting and cropping of the videos all “feel” like AirBnB, making the service both innovative and approachable. It also links property owners to one another, to share tips and information, and deepen the community that’s become one of AirBnB’s most valuable assets.

If you know your customers’ expectations are being shaped by another category (or provider), then it’s time to start borrowing, heavily and without shame. But it’s also time to sweat out the details—to figure out how to fulfill those expectations in a way that customers will embrace. On a flattened playing field with a multitude of players, customers expect service innovation as well as delivery. To stay off the shit list, you have to deliver both.

This article was first published on the CMO Network section of Forbes.com. The original can be seen here.

In these times of mass customization, it seems unlikely that any consumer group could still be underserved, yet in many ways, the very largest one—women—still is. Besides constituting 51% of the global population, women make a majority of purchasing decisions in many categories. But for many planners, marketers and designers, they remain an elusive target market.

It’s not for lack of trying. Countless brands and sub-brands are focused on appealing to women, offering far more than the “shrink it and pink it” version of men’s products common in years past. Yet many are rejected, not because they aren’t different enough, but because they come across as poorly considered, disingenuous, or unaware of women’s distinct needs. The companies are perceived as “gender-washing”, much like the “green-washing” that has eco-conscious consumers up in arms.

HTC’s attempt at an Android phone for women is a good example. The shimmery purple smartphone, called the Rhyme, comes bundled with a set of purse-specific accessories. Its styling and functions attempt to address female-specific needs, but they also characterize women as less tech-savvy.

“What, are women not SMART enough for a regular phone?” responded one incredulous blogger. Another criticized it for pushing “…stereotypes painting women as ditzes who need a sparkling light to find their phone underneath tubes of lipstick.”

Asking people to own an item that identifies them with a gender characterization is not the way to loyalty and love. But neither is ignoring those differences. How do brands reconcile this tension? A few recent successes offer some possibilities.

1. Blur the Lines.
The film “Bridesmaids” starred six women who don’t talk exclusively about men, and aren’t always portrayed as attractive. In so doing, it broke the rule stating that men like comedies with dirty language and embarrassing losers, and women like romantic mishaps. This in-between space appealed to both women and men, grossing 290 million dollars to-date — a record for its franchise.

For brands, a similar philosophy can manifest as “radical neutrality.” By not considering a specific gender at all, but leading instead through a distinct lifestyle philosophy, brands like Ikea, Apple and Zipcar have found tremendous success. None of these companies could easily be defined as “for women” or “for men,” giving them lasting appeal.

2. Consider gender-specific contexts and perceptions.
Hotel group ITC recently expanded their “Eva Exclusively Women” service in India. It designs specific levels of its hotels to be safe and supportive for women travellers, particularly those from Muslim countries who might not be comfortable with male staff and neighbors. Instead of asking, “What do women like?” ITC considered how women’s perspectives affect their needs, encouraging women to travel independently, and adding significantly to their customer base.

By contrast, Altec Lansing’s “jewelry-like” Bliss Earbuds received reviews as negative as the HTC Rhyme’s. Instead of merely considering fit and visual, they might have considered how women act while wearing them. Women often have unique concerns about personal safety or socialization — a running partner of mine lets one earbud dangle when we run, for example. Such insights can inspire innovative solutions.

3. Remember that feminine tomorrow is different from today.
In 2007, Harley Davidson decided to reach out to women and bring in new riders. Unlike other companies which pushed less powerful bikes in hopes of seeming less intimidating, Harley focused on education. They began hosting “Garage Parties” for women to gather and learn about bikes. Harley built it, and women continue to come and learn.

4. Be bold.
In February 2010, Old Spice launched a bold advertising campaign, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” The main character speaks directly to women, making fun of men’s lack of “true” masculinity as well as women’s stereotypical romantic desires. By taking gender by the horns, it made both groups swoon: a product for men with a voice for all.

It’s an encouraging example of a future in which gender unites rather than divides us, and consumers’ level of gender identification is a matter of personal choice. It might feel scary to step beyond stereotypical gender territory, but it can inspire a new world of product and services: if Old Spice designed a product for women, what might that look like?

The quality of Ziba’s work is only as good as the designers that take it on, which is why design directors like Paul Backett pay such close attention to design schools. The fact is, design education varies tremendously from country to country, and from program to program, with many schools producing graduates without the ability to hit the ground running, and unable to create and innovate effectively.

In this seven part series written for online design magazine Core77 Backett discusses these lapses from the perspective of someone who constantly reviews the portfolios of recent graduates. Each part outlines a set of fundamental skills that Industrial Design courses need to teach, with clear examples of each, and proposals on how to adjust programs to make that happen. The series culminates in a survey of top design programs, explaining what makes each of them special, and the hope they offer for bringing ID education up to the level demanded by today’s most innovative companies.

Introduction: Teach Less, Integrate More
What should design schools teach? Or, more important, what should design students make sure they learn? Trends in the design field shift and evolve with incredible speed, and while schools have an obligation to stay current, they do their students a disservice when they completely overhaul their program to reflect the current vogue.

Research: Learning Extreme Empathy
Great designers are great empathizers. Design schools need to teach the difficult skill of taking on the perspective of someone completely unfamiliar, and incorporating that perspective into a design.

Sketching: Approaching the Paper with Purpose
The ability to rapidly express ideas using sketching is essential; it’s also the indispensable exploration and development tool. But as it stands, design students are mostly sketching without purpose.

Prototyping: Learning to Think and Make with Your Hands
Comfort with 3D representation as a sketching tool as well as a way of understanding form and construction. But over-reliance on digital modeling means we’re having students jump to 3D before they understand form and construction.

Collaboration: No Rockstars, Please
Students are graded individually and therefore have to travel the design process on their own. This never happens in the professional world. Learning the skills of teamwork is essential, but under-emphasized in most design programs.

Presentation: The Three Stories Every Designer Must Tell
A good design that’s poorly presented is dead. Students should graduate with dozens or hundreds of presentations under their belts, both designer- and client-oriented.

Conclusion: Designing the Ideal Industrial Design Program
A sampling of Industrial Design programs that are getting it right.

On September 23rd, a team of Ziba’s designers and engineers unveiled a unique bicycle that they’ve been working on for the past six months, in collaboration with nationally renowned frame builders Signal Cycles. The bike, named The Fremont, is the team’s response to a challenge issued by Oregon Manifest, a competition and exhibition seeking the ultimate utility bike.

The Fremont is a practical vehicle that lets regular people get around town and take care of everyday tasks without a car. It’s also a tremendously innovative one, with a unique semi-stepthrough frame, detachable sidecar and integrated cargo bags. Individually, these innovations pose new answers to some old objections about bikes as practical vehicles; together, they’re simply a beautiful piece of transport. The story of how Ziba and Signal rose to the challenge is chronicled in a series of monthly posts, images and videos on design website Core77. An excerpt from September is below.

Ziba: When we started 9 months ago, we really did not know what to expect. At Ziba, we’re used to our projects being meticulously planned down to the last hour and deliverable. This project gave us unprecedented freedom and autonomy, which had its up and downs. On one hand, we were able to take the project to creative heights that we are incredibly excited about. The story of the bike—The New West, the Urban Explorer, and Fremont—manifested itself in a final bike that each of us wish we could own.

On the other hand, a creative blank canvas meant a lot of work. A lot more work than we imagined it to be. When you look at the final product, we hope you see the beautiful craftsmanship, the attention to detail, and just a generally cool bike. But inextricably, we look at it and see late nights spent refining the sidecar, or Saturdays spent fabricating an LED light housing.

Don’t mistake this for regret. Honestly, this bike became something more than work for us. We put in the time because this project was something we genuinely believed in from the start, and that we grew to love as it came to life…

Read the full diary on Core77, and see the results of an early brainstorm from the entire Ziba team in this video.

“Once we were able to understand why the boombox failed in the late ’80s, we were able to understand how we should reinterpret it for today.”

Last year, Ziba designed a line of products for TDK Life on Record, reconnecting the brand to its roots in the love of music. At the center of the line is an exuberant, unapologetic 3 Speaker Boombox. Physically huge and weighing in at 32 pounds, it’s everything a boombox should be: big, solid and demanding of attention. Creative Director Paul O’Connor speaks about the genesis and the process of creating the 3 Speaker Boombox and why it was so important to make it this ‘loud’.

Read more about the line of TDK products in our case study.

In addition to the wide range of work we do for clients, Ziba’s designers often take on side projects for charities and other local non-profits. Our studio culture actively encourages these types of projects, not only as a way to give back to the Portland community that’s supported Ziba’s growth over the years, but also as an opportunity to find inspiration and expand professional boundaries.

Industrial designer Hannah May recently collaborated with materials specialist Jaclyn Kampmeier on one such project, designing and producing an innovative custom shoulder bag for Power of the Purse, a local charity event. More than just a hobby exercise, May used this project to stretch into a medium she rarely encounters in client work — soft goods — and to experiment with alternate design approaches. By involving Kampmeier from the project’s outset, the pair made material exploration an integral part of design exploration. By working directly with experienced craftsmen to build and revise prototypes, they were able to rapidly assess and improve concepts.

In the end, this collaboration produced a bag that’s highly functional as well as responsive to its target user, and reinforced several insights about the design processes that have influenced Ziba’s client work in powerful and positive ways: the value of outside perspectives, the importance of gaining client trust, and the role materials can play in design strategy.

Hannah was able to sit down for an hour and answer a few questions about her experience, and its surprising results. The ensuing interview reveals just how useful it can be for a designer to move outside her comfort zone.

To begin with, what is the Power of the Purse event?
It’s a charity event for Girls Inc, a non-profit that runs after-school programs for underprivileged girls in Portland. It pairs 14 local celebrities with designers to create a purse or bag that is auctioned off at their annual event. They raise enough money in that one night to fund the organization for the entire year.

It’s also a chance for local designers to showcase what they can do. We were actually the only ones in it who weren’t professional bag makers.

Were you nervous because of that?
Oh definitely! We were starting from scratch. I mean, we can design a great purse, but then you have to actually go and execute it. It was a good thing we’d really put our heart and soul into this, because we were up against a group of very talented craftsmen.

What we had going for us was a unique perspective — two of them actually. Neither of us are bag makers, but I’m a designer and Jaclyn’s a materials expert, and the interplay between us exposed a lot of possibilities that a craftsman might not see. We’re used to exploring many concepts through sketching and mock-ups, for example, so we probably weren’t as stuck on a particular material or process as a traditional fabricator might be.

It also gave us the opportunity to develop the material palettes alongside the sketching, so they went hand in hand rather than slapping a palette onto a design at the end. Knowing what materials do and don’t work helps you get to a workable solution much faster.

Was this kind of collaboration, between a designer and a materials specialist, unusual?
Not really. Teams at Ziba tend to be really collaborative, though this was more so than usual — Jaclyn was in on the process from day one. It ended up being so successful that we’re now actively taking the same approach in some of our other projects. It kind of flips the process on its head, and lets materials possibilities push the designs a little, instead of just the other way around. For our long-term vision work, we’re starting to offer clients more materials palettes alongside the graphic and experiential concepts. This really helps them push through to implementation, which is what we all want, ideally.

Tell me about the local celebrity you were designing for.
Her name is Jenn Louis, and she’s the head chef at Lincoln, a really wonderful restaurant here in Portland. She also owns Sunshine Tavern and Culinary Artistry. She’s been in the Portland food scene for 10 or 15 years and has received quite a few writeups and awards, including a James Beard semifinalist nomination. She’s very down-to-business, very honest, but a little quirky too — she showed up to the first meeting dressed in all black, with dyed purple hair. So right away we knew there was going to be a balance to strike between minimalism and play. And the first two things she told us about her needs in a purse were “I’m not trendy,” and “I don’t like purses.”

One of the most interesting parts of that initial meeting was when we had her open up her messenger bag. It was all black too, and really beat up, but when she opened it, it was entirely lined in bright orange. And then she pulled out this clutch. She doesn’t like purses, but she keeps her laptop in a kind of messenger bag, and a clutch inside that. That got us thinking about a transformable or expandable bag, that could serve as both.

We did some research on tablets and laptops, and realized pretty quickly that they’re getting so small that the dedicated laptop bag is starting to disappear. Jenn goes all over town taking care of business and setting up new locations, so her bag really is her mobile office; that gave us a lot of different requirements to fill. We ended up with this great tension between function and emotion that’s very familiar to us from other projects.

How do you get from there to refining it into the actual design?
One useful thing we did was to bring out boxes from our materials library, for her to look at and feel. There were a few things that just made her go “Oooh! That’s really exciting.” Unexpected things too: carpet, corduroy, felts, this tubular fabric that’s kind of like a sea anemone. We had to filter for scale a little bit — not everything that’s nice in a swatch is nice on a large scale — but we ended up with this array of Post-It notes covered in guiding ideas from the questions and the materials research. We also did some trends research.

Even though she told you she’s not trendy?
Well, everyone’s influenced by trends at some point, whether they say so or not. Jenn is obviously not about fads or quick-moving fashion, but we did show her some longer-term movements that seemed applicable, and she was completely on board.

One trend we’d been noticing in a lot of places, even the Milan runways, is this almost literal mix of past, present and future, and it shows up pretty strongly in the bag. The past is in these heritage details, the present is in updating it with newer materials and unconventional connections. The future is really expressed in the size of the bag; it needs to accommodate a laptop, but they’re getting so small, and that gives you a shape and size that’s very modern.

Why do you think Jenn trusted you so much in making these decisions? She didn’t even know you that well!
I think we did a good job of showing our process and involving her. We have clients who want us to walk them through every step, and rationalize each decision to get them on board, so we used that same approach with Jenn. We went to her kitchen, we explained every step we’d taken, we used her perceptions as a lens for choosing materials and design direction.

By the time we laid out the materials board and concepts on table, she said, "Any of this! It’s all me!” I think she felt she’d been listened to, and that made a huge difference in building trust. There’s always this fear that the designers are going to put too much of their own input in, and ignore your needs, but we had a good compromise between listening and proposing new ideas that she was comfortable with.

We also made a point of bringing her into Ziba and showing her our environment. She’s a creative mind herself, so she really loved it — so much that she called us later that day and invited us to happy hour at her restaurant so we could see the environment she lives in, and watch her interacting with other people. She’s quite the entertainer. It was great for establishing balance, and it also gave us a chance to see the materials in her space: a lot of reclaimed wood, tables made of old chicken coops, a neutral to dark palette of colors, but with this very bold, very expressive red painting of a rooster. It was old and rustic, but also very refined. That ended up being a great source of ideas for the bag.

How long did you spend in sketch development after you’d gone through this discussion with Jenn?
Probably a week, on our own free time. We did a lot of quick sketching while she was here, and did some magazine tears and reviews of existing bags. It was very fast, and let us narrow down to two good concepts within a few days. The first one used this reclaimed pot handle and a lot of metal hardware, which was ultimately a little too crafty and DIY for Jenn’s style. The concept we ended up going with was more textural, with felt and leather and waxed canvas, that she really gravitated to.

We ended up spending several days in the shop, trying to wax our own canvas, along with a few other things like cork and old scraps of suit pants. It taught us, first of all, that you definitely want to buy waxed canvas rather than make it yourself, but we also learned that you can maintain it yourself, and it’s fairly painless. Everyone understands that leather wears in and becomes more personal and gets better, and waxed canvas does too, at an accelerated rate. But you can take a hair dryer to it and it looks like new.

There’s only one place in town to get waxed canvas, really, and the guy who runs it also makes his own bags. Just visiting his shop for 45 minutes and looking at the materials and how he uses them taught us a huge amount about what was possible.

Were you doing all this exploration while you were working with the craftsman who ended up making the bag?
No, this was before, because we wanted to go to him with a solid list of materials. His name is Larry Olmstead, and he’s been doing leather and bags for over 20 years with his company, Entermodal. His shop is just down the street from Ziba, so we were able to go in and watch him work and talk with customers. As a designer, it was quite inspiring to see a craftsman who does this for a living. He has a really high standard for his materials, and his bags are very simple, to showcase their quality.

Was he skeptical about being approached for this project?
No, he was totally happy to talk through all these different ideas we had, for shapes and details and experimental connections. The bag concept calls for it to fold from full length to half, so we had to figure that out together. We looked at snaps, belt loops, little magnets, and his expertise was incredibly useful in sorting out the most promising ideas. It was also a real education on how to detail a bag, and the properties of different materials. It’s amazing how many different ways there are for finishing things, even a pocket.

We went there the first time with some sketches and some rough 3-D mockups, and he took a look and said, “OK, let’s do this.” We’d planned on just having a quick meeting, but by the end of the hour he had knocked out a prototype, and encouraged us to take it back to the shop and mess around with it. It was so helpful for figuring out proportions and size, picking the specific materials, locating details and color pops. Things we never could have gotten right otherwise.

How successful was the bag?
Well, Jenn didn’t buy it herself, but that’s usually the case. What we did get were a lot of other people at the auction saying, “Oh, I’d actually use that!” Not that there weren’t a lot of great bags, but most of them tended to be more like art pieces, or special occasion bags. I think this was one of the few that really put a premium on function. We got several emails from people who worked at Power of the Purse, letting us know that they’d been bidding on it. It sold for $1,200 in the end, which is pretty good. We also had a lot of people saying the bag looked very “Portland,” and Jenn is pretty Portland herself, so I take that as a win.

What would you have done differently?
Now that we’ve seen the art that Larry puts into his bags, and the beauty of a more simplified design, I think we might do something more pared down next time, with fewer details and more focus on the material. I mean, we tried to do a lot with this bag: it was convertible, it had three different pockets, it had a strap whose length had to change from long to short. So it would be cool to try and challenge ourselves to do something ultra simple.

Or alternately, taking it to a different extreme by working with Jaclyn’s material expertise from even earlier on. It’d be interesting to work more closely with raw materials suppliers, and come up with a combination that really pushes the edges of what a bag can be. That adds a whole level of complexity, so maybe we’ll try that the second time around.

Would you do it again?
Oh, definitely! It’s funny because now we’re helping out with a bike bag for the Oregon Manifest project, and the other designers are throwing out all these ideas: “Folding origami bag! Collapsing bag!” And we’re like “Hmmm, we’ll see…”

It’s very different when you have to produce it yourself, instead of shipping it off somewhere. We deal with mass production every day, so there’s something magical, and really insightful, about actually seeing every stitch.

With the recent rush of electronics makers hoping to replicate Apple’s success with the iPad, there are now dozens of tablets on the market, performing an ever expanding range of tasks. A recent article by Ziba Creative Director Ryan Coulter points out some surprising ways in which this new platform is fundamentally different from its predecessors, the smartphone and laptop, and how its adoption will radically change the function of both.

Unlike smartphones and laptops, which replaced analog phones, typewriters
and filing cabinets, the tablet is pure abstraction — the love-child of two
digital devices.

Let’s call 2011 the year of the tablet. In the last several months, virtually every major electronics manufacturer has introduced a hopeful competitor to Apple’s iPad, and the aisles at January’s International Consumer Electronics Show were crammed with dozens of variations on the rounded rectangle.

But the idea of a portable touchscreen computing device is nothing new. You know that thing you sign when you get a package from UPS? The touchscreen tablet with a card reader that speeds you through checkout at the supermarket? Those are tablets, too. The Kindle and the Nook? Tablets, albeit very specialized ones.

So why are they popping into the foreground now? For one thing, technology. Improved flash memory, cheaper high-quality displays, more accurate touchscreens, and faster processors are converging to give us unprecedented computing function with few moving parts. Low power requirements are making technology more portable. Furthermore, the ability to stream movies and other content without actually using any memory makes the tablet the ideal mobile media-consumption platform. You don’t have to be an early adopter to see its appeal.

But the most interesting thing about the current fervor is that the tablet is one of the only consumer electronic devices with no analog predecessor. Unlike smartphones and laptops, which replaced analog phones, typewriters, and filing cabinets, the tablet is pure digital abstraction — the love-child of two digital devices. The clay tablets of biblical times were primarily designed to create content, not consume it, but the digital tablet’s onscreen keyboard barely functions. It’s no replacement for a paper notebook and sketchbook, but it’s a trade-off we accept. So why do we need a new product in our digital lives that only consumes?

Read the entire article at Fast Company Design.

I was born in 1985, which makes me 25 today. On paper, I’m an adult. I have a career-oriented job. I rent my own apartment and I pay for my own car insurance. But every once in awhile, usually while playing “just one more” mission in Mass Effect 2 late at night, I have a hard time accepting that my peers, a group of people like me, has begun the process of inheriting the world.

I have a hard time accepting that my peers, a group of people like me, has begun the process of inheriting the world.

There is no shortage of literature about my generation. Gen Y, the Millenials, Gen Me — whatever moniker we’ve earned, it seems like every other business analyst or cultural expert has an opinion. The problem is I’m not sure that we have one.

And how could we? We live at an unusual point in history, where information travels faster than we can process it. People point to Mark Zuckerberg as a defining member of Gen Y, and he might be. Zuckerberg invented Facebook, there is an Oscar-winning film about him, and he is one of the wealthiest people in the world. At age 26, he has accomplished more than most people could in several lifetimes. But Zuckerberg might also be a footnote by this time next year, relegated to a spot in history next to Tom from MySpace or whoever it was that started Friendster. It’s easy to forget that seven years ago we had never heard his name or used his product, and we definitely didn’t know that he has a dog that looks alarmingly like a sheep. This isn’t to slight Zuckerberg either; he’s clearly incredibly bright. It’s just too early to know who, from my generation, will define us and help shape the world. It’s too early to know what our core beliefs and contributions are.

We do have some unifying characteristics though, brought upon by the version of the world we grew up in. Businesses and industries already recognize that we are on deck to be the world’s monetary and cultural influencers, and that there’s an immense opportunity for any company that can go from cold corporation to trusted brand in our lives. Even though we aren’t yet fully formed beings, they need to look at what we do know about ourselves so far, and take a position that helps define what we are in the future.

We’re optimistic and personally ambitious.
In the year after I graduated from college in 2008, the Dow Jones index lost more than 50% of its value while unemployment rose steadily. From Hurricane Katrina to the recent tsunamis and earthquakes in Japan, natural disasters have consistently devastated. Unrest in the Middle East has been constant since 9/11. And for some reason a bunch of people genuinely think that the world is going to end in 2012. My entire adult life has never seen a harmonious world.

Yet we are optimistic because success and change seem very attainable, perhaps more so than ever before. Personal success no longer requires luck or intervention, just intelligence and drive.

Personal success no longer requires luck or intervention, just intelligence and drive.

Here are some of my favorite examples:

• 2000: University of Santa Cruz freshman Jesse Thorn starts a college radio show called The Sound of Young America. Post-college, The Sound became a podcast, and today is played nationally on NPR and Sirius XM. It’s now one of many shows in Thorn’s self-created media empire, Maximum Fun.
• 2009: Lauren Leto, now 24, starts the website Texts From Last Night. Today, Leto is CEO of her second startup: Bnter, a social networking site for sharing conversations. TFLN is worth millions, with a companion iPhone app, book and upcoming TV show.
• 2010: Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost, both 26, create an iPhone tripod mount called Glif. CAD software and 3D printers allow them to create prototypes. They used Kickstarter to raise money for production, and hit their $10,000 goal in under two hours.

Each of these people used tools available to anyone to create something great. Examples of Gen Y members who are seeing success at a young age are numerous and, frankly, very inspiring to write about.

I look at these success stories and see no difference between these people and myself. I sincerely feel like it’s not a matter of if I start my own successful company, but when. For others, why not start a political career? Spread your message on Twitter and get funded on Kickstarter. Do you want to be a stand-up comedian? Record a podcast and put it in the iTunes store. I realize this can come off as clichéd calls to action, but it’s hard to be jaded about the state of the world when so much more is attainable than ever before.

Personal successes seem incredibly possible, but altruistic causes are also even more within reach. It takes about ten taps on your phone to donate to the Red Cross for Japan tsunami relief efforts. Social fundraising websites such as Razoo and Facebook Causes have made affecting a cause easier than ever. Real change can come from these outlets. President Obama isn’t a member of Gen Y, he’s squarely within the traditionally pessimistic Gen X, but he leveraged social media and his message of optimism and hope to capture my attention and the attention of my peers.

What are the business implications when an entire generation sees everything as possible?

What are the business implications when an entire generation sees everything as possible? Companies can play on this genuine sense of personal and global optimism by making success seem even closer. Tumblr is an easy way to create a blog, but it also presents featured blogs and entries for almost any interest, guaranteeing a significant base of followers. The iOS App Store follows a similar model: if you create something interesting, whether it’s a game showcasing your creativity, or an app highlighting volunteer opportunities for local government, the infrastructure is there for merit-based success. With any sense of self-confidence, it’s hard not to be optimistic about both your opportunities, and for those of the world. Brands need to continue to empower individuals to help themselves, and touch the world we live in.

Everyone knows everything.
Despite the always excellent presence of John Cusack, the movie Hot Tub Time Machine was largely forgettable. Which isn’t to say it’s without merit; one shining moment stuck with me. Our protagonists have traveled in time, via hot tub, back to 1986 where 24 year old Jacob asks his dance partner if he can text her later or find her online. This being the eighties, she’s confused. He asks how he can get a hold of her and she tells him to come find her. “That sounds exhausting,” he replies, and I laugh.

I don’t know my little brother Henry’s phone number. I wouldn’t be able to call him if it wasn’t programmed into my phone. But I probably wouldn’t call Henry anyway, I would text him. And I don’t think I would text him either, I would post a YouTube video of a cat doing something hilarious on his Facebook wall. Social media and the ubiquity of cell phones and the internet means that we just don’t lose touch with our friends anymore. We don’t even lose touch with that guy that ate one leg of his sweat pants in junior high (I wonder what he’s up to.) We maintain a persistent connection to most anyone we’ve ever encountered.

We maintain a persistent connection to most anyone we’ve ever encountered.

What this means is that we have a constant stream of everyone else’s interests. Our tastes and knowledge are created by our gigantic communities, and they move at an astonishing rate. This isn’t the flower-power sixties, where everyone shared a vague sense of love and community. Rather, this is specific. This is me knowing what you thought of what you watched on TV last night. Oh also, your favorite part of the episode, and who told you to watch it.

I didn’t learn these things by being overly interested either. You shared them with me, and since we are virtually connected, I really can’t avoid learning about you. I know who internet sensation Rebecca Black is and what she sings. I even know some of her lyrics. This despite the fact that I’ve never actually heard her song “Friday”. It’s not possible to avoid what people care about anymore, no matter where they live or how rarely you see them.

For companies, access to unprecedented amounts of current, relevant information needs to lead to a more focused way of looking at consumers. For the first time ever, a generation is sharing interests on a genuinely global scale. The company TeeFury only sells one product at a time: a new pop-culturally relevant themed t-shirt every day. Because of Gen Y’s constant communication and sharing, they’re able to offer something funny enough and topical enough to warrant an entire run of t-shirt prints every single day. They have enough information about their consumer’s interests to minimize risks, but still offer extremely curated options.

This doesn’t mean you can’t innovate or be disruptive. While it’s probably a bad idea to start creating products based on my inane (yet hilarious) Twitter updates, brands should take advantage of all this connectivity and interest-sharing to get to know Gen Y, and pretty much any other consumer group, more robustly. For example, is your target the 18-30 year old NBA fanatic? Chances are that the vast majority of them read Bill Simmons and Kelly Dwyer. They know what FreeDarko is and have an opinion about John Hollinger’s PER system. Take the same consumer from our parents generation, and their knowledge ended after they read their local newspaper’s sports section. Use these newfound shared interests and experiences to find common needs and give us the products we really want.

We’re not adults, even if we are.
Recently, I commented to my mom how young she and my dad looked in a picture taken shortly after they got married. In the picture, she told me, she is actually younger than I am now. At that point in her life, she was married, she managed a kitchenwares store, and she owned a home with my dad. Meanwhile, the most serious commitment in my life has been to the TV show LOST.

I look at my peers, and so few of them are married. Even fewer own houses, almost none have kids, and traditional career-oriented jobs seem regarded as much less of a prize. I’ve had that conversation about how we have the rest of our lives to work so many different times. I love my job, but I understand this sentiment. Sometimes it feels like the pages just fly off the calendar, and if I think about it too much, I can get a bit existential at times (It’s not a good look — if you see me wearing a t-shirt with Robert Smith on it, don’t talk to me that day). The numbers support my anecdotal insights about these changing life priorities: according to a White House report from March 2011, people are getting married on average five years later than they were in 1950. The same report says that the average age at which a woman had her first child was 25, compared to 21 in 1970.

For some of us, this tepid take on adulthood manifests itself in wanderlust and arrested development. But for others, myself included, it has manifested itself as hobbies and interests geared towards children. Somehow this has become completely acceptable. Ultimately, Star Wars is a movie for 12 year old boys, yet I proudly have an original, framed Empire Strikes Back poster hanging in my bedroom. 20 years ago, the concept of adults playing video games—or even most games—as a serious hobby seemed wildly absurd. Now, it’s completely acceptable for me to spend 40+ hours on my Playstation toppling the Borgia rule in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Women aren’t innocent either. According to the Entertainment Software Association, females over 18 constitute 33% of all gamers.

Companies so far have catered to our child-like tendencies. Men my age like pirates and zombies and superheroes, so we get movies and books about pirates and zombies and superheroes. I can read Grant Morrison’s Batman, and feel like an adult because it’s a ‘dark’ take on the caped crusader, but I am still reading about Batman, the same character that Adam West ridiculously portrayed. Look at the amount of time that Facebook—essentially the narcissistic socializing and quest for popularity of our high school days in a convenient digital format—has begun to occupy. Interests that were formerly trivial or societally unacceptable for adults have become not only the norm, but the next big thing.

Rypple is trying to turn work into a game. Foursquare has turned leaving your house into a game. Even video games have trophy or achievement systems, as if just playing the game isn’t enough of a reward anymore. In a world where everything is trying to become a game, how am I supposed to truly grow up? I’m not saying that there is no merit to this way of looking at things, just that it’s the route companies have mostly gone so far, with varying success.

In a world where everything is trying to become a game, how am I supposed to truly grow up?

Is there a market for making us feel like real adults? Maybe. Zumeo was a self proclaimed “LinkedIn for Gen Y” when it launched in 2009. It hasn’t taken off, and currently gets fewer than 1,000 visitors a month. LinkedIn itself has become the “LinkedIn for Gen Y”. It’s simply a service for grown-ups that happens to embody the Gen Y needs of immediacy and connectedness. The financial service Mint.com didn’t set out to cater to Gen Y, but as a generation that has always been comfortable doing business online, it is a natural fit for us. Clearly, brands have seen success chasing after the adult-babies within us, but some have also seen success simply treating us like adults.

Technology isn’t a thing.
The Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft Kinect have sold extremely well. Both use futuristic-sounding technology such as gyroscopes, proximity sensors, infrared light, and facial tracking. And almost nobody cares. The story of these devices is that they let you dance like Michael Jackson when he was still alive, or play basketball like Stephen Jackson before he was traded to the Bobcats and everyone forgot about him. These things create new experiences, they don’t trumpet their technological advances. Technology for technology’s sake is rarely impressive anymore.

For our entire lives, we’ve seen tech advance at a breakneck pace. It’s a given that computers will get faster every year. Video game graphics will get better. CGI movies will become more realistic. Michael Bay and James Cameron are pretty excited about this, but Gen Y isn’t. What does excite and engage us is technology used in unique or meaningful ways. Hipstamatic and Instagram are good examples. These applications use powerful processors and advanced algorithms to quickly put filters on digital photos, giving them new emotional meaning, almost by magic. We’ve been handed the power to put ourselves into photos from decades we didn’t even exist in. It is powerful technology designed to disappear in service of a special moment.

Be like “The Great One”
It’s probably impossible to define an entire generation very well. Especially one like mine, where everyone has so much access to so much…stuff. The world is flat and endless information is freely available. We don’t know who we want to be, but we have the power to be anyone. In 50 years, I’ll look at 25 year old kids and be so confused about what they are doing and what they care about. Then I’ll post on Twitter about how weird young people are.

Companies have an enormous opportunity to look at what we do and how we live now, and leverage that. As we figure ourselves out, those things aren’t going away, but brands will if they don’t pay attention. Before he became one of the best hockey players of all time, Wayne Gretzky’s father famously told him to “skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been”. To do this though, you need to look at the speed and the angle of the puck. Right now, Gen Y is the puck just after it’s left the stick, brands need to judge our trajectory and skate to where we’ll be.

This article is adapted from a presentation given by the author at the 2011 Interaction Designers Association conference in Boulder, Colorado. The talk, entitled “What Do You Do, Anyway? – Explaining IxD to the Outside World” can be viewed online.

This is the age of the story, we’re often told, and the most effective designers are also good storytellers. If the keynotes and coffee breaks at creative conferences are any indication, we’re now telling convincing stories not just to our clients and users, but to each other. There’s a strong incentive to do this: if we didn’t, none of our ideas would go anywhere.

Unfortunately there’s still one area where we tend to tell very weak stories, and that’s when describing our own process. The narrative of how a design challenge leads to a concept and then a solution is for some reason maddeningly difficult to explain to anyone outside of our own discipline.

To tell a convincing story, you need an identifiable character.

Most branches of design have gotten around this by finding advocates. Architecture, graphic design and industrial design all have talented chroniclers, familiar enough to understand the jargon and process, but versed in writing for a broader audience. They make it their job to create the narrative that designers themselves cannot, and pull back the curtain on the creative act. Writers and filmmakers like Ellen Lupton, Michael Bierut, Alissa Walker, Alice Rawsthorn and Gary Hustwit fall into this category, to name a few. They are helped along by a well-developed history of criticism and analysis, which provides a rich vocabulary for discussing different design disciplines, and familiar case studies for reference.

The glaring omission is Interaction Design. Perhaps because it’s relatively young, or because its tools and processes change with the speed of technology, IxD is one of the only design fields that lacks advocates — the only ones talking about IxD are Interaction Designers. Largely this is because it doesn’t conjure up a “character” in the public mind. Stereotyped and oversimplified as it might be, the image of the bespectacled architect pouring over a model or the hipster graphic designer fiddling with a Wacom tablet serves a very real purpose. To tell a convincing story, you need an identifiable character.

Outside of niche publications like BoxesAndArrows, UXMatters and IXDA.org, IxD’s media exposure is limited to brief mentions in software or gadget reviews (“the interaction is so fluid you almost don’t notice it” or “the designers really thought this interface through”), or profiles of individual designers or studios. The latter can come tantalizingly close to explaining IxD process, but always seem to veer off at the last minute, focusing instead on what makes this studio different from all of the others, without explaining what the others do in the first place.

In a personal favorite example, Gary Hustwit’s design documentary “Objectified” features IxD godfather Bill Moggridge showing off the the world’s first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass, which he helped design in 1979. After pointing out some of its physical features, he describes how he switched one on, and within moments forgot all about the device itself, becoming absorbed instead in the virtual space behind the screen. He quickly realized it demanded its own branch of study, gently explaining how he coined the term ‘interaction design’ to describe it. Then the scene ends.

Definitions of interaction design, when they show up in the media, tend to be both accurate and unsatisfactory. BusinessWeek states that “interaction designers create compelling relationships between people and the interactive systems they use,” while FastCompany tells us “interaction design is the discipline that makes technology useful, usable and fun to use.” Both true statements, but pity the curious reader trying to understand an interaction designer’s daily tasks based on those statements, or worse, how to become one.

But this doesn’t stop people from trying. In February 2011, I conducted a short experiment. Flip camera in hand, I met separately with five members of Portland’s creative economy: graphic designers, art directors, marketing leads, owners of design-driven businesses. These are precisely the people who interaction designers work with and for, or will be in the near future. They are, in other words, the people who most need to know IxD’s process story.

I asked each subject to briefly explain to the camera what interaction designers do, why they’re useful and what skills are needed to become one. The edited-down three minute video that resulted is illuminating and fairly entertaining:

The first thing to note is how everyone agrees that IxD is a hugely useful field, in this exercise and in discussions over the past few years. There’s a pervasive sense that interactive experiences are the crucial brand differentiator of the coming decades, and getting them right is not only central to ongoing commercial success, but an emblem of thoughtfulness and humanity. Perhaps that’s why IxDs get paid so well.

Second, the responses are always framed in terms of deliverables: each subject was asked what interaction designers do, but replied by explaining what they make. When an example is given, it is almost always web or mobile device based.

Third, the skills needed to excel as an IxD are vaguely defined; far more vaguely than for other creative fields, in fact. Empathy, communication, visual sensitivity and the ability to prototype (not mentioned here but common in discussions within the IxD community) are necessary in interaction design, but they’re also needed by practically every other creative professional on earth, from cinematographer to comic book artist.

Fourth, and most significant, is how opaque the IxD process looks to the rest of the creative and business world. Few professionals outside of IxD have the faintest understanding of what happens when the designers actually buckle down and start working.

It’s hard to write a design brief for a magician, or give feedback to a black box.

At first glance, this isn’t such a problem. There are worse things than being thought of as magicians. But the long view highlights three problems in particular that could one day cripple the profession.

1. Potential Backlash. Design Thinking has been roundly ridiculed in business and design publications lately, and interaction designers would be wise to wonder if their field is next. Any discipline or thought process that’s highly valued but poorly described is bound to engender skepticism, and can lead pragmatic businesspeople to eventually wonder if this isn’t just a familiar process with a fancier name.

2. Allies and Advocates. At this very moment, thousands of people are pursuing interaction design tasks with no awareness of interaction design principles. This is par for the course: many present IxDs got their start in some sort of gap-filling role, taking care of the interaction portion of a design project by default, until they discovered that these tasks had a name. By keeping the process mysterious, we hamper the sharing of knowledge with potential allies who are grappling with IxD problems for the first time. We also impede the development of future advocates who could make our case for us.

3. Collaboration. All design is collaborative, especially in a consultancy, and an understanding of process and tools makes that collaboration smoother. It’s hard to write a design brief for a magician, after all, or to give feedback to a black box. Interaction designers frustrated by poorly framed problems or improperly executed solutions may be suffering from clients and fellow designers who don’t actually know what they do.

Solving these problems requires a repeatable story that can survive beyond the confines of the professional community. But “interaction” is an inherently abstract concept, and so internal discussions among interaction designers tend to be abstract. This video, produced to raise awareness of the 2011 Interaction Designers Association annual conference, is an excellent example of effective internal messaging. The target audience is interaction designers, and to this audience it’s an entirely compelling, identifiable and entertaining message.

Terms like “usability,” “compelling interaction” and “meaningful experience” are understood consistently within the IxD discipline. The speakers draw from a set of similar experiences, and have plenty of techniques and approaches in common. An external story cannot make such assumptions.

Fortunately, the storyteller’s craft has several techniques at its disposal to address just this kind of challenge. Using examples, focusing the story and considering the audience are all proven methods of winning over readers, in newspapers, magazines and technical journals alike. For the interaction design community, three approaches hold exceptional promise.

An example would be useful about now. A Wordle diagram of President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address is shown below. The three most common words predictably reference the country and its residents (America, American, Americans), but beyond that, it’s dominated by abstractions like economy, jobs, change and hope.

The following day, National Public Radio conducted a poll asking Americans what they recall from the speech. The resulting Wordle is also included in the slideshow below, for comparison:

In the President’s actual speech, the word salmon shows up just once, part of a brief anecdote about federal government inefficiency: two different agencies, we are told, are responsible for this particular fish, depending on whether it’s in fresh water or salt.

While analysts may glumly assert that such anecdotes indicate America’s shrinking attention span, it’s more likely that it simply indicates the human tendency to recall examples more easily than abstractions. This is why mnemonic devices for names and places work so well: they replace an abstract concept with a vivid visual that’s easier to remember. Abstractions can elevate the level of a discussion, but they work far better when supported by examples. When an example and an abstraction fight, as they do in the diagrams above, the example will always win.

School of Visual Arts professor Liz Danzico introduces the IxD profession this way in a 2006 interview she conducted for the AIGA:

If you’ve been delighted by your iPod, intrigued with your TiVo, or frustrated by your mobile phone, then you have encountered the work of an interaction designer.

Given that I spent nearly two years asking interaction designers to explain what they do before even hearing the word “wireframes”, I find this to be the most effective introductory sentence to the field I’ve seen in print. The fact is, every creative discipline is initially defined by its tools and artifacts. The wisest storytellers respond not by blanketing the landscape in abstractions, but by giving examples so immediate that they lead to constructive questions.

When an example and an abstraction fight, the example always wins.

Don’t obsess over the edge case. Like most creative professionals, interaction designers fear being pigeonholed. But more than most, IxDs tend to respond by describing their profession in terms of everything it could do. This is where many of those abstractions come from: saying you design the interaction between a human and any other device or service can feel like an insurance policy, against being pegged as the woman who does the wireframes or the guy who polishes the app. What it more often does is confuse whoever’s asking the question.

It’s important to remember that an elevator pitch isn’t the entire story, especially when introducing an unfamiliar topic. The more effective approach is to start with an explanation that’s limited but concrete (“most of us work on websites and mobile apps”) and then intrigue the listener by exploring how those principles and techniques could be applied to other situations.

Start where the listener is. The second video above ends with a hapless man identified as “Client” offending a bunch of interaction designers by stating “You’re the ones who make the boxes and the arrows!” He is chastised from all sides.

This message is meant for a clearly defined internal audience, and it’s great storytelling. If the audience is the “Client” himself, things should be stated differently. For one thing, anyone outside of IxD who knows enough to even use the phrase “boxes and arrows” should be applauded, not derided. More important, the designer should see such a statement for the opportunity it presents — you have an interested party with a certain amount of knowledge, and this can be expanded into a longer conversation about the methods and value of the field fairly easily.

As a writer, one of the first questions I ask when taking an assignment is “who’s the audience?” Just as good design requires empathy for the user, good narrative demands empathy for the reader. What knowledge to assume, what analogies and examples to use, and how to pace the story all depend on who you’re talking to.

This is why there is no “best” way to explain IxD, but there are numerous right ways. The most successful strategy is usually one that starts from an example immediately at hand. The modern world is full of products and services that have benefited from good interaction design, or fail because they haven’t; these are your finest narrative starting points. Pointing to a cellphone screen or comparing two familiar websites is a far more memorable way of advocating for interaction design than mumbling something about compelling relationships.

These approaches are generally useful in discussions about any kind of creative process. For designers of all stripes, good storytelling is an extension of the empathy-based insights that already inform their work. For clients and collaborators, the time has come to start demanding explanations this good.

That leading edge drive from the technology side has given designers a strong set of tools…not only for games, but for rich and immersive experiences.

In conjunction with the new Game Wise trend being followed in the Trends section of Ziba.com, Senior Interaction Designer Mike Lemmon discusses the far-reaching ways in which the gaming industry is influencing the design of other interactive experiences.

The incredible advances in game design of the past decade have created a range of powerful tools for interaction designers, who are applying them to non-gaming interactions from dashboards to banking to 3D CAD. Lemmon outlines some pertinent examples, touching on lessons about Gesture, Mastery, Community and Behavior, and their implications for almost every facet of modern technology.

View some recent examples from the Game Wise trend.

Every New Year, Americans make 550 million resolutions to do something different with their lives in the coming 365 days. That’s just under two resolutions per person. Then they go about breaking them with incredible speed and efficiency.

A 2009 University of Minnesota study, quoted on “goalsetting community” website 43things.com, found that 80 percent of resolutions are abandoned by March. This is up from 47 percent in 1997, according to a University of Washington study. When you present these statistics to friends, they’re rarely surprised; making and breaking resolutions seems to be a national pastime, based on how reliably we pursue it. It turns out to be a global phenomenon as well, with well-intentioned revelers in Paris, Tokyo and Sydney failing by the millions to exercise, quit smoking and lose weight.

So why bother? Setting a goal and failing to achieve it ought to be the last thing you’d want to do at the start of a new year. Yet we continue to renew our vows to this unfaithful spouse, and shrug with resignation when we’re jilted once again, just like last year.

The origins of the custom help shed some light on our behavior. Picking a day as the start of a new year and marking it with a holiday is one of humanity’s very oldest celebrations. Equinox festivities can be traced back to 2000 BC Babylon, and the Romans took the New Year seriously enough that they assigned a deity to its occurrence—the two-faced Janus, looking both forward and back—and named the subsequent month after him. They also honored him by paying off debts, returning borrowed items and offering resolutions of good conduct for the next annual cycle.

Cleaning out and starting over are remarkably consistent themes of New Year celebrations, from the Chinese tradition of lighting firecrackers to scare off lingering evil to the universal apologies lavished on friends and relatives during Yom Kippur, ten days after the traditional Jewish new year. The opportunity to close the door on the past and open a new one is incredibly seductive. Just think how often themes of breaking free, starting over, letting go, etc. recur in modern stories and films.

So, if we don’t keep a resolution, does that make it a futile gesture? Only if you think traditions like lighting firecrackers and eating black-eyed peas are futile. Which is to say, yes they are, if you evaluate solely on their purported task—scaring away demons or ensuring good luck—but not if you look at the values they’re expressing. The true function of these traditions, any sociologist can tell you, is to reinforce community through shared ritual, and to offer a sense of control over the caprices of environment and fate. Resolutions are similar. They achieve plenty, even if it’s not what they claim they’re trying to do.

A resolution is one of the clearest and most direct self-stories we get to tell.

The community thing is part of it. The modern United States is a woefully detached place, and holiday traditions are among the last things that connect us to the diverse communities around us. Just as we might get a rush of goodwill from caroling or watching New Year’s Eve fireworks with an unfamiliar group, there’s something undeniably comforting in asking a friend, or acquaintance, or even a complete stranger, “So, did you make any resolutions?” The fact that we usually don’t keep them almost makes it better. Misery loves company, after all, and shared resignation is a great way to build solidarity.

But the making of the resolution itself is where the real emotional power lies. We tell ourselves stories constantly about who we are. It’s why we buy what we buy, live where we live, and say what we say—these all give us opportunities to define who we are to those around us, and more important, to ourselves. A resolution is one of the clearest and most direct self-stories we get to tell. And it’s free.

So why make them on New Year’s Day? If you think about it, we make resolutions all the time, from tiny, immediate ones (“I’m going to stop off at the gym on the way home from work”) to grand, momentous ones (“I’ve decided to apply to med school”). This is part of our daily decision-making process. Because of its traditional and social links, a New Year’s resolution is different. Resolving to do something on a specific day, in the company of millions of fellow humans, means that this is not a functional resolution, but a statement of values.

Even if you don’t keep it, every resolution is a bold statement about what is important to you. “I resolve to lose ten pounds” could just as well be stated as “Being healthy and attractive is important to me.” That first statement is also easier to repeat to yourself and your friends than the second one, which sounds like something a motivational speaker might have you say. It’s also beautifully optimistic. Despite all our previous attempts and failures, we’re still making those resolutions, still trying to reinvent ourselves… because we have to. We still have values.

So by all means, please make a resolution this year. Make a dozen. And pay a little closer attention to them than you have in years past, not in terms of how easy they are to keep, but how truthfully they reflect what’s important to you. That’s the beauty of a great resolution: even when you break it, it keeps doing its job.

Like most Americans, I have a house that fills up with more stuff during the holidays than at any other time of the year. The week after Christmas, my holiday ritual is sorting through all of that stuff to decide what earns mantel status, basement storage and Goodwill donation. As I sort through the piles that have been accumulating since November, I find myself considering what makes some objects worth treasuring and others worth discarding. The simple answer is that most of the objects we choose to welcome into daily life have a story to tell.

Think about someone giving you a tour of their home. When they introduce the objects in their collections they tell you stories: “This is the lamp my grandfather made while in the infirmary in World War II,” not “This won a design award, and I got it on sale for 40% off.” Well, some will tell you that, but those friends are a bore and that’s a story for another time.

On second thought, every object has a story of some kind to tell, but there are several different kinds. There are the stories of function, stories of connection and nostalgia, and stories of possibility. In my ritual sort, the question I’m really asking is, does this object tell a story that I want to add to my own personal narrative? If the answer is no, the decision is easy—off to Goodwill it goes.

Truthfully, most of the objects in our households tell a story of function. A can opener with an oversized handle tells us where to hold it. A chair bends in the shape of a human form with an invitation to sit. Objects with a function story make life easier, and their use more intuitive. When these are lost or broken, our reaction is one of inconvenience, not permanent loss. A similar functional object tells a similar story, so these things are quickly replaced, and the original object forgotten.

Other objects tell stories of connection. These stories connect us with our past; some are literally relics from bygone times. The worn leather briefcase that a now-deceased father brought home every evening for 30 years makes his presence closer. An antique lathe connects us with a simpler time. Occasionally, a new object will present cues that remind us of an earlier era. The original iMac was adopted by millions of boomers new to computing, because it evoked CRT televisions of their youth. Other objects connect us to a tribe of likeminded individuals. Every tribe has its talismans: messages to the world—and to yourself—that you belong to something greater. A letterman’s jacket, a minivan, an iPhone, an electric guitar. When we look at these things, we’re presented not just with an object, but an entire lifestyle, and a group of people we associate with it.

But the most powerful story an object can tell is a story of possibility. The great fashion photographer Richard Avedon used to ask his friends to send him books wrapped in paper. He kept them in his studio, unopened, to represent the potential of inspiration and knowledge. The introduction of an object that tells a story of possibility has the ability to inspire and motivate, often much more powerfully than a goal or resolution. Acquiring a new pair of running shoes allows the owner to imagine a healthier, fitter, more vital self. Acquiring a Moleskine notebook lets us imagine ourselves writing and creating beautiful things, in the company of Hemingway and Van Gogh. If an object can tell the story of potential it can create hope. It can help us visualize a better way of being, and that is a gift of greater value than the actual object itself.

Our relationship with objects has always been a love/hate affair, but never more than during the holidays. We’re reminded of how much joy can be expressed through giving and receiving things, but we also see the worst examples of excessive consumption. As I sit down for my annual sort, I’m reminded that one of the keys to keeping the season constructive is distinguishing between the right objects and the wrong ones. I’m as enamored of a minimal existence as anyone—probably more so considering my formal graphic design training—but I’d be lying if I said there weren’t dozens or even hundreds of bits of stuff that I treasure. So while I’m sorting, I’m also listening, asking every object to tell me its story. And I take care to pick the objects that tell the right ones, because I know that eventually their story becomes mine.

Ziba recently worked with the Industrial Designers Society of America to bring the IDSA annual International Conference to our home city of Portland, Oregon. In response to the growing influence of independent craft and manufacturing on professional design, the 2010 conference featured “DIY Design” as a central theme. Ziba’s President Sohrab Vossoughi, who served as chair of the conference organizing committee, was asked to offer some remarks at the opening and conclusion of the conference. This article combines excerpts from these two talks, discussing the DIY ethic, Portland’s role in the global design community, and the results of this remarkable four-day cross-craft discussion.

Portland is not New York, nor is it London, Milan, Seoul or the Bay Area. These are undisputed centers of the global Industrial Design profession, and Portland lies on the periphery.

But a lot of interesting things are happening at the periphery these days. The tools of design and creation are moving from the studio and factory to the basement and garage, with the net effect of spreading creative potential to anyone with the enthusiasm and persistence to take advantage of them. Good design can truly come from anywhere these days, and in many categories, so can good product. That wasn’t true ten years ago.

…a lot of interesting things are happening at the periphery these days.

What’s also new is the market for these products. Ten years back, handmade and small-run objects held a very specific place in the American consumer landscape: you bought them from hippies at craft fairs, or got them as well-meaning gifts from your grandparents. If you were extremely wealthy you might have commissioned a custom suit or pair of shoes, but in most cases these were rare items with niche appeal. No longer. Online marketplaces like Etsy and eBay have normalized the creation and consumption of independent goods, and built enthusiastic communities around both. They’ve also changed peoples’ thinking about the things they buy and own, leading them to ask how they’re made and where they come from, in a way that might have once sounded fussy and academic.

This resurgence in DIY and independent making is a global phenomenon, so why did we bring the conference to Portland? It’s not a global center of DIY, nor of design—DIY by its very nature hasn’t got a center, and in any case, like we said, Portland’s on the periphery. The future of design doesn’t lie at the center though, and this is a city that has recognized and embraced that fact, perhaps more than any other.

The key ingredients for a DIY movement are here in abundance—the space to create, the knowledge and technical resources, a supportive community and an eager market—and the barrier to entry is remarkably low. Portland combines a creative, educated population with a relatively low cost of living in a way few cities can replicate. For local residents, the progression from “buy it” to “buy it local” to “make it myself” is quicker and easier than in almost any other city. This try-it-and-see mindset is reflected in Portland’s embrace of innovative urban infrastructure, its energetic technology and open-source software community, even its love of creative, locally-sourced food, wine and beer.

It all makes for an inspiring, stimulating place to do creative work. That’s one of the reasons why Ziba has stayed here for the past 28 years, and why talented designers from all over the world move here to work for our colleagues at places like Nike, Wieden + Kenedy, Intel, and Laika, or at one of the thousands of small start-ups and studios that have set up shop. We like it here on the periphery, and we think it’s where the future of innovation lives.

When we first proposed a DIY theme for this year’s conference there was a lot of debate about whether a cross-craft discussion would actually work. Designers are used to hearing from other designers, and we tend to enjoy it, but there was a sense that the topic demanded voices from outside the ID profession despite the potential for confusion or irrelevance. What useful thing could a chef say to a room full of industrial designers, after all? Or a doctor? Or a trumpet builder?

After hearing and participating in dozens of fascinating conversations, I can comfortably say that it worked out just fine. The comments we’ve received in person and online have confirmed that this was a conference that truly made people think: about the role of craft in design, about the relationship between amateur and professional designers, and even about the potential for moving into the DIY space ourselves, or designing products for this dynamic and growing community.

It was also a conference that inspired. There’s no way to hear these stories and look upon these achievements without being filled with a sense of possibility and awe in the natural human capacity for invention, regardless of medium. The diversity of voices has surprised us and impressed us, and made it clear that ingenuity can come from the most unexpected places.

We need both formal skills and a try-it- and-see approach. We need traditionalists and hackers. To have one without the other leaves us beautiful but stagnant, or
it leaves us enthusiastic but unfocused.

Taken together, these speakers have painted an exciting picture of the future of design and manufacturing. It’s a future full of possibility, as the global DIY community grows into a rich source of ideas and disruptions, and presents a unique market for hackable, repairable, modifiable products. This will be a great challenge for the professional design community, and an even greater opportunity.

While we can all pretty much agree that the “Threat or Opportunity” question isn’t really a question—opportunity wins, hands down—we have discovered other tensions heightened by the DIY resurgence. The tension between the formally trained and the self-starter. Between open source exploration and closed-system innovation. Between thinking first, and jumping in with both feet.

Fortunately, these are all creative tensions, and they’re increasingly necessary to good design. Because if we’ve learned one crucial thing, it’s that designers need both. We need both formal skills and a try-it-and-see approach. We need traditionalists and hackers. To have one without the other leaves us beautiful but stagnant, or it leaves us enthusiastic but unfocused.

That’s the danger out here on the periphery. In our independence, we’re tempted to think that there’s only one right path to innovation, or that one skill set will get us there. The crafters, the makers and the professional designers all have something to contribute, and the more they collaborate, the better off we’ll all be. In the warehouses of Brooklyn, the garages of Austin and the basements of Portland, these interactions are just starting to happen. The global center is starting to learn from the periphery. And the periphery is learning from the center.

It’s a thrilling conversation, and I have to agree with the speakers we’ve heard that, for many of us, this weekend marks its starting point. Every one of us is fascinated to hear what gets said next.

The IDSA conference brought together over 40 different presenters, and we thank them all for their insight and inspiration. For further background on those mentioned in the slideshow above, we’ve included the following:

Design*Sponge
Wieden + Kennedy
Local Motors
Converse
Uncommon
Ponoko
Blurb
Michael Salter
Beast
Esque Studios
Make Magazine
Autodesk Sketchbook Pro
Motoczysz
Ward Cunningham
Bridge City Tools
Etsy
Pacific Northwest College of Art

In addition, we’re indebted to these photographers for the use of their images:

DesignUgly
Smastrong
Karen MacKay

In 2006, Sirius Satellite Radio launched a new portable radio device called the Stiletto, and saw its subscriptions skyrocket by 97%. Stiletto went on to outsell rival XM Radio’s portable devices by 4 to 1 that holiday season.

Umpqua Bank, a small community bank based in Roseburg, Oregon, has grown from a modest $120 million in deposits in 2000 to over $8 billion little more than a decade later. This makes it one of the fastest growing American banks of any size in the past ten years.

In 2000, a start-up technology company in Israel, M-Systems, created an entirely new product category – the flash drive. The DiskOnKey went on to sell more than $1 billion, and became the industry standard, recently heralded by PC World as a top ten innovation of the last 50 years.

How did these companies do it? Each of them had business and technology innovations, but they needed more than that. They each needed a consumer experience that was equally innovative. Sirius, Umpqua and M-Systems came to Ziba with different goals and different consumer markets, but faced a common problem: they needed to create a product or service that was meaningful.

For each of these companies, we used Transformational Metaphors to help them create meaning and win in the marketplace. Transformational Metaphors translate the value proposition of a product or service into experiential shorthand that consumers read at a glance, and are one of our most powerful tools. They help consumers understand new products and services and/or recast their understanding of existing products and services by transferring meaning from a previous experience to a new experience – they transform the experience.

When helping Sirius Satellite Radio overtake rival XM, for example, we used the metaphor of the transistor radio to make new satellite technology familiar and approachable. Helping M-Systems create the flash drive market, we used the familiar form and interaction of a key fob. And when creating the Umpqua Bank experience, we used the metaphor of a boutique hotel to transform the bank experience and align it with the bank’s promise of “community prosperity.”

Using metaphors to create meaning is nothing new. Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Power of Myth) and Carl Jung (Man and His Symbols) have written extensively about the role that signs, myths and metaphors have played in doing this throughout human history. What is new is the explicit use of metaphors to shift meaning from one experience to another in order to create more valuable products and services. Ziba, along with other innovation leaders like Apple, Anthropologie and Whole Foods, has discovered how to harness Transformational Metaphors to create real value.

WHY TRANSFORMATIONAL METAPHORS WORK
Although they take many forms, and can be applied to an almost endless array of offerings and experiences, all Transformational Metaphors work because they do three things:

Transformational Metaphors cut through market clutter.
People are inundated by more products, services and content than at any time in history. Recent research indicates that the average American consumer receives upwards of 3000 messages a day, making it increasingly difficult for people to identify new products and services that are right for them.

Transformational Metaphors provide people with a much-needed “quick read” to understand the value of the particular product or service offered. The Sirius Stiletto, for example, is complex technology delivering a very simple value: a highly curated radio experience. It would have been easy to adopt other form factors, but by associating its form and interface with classic transistor radios, the value proposition is communicated clearly.

Transformational Metaphors deliver emotional benefits.
If you want people to love your products and services you have to meet their emotional needs. When Apple began opening retail spaces in 2001, they reintroduced the idea of customer service by leveraging the metaphor of the neighborhood bar. The Genius Bar is now one of the most recognizable elements in any Apple Store, and owes much of its success to its metaphor. By drawing on the social history of the attentive bartender, ready to lend a sympathetic ear and some thoughtful advice, Apple was able to clearly communicate that its customer service staff do more than solve your technical problems. They are friendly, attentive, and personal too.

The Genius Bar works because it fills an emotional need. When people need tech support, it’s because something doesn’t work—often something for which they paid a lot of money. In many cases this malfunction is interfering with their ability to do their job or live their life. To say this creates anxiety is an understatement. When you approach the Genius Bar, you’re probably frustrated, and yearning for competent help and a sympathetic listener. Before the interaction has even begun, the bar metaphor implies both of these.

Transformational Metaphors shift user expectations.
There’s nothing really new about the Genius Bar’s offering: it’s just a help desk. Help desks typically come with negative connotations for most consumers, though. The stereotypical example is a small, fluorescent-lit room at the back of the store, where irritated customers wait in line to shout requests through a small window in a Plexiglas shield to a grumpy and disenfranchised employee who’d rather be anywhere but there.

A cognitive disconnect occurs upon seeing the Genius Bar: warmly lit, with congenial looking staff and a familiar format. The neighborhood bar is about as unlike the typical help desk as a place can be, and this creates a deep shift in user expectations. A customer walking into a Genius Bar knows from the first moment that they’re seeing something new and, given the connotations of the bar metaphor, it’s likely to be positive.

FINDING THE RIGHT METAPHOR
Not all metaphors are created equal and there is a bewildering array of them available; success depends on picking the transformational ones. Having spent many years applying Transformational Metaphors to a diverse range of design challenges, we’ve identified four key characteristics that define a successful metaphor:

1. It must amplify the value proposition. First and foremost, Transformational Metaphors work because they translate the value proposition of a product or service into a real, tangible experience. They are NOT an additional layer of meaning that requires deciphering by the consumer. They express the value of the core offering in a way that is both evocative and immediately apparent.

2. It must draw from the personal and social history of the consumer. Transformational Metaphors work because they’re recognizable, so a reference that isn’t familiar to the target consumer won’t create the needed connection. Umpqua Bank’s boutique hotel metaphor is effective because a good fraction of their audience has stayed in such hotels, or at least visited or read about them, so they understand the level of customer service this implies.

3. It must be authentic to the culture of the company. Transformational Metaphors are immediately apparent, tangible evidence of a company’s beliefs and culture. Consumers today are increasingly interested in patronizing companies that believe in the products and services they offer. Even if a company culture doesn’t completely align with the customer’s own values, being authentic engenders trust and credibility. Transformational Metaphors that don’t accurately represent the company that created them will come across as gimmicky and meaningless. Umpqua Bank has long defined itself by its commitment to a “Ritz Carlton level of customer service.” For them, a hotel metaphor is authentic.

4. It must work in the broader context of the market. Most markets already have metaphors in play: the auto industry has its sports and animal metaphors; cosmetics often reference nature; and many consumer electronic devices evoke traditional media like books and paper. They also have an acceptable tolerance: using a hotel metaphor for a bank is not a huge stretch because both are service oriented. It’s important to be aware of the metaphorical landscape, and make sure the chosen Transformational Metaphor is neither redundant nor inappropriate.

Based on our experience, Transformational Metaphors with these four characteristics create the most value. Those that don’t run the risk of being irrelevant.

Apple does not serve drinks at the Genius Bar, nor does Umpqua have a bellhop… Transformational Metaphors work best when they combine an abstract reference with other meanings, not when they ape an existing offering in every way.

SPOTTING THE WRONG METAPHOR
Like any tool, ineffective use of Transformational Metaphors can actually decrease the value of a product or service. Three particular misuses are worth pointing out because they occur so frequently and so easily.

1. Overuse. Used too frequently or for too long, a Transformational Metaphor can become distracting, insincere and meaningless. Umpqua, for example, has moved forward with a new iteration of store designs that employ some aspects of the hotel lobby metaphor while abandoning others. This is a natural progression, as customers become more sophisticated and familiar with the offering. Once the metaphor is no longer adding value, its job is done.

2. Excessively literal use. Apple does not serve drinks at the Genius Bar, nor does Umpqua have a bellhop. The “back bar” in the Apple Store is fitted with plasma screen information displays, not alcohol and ESPN. Transformational Metaphors work best when they combine an abstract reference with other meanings, not when they ape an existing offering in every way.

Using a metaphor too literally comes across as cliché and inauthentic. They should be experienced. Umpqua users say the space feels comfortable, like a big living room. Perfect. It also recognizes that the principles of the metaphor need to persist, but the signs and symbols can evolve. If they are too literal, Transformational Metaphors stop being transformational.

3. The “unmetaphor.” Just because something references something else doesn’t mean it adds value. If Sirius had released its portable radio named Stiletto with a reference to a knife, for example (in keeping with the Stiletto name), this would have been unique and relevant to users’ previous experience. But because the device’s value proposition is not aligned with the knife reference, the metaphor fails to deliver. It becomes an “unmetaphor”: irrelevant, inauthentic and silly. Instead, referencing a transistor radio associates new technology with the simplicity and familiarity of a past experience.

THE MARKET KNOWS BEST
In the end, the best way to determine whether a metaphor is truly transformational is to observe how it performs in the market, both experientially and financially. We know that Umpqua employed the right metaphor because people hang out there. We’ve seen it with our own eyes. They hold neighborhood association meetings, meet for coffee, and catch up on their email…in a bank. We also know that Umpqua reports twice as many deposits in their new stores as their existing ones.

Similarly, the Apple Store’s bar metaphor is successful because people look forward to going there, and tell stories over coffee the next day about how much they enjoyed their tech support experience. It also helps explain why Apple Stores make ten times the sales per square foot as the average consumer electronics retailer.

Clearly other factors are at play in these market successes, but the power of Transformational Metaphors cannot be overestimated. Competitive landscapes are changing, and where consumers were once resigned to putting tremendous effort into untangling and comprehending new technologies, more and more they demand both function and familiarity. This makes the Transformational Metaphor the crucial partner of innovation. As Sirius, Umpqua, Apple and many others have demonstrated, it’s also a profitable one.

Ace Hotel image CC via Flickr user Charlie Chicago
Transistor Radio image CC via Flickr user Roadsidepictures

It’s all about creating experiences that people can escape to that are even better than the real thing.

In a marketplace overwhelmed by imitation and representation, many consumers are taking solace in products and experiences that are transparently false. By exposing their simulated realities, some brands are now enjoying the kind of loyalty and appeal once reserved for their trusted, “authentic” counterparts. In a quick four minute overview, Ziba Insights and Trends Specialist Wibke Fleischer explains the history and future of the Real Fake trend, from Versailles and Las Vegas to Japan and Xanadu.

If something is obviously manufactured, but in its manufactured state it is very transparent about its fakeness, then it must be authentic!

Want to know more? Explore Real Fake on Ziba Trends.

A big thank you to Portland’s own Transport for their video editing expertise.

“When a brand truly knows its DNA and intimately understands its consumers, there is a sweet spot where the two overlap. This is where beautiful experiences live.”

Recently, at the Ziba Design offices in Portland, Oregon, a curious transformation occurred: six otherwise formal Japanese executives removed their ties and rolled up their shirtsleeves to act out the daily lives of their target consumers. The characters included Shikkari-san, who aspired to achieve domestic excellence and was busy in her kitchen preparing for a family picnic; Kakedashi-san, who was newly married and living on her own for the first time and busied herself getting ready for a visit from the in-laws; and Nesshin-san, who has a passion for food and trying new things, and excitedly gave his wife a new kitchen appliance. The improv was a new twist to our Innovation workshop. Normally we ask clients to simply present their findings from the previous days’ research, but executives from the luxury bath and kitchen fixtures manufacturer Toto were so inspired that a theatrical performance ensued.

Having aspirations to be an actor is certainly not a prerequisite for participating in a Ziba education workshop, but wanting to gain a profound understanding of the passions and desires of your target consumer certainly helps. Ziba’s 25-year history designing award-winning products and experiences for the world’s leading companies has taught us that “innovative” products designed in a vacuum have the potential to be nothing more than an interesting concept—that is, unless the product is designed with the consumers’ innate needs and desires in mind. When a brand truly knows its DNA and intimately understands its consumers, there is a sweet spot where the two overlap. This is where beautiful experiences live.

What Beautiful Experiences Are and What They Are Not
The market is overwhelmed by products that don’t seem to care at all for the consumers they are wooing. Sure, they may be smartly designed or “technologically advanced” or perhaps both of these things and inexpensive, too. But, unless the product is truly relevant to your target consumer, then it is just another product that can be easily passed over for a cheaper one, or a blue one, or whatever happens to be most convenient at the moment.

Designing beautiful experiences means abandoning design for design’s sake; it means giving up on chasing the competition; and it means doing away with spaghetti-testing products by throwing them at the world to see what sticks. Beautiful experiences are intentionally designed. Brands need to dig deep to move beyond demographic data and intimately understand the heart and minds of their target consumers. Brands need to discover and clearly communicate their authentic promise. And, finally, brands need to consider how trends will inform their product or service offering and ensure its relevance. When these three factors are taken into consideration, designing beautiful experiences can begin.

The success stories are easy to identify. Think of Harley devotees who happily upgrade their bike for the latest $36,000 model. Think of Virgin Atlantic’s dedicated tribe of ‘Jetrosexuals’ who wouldn’t dream of abandoning the brand that services them with dedication and flair. In 2008, Virgin recorded a profitable year when many other airlines were recording losses. The airline’s total number of passengers increased by almost 6 million. And then there are brands like Costco that truly know their DNA. Costco’s brand message is clear: quality, value, simplicity, clarity, transparency. What you see is what you get and you know what to expect, from the warehouse-style layout to the hairnet-wearing sample servers. Costco exudes enthusiastic, utilitarian consumerism. Remarkably, this brass-tacks approach has paid in spades, with 1 in 10 Americans carrying a Costco card. All of this without advertising.

A Peek into the Design Process
Toto approached Ziba with the same questions that many of our clients come to us with: namely, ‘can you design a product that differentiates our brand in the market’ and ‘how can we better appeal to our customers?’ The Japanese Toto Modular Kitchens division understood that the lines were blurred between their brands and product lines and that the company had relied heavily on selling functional attributes that did not always have relevance for their customers. They had piles of demographic and market research studies. What they needed to know was how to mine their data and harness their exceptional design expertise to create a design strategy that served their target consumers’ deep-seated desires. So, instead of proposing to design a new product for them or even creating a design strategy for the company to execute on, we said what we find ourselves saying more and more to clients, ‘Come spend time with us. Let us show you how we discover beautiful experiences. Then, take the know-how back to your company so that you can innovate for yourselves.’

Toto’s three-day journey began with creating rich consumer profiles that transcended the obvious demographic facts and delved into understanding the intricacies of how Toto customers inhabited their kitchens. How did that 33-year-old woman living in an apartment with her husband two hours outside of Tokyo shop? What did she eat? How did her family use the kitchen? Was it open plan or a separate space in her apartment? Did she invite guests to dine or did she eat out? Did she want a kitchen to show off or was she more interested in function or a space to call her own?

Once Toto customers were brought to life with deeply detailed portraits, it was time to reflect on the nature of Toto’s company. Brand DNA helps determine the types of products, services and experiences the culture can authentically support and deliver upon. Ziba employs a range of tools to uncover a brand’s essence, values and character. These elements define the internal beliefs and guide the external expression of the brand. Identifying these components is not about aspirations or crafting consensus-based missions statements, but discovering what makes a particular brand authentic.

The second day of the workshop we asked our guests to go shopping “in character.” Teams Shikkari-san, Kakedashi-san, and Nesshin-san were given $100 and a shopping list with the directive that they must find products that reflected the qualities they had established for their customer. If Shikkari-san sought comfort, nurturing, and sensitivity, then how did the products reflect this? Was it the curve of the form? The tactility of the material? The gentle tone of the color? Was it the fact that when you closed the lid it had a soft “pffft” sound rather than a “click” sound?

The third day is when the workshop turned from business to theater. Inspired by their discoveries, our guests not only told stories about each product, but acted out complete scenarios for how each product would be used in context. Then, when asked to develop the statement “I love my Toto Kitchen because…” each character responded with answers like “I can have a rich life” and “It gives me peace of mind.” This is when the conversation really took off.

Suddenly Toto executives understood that it was not just the latest finishes and materials that were important, but how people actually felt in their kitchen environment. Our guests spontaneously generated their own discussion weighing the values of their products. Instead of only focusing on sales and numbers, they began asking, “Does it feel rich enough? Does it feel like it provides a sense of order?” Opportunities for design for each of the consumer types became clear. Now Toto had the know-how to go back and push beyond cost engineering into evaluating whether their choices were affecting the way people felt about their products, their company and their brand. Toto was ready to innovate.

“Designing beautiful experiences means abandoning design for design’s sake; it means giving up on chasing the competition; and, it means doing away with spaghetti-testing products by throwing them at the world to see what sticks.”

Discovering Beauty
Ziba’s own reflection on innovation has led us in a surprising direction. We have recognized that our clients seek more than answers to their design and brand challenges—they want to learn how to think about and solve these problems in a different way. As a result, we have built a much more robust education program. Here is the logic: we think that the Chinese proverb ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’ has applications to the consultancy business as well. Ziba’s take on the adage goes something like this: Design beautiful experiences for your client and they will achieve one-off success; teach your client how find beauty for themselves and they will have the capacity to continually deliver truly beautiful experiences that can turn customers into long-term loyalists.

“The cry for authenticity is a call to action for any company intending to be relevant in the twenty-first century.”

Chapter 1 from Authenticity is Now: A Working Definition of the Fluid State of Being as it Applies to Business and Design published in 2007.

There is one question that I am asked on an almost weekly basis by business executives and that is, “How can I differentiate my company in the marketplace?” My answer to every president, CEO or VP of marketing is always the same: “Why do you want to be different? Why not truly be yourself and create a meaningful relationship with your customers?” We are swimming in an overabundance of products and services. “Different” is no longer a differentiator. Creating an authentic relationship with your customers, however, is. Authenticity in business is a distinctly twenty-first century concept made relevant by a confluence of factors.

The last decade is rife with examples of exposure of institutional dysfunction—from Enron and other companies being put to task for unfair labor practices, to academic and literary plagiarism, to the failure of government to perform its duties in cases like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The public’s trust of businesses and institutions is in steep decline. Consumers’ media savvy has pulled back the wizard’s curtain on insincere marketing ploys that are only surface-sexy. Reality TV and online characters like MySpace’s lonelygirl15 have redefined our sense of reality, bringing the question of “What is real?” into mainstream dialogue. Additionally, advances in manufacturing and technology, particularly the Internet, have made available a proliferation of product and service offerings from around the globe, overwhelming consumers with options. The Internet has also empowered those consumers to create an unprecedented peer network that critiques companies and allows users to find exactly the product they want.

Consumers seek meaning and a brand they can trust. They are busy at work on Web 2.0 platforms creating ways to cut through the noise in search of products and services that resonate with integrity and transparency: in a word, authenticity. It’s no wonder, then, that TIME magazine voted ‘You’ its Person of the Year in 2006. As TIME Editor Lev Grossman wrote, “[2006 is a] story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before… It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.” Not to mention the way we do business. The cry for authenticity is a call to action for any company intending to be relevant in the twenty-first century.

Ziba has spent 24 years helping companies innovate. Initially, as a product design firm, we designed products that inspired company offerings, many of which won international awards. But, as the marketplace has shifted, so too has our own practice. We began to notice that a single, beautifully designed product was nothing more than a beautiful object without the focused intent of a company that had taken the time to understand three things: the deep-seated desires of its customers, its own DNA and the sweet spot where the two overlap.

We began to change our approach. We started talking to potential clients as an experience innovation consultancy about taking a step back before populating the world with another product. Now we work with them to evaluate who their true tribe is and what makes the most sense for those customers and the company at that point in time. In many instances, we ask clients to push the pause button, dig deeper and reconsider what it would take to act authentically and make their customers truly love who they are as a brand.

Ziba did this with Umpqua Bank, a regional bank with over 65 branches in Oregon founded to provide loggers and farmers a banking alternative. When Umpqua approached Ziba to redefine its banking experience, we didn’t start designing right away. First, we needed to discover what banking meant in the hearts and minds of Umpqua’s customers. What were their attitudes about banking in general? How did community banks like Umpqua fit into that picture? How did large, commercial banks fit into that same picture? With the convenience of online banking and ATMs, what would motivate customers to even go into a bank in the first place?

Next, we needed to understand Umpqua’s culture. What did Umpqua believe in? What was it good at? What did it stand for? What could it stand for?

After researching these questions thoroughly, we found that what Umpqua’s customers were craving was intimacy. They were tired of the impersonal service they received from regular banks and suspicious of financial institutions in general. While other banks were competing with the Internet and ATMs based on convenience, we identified an opportunity for Umpqua to provide customers with a “slow banking” experience that was both inspirational and encouraging. This translated into comfort and personal service—a hotel/retail metaphor with a modern craftsman aesthetic.

The result was an unprecedented banking experience truly tailored to the specific needs of Umpqua’s customers and the unique expression of Umpqua’s DNA. It also happened to make Umpqua a lot of money. The first week the store was open it generated a record one million dollars in deposits. Nine months into the first year Umpqua’s new store had a record $50 million in deposits. The company is currently rolling this store concept out to its other branches up and down the West Coast.

This is what we mean by forging an authentic relationship. It’s not the kind of relationship that lasts for only one season, or that comes on suddenly because your product is cheaper or more beautiful than another. It’s the kind of relationship that emerges because you offer something that caters to an essential desire and makes your customers feel that they can be more authentically themselves. It’s the kind of relationship that allows for mistakes and forgiveness and creates a bond of loyalty. And, once you have established an authentic bond, you can never rest on your laurels. People change, trends change and you must always be willing to reinvent yourself as both your company and your customers evolve. If you do, however, your true tribe will love and reward you for it, then spread the word on Epinions, BizRate, Digg, Amazon and so on. It is hard work. It takes courage and a willingness to give up trying to be everything to everybody. But, in this age when people are longing for authenticity, your tribe demands it—and your business depends on it.

Chapter 2 from Authenticity is Now: A Working Definition of the Fluid State of Being as it Applies to Business and Design published in 2007.

I am a message junkie. I am constantly consuming and deconstructing thousands of messages each day—from a TV commercial promising that I’ll attract more women if I spray my entire body with deodorant to a YouTube video of Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho kicking a ball off the crossbar five consecutive times from thirty yards. I have been known to love any message, no matter what it is, as long as it is genuine. Lately, however, I am having a hard time finding messages that move me. There is a dearth of authentic product and service messages and I have a growing intolerance for the increasing number of messages that are fake.

Every day we are confronted by experiences that challenge our understanding of what is real and what is fake. Kids download school papers online, rappers “sample” music and resell it, pop singers lip-synch “live” shows. Reality TV is edited to make it seem more real. We live in suburbs dressed up to look like turn-of-the-century English garden towns. We eat fake eggs that taste pretty close to real eggs. Women who can easily afford genuine Louis Vuitton bags frequent New York City’s Canal Street to purchase illegal knockoffs. Hipsters are paid to sit in cafés and “casually” promote products. And YouTube’s lonelygirl15 draws everyone into the debate over what is real and what is fake.

The Internet has also created transparency as customers use information to strip away the veneer of sexy marketing to reveal the true product, service or company. This, in turn, has created suspicion. They are tired of what Steven Colbert has satirically termed “truthiness”—the notion that something can be proclaimed true without any regard to evidence or fact. People are increasingly searching for things that are authentic, sincere and genuine.

Even so, many companies seem to have fallen into the trap of trying to seduce customers, rather than authentically connect with them. Authenticity is more than just a “bellyfeel,” to borrow a Newspeak term from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (for the record, I have not read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I have read Wikipedia’s entry on “truthiness” where this reference is made). At Ziba, we create authentic experiences by truly understanding the motivations of customers —not by asking them what they want, but by understanding what they need. We combine that knowledge with a deep understanding of why a product or service exists. Over the years of creating authentic products and services we have identified four sources of authenticity to consider when you are trying to reinvent your brand, your company, a product, or just trying to stand out in a world overrun by inauthentic products and services. These sources of authenticity include place, person, artifact and time.

“The Internet has created transparency as customers use information to strip away the veneer of sexy marketing to reveal the true product, service or company.”

Authentic [Place]
I don’t know a lot about wine, but I love a good story. In the tasting room of the Square Deal wine shop in Portland, Oregon, a map of Europe hangs on one wall. The shop imports wine from small, undiscovered wineries throughout Southern Europe. The shop’s sommelier introduces each wine by pointing out its location on the map and then tells a story filled with details of where the wine comes from as well as the climate and soil conditions of the place. Drinking ourselves around the map, it is the stories of place that make the experience, and therefore the wine, more meaningful.

Square Deal is not the only company to leverage place to build a meaningful brand experience. rag & bone crafts handmade denim jeans in North Carolina, where generations of jean makers live. The brand is about returning to the authentic origins of denim jeans. In its marketing materials, rag & bone leverages the denim-jean-making-heritage of North Carolina to make its brand more sincere. Killer Dana Surf Shop, located in Dana Point, California, is believable because it is located blocks away from the local surf spot bearing the same name. By using a local surf spot name, the shop leverages the power of place and gives credibility to its brand and product offering. Nintendo understands the power of place in creating meaning. Its introduction of the Wii leverages Japan’s reputation for creating innovative consumer electronics to introduce a completely foreign way of gaming to the rest of the world.

Place connects with our hearts. It provides immediate imagery. It defines culture and triggers memories. Place is difficult to fake—you either come from a place or you don’t. It resonates in this age of misrepresentation.

Authentic [Person]
Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Phil Knight. These are people with a deep passion for what they do. They each have a strong vision and point of view. They are courageous in sharing their point of view with other people. They are not afraid of being rejected. These people possess a core set of values and are compulsively committed to creating products, services and brands that embody these values, whether you agree with them or not. American Apparel’s controversial founder, Dov Charney, has created a $250 million business not by selling T-shirts, but by selling his seemingly incompatible values of social responsibility (made in L.A.) and seventies-style eroticism. It works because Charney truly believes in these values and runs his company accordingly. American Apparel offers health care to all employees, including those working in downtown L.A. factories. The company’s retail stores celebrate the sexual freedom of the Seventies with vintage Penthouse magazines pinned to the walls. You might disagree with Charney’s point of view, but the fact that he actually has one, is willing to embody it and realizes his vision in every detail of the company is attractive to many. He’s not trying to make everyone happy. But he knows that some people will be attracted with a great deal of passion.

Brands with strong people and clear values inspire us. They help us relate to a brand. They give us someone to cheer for or root against. They connect us with archetypal stories—good overcoming evil, kings being toppled only to climb their way back to the top.

Authentic [Artifact]
Even though the world doesn’t need another sandal, we have one—Crocs. In just five years, Crocs went from an idea in Lyndon “Duke” Hanson’s head to a $239 million company. Why do people love them? While many of us find them downright ugly, Crocs have a rapidly growing base of enthusiastic fans. They are loved because the product itself is authentic. Crocs focused less on fashion and more on the technology of the resin that makes their shoe unique. Croc resin is waterproof, lightweight and, unlike plastics and rubber, resists bacteria and fungus. The sandals provide an unusually comfortable fit because they mold to the contour of the foot while “circulation nubs” improve circulation and reduce muscle fatigue. The story of Crocs is in the artifact itself: how it was made, its clarity of purpose.

We love products that express their authenticity. Authentic artifacts connect with our senses. They have clarity of purpose and often express the process of making. They can be low- or high-tech, but there is always an honesty to the materials and processes used.

Authentic [Time]
Many people believe that an old product is somehow more authentic than a new one. If you ask someone to name an authentic product, they will often name something 40 to 50 years old. For example, a 1956 Ford truck or a molded plywood Eames chair from the Sixties. However, authenticity is not defined by the age of the item. The 1956 Ford and the Eames chair are authentic because they are “of-the-time.” They reflect the social and cultural values of the era in which they were made. Attempts to replicate or imitate these products become an expression of nostalgia and read as inauthentic. In order for today’s products and services to be authentic they can be inspired by the past, but they need to reflect today’s values and technological capabilities. Authenticity is about being timely, not imitating the past.

Authenticity [Now]
It wasn’t long ago that you could attract people by being new and innovative. Today, however, new is expected. In a world where the same factory makes products for competing companies and retailers and service providers are going directly to manufacturers to make products themselves, people are looking for something more meaningful than another widget or me-too service. Authentic experiences cut through this noise. They derive meaning from real stories of place, people, product and time. Great product and service experiences get their authenticity from all four sources. They connect with us on a deeply emotional level and have the power to last through trends and fads. Companies that make them don’t ask permission to act.

We are drawn to these companies and their products and services because they stand for something. And, especially for a message junkie like me, meaning and sincerity matter.

Chapter 3 from Authenticity is Now: A Working Definition of the Fluid State of Being as it Applies to Business and Design published in 2007.

Certain brands can be so successful that they become icons for their era. Oldsmobile enjoyed this place in American brand history in the 1950s and 1960s as a symbol of middle-class success. Enjoying icon status, however, can become a liability when trends change or the next generation comes along and defines everything differently, from symbols of success to the very nature of success itself.

“Enjoying icon status can become a liability when trends change or the next generation comes along and defines everything differently, from symbols of success to the very nature of success itself.”

Oldsmobile tried to remedy its predicament in the late 1980s with the company’s “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” ad campaign, but it quickly became an Advertising 101 example of what not to do when sales are falling fast. The campaign failed to engage the next generation of buyers because it merely told them that the slightly altered product wasn’t the same old thing that their parents liked, rather than redefining the experience to engage a new value system. The campaign only served to reinforce that Oldsmobile was, in fact, the car for an older generation.

Not every company will need to address change on this scale, but brands that seek to evolve and continue to engage their audience authentically will reach a crossroads where a significant trend renders values passé (think Kentucky Fried Chicken changing its name to KFC when “fried” became a bad word) or a new generation of consumers appears on the horizon (think Cadillac or the VW Bug). The terms of authentic engagement will change and it will not be enough to simply alter your messaging, product or service. Understanding the unmet desires of your audience must be part of the equation.

The overabundance of products and the peer-to-peer review opportunities made possible by the Internet empower consumers to reject companies’ half-hearted attempts at change and then spread the word. In this age, authenticity truly is in the eye of the beholder. In order to evolve, companies need to understand whom the tribe is that they will relate to at a specific point in time. Will you evolve with the audience that already adores you, or try to learn the language of a new generation and capture their hearts instead? Is it possible to do both?

Starbucks is at such a crossroads right now. When I started drinking Starbucks coffee back in the early Nineties, it satisfied the widespread need for a good cup of joe. Before Starbucks, you couldn’t find a good cup anywhere. I grew to depend on my morning latte and the store’s increasingly convenient locations. For my generation, Starbucks was about the ritual of coffee and the company’s version of café culture. Today, my daughter also enjoys Starbucks but, for her, Starbucks is about something different than coffee. Starbucks is Hear Music. It is CDs that she can buy at the store and artists she can listen to on XM radio. It is fruity drinks in the summer. It is a book club.

Starbucks lost my devotion a few years ago when it seemed to extend beyond its reach of simply serving coffee. We’ve recently heard about how Starbucks is taking a good hard look at itself to determine who it wants to become. In that process, Starbucks will need to address the question of audience. Will Starbucks seek to engage me, the original audience who has grown with the brand, or the next generation of customers for whom Starbucks has become a kind of ubiquitous entertainment company that also serves refreshments?

When Ziba worked with KitchenAid to help reinvent its brand, the company found that it had driven itself into a mid- to value-tier offering trying to compete with brands that had entered the category with lower-priced, feature-heavy products. In the process, KitchenAid had given up the quality that had been a hallmark of the brand. The stand mixer had earned icon status; the heavy, almost industrial cast metal became a symbol of the hard working, dedicated homemaker. This design language had been pervasive across the company’s products, from the heft of refrigerator doors to the satisfying latch of dishwasher doors. KitchenAid acknowledged its watered-down position and chose to reinvigorate the brand and reconnect with its target audience. The company just needed to decide whom it wanted to woo.

At Ziba, we strive to understand the motivations of customers. In fact, we think it is the most important work to do in establishing an authentic brand experience. Running a few focus groups is not enough. We use our deep understanding of consumers and brand to develop metaphors and themes that manifest in what we call a Visual Brand Language (VBL), which reflects the desired brand experience and core brand objectives.
We develop the unique VBL for a brand by understanding the evolution and goals of the brand position; establishing desired brand personalities; mapping customer perception of the brand personalities in the context of the brand and its chief competitors; defining and assigning visual characteristics to current, desired and competitive brand positions; and determining the visual characteristics of a brand’s desired brand position. Once all of this groundwork has been laid, only then is it time for the design team to abstract design principles and create a new, authentic brand experience.

KitchenAid was surprised to discover that the younger generation remembered the design details of the products that their parents owned when they were young. However, when they went to purchase KitchenAid products, the qualities they remembered and loved had disappeared. This key discovery from our qualitative research reinforced for KitchenAid that the brand and product qualities they had once been known for were still remembered and in demand. This new generation was the primary buying audience of kitchen appliances and hungry for a brand they could trust. After working with Ziba, KitchenAid had a crystal-clear picture of whom they would appeal to. The result was ProLine— a new range of high-end kitchen appliances that earned KitchenAid multiple accolades for innovation and manufacturing process. Since the introduction of ProLine, KitchenAid has returned to its position as a leader in high-end kitchen products.

In the age of authenticity, lyrics (with a minor addition by yours truly) from a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song seem apropos for engaging your customers: “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, [you’d better learn to] love the one you’re with!”

From Authenticity is Now: A Working Definition of the Fluid State of Being as it Applies to Business and Design published in 2007.