After 15 years of design research as a growing and now dominating force within the business of developing products and services of real value for the consumer, the question about what’s next is beginning to rise.

As the power and methods of design research is becoming known by everybody who wants be sure to make money in a world of ‘more products faster’, it is obvious that we all need to find the next tool or weapon in the battle to develop the next big thing, before the competition.

Here’s my bet, and I’ll be blogging a bit about that for a while, because I think it is explosive… Corporate Collective Creativity. With design research as a standard process we need to look for a new creative potential to release. We believe that potential could easily be the vast research and innovation resources that exists within every company – but that usually stays largely untapped due to a variety of organisational, psychological and even physical reasons.

Most senior designers have years of experience with being two things: design developers – and facilitators of processes that synthesizes the right framework for the innovation work. Almost always painfully ignorant to the specific project designers gather information from the market and from inside the client’s organisation … where they often find many of the answers already – inside the organisation, right under the client’s nose, usually, though, well hidden or just not actively seeking to become of value. Simply because the organization does not recognize the value or is able to facilitate it.

If the corporate world can learn to activate and cultivate the vast research and innovation resources inside their organisation, the speed and precision of development can be seriously increased. We believe they can learn that from us and our colleagues in the design business.

My new design thrill is time. After 17 years of designing, it’s occurred to me that companies continually fail to consider one important parameter: time factor. Put simply, this is the amount of time a user is willing to spend on your product, service or communication solution before they give up and walk away.

Take this American billboard, for example. It may not be pretty, but it sure as hell works.

Why? Its design acknowledges the fact that people only have a split second to get the message. A two-word eye-catching question against a brightly coloured background attracts your attention in a flash and quickly communicates the product.

It competes hands down against the hundreds of other billboards in the city, which demand as much as 10 seconds from passers by. Just a thought … Check out Thinkaboutit for more reflections on the design time factor.

Consumer behaviour is changing as a result of the economic downturn– but how? I’ve observed how it’s affecting the eyewear sector.

Before the downturn hit, this is what eyewear consumers were doing:

1. Flashing money
Eager to flash the cash, consumers bought frames that looked expensive.

2. Standing out
Consumers bought flashy, expressive frames.

3. Changing styles
Consumers bought expressive and expensive frames because they could afford to buy new frames if they grew tired of a certain look.

And this is what eyewear consumers are doing now:

1. Choose sides
Brands that are neither cheap nor expensive are suffering as the middle ground disappears. So choose sides.

2. Stand out – intelligently
Consumers don’t want bling – but intelligent details and technical solutions that add value to their choice of frame.

3. Think longevity
Your consumers want design that lasts longer. Prepare for a return to rounder, friendlier shapes and less expressive colours.

As always – in recession either classic products or true innovation will prosper. Nobody wants more of the same.

I’ve just had a meeting with a business man from Asia, who is about to launch an online service that allows design project owners to crowdsource on even complicated design projects. Three months ago I had a similar meeting with a Dutch guy, also about to launch a crowdsourcing tool.

This momentum just confirms my belief that crowdsourcing is a key design tool of the future. Why? It allows thousands of brains to chip into the development process, making the creative process quicker and more expansive.

My bet it’s not a stand-alone solution. Creative processes require considerable and careful management. But with a little culture change and enough contributors and users on board, I do believe that crowdsourcing is a key way forward for creative development.

Call it the democratisation of design – even non-designers can point and click their way to ingenious solutions with a crowdsourcing tool. Time to retire, I guess.

This year's Mini-lit hit

Due to my roots in communications design, I’m often asked this question. It’s a question impossible to answer with conviction, as no other design discipline has such a wide cultural and personal variety as communication.

Blogging may be the fashionable answer right now, but in essence it’s just more of the same. There’s a more interesting answer. A new thing is going on, that if nothing else illustrates the challenge of the continuous information overload.

It’s called Mini-lit. The phenomenon owes a lot to synchronised messaging: SMS, Twitter.com, chat etc. It’s about saying a lot in very few words – demanding more from the reader – and sender. Mini-lit is limiting the number of words you have to convey a message: a five-word film review, 12-word novel, six-word prayer. Concentrate, think and communicate and challenge me – don’t just spam me with words. That’s the idea.

Hemmingway apparently started the whole thing when he was dared to write a six-word-novel. He came back with: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Now you know what I mean.

I think Mini-lit will find it’s way into mainstream communication – for a while. This year’s surprise hit in U.S. bookshops was ‘Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure’. And a second six-word collection, on love and heartbreak, will be out in January. The Mini-lit thing is spreading.

Read more here

Look at this picture – proof that the US is the mother of innovation culture. In Denmark we also have a tradition for caramel apples. Tradition with a big T, that is. It’s never changed and it is still only possible to get the red classic version that is superimposed bottom right. Randomly browsing I stumbled over this: http://www.amyscandykitchen.com, where the main picture is from.

It’s a perfect illustration of how important it is to look at something you like (the red caramel apple) and think: “that is really nice – how can I make it even better” (look at the that striped monster in the bottom corner of the tray). Thinking “We can do better…” is the heart of progress (a possible path to wealth). Thinking “…and then we can do better again, immediately!” is the heart of innovation (the safest path to survival)- always moving, changing, improving things. Look at this picture and learn a bit about what it means when innovation is a cultural business drive – not just a contemporary management book theme. In the States this drive to innovate somehow repeats itself in just about every business area you look at. Try to impose the feeling from these two pictures on your own field of business, and consider if you do as well as Amy. We can all learn from her:-)

Flew over Las Vegas a few months ago (landed there too) and got a shock as you do sometimes seeing a city from above. This picture shows just a tiny part of the area of the city, where two million people live. Looks like a city made by a harvesting machine – and 95% of inhabitants work in service or entertainment (not a lot of production going on there).

This city didn’t really exist 60 years ago. There’s a sci-fi feeling to it, maybe because we know that more and more people move to the cities to work in service or entertainment, as manual labour is taken over by machines.

It might well be a picture of our future seen from above…(and with global warming, maybe even the weather in northern Europe would become more like Las Vegas – one can hope:-)

Just some food for thought: there were 262 entries in the competition to design the visual identity for COP 15, the international UN climate conference to be held in Copenhagen in 2009.

My conservative guess is that an average of 25 hours has been used to produce each design proposal for the competition, which revealed the winner this week. That totals 6550 hours.

For the climate CO2 geeks: computers and light for one workstation uses about 500-600 W/hour. That’s 3.275 KWh, equalling approx. 3 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

This may not do away with all of the Antarctic. But if what they want from the conference is more awareness about cutting our power consumption, there may have been more responsible ways of getting the message across.

For the rest of us: one designer hour is maybe worth an average EUR 75. That equals EUR 491.250,- (DKK 3.7 mio – one kindergarden yearly budget) of our little country’s economy spent on producing one winning proposal. There may be more responsible ways of treating the fragile Danish design business. And maybe even better examples to set…

We didn’t win (you may have guessed, we actually never do:-), but personally I oppose public competitions. It’s the least professional way to choose a partner for a long large-scale project and it’s such a waste of time for all the designers that didn’t win. And more often than not – time is what we sell.