Feel inventy and collaborative today? If you have awesome ideas for innovative, eco-efficient products it’s time for action. While climate gurus debate a greener world in Copenhagen these weeks Quirky walks the talk. During the summit, you can submit your wildest, sustainable product ideas to the site – without the usual fee of 99 USD.

Or you can discuss or vote others’ eco-effective ideas closer to production. Even improve them to gain co-ownership. Unlike other community-based idea sites, such as Dell’s ideastorm or Starbucks’ mystarbucksidea Quirky shares profits with you if your product vision makes it to production. 12 cents in your pocket for every dollar your product makes.

So, what are you waiting for? Experience the power of co-creation and crowd-sourcing before you try it out in your own business.

Robot geeks, check out Botjunkie, or as a starter, Fast Companys great line up of Boston Dynamics amazing running, walking, climbing ’terminators’. Cool stuff. I’m gonna buy one of these guys asap. Maybe the RHex on the video below who seems to be the perfect role model and buddy for my Husquarna AutoMower®.

One of my colleagues circulated a series of 70′s Trabant commercials. Watching them with both amazement and ostalgia, I realised that I’d almost forgotten about this automotive impossibility which survived more than thirty years. Including most of its strange signature features. 15 years delivery time. Under-the-hood, fast refuelling. Its funny two-stroke sound. Its signature 50 meter smoke tail dragging behind it. And not to forget, the innovative body work in Duroplast composite (which unfortunately wasn’t really water resistant). But even more fascinating is how more than three million of these things were put together – finished off with both passion and frustration. Have a look, and rediscover that superior product finish is nothing but a matter of creative craftsmanship and a willing heart.

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.

Businesses and organisations often overly invest in short-term initiatives, instead of identifying the problem and developing solutions – the key to which is multi-skilled, stakeholder involvement.

One example is cycle helmets. Today, after more than 10 years of public campaigns with little impact, people are starting to don helmets. Why? A new product design approach is supplementing the public campaigns.

New design solutions make people want to wear a helmet. BELL, for example, has moved away from the typically unattractive cycle helmet to a tough and attractive piece of sports equipment. Yakkay has taken it a step further by placing the visual focus on fashion instead of safety. But their success isn’t just the result of good design, but also years of public campaigns. In other words: it’s a combined effort.

The lesson? Involving all stakeholders early on in multi-skilled, collaborative process will result in hitting target faster and more accurately. If the public health campaigners had teamed up with designers 10 years ago, we may all have been cycling more safely and stylishly for years now.

Know road heating? That stuff has been around for about 30 years without really taking off. Bum heating in urban spaces will definitely make it big. This massive, concrete bench with built-in bum heating and internet access, and a halo found downtown Umeå, Sweden documents this trend. I guess the purpose is to get a couple of people out on the streets when it is minus 20°C and dark at 3PM. Cool thing but someone told me that each bench consumes the same amount of energy as a family home. You might want erect a wind mill beside it to get heated in a sustainable way.

Start taking notice of your (potential) female customers, was thrust of a seminar late last year at Copenhagen Business School. The seminar focused on how businesses can increase sales significantly by focusing on female customers. According to Helle Katholm Knutsen, women decide or influence a whopping 80% of all purchases! A GIANT business opportunity.

Many of Designit’s clients are starting to recognise this opportunity and requesting our expertise on how to best target the female segment. And we’re not the only ones. Here are examples of formerly male-focused companies that are doing what they can to get their foot on the female ladder.

Take for example Sydbank, which has a pension and investment service especially tailored to women. Or Q8, the chain of petrol stations, who is launching ‘Qvik To Go’, a new product series of healthy snacks and stations with new interior that appeals more to female customers. When Procter & Gamble Co. invented Swiffer, it was a result of considering how women feel while cleaning the house.

The business potential of the female segment is huge, so grab it!

I’m currently reading a book by Rolf Jensen, called “Dream Society”. In this book Rolf Jensen tries to define the future society of the western world. In the past we’ve been hunters and collectors, we’ve been through the agriculture and industrial societies. Many would agree that we at the moment are living in the information society. Rolf Jensen though, is stating that we are entering the “Dream Society” or the experience economy as it is also called.

Rolf is definitely into something here – and why shouldn’t he be – he’s one of the leading futurologists. In my opinion the dream society is not only in the beginning state. We are living it.

You can define the dream society as a society, where we’re not only buying products, we are buying stories and dreams. We want a good story to accomplish the product we’re buying. That can either be the wine where you “know” who the farmer is, a product styled by yourself or any other story attached to a product. For the same reason individualism is becoming more and more relevant in product design. Many of the “old” brands is learning this the hard way. People are no longer satisfied with a pair of jeans or shoes that everybody else is wearing. They want a story attached to it. Nike, Burton and other companies has taken this into consideration and made it possible for their consumers to style their own products and thereby attaching a story to the shoes they are wearing or the snowboard they are riding.

So why am I writing this. I’m doing it to open your eyes for the new possibilities and to get on the train before it’s left the station. I would also like to recommend this book to everybody who’s interested in design and branding.

On my recent vacation in Egypt I saw this ATM. I needed money, but I still walked around for almost an hour to find a bank that I felt looked reasonably safe and trustworthy.

A bank with an armed guard outside gave me more confidence that I wouldn’t get cheated than with the ATM shown in the picture.

How does this translate into design? First of all, the company producing the ATM has absolutely no understanding of the problems and challenges their client, the bank, has. And the bank has no understanding of their client, the person walking up to an ATM.

Just few days of channel service analysis might have saved all 3 parties (manufacturer, bank and client) from embarrasment, distrust and annoyance.

If a designer had been involved in the process, the manufacturer could have found a better solution for the banks challenges, the clients would still feel confident about the banks services and the bank would make more money.

Who should now feel cheated?

I experienced a new temporary screw cap for the first time last week, and I wasn’t impressed. Then yesterday I saw an article in a Danish newspaper that showed that I wasn’t the only one that was pulling their hair out at the new design.

“Can you open it?” read the headline. The article describes how Arla has been forced to change the screw top on their milk cartons following increasing pressure from unsatisfied customers. But the new design, created by Tetra-Pak, has prompted even more complaints than the first. Now the newspaper has created an online vote for the worst packaging.

This is one example of tricky packaging. People are tired of it. Companies have the chance to solve many of these everyday problems through design – and make money in the process. Instead, they opt for quick-fixes that may be cheap but leave the customer frustrated and prompts them to switch to another brand.

Just think what life could be like if companies invested more resources into reinventing packaging as a concept. Be visionary and capitalise on the strategic dimension in ‘packaging usability’. It’s just a small thing but you can be sure it’s got huge commercial potential.