Sculptural Sitting

I`m a sucker for a nice piece of furniture, even if its only an occasional purchase after a windfall. I`m particularly enamored with pieces that are not subject to the terror of chocolate fingers from my 10 year old son, or light bleaching. I have a very nice red wool chair that jives me almost as much stress as pleasure. In light of this I was very keen to know more about this piece when looking for some kitchen stools for my new house. Its created by a small designer maker company called Philip Watts Design (www.philipwattsdesign.com), apart from the sculptural quality, I love the allusion to both Duchamps Readymades, vernacular Italian seating and Futurist notions of motion. Of course the devil is in the detail and it would be crazy to buy one of these without seeing the quality of the casting in the flesh but it could well be I`m adding to my collection and won`t have to worry too much about sticky fingers.

Back in the sadle

It's been so long since my last post terminating this blog was a real possibility but with renewed vigour and some new technology I'm hoping to be more productive. I'm writing 4 bids for research funding at the moment so I need all the imagination I can generate more soon.

-- Post From My iPhone

GameJam@infoLab - Live.It!

Recently I spent an enjoyable few days as one of the judged of a mobile design competition. Sponsored as part of an international program by nokia the GameJam@InfoLab event drew students from across disciplines to create concept designs for mobile phone games in 2 days of red bill fuelled mayhem, with a petch Kutcher style presentation at the end. The motivation for this was not only some really nice phones for the winners and runners up but also the opportunity to go into the next stage of the competition and a trip to San Francisco to present their ideas.

Game Jam was organised by Paul Coulton, one of the leading mobile developers in the UK and internationally, a Forum Nokia Champion and all round good egg. You can find out more about GameJam and some of the other experiments / mobile services that are coming out of this research group at www.mobileradicals.com, there is more about one of Paul’s highly innovative, fun services on the Nokia Forum site, this one talks about a service to create 3D images with an ordinary mobile camera phone

Getting back to GameJam it was so encouraging to see the energy of students and the creative suggestions, there was a real buzz around the event. The aim is to make this an annual event and to expand the scale in future, this deserves to really take off.

Incidentally, the image above shows the winning team being awarded their prizes, it also represents an addition ot my collection of photos in which I am comically obscured.

HighWire - Creating Innovative People for Radical Change

I have been involved in an exciting new approach to research recently, culminating in a £4 million grant for the EPSRC to develop cross disciplinary research projects that cross between design, computing and management. As a result, Lancaster University’s new Doctoral Training Scheme, HighWire, has begun recruiting students.

HighWire will to create a new breed of PhD student though the development of a post-disciplinary approach to research that focuses on problems rather than conventional subject areas or disciplines) we are also placing innovation at the heart of its curriculum and ethos, something I’m a serial poster about here. The scheme will provide funding (bursary and enhanced stipend) for 50 PhD students over 5 years.

We are running a recruitment event in Lancaster on the 11th of March with another later in the year. More information on the scheme and the event are available on the HighWire website.

Sea Kittens

I’ve been reading a lot about branding lately, its interesting to see the disjunction between the business-as-usual approach and new emerging approaches that realise that we really are in the process of moving into a new phase of citizen consumption. Something very much in the business as usual camp is PETAs (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) campaign to ‘re-brand’ fish as sea kittens in an attempt to make fishing and eating fish less attractive. Despite a nice web tool that allows you to make your own photo fit sea kitten there are a few problems. Firstly kittens yum yum! My son and I now enjoy sea kitten pie and sea kitten fingers), secondly such an earnest approach “hooking a sea kitten through the mouth and dragging her through the water is the same as hooking a kitten through the mouth and dragging her behind your car” is asking for a response. This came in the form of a spoof site shown here…with a steak advert attached.

The Perfect Woman

There is a video on you tube and portal sites such as bore me and dig about a breakthrough in interactive robotics. The clip shows an interview with some scientists and a lifelike looking robot that is soon going to be on sale, you can see this here. This is clever because with the limited amount of time one screen this robot is reasonably convincing but not nearly as lifelike as Hiroshi Ishiguro`s Geminoid HI-1. Following links to the website the game is quickly up, as the online ordering system shows the robots start to move mechanically but gradually move into (fully clothed) pole dancing and eventually short circuiting in an explosion to reveal an advert for Nivia shaving foam and Philips razors. This sort of advertising is not new with people like Dare doing this sort of thing with Axe/Feather as far back as 2003 but its still interesting as a construct that appeals to base emotions and our curiosity, I’m also aware that I’m doing the work of the advertiser right now in propagating the site.

As advertising budgets contract it will be interesting to see if this sort of playful tangential word of mouth approach continues or if there will be a contraction to the hard sell or something new will emerge

Incidentally, be careful to go to www.perfect-woman.com if by mistake you go to www.ideal-woman.com you get a very different experience

Dare to be Different

I spent some time recently working with Dare, a fantastically talented new media advertising agency, anyone who scans the Campaign awards results will know how highly regarded these guys are in the industry and in the wider commercial field. I was at Dare to help them look at their creative processes and how they intend to keep their innovative edge. This problem affects most companies but especially those in the creative sector. I started doing projects with Dare 8 years ago when they had 15 people and were the definition of a guerrilla-marketing agency with radically innovative projects being developed by the seat of their pants – with startlingly good results. Now they are over 200 people and its more difficult to be fleet of foot, when you have the footballer Kaka for 15 minutes for a shoot its hard to be footloose and fancy free.

A group of designers and technical experts came together, really to think about how to keep the gorillas spirit alive, and really preserve opportunities for serendipity with a larger structure. It was an interesting day, largely because there was such a flexibility of thinking and willingness to consider new ideas from the participants. It was also stimulating because there was a palpable sense of tipping point where innovation moves from an implicit, unacknowledged activity towards a appreciation that these things can be brought into the light, without crushing the life out of them.

This is symptomatic of wider debates in the design industry (with some notable dissention from people such as Rick Poynor in his article ‘Down with Innovation’). Some agencies use a very clearly articulated production process such as Prince2 while others are much more organic, one this is for sure though, these sorts of discussions are going to become more common and more important as the design industry matures.

Imagination: Doctoring the Future

I write to the clink of Champaign glasses as we celebrate a significant success for ImaginationLancaster. We have been awarded (with Computing and our Management School)  a bid for £5 million from the EPSRC to establish a Digital Economies Innovation Doctoral Training Centre. This is one of only five centers in the UK under the Digital Economies DTC call.

The funding will be used to pay for the fees and a stipend for 50 studentship over 5 years to undertake firstly a one year MRes then a PhD project across the fields of Design, Computer Technology and Management. We will be recruiting the cohort of students for September 2009 and eventually all the PhD students will be accommodated in the new Imagination building, expanded specifically for the purpose when we put in the bid.

As coordinator for PhDs in Imagination my administrative responsibilities are going up up up, but it’s a fantastic vote of confidence for the Imagination and Lancaster University, it also gives us the opportunity to make a real impact on design research in the UK and beyond. Anyone from the UK or EU interested in applying should go to the Imagination website here then contact Leon Cruickshank as PhD coordinator for more information.

Now where is my drink?

Passion for Panton

An entry on the excellent blog of Kevin Roberts http://krconnect.blogspot.com/2008/12/have-seat.html about well designed (and indeed designer furniture) has prompted me to respond with my ideas for the perfect balance of design quality, practicality (we still have kids with chocolaty fingers in our house) and affordability. For me the best balance if the Panton stacking chair (above) its sublimely elegant, very comfortable and wipe clean. In addition, you can get a good original from a few hundred pounds. Make sure you do get an original; this is made from acrylic rather than polypropylene. For those not in the know this is the difference between the plastic used in good clear drinking glasses and the plastic used for washing up bowls.

Do go and check out the Villain chair Kevin talks about, it would be top of my list if funds were not an issue.

Past-It Post-Its?

We use post-its all the time in Imagination, especially when working with commercial clients in visioning exercises where we need to capture everyone’s ideas very quickly and democratically - ones the ideas on the board it becomes anonymous, especially as we always use the same excellent Sharpie pens. The problem is that as these sorts of techniques are propagating thought the people we work with we are starting to find that because its so familiar our partners are thinking more about technique than ideas. Recently we spent a day with the guys as Mott McDonald and a primary care trust in Walsall. They wanted some help exploring the future of healthcare communication. It was a great day but we had to get over the fact that they were keen to talk to us about the power of hexagonal post-its (even though for us, they are a little too small to communicate a concept to a group). Its a symptom that is making us re-assess some of the techniques we use for this sort of activity. On one hand the barriers to engagement with post its are so low but I think increasingly we are going to be using actors, totems and tagging (of the physical but also meta-dater) approaches and give post-its a bit of a rest for a while.