With this in mind, we tailored our presentations to give the students a feel for Continuum’s social innovation process. The morning started out with a tour of the space and its project-specific installations, led by the studio principal Alex Hennen. Then, design strategist Brian Wen led a presentation and discussion on design strategy and ethnography in emerging markets.

Below are some impressions from the students:

“I began to realize all the types of people, methods, and practices that go into social design. It is a complex system.”
Alexandra Cantle

“[I got] a chance to see more ways that design can create social impact. It also was good to see the importance of video interviews and what they can reveal.”
Stephanie Treinen

 ”Being in product design, I’ve come to the realization (or more left the state of denial) that you really need to get out there and talk to people when doing research. Not just sit and google things on a computer.”
Ryan Robinson

“[I got] a better understanding of the effectiveness of systems thinking, the process involved, and the importance of beginning with people’s values, and how to work with and understand people in a ethnographic design context.”
Julian Rood

Our LA team hooked up a dual quad-core CPU Mac tower to enable Professor Tim Kasser to present and participate remotely. Supported by a great deal of analytical data supported by psychologists, Professor Kasser predicted a future focused less on extrinsic values (materialism) and more on intrinsic values (spiritualism). This is important, he explained, because when people focus on extrinsic values, their level of happiness and gratification goes down, and vice versa. To further explain the difference, he compared people who focus on the material against those who focus on the spiritual the day before and after Christmas. 

Nathan Shedroff presented a thought-provoking piece around meaning and how to find it. He said that traditionally, when people say “Less is More,” it generally makes people nervous, as they believe things are being taken away from them. He proposed re-phrasing it as “getting more for less.” With a strong focus on meaning, he also spoke about how any two people can have their own definition of values such as freedom and security, but the expression of those values can be very different. One example of this is that while NRA folks believe possessing firearms is an expression of security, others may think the exact opposite. 

Sean Brennan’s presentation looked at a shift occurring in Gen Y; the first generation that will not be as economically successful as its predecessors. Since they can’t afford more, their aspirations and spending behaviors will be different (and incomparable to previous generations). He looked at how this generation is using the internet as a way to rapidly prototype new identities, form relationships, and use their creativity and experiences as currency (Flickr travel photos, twitter updates). They spend their money on tools and services that allow them to do these things. Sean also echoed Professor Kasser’s points by sharing some of the thinking that’s happening in Continuum’s NEXT community, particularly around how sharing plays an important role for members of this new generation and how technology and services allow this generation to be green and thrifty by default. 

The crowd was very engaged in the panel discussion and raised some very good questions. Since half of the audience was design professionals, the conversation focused around what the implications would be for the future of design. The event lasted well into the evening hours, and everyone walked away with new insights in the future of consumerism.

The conversation focused primarily on the disaster in Haiti. Frontline reports from Jean and Gerald underscored the extraordinary challenges the humanitarian community faces in delivering aid to a country hobbled by a threadbare infrastructure (including a lack of basic governance) and debilitating poverty. Taking a step back, we looked at a country that has been the recipient of over $4 billion in aid over the past 20 years. Pre-earthquake, there were over 10,000 private aid organizations working in Haiti, providing basic services in every arena of life. Depending on which source you choose to believe, the estimated cost of recovery hovers in the range of $7.2 to $13 billion. The main focus now is pure “rescue:” How to deliver and distribute it. This is the horse before the cart of reconstruction.

And it all reminded me of something I heard the founder of a social enterprise working in Haiti say, post-disaster: “Rescue is important, but doesn’t lead to anything more than rescue.” That’s not to say immediate relief isn’t a must have—but what’s the role design can play in the long-term recovery (and we’re talking decades) facing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? That’s the big question to ask—and some of what we touched on during the panel conversation.

You can view the video of the conversation here.

The students filed in, having been told by Professor Ager that the night’s session would be different. They settled in among a sea of Post-Its and Sharpies—the building blocks of great ideation.

The facilitators for the evening, Anna Muoio and Jon Campbell, kicked off the evening with a simple task—write down the steps that one would go through to pick up a rental car at the airport.  Bulleted lists were scrawled on paper at tables across the room.

The students, like most of our workshop attendees, were confident that they covered everything. Over the next few hours of the workshop, the students would come to view the same experience with very different eyes, and would realize that, in fact, there is much more to see.

After hearing about the basics of Design Thinking and Service Design—methodologies, principles, tools and ways of working effectively—the students learned how to use them. Encouraged by their facilitators and supporting cast from Continuum, including strategists, designers and engineers, the students explored the gamut of the rental car experience.

Armed with Post-Its, Sharpies and nimble minds, students used a tool called ‘Journey Mapping’ to examine the total experience and understand each step from the consumer’s point of view, along with accompanying needs, anxieties and emotional connections. This exercise enabled the students to view the entire picture of how the experience flows and the holistic implications of potential changes and improvements.

Students were then charged with defining the ideal rental car experience, and, in the spirit of using new tools along the way, teams were challenged to convey an individual brand attribute through the experience. One team, charged with creating the experience with the brand attribute “edgy,” decided that ideally the rental car experience should be like a fashion show. They designed individual touchpoints along the journey that would help to create an “edgy” rental care experience.

The workshop was lively, and the students were both engaged and interested. After the workshop, one student said he is always asked to learn linearly.  This workshop, however, took the “Atlas globe” off of his back and allowed him to think more freely. The students departed the workshop in love with their favorite new office supply and excited to apply what they had just learned to their work.

Let’s take the bad news first. Something happened in 1990 when GM acquired 50% of Saab, and something REALLY happened in 2000 when they bought the other 50%. Some will say that GM sucked the lifeblood out of the brand by trading on decades of consumer loyalty bred from uniquely Saab innovations, like an ignition key on the floor, instead of developing innovations on their own. Saab did, in fact, keep pace and even developed some promising models under the aegis of GM, but moved from the endearing quirkiness of rational Swedish engineering to the more economical rationale of cross-model parts compatibility and shared-source manufacturing.

The problem with GM Saab started in 1993, or rather the 1994 model year when things got ugly. Saabs were, up to this point, an acquired taste aesthetically, but were never confused with any other car on the road. The profile was distinctly “Saab”. 900 fans were let down by the 1994 version, and the brand never really recovered as the car changed over the course of a decade to resemble many cars, all seemingly merging towards the center of the herd where it’s safe. GM took a brand that offered a spectrum of ingenuity and innovation and boiled it down to model lines based on other cars that GM had on hand, and therefore their surplus of cheap parts. Most 900, 9-3 and 9-5 models to follow were based on lesser platforms (Opel’s Vectra, for example) and utilized parts common to the GM family tree. In effect, GM diluted the Saab heritage by marrying cousin to cousin and made it impossible to build upon all that strong Swedish DNA.

Now GM has Saab up on the auction block. A few contenders have raised their bidding paddles, including fellow Swedes Koenigsegg and more recently the Dutch fabricator Spyker, both manufacturers of exotic and ridiculously expensive supercars. For unknown reasons, these negotiations seem to end consistently without a deal and a handshake. At this point, it looks as if Saab will either be retired altogether or bought by an obscure emerging market manufacturer and cannibalized of all of its assets. Glimmers of hope reside only in the silver lining behind cloud number 3: Subaru. If there is any sense in this world, Subaru will buy Saab.

With a few exceptions, GM Saab continued to offer basically the same car for 15 years. In 2005, this was taken to the opposite extreme when GM, in its brief but most inspired moment, created the Saab 92-X by badge engineering a Subaru Impreza WRX (also partially owned by GM at the time) with Saab styling, comfort and handling. This car still ranks near the top of my candidate list as a replacement for my 1990 Saab 900T that I sold 3 years ago. I haven’t had a car since, but that’s another story. The 92-X represented a brief moment of hope for me that great things could come out of the unholy union of an elegant Swede descended from jets and a nimble Japanese rally car pumped full of horsepower. *sigh*

Speaking of horsepower, how about some good news? It’s January. Among gear heads, this is a quiet time of year, with the only outlet being Top Gear episodes on BBC America. If you’re really Jonesing, you crawl over to internet videos of obscure automotive competitions like Race of Champions in China or Ice Rally in Finland. Not this year. So far, 2010 is WAY different. Not only will we get the Winter Olympics and World Cup Soccer, this year will mark the first year in my lifetime that the US will field a Formula 1 team. In a sort of perfect storm scenario, team USF1 has managed to time their launch to take advantage of three unique circumstances: open grid spots; investor faith in emerging teams; and a surplus of talent and technology.

Formula 1 teams are monstrous efforts that draw heavily on a multitude of resources, not the least of which is financial. When you figure that, in the past, heavily-funded team like Honda, Toyota, Minardi, BMW and Jaguar invested millions of dollars season after season only to finish consistently in the lower half against equally-funded teams like Ferrari, Mercedes McLaren & Red Bull, it becomes a difficult sell to convince outside investors to invest in a fledgling team. All five of those teams decided the back half of the grid was not worth the cost and will not be on the grid this year.

Last year, a rookie team, Brawn GP, did not exist (in theory) 30 days before the start of the first race, however, they took top honors in both of the categories for which Formula 1 teams compete: The Constructor’s Championship and the Driver’s Championship. This opened the door for any new team to solicit funding during a time (2009) when funding was extremely hard to come by without forming a partnership with a major auto manufacturer, which is the prevalent route among F1 contenders. Richard Branson came on last year as Brawn GP’s only sponsor. This year, Sir Richard felt confident enough to simply field his own team.

Navigating the political structure of the sport is like trying to explain tax law to a third grader. The governing body of F1, Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) is the official legislative body and creates the rules that govern teams, cars, drivers, testing, management, budgets, etc. During the summer of 2009, they tried, as they often do, to regulate the sport to reflect major overtures in public sentiment and to safeguard the sport. In years past, these regulation changes focused on increasing the sustainability of the sport and controlling the excessive spending on technology and testing. The sport has no lack of detractors that bemoan it as a hideously obscene display of inefficiency, excess and indulgence. Short-lived solutions like “No tire changes during a race” last for about a season until the winds of public opinion change, and then they go away.

This year, under the dark cloud of the global recession, the FIA attempted to place a regulatory cap on team budgets in order to level the playing field between mega-manufacturer-sponsored teams like Mercedes and those that are funded privately like Force India. In the end, the teams argued the point into submission, but not before taking a very careful look at their own operations and how they could slim and trim down to a sleek $35 or $40 million operating budget. With that came realizations that there was indeed fat to be trimmed and so the trimming began, leaving a lot of uniquely-skilled individuals looking for work. Couple that with the withdrawal of 3 or 4 teams (depending on how you count) and the soup lines start to stretch around the block. The same can be said for the racing world in general, stretching through the other open wheel classes, NASCAR, LeMans, etc. This affected not only teams, but also nearly every aspect of the complex network of suppliers, fabricators, manufacturers, and testing facilities. Suddenly bargain deals were everywhere, and USF1 is not the only team taking advantage of this. The grid this year will also see new teams Lotus, Virgin, Campos and Sauber (minus BMW support).

USF1 announced themselves officially as a team in March 2009, although the organization started 6 or 7 years ago. Since March, they have been a SkunkWorks-type operation, with precious few information leaks, most of which centered around tertiary-level organization (they have yet to announce who will be driving their cars). This is an odd way to begin a relationship with a future, and currently non-existent US fan base. But looking closely at the team structure reveals some promise in the names that show up on the non-technical side. USF1 managed to strike a partnership deal with Chad Hurley (YouTube) that may affect the way we watch F1….sure why not? Hurley knows how to handle popular, mainstream media. Other rumored sponsors include Rich Silverstein of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, so USF1 should have some flashy marketing and catch phrases like “Got Speed?”. Others rumored to be part of the mix are Bay Area-based IDEO (unconfirmed..but I’m crushed anyway) and Octagon Worldwide in Charlotte, NC. Within that mix is some incredible potential for the USF1 brand to be engineered from scratch into an American legacy.

So my days over the next three months will be spent watching the rapid emergence of USF1 and monitoring its growth. USF1 is uniquely positioned to offer US race fans a home team on the world stage of auto racing. Skeptics will immediately draw parallels from this lofty endeavor to the uphill battle that US Soccer has had over the last two decades since Americans just don’t gravitate towards sports that we do not absolutely dominate. We could care less about rugby or cricket, we give marginal deference to hockey and soccer, and you can just forget about cars that turn right while racing. Conversely, we’re addicted to YouTube and Twitter since they bring us to an intimately close vantage point. Maybe the dream team that USF1 has assembled can pull it off. I’ll be watching.

Kiran’s latest thinking on how to enact change is The Design for Giving Contest. Through this, an entire emerging generation is called to action. She’s continued to drive home the point “Do not let the teachers drive the project; let them just guide it.”

Stanford d school and IDEO team with the contest team while designing the toolkits.

With over 1300 entries pouring in from children full of earnest thinking and concern the teams from Continuum, IDEO, and the Institute of Design at Stanford were sure to be overwhelmed. As any contest of this size our team was rigorously making sure every entry had fulfilled each category with a level of clarity and conviction. Though, we also admitted how each entry would be its own mystery whose impacts we couldn’t possibly fully grasp: the elderly they visited, the thirsty villagers they spoke with, or the water sanitation issues they researched. Qualifying the entries would be soft, but also hard and fast. Sixth senses were hard to trust on this one.

I will not forget one particular entry. As we were going through many dozens of entries we began to learn their rhythm, their formats, language and tactics. Shivesh Pandey’s entry was different. This 11 year-old dove into a problem we hadn’t seen in other entries. He started to envision a technology device for his local train station. He explained that his motivation was several deaths from people trying to cross the train tracks as unannounced trains wizzed through the terminal. Following his explanation he submitted his genius: a fully equipped, stacked device outlining each feature – in crayon and colored pencil. Without a flinch, he had the answer. He was simply calling for its production and installation.

Electro Radio Transfer Waves - Shivesh Pandey

We’ll look forward to staying involved in Kiran’s work as it surely evolves. Kiran recently shook things up at TEDIndia and her contagious thinking. It seems the contest already has a life of its own – in the best way.

Apps are great – having downloaded two billion of them, users clearly love them, but I wonder what this means for the future of users’ experiences on mobile and other devices. While apps are great at maximizing the experience on a particular device, the proliferation of different smartphone platforms means that there are at least five different OSs developers need to think about (iPhone OS, Blackberry OS, Symbian, WebOS (Palm) and Android). Isn’t this just another version of the Windows, Mac OS and Linux battles? (Interestingly, Windows Mobile, while early to the party, seems to be lagging.) What you can do in the mobile world depends, more than ever, on what device you have.

 Certainly the last 15 years have seen multiple revolutions in the web experience (anyone remember html 1.0 and blinking text?). Instead of ‘there’s an app for that,’ just a couple of years ago, we might have said, ‘there’s a site for that.’ But the limitations of the web environment (or the great capabilities of the iPhone) made the opportunity for apps too good to ignore. Each opportunity brings new challenges with it; in this case, it’s finding, choosing and managing lots of apps. In a world of 100,000 apps, the killer app might just be an app navigator. The iPhone App Store today has a lot more in common with Yahoo! in 1994 than Google in 2009.

So we’re only at the beginning, and we know a lot is going to change in the app space. But the right question here is: What’s the total experience that users really want to have? And who’s going to make it happen? It’s time to take a step back and think about people.

Bench advertising is very commonly seen in bus stops and public parks. On my daily commute, they’re mostly dominated by dentists, realtors, pharmaceutical companies, and sometimes public health campaigns like HIV testing. Ever since the smart advertisers from “District 9″ flooded the city of Los Angeles with “Non-Humans seen in La Cienega exit off 10 freeway,” “Bus bench for humans only” warning signs (I actually followed the sign and called to report non-human sightings), Cougar Town is now following suit and put Courtney Cox on the typical realtor bus bench spots.  Compared to conventional posters, these attempts to make audiences feel as if they are actually living the storyline seem more effective. To those who watch Cougar Town, it adds realism and emotional connections, to those who don’t, it peaks curiosity to find out more from those www’s…

"Up In The Air"

I have a 12-mile daily commute on Venice Boulevard, and it’s very interesting to see how advertisers try to grab commuters’ attention, especially now with digital billboards. As I wait for the lights to turn green, I now get the pleasure of being advertised by up to 6 different TV shows, whereas 2 years ago, I would have seen that billboard long before I arrived, and ignored it completely as I waited for the lights. Though none has impressed me until recently when I saw the smart advertisers from “Up In The Air” truly embrace the technology by shifting two images with the same background–one with George Clooney alone facing the runway, the other with two other travelers in the picture (as shown) within the same time frame given to each advertiser. I see a not too distant future when billboards will actually work with local traffic patterns (loaded with Google traffic data), to rotate content accordingly, or even work with cars embedded with smart chips to gauge the primary audience level at each given stop light.

826 Boston is the seventh center to be modeled after 826 Valencia, the acclaimed youth writing program co-founded by writer Dave Eggers. Continuum paired up with the local writing and tutoring center to create a new brand identity, communication strategy, and print collateral.

The collateral, playing off 826 Boston’s whimsical Greater Boston Bigfoot Institute storefront, includes witty copy, colorful graphics and hand-drawn illustrations.

The new identity will launch Monday, October 5th at and advanced screening party of Where the Wild Things Are, hosted by 826 Boston and the movie’s screenwriter Dave Eggers.