Filed under: Uncategorized
Long time no hear, I know. But I’m making a (sarcastic) exception in my vow of silence to promote a great event I’ve been working on in Charlotte: Innovate Carolina. It’s put on by the PDMA Carolinas Chapter (Product Development and Management Association) and promises to be a jam-packed day of Open Innovation conversations with local companies such as SPX, Ingersoll Rand, Enventys, and Electrolux.
Since tax day’s been extended, there’s no excuse for innovators to miss this one!
Filed under: arts and creativity, Charlotte, community services, design research, information design, innovation, social media, Uncategorized | Tags: barcamp charlotte, charlotte design week, idsa southern district conference, richard saul wurman, ritz carlton charlotte, tedxcharlotte
photo via sirconferences
I wanted to quickly highlight a handful of design+innovation events in the Queen City before they sneak up on us! Who knew we were such a hotbed?!
- Perhaps as a preview to TEDxCharlotte, TED conference founder Richard Saul Wurman is visiting Charlotte to host a double feature on 4/7 and 4/8. The first is “Charlotte as a Learning Playground,” which is geared to be “an interactive conversation on Charlotte’s present and future identity.” At $199, it’s a little pricey, but one perk is that it’s at the new Ritz Carlton Uptown, where attendees can enjoy a fancy spread of hors d’oeuvres and try out the locally filtered water through its first-of-its-kind LEED setup.
- Charlotte’s own AIGA chapter is coordinating the city’s first annual Design Week, and they’re kicking it off at Imaginon on 4/13 with a Design Unplugged panel discussion of local creative directors and businessfolks.
- The next two conflict with an innovation event I’m attending in Chapel Hill, but I figured I’d share it here for those staying local that weekend: Barcamp Charlotte is hosting version 3.0 at Area15 on 4/10 and the Southern District Conference for the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) is in Charlotte on 4/9-11, themed The Economy of Design.
Filed under: consumer behavior, delighters, Uncategorized | Tags: data visualization, easybloom, mint.com
photo via easybloom (click for larger)
At work, I’ve been thinking a lot about how consumers consume data and use it to make everyday decisions. Now that we live in always-connected, info-lusting world, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that there are examples of it everywhere after I leave the office. I’ve been using a calorie-counting app on my iPhone to balance food with exercise over the last two weeks. I’ve played around with Mint.com and TurboTax to make decisions that deal with money.
Over the weekend, I used a sensor-based device called EasyBloom to decide what seeds to plant in my backyard, based on the chemistry of the soil and the amount of sun it gets (clearly, my plants get no sun at night, as the picture will above confirms.) And while the chart is nice to have for reference, what’s far more important about the data is what I should do about it. Since I’m no gardener, the insight and the expert recommendations that companies make for me is where the value lives.
I’ve written about data visualization before, and there’s many many beautiful examples of it everywhere. Then what’s the lesson here? Sometimes as designers and businessfolks, we forget to finish drawing the conclusion and offer the viewer a point of view by which to process those great charts, graphs, and lines. Be that an insight, a recommendation, or a call to action, remember to give consumers the ending!
Filed under: arts and creativity, Charlotte, innovation, social media, Uncategorized | Tags: Charlotte, dan pink, ideas worth spreading, NC music factory, ted, ted talks, tedxcharlotte
How excited was I when I learned about this?! Looks like details are still being formed, but a local version of the knowledge phenomenon that is TED will take place at the NC Music Factory in September. You need to apply to attend, but admission is free if you are one of the chosen. The RTP version is in just a few days.
Until then, here’s one of my favorites from Dan Pink talking about the topic of his most recent book, Drive, which is all about human motivation. A wonderful lesson for service designers everywhere.
Filed under: arts and creativity, Charlotte, innovation, Uncategorized | Tags: amelie's bakery, area 15, brainstorming, Charlotte, creativity, ideation, imaginon, innovation, magellan idea center, the light factory, wachovia
Innovation experts stress the value of conducting ideation sessions offsite, where participants focus on the task at hand and are removed from their day-to-day distractions. Brainstorming in a unfamiliar, yet relaxed environment really gets those alpha brain waves moving.
The economy undoubtedly presents a cost challenge, and it may seem like a luxury to whisk away your most productive employees for a day. However, I’ve seen dramatic differences in idea quality when teams downgrade to ideating in an internal conference room. In light of that, I suggest a few affordable creative spaces in Charlotte, all of which cost far less than a boring hotel ballroom and worth the investment for results.
photo via Magellan/IMR
The Best Buy: Magellan Idea Center
Located just outside Uptown in the Atherton Lofts, this space was designed with ideation in mind. (They also use it for focus groups and other types of market research.) It’s a huge space packed with creative stimuli (magazines, toys, and local art) and has smaller spaces ideal for breakout exercises. Lots of amenities are included, like coffee, snacks and tech equipment.
The Local: Imaginon
One of the benefits of having a session in a children’s museum is that it encourages your participants to think like kids again. Frank Blair of PLCMC suggests choosing one of the round rooms, adjacent to the courtyard, to have a session outdoors. Note that meetings technically have to be open to the public, so it may not be ideal for super-secret topics, but would be a nice place for brainstorming with potential customers.
Runner up “public” space: The Green at Wachovia
The Extra Sensory Experience: Amelie’s French Bakery
Though I haven’t had a workshop here myself, I imagine it would be a lovely place to host one, especially with the tasty treats so close by. And it would be a neat option for teams who are most creative during non-business hours, since they’re open 24/7.
Runners-up: The galleries at the Light Factory or the studios at Area 15 in NoDa (site of local meetups and barcamps.)
I’d love to hear about spaces that other folks in the area have tried. Post them in the comments!
Filed under: innovation, innovation trends, Uncategorized | Tags: building your innovation capacity, innovatecarolina, innovation, marshall brain, PDMA, product development and management association
I haven’t been posting as much as I’d like, and one of the reasons is that I’ve been working on putting together a great conference I’m about to plug: Innovate Carolina, which will take place on Saturday, April 10 at the UNC campus in Chapel Hill. The one day event is jam-packed with some great speakers, including Marshall Brain, the creator of How Stuff Works and the host of the NatGeo show “Factory Floor.” It’s put together by the Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA.) Non-members can attend for only $99 through the early bird deadline. The lineup is undergoing a few finishing touches and includes a some local Charlotteans, so check back to see more details on the program.
If you’ve got a few more dollars to invest in a quick workshop on innovation, consider “Building your Innovation Capacity” taught by the McColl School of Business at Queens University on March 17-18. I don’t know much about it outside the website, but it looks to hit on a broad range of steps in the innovation process.
Filed under: Charlotte, consumer behavior, information design, retail and restaurants, Uncategorized | Tags: Charlotte, gregg rapp, liberty gastropub, Queen's Feast, restaurant menus, scarcity
logo via Queen's Feast
For some reason, my mindmap over the summer about Charlotte Restaurant Week got lots of hits, so I thought I’d revisit the topic.
The winter version of the event is here once again, and like many Charlotteans, I will put my New Year resolutions on hold to participate. Why is it so successful? It’s great for restaurants because it fills empty tables during a slow period. The scarcity of a $30 deal at a fancy restaurant will sucker any diner into trying something new.
Personally, I like it because it’s another reason to bring people together. But it also cuts down the number of decisions I have to make when ordering off of a menu. This reminds me of a little publicity blitz by Menu Engineer (that’s right, an engineer) Gregg Rapp went on last fall. His interviews with Time and the Today Show reveal all the tricks he teaches restaurants as they redesign their menus to get you to spend more on your meal, including using center justification and taking out dollar $igns. He also uses fanciful descriptions that make their popular dishes hard to resist.
You don’t often get to read a person’s mind as he/she processes a menu to see if these tactics work. This Charlotte Loafing blogger shares her mental gymnastics on one of Restaurant Week’s participants, Liberty Gastropub, and it looks like the tasty descriptions work on her.
Filed under: 2 min mindmap, information design, Uncategorized | Tags: 2 minute mindmap, charlotte viewpoint, new year's resolutions
Closing out week 2 of the whole resolution thing, I thought I’d throw in a quick 2 minute mindmap. One of my resolutions is about working more with my hands, as I wrote about for Charlotte Viewpoint, but this mindmap is a simple brain dump on another related resolution: to eat better. Creating this helped me realize that I should put my vitamins in a place that’s easy for me to remember to take them.
click for larger
Filed under: consumer behavior, delighters, innovation trends, retail and restaurants, Uncategorized | Tags: delighters, grocery store innovation, mccormick, portion size, spices
I was at Harris Teeter the other day and caught this little delighter – pre-measured spice packs combined with recipes. I wished this was around when I was in college, I would have saved myself tons of bland meals because I was too cheap to buy all the spices I needed. Aside from actually solving for a problem that exists, what I love about it is that it probably didn’t cost a fortune to develop. It simply re-proportions existing products. It reminds me of a marketing trend of packaging smaller portions of goods to bring down the price so that consumers in developing countries can afford them.
click for larger
I realize that this is technically not a “delighter” per se, but the solution itself sure delighted me anyway!
Filed under: arts and creativity, community services, innovation trends, social media, Uncategorized | Tags: brainstorming, crowdsourcing, NY Times, the point
photo via NY Times
I’m a few weeks slow on the draw this time around, but one of my favorite end-of-the-year things to do is pour through the The New York Times Magazine’s Year in Ideas issue. In the past, I’ve used it for a brainstorming exercise (sort of like a word-association activity, but as stimulus to inspire new applications for their product using one of the featured ideas.)
One of these is called Subscription Artists, is another take on crowdsourcing, where a recording artist finances her work by soliciting pledges from fans. The article mentions Kickstarter as the tool to collect the funds, but The Point also does the same thing (I think Kickstarter is focused on artists.) The beauty of these sites is that participants actually commit money to ideas that they like, where as some other crowdsourcing mechanisms often turn out to be popularity contests.
How might a company use a Kickstarter-like tool to figure out what features their customers value?
