Ideo Designer Designing Smarts to Compete with Apple

We worked with Ideo in some of our shopping labs and problem solving spaces.   So the emergence of the emergence of a new smart speaker from an Ideo designer was of interest.   Look forward to seeing what this looks like.  Audio only, or an aim at the assistant-enabled markets from Amazon and Google, Samsung and Baidu too?

Ex-Apple designer to launch a product that competes with Apple itself

Christopher Stringer worked on many of Apple’s biggest hits. Now, he’s getting ready to release a new series of smart speakers that could compete with Apple HomePod and Sonos.
By Mark Wilson in Fastcompany

Christopher Stringer was a designer at Ideo, who helped create Dell’s hit ’90s design language, before he got the call from Jony Ive in 1995 to join Apple. Stringer went on to become a key figure in one of the most influential industrial design teams in history, launching dozens of products from PowerBooks to the iPhone.

In 2017, Stringer left Apple to build something new. According to a new report in the Financial Times, Stringer is now raising money to launch a product that will compete with Apple itself.

Stringer’s startup is called Syng. He cofounded it with Damon Way, who launched the tech protector brand Incase, and Afrooz Family, a master coder and former sound engineer at Apple who worked on the HomePod. Set up in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, Syng describes itself as “a future of sound company,” and it’s working on a new series of smart speakers, dubbed “Cell,” to rival the HomePod and Sonos, with the first of the line coming out in the fourth quarter of 2020. The Cell will undoubtedly be an impressive piece of machinery: Syng has lured designers from Apple, Nest, and Nike.  ....  " 

Target Tests Vertical Farms in/on Stores

Interesting play that uses existing real estate footprints.  Attract new consumers.  Place to test other technologies like drones and robotics to test sensor and labor alternatives?

Target to test vertical farms in stores  Retailwire, discussion. by Tom Ryan

Target is looking to shorten the distance from farm to plate with a planned test of vertical farms, an agricultural technique that involves growing plants and vegetables indoors in climatized conditions.

The initiative, to take place within select U.S. stores, is part of ongoing research and development being pursued by Target’s Food + Future CoLab, a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab and Ideo launched last November that has been exploring urban farming, food transparency and food innovation.

According to Business Insider, tests of the vertical farms could begin in spring 2017. If the trials succeed, Target’s stores will likely be filled with growing leafy greens, the most common stock for vertical farming at present. Potatoes, beetroot and zucchini could potentially be made available as well. MIT could give Target access to ancient seeds for rare tomatoes or peppers. .... " 

Looking at Target's Future Lab

Continue to be a student of spaces devoted to innovation.  See my tag links below for years of looking into the space, including a decade plus of my work in CPG and retail spaces.  Contact me for more, glad to participate.    The space below collaborates with groups we also worked with.

In Retailwire:
In its collaboration with global design firm IDEO and MIT Media Lab, Target's Food + Future coLab last week unveiled its first two innovations with a focus on food transparency.

Opened in January near MIT's campus in Cambridge, MA, "the bustling lab full of bioengineers, students, nutritionists and farmers [are] hard at work testing big ideas about the future of food," Target said on its Bullseye View blog. The multi-year collaboration, first unveiled last November, is concentrating efforts on urban farming, food transparency and authenticity, supply chain and health.

The first of the two ideas developed by the team focused on food labeling. The line, Good & Gather, displays ingredients on the front of packaging rather than in fine print on the back. .... " 

Employee Engagement Formula

How do companies engage with their own employees?  In the HBR:

" .... IDEO’s origin story sometimes sounds like a myth or a fable, but it’s actually true. David Kelley founded the company with a simple goal: to create a workplace made up of his best friends. In the beginning he did, in fact, bring in some of his closest buddies to launch the Silicon Valley firm that would become IDEO. More than 30 years later, we’re a global design company that employs more than 650 people. Obviously, we didn’t get to that size by hiring only our friends. But David’s early intention still greatly informs the way we work. There are, in fact, four elements of our culture that came directly from his founding statement. We think they’re essential factors in keeping employees engaged — not just at our company, but at any company. ... " 

Creative Leadership

In the HBR: Examples of creative innovation leadership.  From IDEO and elsewhere.

Creative Leaders

Tom Kelley, co-author of Creative Confidence (Crown Business, 2013) and a partner at IDEO, a global design and innovation firm,  on what creative leaders do.   We worked with IDEO in a number of ways, see the tag below.    Well done short piece in the HBR.

Magic Mirrors in Retail

Evan Schuman looks at the magic mirror concept.   Good thoughts.   An idea that we examined and featured at times in the innovation center for cosmetics marketing. (See Mirror tag below)   Including one developed by  IDEO.  Was difficult to integrate with physical retail.  We collaborated with a number of lab experiments in the area.    Will it be any different with better integrated virtual reality?

" .... Although the concept has never caught on with shoppers, retailers just can't seem to let go of the magic mirror, in its various incarnations. PayPal tried one variation last year, Bloomingdale's tried a magic mirror the year before that (having already given it a whirl in 2007), and John Lewis did it the year before that. In 2011, it was The New York Times that toyed with a magic mirror, one that would be in your own bathroom and display ads. ...  ".  

Read the full article before launching a method like this.

Ideo Redesigns Monday

I never thought Monday was awful, but the design ideas are good in general.  Culturally we believe the thought and why not create a marketing idea that builds on this?  In Wired.

IDEO and Nearables

IDEO worked with us by helping build a Gym for designing consumer products, which connected to our innovation centers.    Now they are promoting the idea of bluetooth 'nearables'.   Read the comments, they have some good complaints.  In FastCodesign:

" ... Last week beacon technology--sensors which can trigger actions in devices that come within range, increasing their spatial intelligence--shrank in size and grew in opportunity with the introduction of Estimote Stickers. Three millimeter-thick adhesives no bigger than an oversize postage stamp, the nearly weightless Stickers--dubbed "nearables"--are an impressive evolution of the egg-sized Beacons that Estimote introduced in 2013.

“Beacons are a little bit like URLs for the physical world,” says Steve Cheney, cofounder and senior vice president. “We don’t know exactly how it’s all going to work out, from the experience level, but I think the apps you use the most will start to integrate beacon technology in a way where you assume it was always that way.” Like the larger Beacons, Estimote's Sticker-sensors, set to ship this fall to curious developers and companies eager to take advantage of the internet of things, help apps “see” their surroundings via motion and temperature sensors that communicate with nearby devices via Bluetooth.  ... " 

Made in the Future

Tim Brown of IDEO announces: Made in the Future.  Looks to be of interest:

Does changing how you make things change the way you live?

The answer is “yes,” according to Made in the Future, an experimental project I collaborated on with some colleagues at IDEO Boston. The Made in the Future website recently launched and it explores how today’s innovations in maker technology might affect designers and society at large five to ten years from now.

To get inspired about what making something by hand means to people, we constructed toy airplanes with kids, cooked alongside chefs, built motorbikes with weekend gear heads, and hung out with gifted researchers at the MIT Media Lab. We looked at cutting-edge innovations in designing, manufacturing and distributing, and asked: where’s it all heading next? It was all incredibly inspiring and we learned a lot. ... " 

IDEO and Fun in Innovation

From Innovation Excellence via Linkedin:  A look at IDEO, asking why the fun has not spread.  Worked with IDEO a number of times, including our work at the Innovation Centers and GYM.  Always interesting collaborations, often useful.  Applied fun in innovation is a good idea.  Making it useful is often difficult.

Upending the Pharmacy Model

In Wired:   Design thinking it says.  More like back to the economics of labor costs.   Drug companies may like it because will increase compliance in taking the prescription.    " ... A startup pharmacy called PillPack hopes to change this archaic process. For $20 a month, PillPack will deliver prescription drugs to patients with the efficiency of Amazon Prime. Pillpack came to life thanks to a new incubator program at the famed design consultancy IDEO and the core of their service is a small blue box that organizes all of your med into “dose packets,” little plastic baggies marked with the date and time they’re to be taken. A jumble of amber bottles are replaced by an efficient to-do list made of drugs. .... " 

Creativity Challenges from IDEO

In the HBR:   From a group we used a number of times.   For more on that click on the IDEO tag below. We practiced by setting up context creating locations.  For more about that, click on the Innovation Center tag link below.

" ... People often ask us how they can become more creative. Through our work at the global design and innovation firm IDEO and David’s work at Stanford University’s d.school, we’ve helped thousands of executives and students develop breakthrough ideas and products, from Apple’s first computer mouse to next-generation surgical tools for Medtronic to fresh brand strategies for the North Face in China. This 2012 HBR article outlines some of the approaches we use, as does our new book, Creative Confidence:  Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All. One of our top recommendations? Practice being creative. The more you do it, the easier it gets.  ... "

P&G Gym from IDEO

For a recent talk I had to research some of the work that IDEO did for P&G.  I re-discovered this Bloomberg article about the design work that IDEO did to help create the GYM.   Excellent overview. This became part of P&G's Innovation Centers.  I spent many sessions at the consumer driven GYM facility.  This post archives the mention of IDEO and the GYM.   Contact Wayne Fisher at Rockdale Innovation for more about using some of the product development creativity techniques developed there.

IDEO Design Apps

I had heard of this before and reported on it, but never experimented with it. This is a reminder to give it a try.  We used IDEO for consumer creativity lab development and our allied innovation centers.    " ...   Napkin Labs Turns IDEO's Innovation Process Into Web Apps For All An off-the-shelf crowdsourcing platform will let companies create "challenges" to gather insight, and guide users with a series of design-focused exercises. ... " . 

" ... While the power of a design thinking app store has yet to be proven -- right now they have brainstorm, discuss, refine, but look for updates in a few weeks -- Gibson gave some hints for the kinds of tools they hope to make, which sound promising from a brand standpoint. "Any type of research method for how to draw out insights from people in a non-obvious way is fair game for our exploration." ... " 

Next Big Thing in Design

Design has recently been brought to my close attention.  Tim Brown writes about his book in Linkedin:  " ... In my book, Change By Design, I chronicle the end of Design with a capital “D” and the rise of “design thinking,” a more collaborative, human-centered approach that can be used to solve a broader range of challenges. Design thinking harnesses the power of teams to work on a wide range of complex problems in health care, education, global poverty, government — you name it. By taking this more expansive view of design, you’re able to have much greater impact. ... " 

See also his Ideo blog, which has this and related posts.

Future Packaging

IDEO produces some interesting package designs of the future.  " ... To a large extent, packaging mediates our experience with the world, probably more than any of us realize. This year’s charrette elicited a vast array of ideas that explore how packaging design can assume more participatory or guiding roles in a product’s or object’s consumption. Bertrand and co. guided teams to develop ideas around two categories: Relationships and Tensions. ... " 

Food Network Starts an Analytical Partnership

With my food and retail background and interests I found an interesting mention in this AdAge article.  It is rare to see plays regarding the food industry using analytical methods.  The article describes how Food Genius is partnering with the Food network.  What do they do?  " .... pitched a vision of using big data to make all of Food Network's digital properties smarter, creating a more personally-relevant experience for consumers looking for recipes, ingredients or restaurants. The Chicago-based company closed a $1.2 million financing round in July with funding from Hyde Park Venture Partners, New World Ventures, Amicus Capital and IDEO ... "    " ... Using Food Genius Reports, you can explore ingredient trends and discover deep context about how those ingredients, as well as preparation methods, and sensory language are utilized with the most comprehensive database of restaurant menus ... " 

Creative Confidence

In Linkedin:  Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO on creative confidence, with some useful  links as well.   " ... creative confidence is the ability to come up with breakthrough ideas, combined with the courage to act. Individuals with creative confidence live up to their potential to identify and launch creative solutions that solve unmet needs and create maximum impact on the world around them ... " 

Training Bacteria to Grow Consumer Goods

An approach I had not heard of before. This looks to be still in the very early stages of usefulness.  The use of the term 'provocation' here as opposed to the simpler 'experiment' is also not useful.

 " ... designers at IDEO have teamed up with scientists at the Lim Lab at the University of California, San Francisco to envision a "provocation" (that's designer-ese for thought experiment) in which they explore the possibilities of exploiting known properties of microorganisms to literally "grow" the products we use every day. The ultimate goal of their collaboration is to "program" any desired shape through a combination of manipulations carried out in the lab--from genetic engineering to novel growth media .... "