This is Mona

Typography meets product design with chic letter-shaped plywood candle holders

Excellent article about keeping grounded in design by focusing the approach with the end user in mind. 

• Start with exploratory research. This is the time where researchers deliver findings and insights to the design team and client. This is also the time where most design research programs end—where designers’ imaginations (and sometimes their egos) may start to subtly compete with user insights.

• Keep researchers involved continuously. We must keep assessing design and engineering concepts with users to ensure that we have properly interpreted their needs. Ron and his team, for example, go back to the users with working prototypes to ensure we have not deviated from the original goal. 
  
  
• Meet with users again and again. Even as the product is passing though mechanical engineering, we check to make sure that any production modifications made for the sake of efficiency or branding have not diluted the product’s benefits.
  
  
• Establish a set of checks and balances. This ensures that designers, engineers and the complete product development team maintain a healthy modicum of empathy for users unlike themselves.

Full article here

Architects—perhaps the most design-savvy business people of all—suffer from an industry-wide anti-usability epidemic. And the higher-profile the firm, the sorrier the site. 

A well put statement by ALISSA WALKER from Fast Company

Full article: http://su.pr/2JGVdk

Great idea for residents who could do without the commitment of owning a home that requires upkeep. These mobile homes can be placed by the sea, the mountains or a tourist destination. Well designed and functional. 

Full article in Yatzer

Co-creation at its finest. 

58 billion on the go coffee cups get thrown away into landfills every year. This is not sustainable. The Beta Cup is a community based initiative to tackle this problem. Starbucks has agreed to sponsor Betacup’s contest to redesign the coffee cup in an effort to reduce the waste.

Betacup from the betacup on Vimeo.

(Via Fast Company)

As many people fumble with the dreaded word recession, I personally think that there is much gain to be had as a result of the economic downturn. Let me put this into deeper context. The digital arena, which I classify as a service industry mainly because its success is based on a positive user experience, we all play in has not only emerged as a dominant communications channel, but has evolved from a single to a multiple track platform. The explosive growth in this domain has been realized in part ever since the advent of online community. I don’t mean to be absolute when I say that these movements, if you will, have marked digital in 2008/2009. They have set the stage for the next wave of trends we are currently and soon will be witnessing for digital, such as advanced mobile communications, location based services and citizen journalism. Its a lot to handle for the likes of brands and consumers as they equally try to reconcile some purpose and relevance among the many emerging technologies. Now more than ever companies have to recalibrate to offer compelling value based on understanding user wants.

Design provides much value in this context. There is a strong opportunity to capitalize on the effects of the recession by embracing design across a multitude of functions, all towards igniting innovation and a basis for human centred offerings. There is lots of room for companies and their brands to improve the customer experience. To highlight my point, I was reading an article in Monocle on how a recession can yield positive challenges for the hotels industry. The recession has seen a great halt of hotel projects. In tandem, user desires for an unparalleled experience is unabated. Times like these call for hotel management types and designers to really consider what the customer wants. What’s the difference in the evolved desires between hotel guests and digital consumers currently? Not much. Both are looking for relevance, originality and context. Realize, the intent here is not to isolate my point to the hotel industry per se, but to highlight a universal truth that applies to the digital communications industry.

Where momentum of new technologies is rapid, agencies offering digital capabilities are gradually witnessing clients seeking them out for thought leadership, rather than for production alone. Good move. Clients need to be just as savvy as their consumers when it comes to properly adopting technologies to meet a business objective and user need. If the outcomes of a recession are placing increasing onus on behalf of the clients to get creative with their value proposition, all the better.