swissnex Boston, the Consulate of Switzerland in Cambridge is pleased to announce an event on innovation strategies and on the intersection of innovation and sustainability. The two-day conference takes place on April 30th and May 1st and will bring together large corporate, entrepreneurs, venture capitals, startups, academics, business leaders, consultants and other professionals involved in innovation management. Its main objectives is to present and discuss recent methods, practices and innovation for coping with downsizing and troubled economy and the new paradigms required to build new business model based on open innovation and innovation partnerships.  Harry West, VP of Design Strategy, will be participating in the first panel discussion and Mark Bates will be leading a breakout session on Sustainable Design.

The event will take place on Thursday April 30th and Friday May 1st at: swissnex Boston, Consulate of Switzerland, 420 Broadway, Cambridge, MA (close to Harvard Square). The program can be viewed here. The fee to participate in this event is $150 the 2-days, or $80 per day (either April 30 or May 1). Seating is limited.

Please contact Pascal Marmier at swissnex Boston for more information: pascal@swissnexboston.org 

We are facilitating a design thinking workshop as part of Boston AIGA’s 25th Anniversary Celebration on this upcoming Saturday, March 28th. The description is below. If you know anyone interested in learning more about Continuum’s approach to Design Thinking please forward along the link below.

Bridging Business & Design: The Power of Design Thinking
with Matt Carlson, Principal, Brand Experience
30 participants  |  9am – Noon

Design Thinking is a structured approach to the creative process, a powerful tool for communicating the value of design to clients through a collaborative process. In this half-day workshop Continuum will show how to apply the principles of Design Thinking to solve business problems big and small, creating lighthouse concepts that can guide design and galvanize organizations.

Matthew is a principal at Continuum, with a focus on brand strategy and experience design. For 15 years, he has helped companies to understand their customers, identify unmet needs and envision brands and products that meet those needs. He works with industrial designers and ethnographers, engineers and MBAs to make ideas real and bring them to the marketplace.

People can register for the event at the Boston AIGA Website.

On a recent trip to Spain I had the pleasure of visiting Seville for a few days. It was even more vibrant than I recalled from my prior visit in 2000. Sitting at cafes I enjoyed the sounds of varied tongues surrounding me—Spanish, German, French, Dutch, some completely unrecognizable. I returned to the gardens and again admired the Mudejar architecture.  But, in the midst of this old city was a new variety of charm: bikes.

There were businessmen on bikes. College students on bikes. Moms, Dads, teens on bikes. Bikes, bikes, bikes.

Sevici, launched in April 2007, is Seville’s thriving public bike program. Taking the lead from other European cities such as Lyon, Paris, and London, the program was implemented to reduce environmental and noise pollution, lessen road traffic, and provide a convenient service to city residents. So far, so good.

The key to the success of Sevici and other thriving bike share programs: smart design.

Employing learnings from the failures and successes of other bike share programs, Sevici offers a service that fits into people’s lives as they are.  It not only makes life easier, it enhances people’s lives by replacing the chore of commuting with a pleasant, refreshing activity.

So. What makes it work?

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There has been enough buzz around the PVC problem in the last 10 years that many credit card holders are aware of it, and would prefer a cleaner alternative.

It’s hard to know how many credit cards are really out there, but if every household in the US (~100 million) has 10-20 cards that’s 1-2 billion cards just in the US (yeah, that’s a lot of cards), using 10 million pounds of PVC (about 0.01 lbs/card).

Enter PLA–Polylactide or polylactic acid resin. This stuff has been around a while, and sounds great…made from corn, it’s biodegradable, compostable and renewable so it should be pretty eco-friendly right?

Unfortunately, not really.

There is a down side, at least for the near future. PLA is pretty energy intensive (like corn-based ethanol…don’t get me started), and most of our corn is grown in states whose electricity is coming from coal-fired power plants. Add to that the fact that corn-based products are competing with a food source and it’s reason to pause. Plant-based polymers have to be part of our future, but there’s still work to do.

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Check out this Reuters Shop Talk article that makes light of the currently dismal retail situation.

Please comment below with your own additions to the list. Is there anything JP Morgan analyst Brian Tunick left out?

Barbara Millicent Roberts, a.k.a., “Barbie”, is fifty. (And she doesn’t look a day over twenty-five.)

She marked her big day with a gala on March 9th at a real Malibu Dream House – a 3,500-square-foot pad overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The ultra-girly soiree was designed by Colin Cowie, event-planner-to-the-stars, and styled by interior designer Jonathan Adler. The party boasted the jams of DJ AM on the turntables, and hosted chic guests including supermodel Heidi Klum.

Celebratory events are planned in France, China, Italy, Germany and the UK. Barbie collectors worldwide will delight in the ultimate doll experience – a Barbie flagship store in Shanghai, featuring a spa, design center, cafe and fashion runway.

Her influence spans across decades and world cultures, not to mention – it’s splashed all over retail these days. Her pink panache is flaunted in Manhattan Bloomingdale’s windows. Makeup manufacturer Stila has created iconic color palettes just for B’s big day. Oh, and she’s also on Facebook. (What? You STILL don’t have an account? We do.)

Over the years, Barbie’s been an astronaut, a scuba diver, and a pediatrician. She’s even run for president. What’s next for our favorite unrealistically thin role model, we wonder. Does she have another fifty years in her? It’s all up to the world’s #1 toymaker.

According to the guy who maintains his instruments, Eddie van Halen wants his guitar to “sound like nut butter.” And he means it. The words musicians use to describe music are a special language, and those who swing the electric guitar are virtuosos of this sounds-like-a-non-sequitur-but-isn’t argot.

An electric guitar, by itself, sounds like nothing—quiet and weak, it requires amplification. A guitarist’s “sound” is a combination of the vibration of the strings, the wooden body of the guitar, the electronics picking up the sound, and the amplifier broadcasting the sound. (Also, according to Eddie van Halen, the cable connecting the guitar and amp makes its own contribution.) The elements that affect the sound of an electric guitar add up to the “tone.” Every guitarist has his or her own holy-grail tone, and the language guitarists use to describe tone includes not only straightforward terms like crunchy, smooth, dark, rich, and warm, but also more abstract terms, like “brown tone” and “woman tone.” Hard to picture, but carrying common meaning among guitarists—everyone knows “woman tone” refers to Clapton’s late 60’s sound. Right?

To affect the tone, guitarists put electronic devices between the guitar and the amp, often in the form of “stomp boxes.” Many are covered with knobs and buttons, usually including a big button the guitarist can step on (ok, stomp on) to turn the effect on and off. There are many companies making stomp boxes, and classic circuits custom-designed for, say, Jimi Hendrix are reissued with modern electronics on-board that provide more customization of the tone.

Entertainingly, stomp box manufacturers choose various strategies for naming their products. Some focus on the technology, describing aspects of the circuit contained within. Others describe the effect on the tone. Some pick very descriptive names, while others are more evocative. Some are technical, some emotional. And a few…well, maybe they’re meaningful to a better guitarist than me. To help you navigate the landscape, here’s a map. Rock on.

[Photo by Michael Morel]

The Pompidou Center in Paris has just opened a “radical and unprecedented” art show called “Void,” an exhibition of nothing. Empty rooms. Bare white walls. Nothing except exit signs and wall detritus like thermostats and light fixtures to attract the viewer’s gaze and provoke thought. About what? Well, that’s up to you.

Monday’s article on the show in the UK’s Guardian quotes the artist, Robert Barry, as saying the purpose of an exhibition on emptiness is to let us “be free for a moment to think about what we are going to do.” Well, it just so happens that “What are we going to do?” is the question of the day—in fact, it’s the $700+ billion dollar question. And for me, it begs another question about appropriate velocities—the speed of everything once we dust off this current mess of meltdowns and bailouts.

Gimmick or not, perhaps “Void” is the perfect provocation for finding time—and the space which is what the “art” is trying to give us—to pay attention to a new order emerging. Designers are trained to have a keen sense of this: And of designing early warning systems to help us detect what’s coming down the road and what might be, for the time being and for most people, just out of view.

Barry is known for focusing his art on the interstitial—the space in between, on nothing. He has said: “Nothing seems to be the most important thing in the world.” I’m not sure that’s true and don’t have the qualifications—or the bandwidth now—to debate this artistry. But if nothing gives us time to rethink where we are and where we’ll go—and especially, how’ll we get there—then I agree and would have to say that nothing is surely something.

Photo: The Guardian

In a recent Business Week article, “The New Humble World Order,” my colleague Harry West pondered what it will be like to hop back on the economic bike from which we’ve just taken a tumble. The question may not be so much what kind of bike we’ll get back on after we dust ourselves off; but rather, what the road we’ll be pedaling down will look like this time around?

A return to the mega-highway speed of life with more fast lanes and high-velocity on and off ramps seems imprudent, although perhaps instinctual. Do we want something like we just had or something akin to the 1990s—a singularly insane period of time when we managed to create and then destroy more wealth than in the history of coins clinking in our pockets. An illusory and intoxicating time in most ways—and a time in which there was one speed: Faster.

During those halcyon but hectic days of the pre-dotcom bubble burst, I was writing for Fast Company where our daily mantra was the Hunter S Thompson prescription for life: “Faster, Faster until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.” We even drank from trough-sized coffee mugs emblazoned with these words in illustrator Barry Blitt’s hyper-stylized, graffiti-spattered pen. We were all about fast. It’s what we drank. It’s how we rolled.

Slow was anachronistic. You could say, almost a quaint and humble sentiment. It may seem a big surprise then that several years into the breathtaking, maddening but awesome pace of Fast Company, I found myself on a plane to Bra, Italy to write about the burgeoning Slow Food movement. There’s nothing quite like hanging with Italians to recalibrate your sense of time, urgency and immediacy. Literally. Folks at Slow Food HQ actually told jokes about snails and turtles. I observed the slow patience of some of the best vintners of the Piedmont region. Carlo Petrini, Slow Food’s founder and potent proselytizer for life thoughtfully led, was late for our scheduled interview. And not just by a few minutes. But by two days. That’s how he rolled.

What does all of this have to do with a new (humble) world order, falling off bikes and pace? Fast leads to hard falls and big crashes. It happened nine years ago—when the bubble popped and over $8 trillion of market value evaporated in a seeming instant. To offer some perspective, as Burton Malkiel does in his tome “A Random Walk Down Wall Street,” this evaporation was “as if a year’s output of the economies of Germany, France, England, Italy, Spain, Holland, and Russia had completely disappeared.” That’s a big fall. The $12 trillion tumble of the past few months (and that’s not accounting for the $10 trillion lost in real estate) does more than scrape a few knees.

So before we get back on the economic bike this go around, it will be prudent to force to the forefront that humble and quaint notion of Slow and ask: What is the appropriate velocity of things? Because it’s only in times of forced slowness—slow spending, slow growth, slow recovery—that we have the time and hopefully the humility to ask about appropriate velocities: of markets, communications, relationships, production, supply chains, technology, global connectedness, growth—of companies and investment portfolios—of development and our own rabid consumption.

“We have lost our sense of time,” was the first thing Petrini said in our interview—the shot over the conversational bow those many years ago. It’s an even more urgent proclamation now. The brand of slow he was talking about doesn’t mean checking-out, off-ramping and becoming stupid. It’s not about a lowering of bars or expectations. It’s about control and consciously choosing the rhythms of life.
And this includes the rhythm of everything we do, from the pace of our own days to how we choose to grow our food or to invest our money. It’s about accepting a more natural metabolism.

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