Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on May 06
I'm heading out Wednesday to Pasadena for a great conference on Serious Play and innovation at The Art Center College of Design. Chee Pearlman is orchestrating the event and it has an amazing list of speakers.
There will be a series of Serious Play Studios where we're all participate and learn from one another. I'm going to do one on Serious Play: Airport Security. No, seriously. This is what it will do: "Apply concepts of play to a truly serious design problem. Through prototyping and role play, create new solutions for that most hair-tearing of experiences, getting though airport security. Get direct hands-on immersion into ideas that Tim Brown presents in his Conference keynote talk."
Fun.
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on May 06
It's May 17-20, and is based around the ICFF furniture fair. Check out the schedule for New York Design Week from our partners at Core77.
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on May 06
Check out this great comment by Ross on my post saying that NYC is becoming a big innovation/design center. He argues that media/marketing is moving toward design in terms of designing better interactive experiences. Plus the line between product and marketing is blurring. So NYC is getting hotter in terms of design--but innovation comes from universities and that leads Ross to say that NYC isn't that much of an innovative center. Hmm...
Here's what Ross thinks:
May 6, 2008
The Big Apple is big on Design bizBruce Nussbaum asks if New York is the new innovation and design center. I say “Yes” to design hub, but no to NYC as an innovation center. Here’s why:
Big Design companies are focused in NYC
Advertising Age recently came out with their 2008 agency report, which has a list of the top 25 ad agencies by revenue.
Ad agencies are not design companies (yet), but the line between product and marketing is blurring rapidly, and at the same time, digital marketing is growing as an industry — in the double-digits. Some of the big shops out of NYC: BBDO, McCann Erickson, OgilvyOne, JWT — all with interactive arms.
And then as s Bruce points out, there are a sh*t-ton (yes, that’s a technical quantifiable term) of small but leading design firms moving to or newly focused in NYC (Jump, IDEO, Frog, fuseproject).
But Innovation comes from small shops elsewhere
It’s no secret recipe that innovation comes from areas with strong academic environments — learning hubs like Boston (MIT’s Media Lab, Harvard), Pittsburgh (Carneige Mellon U and the Entertainment Technology Center), or Chicago (Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology).
In fact, Pittsburgh is a great case study — Google opened up an office there because of the rich talent coming from Carnegie Mellon.
So yes, something is brewing in NYC — the ad/marketing industry is undergoing a transformational shit to a design-focus — and NYC has always been a hub for advertising.
And innovation can still be found where you might least expect it — the dark corner room with the jolt-cola fueled masters candidate. Ahh, I miss those days at the ETC.
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on May 05
I hear that San Francisco-based innovation consultant Stone Yamashita Partners is opening an office in New York City in a few months on West 12th street.
San Mateo-based Jump Associates, another innovation consultancy, is rumored to be heading to New York soon as well.
Palo Alto-based IDEO, the biggest of the innovation/design consultancies and most global, opened their New York office last year.
And while not in the "innovation" business, Yves Behar, founder of fuseproject, is a brand and product strategist, and he spends half his time in New York these days. So does Jeneanne Rae, co-founder of service innovation consultancy Peer Insight.
So what's up with this eastward migration of design thinkers doing innovation strategy work? I think it's the realization among big consumer goods companies such as J&J, Pepsi and Coke, plus the financial services folks on Wall Street and in Boston, plus the old-style media and marketing people on Madison Avenue that they really need
Continue reading "Is New York The New Innovation And Design Center?"
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on May 02
Fareed Zakaria is one of the most thoughtful foreign policy analysists of our day and his new book, The Post-American World, is a must-read for anyone interested in globalization--or the Presidential election for that matter. I know Fareed from the Council on Foreign Relations and his great columns in Newsweek and this book is as important at Tom Friedman's The World is Flat.
Why? In our discussions about innovation and design thinking, we all talk about social networks, collaborative innovation, consumer cultures, demassing, partnerships, etc. It is a conversation about the new diffusion of power in our society and the rise of many new sources of authority, opportunity and creativity. The hierarchical, centralized model of organization and power is being replaced by a more defused, networked model. In my line of work, I've gone from the Voice of Authority as head of the editorial
Continue reading "An Important New Book: The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria."
