Image of the bike, ready to roll

Looks unlike anything you'd see on a road, huh? Well that's exactly the point. These concepts are not necessarily meant to be produced, but to start a conversation about received design wisdom and to get people thinking about design -- and those elements we take for granted. More from Branko -- and more images of the motorcycle, after the jump. Also, check out the film on the Non-Object site.

Everyone's been talking about the Nike Plus community of runners and athletes for years now. It was a really smart use of technology which displayed its creators' grasp of how to tune into social networks in an appropriate and useful fashion. Now Nike's at it again, with the 1/1 program.

This is more of a stretch -- an attempt to build a community of artists around the Nike brand and the theme of football (soccer). People join the 1/1 community and submit a football-themed piece of artwork which is then displayed in the online gallery (which has a bit of an annoyingly complex interface, but bear with it). 11 winners will be shown at a real-world exhibition in Basel, alongside the work of 11 professional creatives. One will be used on a limited edition pair of shoes.

The whole thing is being curated by the uber-hot fashion/design/creative site, ShowStudio, pioneered by photographer Nick Knight, which has been at the forefront of multimedia experimentation for many years now. They picked the 11 pros, including the designer, Dominic Wilcox, whose stunning case for a pair of Nike shoes and sculpture (both made from toy plastic football figures) are shown above and after the jump.

It's a smart move for Nike, whose brand has worked hard to align with the creative community. In this instance, the community aspect of the program is hosted on Myspace, so no need to build a costly backend system. And while the quality of the resulting artwork will surely be mixed, it's a really fun, loose and open project. Closing date for entries is 18 May. Meantime, check out another of Wilcox's pieces here...

Three people, including Paul Edwards, senior design manager from Virgin Atlantic and Mat Hunter, the London partner at IDEO, briefly gave their take on design leadership. The ensuing discussion was a little all over the map, with apparent ongoing confusion among designers about how to define their role. (Note to designers -- please stop the navel gazing and just get on with it. You have earned your place at the table. Business leaders are taking you seriously. Now prove your worth.)

So that's probably why I was taken with the views of Ralph Ardill, Founder and CEO of The Brand Experience Consultancy, who said firmly "the number of designers I hear who say a client is a nightmare or a project is a nightmare. Get real! Design is change. It will hurt and you should expect it to hurt."

For a long time, Ardill worked at Imagination, one of the first firms to understand that experience, not product, is at the heart of everything a designer does. These days he works with the C-suite on long-term projects that make a difference. And he was smart, down to earth and had some slick aphorisms for all to bear in mind.

After the jump: some of Ardill's tenets for good business and good design leadership.

Firms have to learn to focus on one consumer and his/her experience at a time, even if they serve 100 million consumers... No firm is big enough in scope and size to satisfy the experiences of one consumer at a time. The focus is on access to resources, not ownership of resources.

CK and his co-author, MS Krishnan, are coming into BW Towers next week and I'll be recording a video interview and chatting with them for a piece we'll run on the Innovation channel some time soon. Do let me know if you've got any questions for them...

Though the sector is often misunderstood as a container for the soft, largely undesirable “McJobs” most vulnerable to economic malaise, the report tries to show the diversity of the sector, pointing to old-line companies such as Rolls-Royce (the aircraft engine manufacturer) and BAE Systems which have profitably transitioned their businesses from simply selling commodities to providing services. Rolls-Royce, for instance, now leases its engines to airlines rather than selling them outright.

(You can read an executive summary here; download the entire report here; and, better yet, hear a discussion with IBM’s chief service researcher about the report here.)

Of course, IBM itself is likely one of the most successful examples of a company that has made that transition. So it’s not entirely surprising that it would aggressively back this kind of effort. What’s more, issuing a report like this is a return to first principles in effect for IBM. The company was instrumental in helping establish computer science as an academic discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. Now, the company hopes to do much the same thing with the service sector, helping to establish, legitimize, and staff future ventures with a new crop of graduates and executives.

More importantly, the report convincingly makes the case that now is the time for such investment. Citing UN labor statistics, it notes that, for the first time ever, service jobs outnumbered agricultural and manufacturing jobs worldwide in 2007. In the U.S., the service sector accounts for more than 80% of GDP. However in developed economies, research and development investment in services typically accounts for just a third of R&D spending, whereas the sector accounts on average for two-thirds of GDP and employment.

So what does the report suggest? It encourages universities to offer courses in service science, management, and engineering to graduate employees that can work beyond traditional boundaries. It wholeheartedly embraces interdisciplinary approaches to academic and business research. And, it urges employers to create hiring policies and career paths that support service professionals.

Broadly, the goal is to foster the creation of “adaptive innovators,” or those sometimes referred to as the “T-shaped” people. So-called T-shaped employees have a deep proficiency in one area, engineering for instance, but are also conversant and comfortable interacting in a profitable way with other departments, marketing, industrial design, and finance for example. So goes the theory, a work environment generally filled with T-shaped workers is naturally collaborative and not excessively siloed.

All in all, it's a worthwhile read which, while deep, is accessible enough. It will be interesting to watch forthcoming academic and research developments pegged to such reports. If IBM can make itself as vital to the development of a rich, profound service science as it did fifty years ago with computer science, it may once again prove a beacon.

(As an aside, one nice touch in the report is a rich glossary that is helpful, especially with terms that may have acquired multiple meanings with varied usage. It helps cut some of the jargon – "adaptive innovators" – and refresh the memory – "service sourcing.")

The short clip followed Bjorn Hartmann, a Stanford PhD candidate and editor in chief of Ambidextrous Magazine, on trial and error in experience design. Hartmann’s presentation included an interesting segment on a piece of design software dubbed d.tools, which facilitates rapid prototyping of both software and hardware products. A lot of the attendees I’ve talked to over the last day and a half are actively trying to do more of this even in small and medium design organizations.

Hartmann described the way a design team could create an interface and then see how it would function on five different cell phone models, for instance. Or, how subtle programming differences would change a piece of interactive software. If you’re a designer interested in using the software, you can check out Hartmann’s website for some more info.

Heath told an extended version of the story, which I hadn't heard. The company's R&D department created an adhesive that didn't stick, a product that should have died. A group of researchers led by Art Fry believed the adhesive could be used on a bookmark-like product similar to what would eventually become the Post-It note. He approached the company’s marketing department which told him, even during extensive market research, consumers had never asked for pieces of paper that didn’t quite stick.

To circumvent these short-sighted managers, Fry had a large number of Post-It-like prototypes made up and distributed to the secretary pool. Once the copmany’s administrative assistants had taken to the new tool, affixing them to documents circulating in front of vice-presidents and other upper-level executives, Fry cut off the supply and directed the complaints to the marketing department which had red-lighted the idea in the first place. The rest is history.

From this, Heath’s lesson for experience designers here at the conference is that stories of failure are often the most instructive. More over, Heath suggested that designers may need to "selectively ignore feedback," something many of the designers in the room seemed to agree with. A product manager sitting near me whispered to himself, "Companies that can’t fail, often do," a nice encapsulation of the mood in the room.

Coughlan said IDEO had done this at one point when it was working with a maker of toothpaste. "We wanted to look at extreme oral care users, so we found people without out teeth," he said, to laughs. "At the other end of the spectrum, there was a person who had seven types of toothpaste and used them at different times of days. It sounds extreme but yielded incredible insights about flavor, consistency, and so on."

He then recounted two in-depth stories about a totally un-designed experience and one that was completely over-designed, both extreme examples that were instructive. This was a particularly interesting set of examples. A four hour, $2,500 hospital nightmare helped IDEO identify many of the common healthcare experience problems. "There was absolutely no thought about how a patient feels about going to this place," said Coughlan. (The doctor later told him, "'experience design,' we don’t do that here.")

And, on the other end of the spectrum, an over-designed, over-managed experience at a luxury hotel created an eerie rehearsed, robotic, scripted experience. Coughlan said this experience taught the firm to enable improvisation, creating less controlled experiences, and creating less controlled experience.

More substantively, besides a social network tied to the conference and a digital repository of the talks and presentations, the organizers are also keeping a running set of whiteboards summarizing the various talks. Attendees have been coming up and snapping pictures of the colorful diagrams and lists with their cell phones. It’s a nice touch that adds a workshop-y element to the presentations.

Ratzlaff, also a former Frog designer, dropped a few tantalizing examples from his years as an Apple alum during a talk about how managers can change organizations’ cultures towards innovation. Ratlazz didn’t mince words in addressing the sometimes drastic steps he believes managers need to take to shake things up, including public firings, A-wall design, and shutting down lack-luster projects.

“Steve [Jobs] did a tremendous job of turning the business around,” he said of the period in the late 1990s when Jobs came back to Apple, engineering a turnaround at the troubled company. “But he did that also by changing the culture of the organization,” he added.

Ratzlaff recounted the early days of Mac OS X, Apple’s next-generation operating system based on Unix. Ratzlaff said that, initially, the company had planned to simply adapt its existing interface to new underlying technology it acquired when it purchased NeXT in 1996-7 (the transaction that also brought Steve Jobs back). Eventually a group of renegade designers helped create the concept for the entirely new system, working against the grain of the company’s initial strategy.

Ratzlaff said that the early project had one designer tasked with grafting previous visuals onto a new platform. In general, many insiders weren’t interested in recreating Apple’s operating system at all. But, as the fledgling project hit various roadblocks, Ratzlaff says he and a group of designers began prototyping a new, sleeker interface without an official mandate. Initially, it was “just a couple of people screwing around,” he said. “We eventually built a prototype, showed it to Steve, and he loved it,” added Ratzlaff.

Ratzlaff also offered the example of the public firings that typified the company’s return to its now famous secrecy. Jobs, he said, fired the manager of the Newton project when he leaked information of that project’s termination. “It took a while, but eventually people got the message,” he said of the Jobs moves. Though harsh, these moves helped the company’s designers get back on track after a rocky period, Ratzlaff concluded.

More seriously, Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer and Henning Fischer opened the conference by framing the day’s events as an attempt to begin turning the relatively new domain of user experience design into a core business discipline. A quick, informal poll of the crowd showed that few of the designers in the room had a predecessor performing the same job, underlining the relative newness of this subset of design for most companies.

Throwing up a quote from the New York Times.com’s Design Director, Khoi Vinh, describing the multiple, overlapping demands placed on designers responsible for the user interactions of products, from software to consumer electronics. These include the ability, for instance, to work autonomously and in multiple channels – on the web, mobile, and in print for example.

Schauer and Fischer then made an analogy to the iPhone, which was of course nicknamed the Jesus phone for its all-in-one qualities, being a cell phone, touch iPod, and internet device. They followed up by asking, “is it time for Jesus Designers?”

Jokes and another round of laughs aside, their point was clear: even as C-suite understanding of experience design is still forming, the expectations on designers responsible for experiences are multiple and multiplying. The problematic is set, on to concrete examples.

We discussed a couple of the problems in last week's Innovation of the Week podcast, and we chatted further offline about some of the others. (Apologies -- I fully intended to post this to accompany the podcast going live, but instead I got walloped by the nasty flu that's going round and spent the week in bed.) Anyway, check out Marty's take on some serious issues:

Balancing long-term goals with short-term demands
Sustainable earnings can be addressed by serial innovation. This problem can be addressed by becoming a "designful" company. By avoiding being merely a "deciding" company, you can create sustainable earnings because you’re always innovating.

Predicting returns on innovative concepts
This is about design rigor and the design process. If you do your homework, come up with a range of options, prototype them, test them with customers... then you end up de-risking innovation. Of course you can never totally predict the returns of innovation as there's no past measure to measure against. But after you’ve de-risked an idea, release it in a stagegate, venture capitalist way. If you get good feedback, spend a little more, then more and so forth. If it doesn’t look like it’ll get through the gate, shut it down.

Square, spiral bound, and replete with pages of Post-it-style stickers (which readers can use to mark entries with "love it" or "skip it" notes), IDEO's city guides reflect the snapshots and quick, pithy texts that the firm uses when doing ethnographic research for major corporations. Even the inclusion of Post-its suggest IDEO's signature style of brainstorming, which incorporates jotting quick ideas on small sticky notes to quickly share succinct ideas.