Men’s canvas holdall made from flags by Paul Smith

via Paul Smith

Spaghetti benches

words James Richards Visitors to the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in west London may never sit comfortably in a public place again. Pablo Reinoso’s new exhibition features three ordinary park benches – but with a twist. “I call these my spaghetti benches,” says Reinoso. The benches’ wooden slats appear to be still growing, snaking out beyond one end. On one piece, the slats climb up a nearby wall in a mass of wooden tendrils. In another, the slats intertwine and overlap before forming another bench. “I love working with the material. But it’s a slow process,” says Reinoso. “You can’t use a single piece of wood because the grain wouldn’t support the curves I need. Bending the wood is only realistic when you have lots of pieces the same shape. Here, I had to carve individual pieces then glue them and just keep repeating.” “An ordinary park bench takes about two days to make – for one person, the spaghetti bench takes two months,” he adds. “But if I had the time, I could have gone on for a kilometre.” The first floor of the gallery will also feature Reinoso’s “breathing sculptures” – a wall of fabric cushions controlled by miniature fans. They inflate and deflate at a rate designed to mirror a person’s breathing pattern. Visitors will also get a glimpse of Reinoso’s future projects, including models of a concrete staircase to the treetops, and four spaghetti benches intertwining to form a covered pagoda. The show runs from 30 April – 17 May images Courtesy of the Carpenters Workshop Gallery cwgdesign.com www.pabloreinoso.com via Iconeye

fred butler

Lovely collection by Fred Butler, set designer turned jewellery designer. Images via Style bubble

It's a cardboard world

Michel Gondry's 'Science of Sleep' surely inspired the people who came up with this concept for the new Diesel store which just stocks accessories and intimates. The interior is constructed entirely out of different shaped cardboard boxes and are used to display the Diesel stock and brings to my the carboard city in Stéphane's dreams. Not to bring out the violins or anything but as a child, I didn't really have much to play with other than cardboard boxes (gosh to be a toddler again and be really really amused by a plain cardboard box....) so this really tugs on my heart strings.

My only worries are whether clumsy me will tear the whole store apart in a dramatic domino effect if I knock something over. Oh and whether people who happen to be carrying some Crayola felt tip pens (as you do...) will get the urge to start scrawling on the boxes in manner of graffitied toilet doors (question, why do people love writing things like 'I HEART YOU MICHELLE' on the back of toilets....does said door defacer expect Michelle to turn up at that exact toilet cubicle?).

via style bubble

klein bottle house, mcbride charles ryan

Klein Bottle House, Rye, Mornington Peninsula (outside Melbourne), Australia.

More photos, text and link, below.

TEXT:

The Klein bottle is a descriptive model of a surface developed by topological mathematicians. Klein bottle, mobius strips, boy surfaces, unique surfaces that while they may be distorted remain topologically the same. I.e. a donut will remain topologically a donut if you twist and distort it, it will only change topologically if it is cut.
The surfaces that mathematicians have developed hold intrigue for architects as they hold a promise of new spatial relationships and configurations. Technology (CAD) has played an important part in all this, it is now more possible to efficiently describe more complex shapes and spaces and communicate these to the build. Previously the more orthogonal means of communication – plans, sections and elevations naturally encourage buildings which are more easily described in these terms, i.e. boxes.
This holiday house is situated on the Mornington Peninsula 1.5 hrs drive from Melbourne. It is located within the tee–tree on the sand dunes, a short distance from the wild 16th beach. From the outset MCR wanted a building that nestled within the tree line. That talked about journey and the playfulness of holiday time. What began as a spiral or shell like building developed into a more complex spiral, the Klein bottle. MCR were keen to be topologically true to the Klein bottle but it had to function as a home. We thought an origami version of the bottle would be achievable and hold some ironic fascination. (The resulting FC version also has a comforting relationship to the tradition of the Aussie cement sheet beach house).
The building (we think) is also within that tradition of the use of an experimental geometry that could be adapted to more suitably meet contemporary needs, and desires. In that sense it is within the heroic tradition of invigorating the very nature of the home, most notable of this tradition would be the great experimental heroic houses by Melbourne architects in the 50’s (McIntyre and Boyd in particular).
The house revolves around a central courtyard, a grand regal stair connecting all the levels. There is a sense of both being near and far to all occupants.
Its endless, curling shell-like quality particularly in the tee tree brings about a comforting togetherness.

Materials
Exterior: Metal sheet, Lysaght ‘Cladding Profile’ Night Sky / Fibre Cement Sheet/ ‘Pomegranate’
Tretford Carpet / Bamboo Veneer (BT Bamboo, Eco Flooring Systems P/L)/ White Signorino Tiles/
Glass Mosaic Tile/ Paint colours: Elephant, Antique White 50%, Pearl Ash, Red Clown, Spanish
Olive, and Black

Klein Bottle House
Floor Area: 258m2 approx
Principal Architects: Rob McBride, Debbie-Lyn Ryan
Project team: Drew Williamson, Fang Cheah
Clients/Builders: Donna & Mark

via Materialicio.us

McBride Charles Ryan, Architecture and Interiors

Christian Lacroix to design luxury residences in…where else but Dubai

This just in. Joining the stellar list of his Italian counterparts, French couturier Christian Lacroix is now going to give us a taste of high-end Parisian interiors by teaming up with Kuwait-based property developer Abyaar, who are developing a number of projects in UAE.

Lacroix will design a 38-unit luxury residential tower on an undisclosed location in the Jumeirah area. According to the designer, who has designed everything from hotels such as Du Petit Moulin to the French TGV train interiors, the interiors of the luxury property will be a blend of the contemporary and Middle Eastern elements. We can’t wait to get a sneak peek.

Interiors of Du Petit Moulin in Paris by Lacroix

via De51gn

Orchid House by Sarah Featherstone

Here’s celebrating nature with an eco-friendly house in Cotswold in the UK. Designed by London-based architecture firm Featherstone Associates who are also designing the Athletes’ Village for the 2012 London Olympics.

Even architecture buff Brad Pitt is rumoured to have shown interest in the project that is to be built on a privately-owned 500-acre nature reserve near Cirencester. It has now been bought off-plan by an anonymous buyer for a neat sum of £7.2 million.

One of the many green features of Orchid House will be to produce more energy than it would consume with an underground heat pump and geothermal heating.

via Des51gn

Cool Packaging

via Ampersand and TrendInsights

Down with Innovation by Rick Poynor

Interesting tex on innovation and design by Rick Poynor

In the 1980s, when I began to write about design, its appeal seemed fairly obvious. Things that had received the attention of good designers tended to look better than their more routine counterparts. This improvement was layered with all kinds of meanings tied up with the question of how and why something looked better. Nor could visual appeal be dissociated from the function of an object, graphic, or interior design. If the designer’s visual concerns got in the way of the design’s intended use, then this was naturally a problem. But the crucial point was still that the designed object was attractive and provided a more pleasurable and engaging experience than undesigned or less-designed versions of the same experience.

Even then, some observers worried that designers saw their work as little more than decoration. Style was regularly denigrated for being superficial and empty-headed, usually by designers themselves. Yet the visual nature of design was not seriously challenged and designers continued to argue, as they had argued for decades, that “good design is good business.” By improving the design quality of their products, companies would sell more than competitors that hadn’t seen the light. Still, plenty of companies didn’t seem to get it. In defiance of common sense, or maybe because their leaders lacked a visual education and just didn’t know how to look at things, they really weren’t comfortable with designers or design.

But designers were right. By the 1990s, almost everyone was getting the message. Design had turned out to be as important as designers always insisted, and it was the force of their commitment, imagination, and creativity, as an expression of public need and desire—designers are people, not a breed apart—that had made it so. Design is now so important, it seems, that designers can no longer be trusted with it, and to make it absolutely clear that control has moved into someone else’s hands, design needs to be given a fancy new name. Call it design thinking. Call it innovation. “Everyone loves design but no one wants to call it design,” BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum informed the readers of Design Observer last year. “Top CEOs and managers want to call design something else—innovation. Innovation: that they are comfortable with. Design, well, it’s a little too wild and crazy for them.” Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, offers this prescription: “Businesspeople don’t just need to understand designers better—they need to become designers.”

The first step in the process of disempowering designers is to insinuate that, despite all that time at design school followed by years of doing the job, they have an incomplete grasp of design. They are so preoccupied with fussing over the details and their need to “make things pretty”—tantamount, it’s always implied, to a character flaw—that the big picture passes them by. “Designers like the shiny-shiny,” writes Peter Merholz, president of the design and consulting firm Adaptive Path. “That’s often why they got into design.” Merholz has apparently spent his career “fighting small-minded design thought, particularly in the world of graphic design where the cool, novel, and stylish is lauded over the useful, usable, and truly engaging.” Enough of those pesky design stars with an overinflated belief in their own creative vision! “Design is getting a lot more humble, and that is a very good thing,” says Adam Greenfield, who teaches in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. “I take my inspiration from guys like Jasper Morrison or Naoto Fukasawa, who very consciously try to step out of the role of godhead or genius or expert.” Never mind that Morrison, however mild his manner, has been a highly publicized design luminary for the better part of 20 years.

Having written off designers as mere stylists with insufferable egos, whose sole aim is to impose their impractical excesses on long-suffering consumers whom they never trouble to consult, the way is clear for a new breed of intermediary to step up and take business’s hand. They might once have called themselves design consultants—the rhetoric is not so different—but today they are known as design thinkers and innovation experts. For these design-ovators, everything is subordinate to strategy. Design is one small cog in an elaborate analytical machine intended to dazzle prospective clients into believing that they are dealing with rigorous professionals who work with precise methodologies and defined, quantifiable outcomes. “The great news for designers about the rise of corporate interest in innovation is that it recognizes, more than ever before, the strategic contribution of design to product, service, information, and environmental offerings,” says Larry Keeley, cofounder of the “innovation strategy” firm Doblin. Doblin has an impressive chart detailing 10 types of innovation it addresses in the areas of finance, process, offerings, and delivery. In the explanations of “business model,” “networks and alliances,” “product performance,” “customer experience,” and so on, the word “design” occurs just twice.

Design thinkers are masterly at weaving a dense web of plausible-sounding words around their analysis—just read their blogs—and this is where they win out against designers, who generally speak most eloquently through their work. But if we leave aside the self-serving patter aimed at building a would-be design thinker’s reputation and wooing clients, what are the innovationists saying? Let’s hear from Ziba, highly regarded in innovation circles, explaining its approach to experience design on its website: “Customers seek beautiful everyday experiences. To be moved. To grow. Laugh. Cry. Discover. Move beyond their basic needs. Surprise them—maybe throw in a bit of suspense… inspire, educate, involve and entertain. The right combination creates insane loyalty.” Whether Ziba clients such as Pepsi, Dell, Black & Decker, Starbucks, and Frito-Lay do any or all of this for you is a matter of taste (for me, it’s a “’fraid not”). But let’s be clear that the big conclusion about “insane loyalty” is pure marketing hogwash.

If a continuous cycle of vital innovation is going on, why do the mission statements sound so trite and patronizing? And, actually, which is more patronizing: to create something you believe in because you think other people might like it too, and just put it out there? (The old, design, way.) Or to study every facet of consumers’ behavior with the intention of filling them with feelings of “insane loyalty” for your client’s products? (The new, innovation, way.) Lest there be any doubt about the ultimate goal of all this higher-grade design thinking, Fast Company magazine has the lowdown: “It’s taken years of slogging through Design = High Style to bring us full circle to the simple truth about design thinking. That it is a most powerful tool and, when used effectively, can be the foundation for driving a brand or business forward.” In other words, good design is still good business. While this view of design remains as limited as it ever was—what else might good design be?—it is becoming harder and harder to keep sight of what is wrong with a culture mediated largely by commercial forces pursuing their own ends. But it comes down to this: Is an encounter with an everyday brand—a bottle of soda, a power tool, a packet of snacks—the place to go if you want to be moved, to seek education, or to grow as a person, and aren’t there better places to find those kinds of experiences?

This brings us back to design’s visual qualities. It is hardly surprising that designers try to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the accusation that they are hung up on making things look pretty. Belittling language of this kind suggests that the visual is inherently trivial, easy to do, and beneath consideration, that form is not a powerful medium of expression and carries no meaning for the viewer. Design thinkers like to talk as though we have somehow passed beyond the stage where the way things look needs to be a primary concern, and designers, browbeaten and demoralized, half seem to believe them. They have been too ready to accept the caricature of themselves as airheaded stylists who care about insignificant niceties of no concern to anyone else. At the very point when designers most need to mount a spirited defense of the visual, many seem to have lost their nerve and fallen silent.

Yet the rhetorical reduction of design to frivolous prettification reveals a willful blindness to the power of expressive form-making, if not a deep, philistine ignorance of the history of design and visual culture. The scale of the oversight is so colossal, and frankly baffling, one hardly knows where to start. Are the great cathedrals of Europe—Rheims, Lincoln, Chartres—merely pretty? Are the gardens of Kyoto? Is Alvar Alto’s Paimio armchair? Was Alexey Brodovitch’s Portfolio magazine? How about Leica cameras? The patterns on Moorish ceramic tiles? Or the PowerBook and the iPod? There is surely no need to go on.

A moment ago I used the word culture, a notoriously awkward concept. According to the critic Raymond Williams writing in Keywords, his classic lexicon, culture is used in two crucial senses. In cultural anthropology—now there’s a word the innovators love to bat around—it refers primarily to material production, while in history and cultural studies it refers primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. Combining these usages, we might conclude that culture is about things (which have a look) and meanings (conveyed by how they look). Whichever way you look at them—so long as you do actually look—these products of our culture tell us who we are. There is bound to be a relationship between impoverished ways of (design) thinking and impoverished visual form.

Design thinkers set great store by business targets, by driving the enterprise forward, because it is exactly what their clients want to hear and it gets them work. Seen from outside the cozy bond of service provider and client, this is a severely limited way of viewing design, and the total domination of current design discussion by this kind of commercial rhetoric is a worrying trend. Michael Bierut is one of the few designers to call out the design thinkers and question their nostrums, so I asked him whether design has a cultural value beyond its business uses and functional purposes. “The business use—the specific goal that motivated the client or sponsor to initially fund the work—often fades away, sometimes quickly,” he says. “In some ways, you might argue that aesthetic value—for an enduring design, at least—is the only lasting value, since over time functional needs can change and business moves on to the next goal.” Approaching heresy at a time when aesthetic quality is the last thing we are supposed to consider, Bierut goes so far as to modestly propose that “just making something look nicer” or “replacing something ugly with something not so ugly” is an admirable goal for designers.

That probably sounds woefully simplistic to design thinkers. Where is the system? Where are the charts and diagrams, the Capitalized Concepts, the new ways of thinking uniquely suited to market conditions now? To understand why it isn’t at all simple, to appreciate how hard it is to create something special, of lasting quality, you need to know a little about design.

The problem that designers face now is the same problem they have faced all along: how to communicate with clients who lack a basic grounding in the visual arts and don’t seem to think it matters. Businesspeople don’t need to become designers. They need to learn that there are types of awareness and understanding expressed through visual form that even a team of the finest poets would be hard-pressed to summarize as a list of handy PowerPoint bullets. Music, dance, and the visual arts operate on a different plane from words. As Dori Tunstall, design teacher and anthropologist, says: “There is an inherent intelligence to beauty, which is about the depth and passion we feel for the world.” Design thinkers like to wax lyrical about the elegance of their strategic thinking as a form of design in its own right, as though this could ever be a substitute. They can keep it— in 2108, if there are museums then, no one will queue to see a strategy. Give me something tangible, something brilliant and extraordinary that illuminates our perception of what human life can be. For that, we still need designers.

Rick Poynor is a writer and critic based in London specializing in visual culture.
Illustrations by Paul Hoppe
via ID Magazine

Boutique Beat | Top 10 New Stores

The Moment’s retail enthusiast, Christene Barberich, rounds up some notable store openings.

Alexander McQueen Los Angeles
The Brit provocateur Alexander McQueen recently made his L.A. debut, joining Marc Jacobs on Melrose. A soaring stainless steel deity — “Angel of the Americas” sculptured by Robert Bryce Muir — is suspended in the storefront to greet guests. [via La Times and WDD]
8379 Melrose Avenue, 323-782-4983; Alexander McQueen.

Steven Alan (men’s and women’s wear) Los Angeles
His roots are in New york, but Steven Alan recently proved his street-chic mini-frocks and outerwear are L.A. compatible when he opened two new outposts. The Westward expansion continues with another Steven Alan shop set to open in Venice next month. [via Refinery29]
West Hollywood: 638 North Robertson Blvd; 310-854-1814.
Brentwood: 11677 San Vicente Blvd, number 111; 310-820-4700; Steven Alan.

Jan & Äya (home and accessories) Brooklyn
The newly opened Jan & Äya offers more proof that Brooklyn’s Greenpoint is in a state of metropolitan takeover. The ethereal white nook opened by a Swiss-born couple is a finely curated assortment of treasures, from tea towels to quirky handmade artworks. [via DailyCandy]
99 Franklin Street, Brooklyn, 718-609-1404; Janandaya.

Thistle & Clover (women’s wear) Brooklyn
Fort Greene’s fashion crowd can now get a quick fix — and a spot of coffee — at Thistle & Clover. St. Kilda’s diamond star stud earrings are a steal at $198. [via Clinton Hill blog]
221 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn; 718-855-5577; Thistle & Clover.

(Piera Gelardi)

Acne, (men’s and women’s wear) New York and Paris
Acne’s creative director Jonny Johansson has brought his sleek Swede styles to an airy shop on Greene Street and Paris’s Jardin du Palais Royal, opening nearly simultaneously. [via Style and Vogue (UK)]
10 Greene Street, New York. 212-625-2828
124 Galerie Valois 75001 Paris. 011 33 01 42 60 16 62; Acne Jeans.

Jerome Dreyfuss (accessories) Paris
Somehow, Jerome Dreyfuss makes “status” bags that aren’t obnoxious. In his new Paris boutique, devotees will want to take hold of his oversized Diego sac (about $700) or his party-perfect Jean clutch (about $450). [via Refinery29]
1, Rue Jacob 75006 Paris. 011 33 01 4354 7093; Jerome Dreyfuss.

Dunderdon (men’s wear, women’s wear, accessories) New York
The Swedish invasion continues with the arrival of Dunderdon, an A.P.C.-esque line of men’s shirts, jackets and trim trousers founded by a carpenter and naturally inspired by traditional Scandinavian workwear. [via Glam]
25 Howard Street, 212-226-4040; Dunderdon.

John Varvatos (men’s wear) New York
With the opening of John Varvatos in the old CBGB space, guys can shop for sport coats and suits amid the ghosts of the New York Dolls and the Ramones. (Varvatos preserved the old posters and grafitti on the walls.) [via FashionIndie and Forbes]
315 Bowery, 212-358-0315; John Varvatos.

Acrimony (women’s wear) San Francisco
Hayes Valley lives up to its rep for hosting the city’s most intriguing new boutiques with the arrival of Acrimony, a chandelier-and-pale-wood-clad one-stop shop for emerging labels, including April 77 and Common Projects. [via Refinery29]
515 Gough Street, San Francisco. 415-861-1025; Acrimony

Den (men’s wear) New York
The pop-up emporium Den has given the German men’s-wear designer Robert Geller a new home, literally. The tiny space, which opened on Monday, features a wood-beamed “house” to frame Geller’s sharp neutral separates. Stay tuned for New York-based Common Projects to take over the rotating boutique this summer.
330 East 11th Street, 212-475-0079; Den.

via NYT

By Christene Barberich

Design Miami/ Basel Names 2008 "Designers of the Future"

Tomorrow may be opening day of Milan's Salone Internazionale del Mobile, but we're already looking ahead to June, when Design Miami/ Basel will host its third global design extravaganza in Switzerland. The show will feature brand new work by each of the just announced winners of the 2008 Design Miami/ Designers of the Future award. Below, we offer a handy breakdown of the five chosen ones.

Martino Gamper

Born/works in: Merano, Italy/London

On the resume: Studied sculpture and product design in Vienna under the tutelage of such artists and designers as Michelangelo Pistoletto and Ron Arad; has designed for WMF, Villeroy & Boch, and Lavazza

Known for: Reworking discarded objects to create a disparate family of objects, site-specific installations, and special events

Recent project of note: "100 Chairs in 100 Days" (pictured above), which resulted in the creation of a series of hybrid seating creations fusing the different part of found chairs

Max Lamb

Born/works in: Cornwall/London

On the resume: Worked as a design consultant for Ou Baholyodhin Studio in London, designing furniture, graphics, exhibitions, and private domestic interiors; has masters degree in design products from London's Royal College of Art; spent a year designing for Tom Dixon Studio

Known for: Exploring and re-contextualizing both traditional and unconventional materials, celebrating their inherent properties, and exploiting their potential

Recent project of note: "Exercises in Seating," which combines his fascination with the handmade and zest for Britain's industrial heritage

Julia Lohmann

Born/works in: Germany/London

On the resume: Degree in graphic design from the Surrey Institute and MA in design products from the Royal College of Art; her work has been commissioned by the French National Art Collection, Galerie KREO in Paris, and the droog design group

Known for: Investigating the contradictions in our relationship to animals as sources of food and materials. By working with offal, leather bits, and other meat industry waste products, she probes those contradictions while "giving value to leftovers"

Recent project of note: "The Catch" (pictured at right), which forms a stormy sea out of empty used fish boxes, confronting visitors with the consequences of over-fishing and the heedless consumption of marine life

Clemens Weisshaar & Reed Kram

Born/works in: Munich/Munich (Weisshaar), Columbus, Ohio/Stockholm (Kram)

On the resume: Weisshaar studied product design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art, spent three years as an assistant to Konstantin Grcic; Kram studied at Duke and MIT, where he was a founding member of the Media Lab's Aesthetics and Computation Group

Known for: Expanding the intersection between architecture, industrial design, media design, and fashion

Recent project of note: "Breeding Tables," which outlined the designers' approach toward intelligently intertwining product development and media design, while taking advantage of the newest technological possibilities

via mediabistro

Thrill of the Chipchase: Human-Centered Cell Phone Design in Ghana

Design thinking. The designer as ethnographer. Design for the other 90%. Greener gadgets. Writer Sara Corbett managed to harness all of these zeitgeisty ideas into a single article in yesterday's New York Times magazine. From recounting her meeting in Ghana with Nokia human behavior researcher-cum-user anthropologist Jan Chipchase, Corbett covers the global cellphone market, the spending habits of perople in developing countries, microfinance, and an innovative Ugandan method of transferring funds via prepaid phone cards (take that, PayPal).

Corbett waits far too long to bring up the real problem of reliable sources of battery-charging power in developing countries but provides a fascinating look at the research methods of the globe-trotting Chipchase. Among them is "Future Urban," a project to explore what the cities of the future will look like. The project leads Chipchase and colleagues to set up an "open design studio" that invites members of a Ghanaian refugee settlement to come in and share ideas and drawings for their ideal mobile phone.

"It's an easy way to see what's important to them, what their challenges are," [Chipchase's Tokyo-based Nokia colleague Younghee Jung said]. One Liberian refugee wanted to outfit a phone with a land-mine detector so that he could more safely return to his home village. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people sketched phones that could forecast the weather since they had no access to TV or radio. Muslims wanted G.P.S. devices to orient their prayers toward Mecca. Someone else drew a phone shaped like a water bottle, explaining that it could store precious drinking water and also float on the monsoon waters. In Jacarezinho, a bustling favela in Rio, one designer drew a phone with an air-quality monitor. Several women sketched phones that would monitor cheating boyfriends and husbands. Another designed a "peace button" that would halt gunfire in the neighborhood with a single touch.

via mediabistro

360-degree experience: create meaningful experience

We've been talking and seeing feminization in design and brands attitudes towards customers, this article elaborates on the subject with experiential design. How do you gain and maintain your key customers in our cluttered consumerist world.
Create an experience, we can see it happening in advertising with Sony Bravia and the like.no.other installment or Cadbury and its glass and a half full (both Fallon), but also in retail with concept store like Komplex in Paris or hotels like Le Bristol also in Paris. (see article below)

360-degree experience: create meaningful experience by Sohrab Vossoughi

It's all about experience, companies that try to create holistic experiemces by emotionally engaging their consumers are flourishing

Advances in manufacturing technology and the global reach of the Internet have leveled the playing field in the product marketplace. It wasn't long ago that time-to-market was two years, then 18 months, and then 12 months. Now, a competitor can knock off your "innovation" in six months or less. Many businesses understand that being "new" or "different" is no longer a differentiator. Countless companies are elbowing their way to the top with designs that are also "feature-rich" or "patent pending." Innovation in product design has lost its meaning and, therefore, its value.

There is still one frontier that remains wide open: experience innovation. This is the only type of business innovation that is not imitable, nor can it be commoditized, because it is born from the specific needs and desires of your customers and is a unique expression of your company's DNA. Yet the design of an experience is often overlooked in the rush to market.

Creating a Complete Experience

Companies intending to be relevant today must learn the art of creating experiences that genuinely engage their customers. Choice-fatigued consumers are not looking for another product that hasn't taken their true needs and desires into consideration. They are looking for companies in which to believe and give their allegiance. They are looking for experiences that cater to their deep-seated desires. This type of engagement requires much more than the latest technological breakthrough: It requires emotional engagement.

This has the highest value to customers because it has meaning. And it even allows companies to reimagine an old idea: The product or service itself does not have value, but the way in which it is experienced makes it fresh. That means you can even charge a premium for it. At over $100 a pair, Lululemon Athletica's (LULU) yoga pants aren't popular simply because of an advance in athletic apparel design. The brand's promise of well-being and its promotion of conscious living permeate every aspect of its business, creating an experience that customers are willing to pay top dollar for. Lululemon's sales at its retail stores doubled in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Creating a meaningful experience requires thoughtful attention to your customers at every point of contact—what I call the 360-degree experience. There are four components to consider when designing the 360-degree experience:

Know where you are in the innovation cycle. There are three areas of innovation: technology, product, and experience. Companies such as Intel (INTC) or Texas Instruments (TXN) offer technology products, such as a semiconductor or wireless data transmission, which can be broadly adapted for many uses. A company such as Sony (SNE), meanwhile, has commercialized a technology and created physical products. Then there are companies that create an experience for customers; engage them and tell a story. Starbucks (SBUX), for instance, took a simple product—coffee—and turned it into a complete experience that satisfied the previously unmet need for café culture in the U.S. Understand where your mindset lies in this innovation cycle, and know what it takes to participate and perform in the other spaces. Migrating to a different area is possible but extremely difficult, and one which requires an alteration of thinking, measurement systems and, eventually, a company's DNA.

Know your DNA. The only way to attract your true tribe is to authentically be yourself. Take a stand. Do what is natural to you and you won't have to fake it. Understanding your company's DNA is central to experience design.

The athletic apparel company Nau is a great example (BusinessWeek.com, 1/31/07) of a company that knows what it stands for and what it is good at. With roots in the outdoor apparel industry, executives creating the company didn't just produce another label to compete in a glutted market. Instead, they established a mission based on their personal values for conscientious business practice and built a business that reflects these values. That ranges from a product line based on sustainable product innovation to a "partnership for change" program whereby 5% of every sale is donated to an environmental, social, or humanitarian organization.

Make emotional connections. Understand your customer well enough to know the difference between what they need and what they desire. In the Western world, businesses meet customers' functional needs with ease, but often seem to have forgotten how to connect with them emotionally the way, say, the corner grocer in a small neighborhood knows what products each of his customers loves. While it may not be possible to know each customer individually, we can delve much deeper than customer research statistics usually allow to create highly contextual experiences that reflect values, behavior, attitudes, and motivations. Ferrari is a wonderfully innovative brand in this regard—not only has it designed a thrilling racecar, but it tapped into the desires of those people who secretly dream of being a racecar driver. From the sound of the engine to the design of the fire extinguisher that is affixed to every interior, Ferrari found a way to put the racing car experience in the hands of a layman.

Design for the complete experience. There is no experience killer worse than a story being told in only one place. You may have a great product, but if customer service or your Web site don't reflect the story you are telling, the experience is invalidated and you run the high risk of losing the relationship with your customer. Every aspect of your business must reflect your company's DNA—and what you have learned about the desires of your customer. American Express (AXP) is a good example here—from the breadth of its product offering to the detailed level of service, its thorough approach provides customers with a feeling of security, empowerment, and being well-cared for—a feeling for which customers will pay a premium.

Competing in the market today demands innovative, emotional engagements. Creating complete, 360-degree experiences is the only way to be relevant in a glutted marketplace.

Sohrab Vossoughi is Founder and President of ZIBA Design, the company he started in 1984. The recipient of more than 30 patents and over 200 design awards, Vossoughi was named BusinessWeek's Entrepreneur of the Year in 1992. He continues to direct projects for clients including Nike, Microsoft, Xerox and Hewlett-Packard.

via Business Week

Beyond Measure: conversations across art and science - until June 1

Geometry is used by architects, artists, astronomers, bio-chemists, engineers, surgeons, physicists and mathematicians - among many others - as a means to understand, explain and order the world around us. It draws parallels between the artist's studio, the laboratory and the study, as equivalent places for thinking, imagining and creating.

Over sixty contributors include artists Richard Deacon, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Robert Morris, David Nash, Keith Tyson and Conrad Shawcross are taking part in this exhibition - with its associated workshops, talks and events. It will also feature Sir Christopher Wren's dividers, virus-structure models produced by the Nobel winning biophysicist Professor Sir Aaron Klug.

Beyond Measure: conversations across art and science
Until June 1
Kettle's Yard
Castle Street
Cambridge CB3

T:01223 352124
www.kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk

Venue :

Kettle's Yard
Castle Street
Cambridge CB3

via BDonline

Can't get enough of Jan and digital nomadism

More on mobility and technology with a Special report in the Economist entitled Nomads at last

The Economist newspaper has published a special report on mobility, wondering what the social effects will be. Sources are some of the top people in the field (many of whom are frequently written about on this blog). Our nomadic future [leader article]“Prepare to see less of your office, more of your family—and still perhaps be unhappy” or “nomadism promises the heaven of new freedom, but it also threatens the hell of constant surveillance by the tribe”. Nomads at lastWireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other, says Andreas Kluth. Labour movementThe joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere. The new oasesNomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic. Family tiesKith and kin get closer, with consequences for strangers. Location, location, locationIt matters. A world of witnessesWhen everybody becomes a nomadic monitor. Homo mobilisAs language goes, so does thought.

Designing for the other 90%

Ok, just in case you haven't seen it yet, this article combines two things I am completely obsessed about: Jan Chipchase (not in a sick way obviously, the guy is just really interesting) and designing for the other 90% (product design, mobile devices and architecture, there is a giant market out there and the possibilities are endless)
Enjoy the read

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

Shaul Schwarz/Reportage, for The New York Times

SELLING TO THE OTHER THREE BILLION A cellphone shop in Accra, Ghana, which carries and repairs a variety of handsets.

• By SARA CORBETT

If you need to reach Jan Chipchase, the best, and sometimes only, way to get him is on his cellphone. The first time I spoke to him last fall, he was at home in his apartment in Tokyo. The next time, he was in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in West Africa. Several weeks after that, he was in Uzbekistan, by way of Tajikistan and China, and in short order he and his phone visited Helsinki, London and Los Angeles. If you decide not to call Jan Chipchase but rather to send e-mail, the odds are fairly good that you’ll get an “out of office” reply redirecting you back to his cellphone, with a notation about his current time zone — “GMT +9” or “GMT -8” — so that when you do call, you may do so at a courteous hour.

Keep in mind, though, that Jan Chipchase will probably be too busy with his job to talk much anyway. He could be bowling in Tupelo, Miss., or he could be rummaging through a woman’s purse in Shanghai. He might be busy examining the advertisements for prostitutes stuck up in a São Paulo phone booth, or maybe getting his ear hairs razored off at a barber shop in Vietnam. It really depends on the moment.

Chipchase is 38, a rangy native of Britain whose broad forehead and high-slung brows combine to give him the air of someone who is quick to be amazed, which in his line of work is something of an asset. For the last seven years, he has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a “human-behavior researcher.” He’s also sometimes referred to as a “user anthropologist.” To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.

What amazes Chipchase is not the standard stuff that amazes big multinational corporations looking to turn an ever-bigger profit. Pretty much wherever he goes, he lugs a big-bodied digital Nikon camera with a couple of soup-can-size lenses so that he can take pictures of things that might be even remotely instructive back in Finland or at any of Nokia’s nine design studios around the world. Almost always, some explanation is necessary. A Mississippi bowling alley, he will say, is a social hub, a place rife with nuggets of information about how people communicate. A photograph of the contents of a woman’s handbag is more than that; it’s a window on her identity, what she considers essential, the weight she is willing to bear. The prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers — lending to Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.

Last summer, Chipchase sat through a monsoon-season downpour inside the one-room home of a shoe salesman and his family, who live in the sprawling Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Using an interpreter who spoke Tamil, he quizzed them about the food they ate, the money they had, where they got their water and their power and whom they kept in touch with and why. He was particularly interested in the fact that the family owned a cellphone, purchased several months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a month, could run errands more efficiently for his boss at the shoe shop. The father also occasionally called his wife, ringing her at a pay phone that sat 15 yards from their house. Chipchase noted that not only did the father carry his phone inside a plastic bag to keep it safe in the pummeling seasonal rains but that they also had to hang their belongings on the wall in part because of a lack of floor space and to protect them from the monsoon water and raw sewage that sometimes got tracked inside. He took some 800 photographs of the salesman and his family over about eight hours and later, back at his hotel, dumped them all onto a hard drive for use back inside the corporate mother ship. Maybe the family’s next cellphone, he mused, should have some sort of hook as an accessory so it, like everything else in the home, could be suspended above the floor.

This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia’s researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.

The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.

Shaul Schwarz/Reportage, for The New York Times

IDENTITY FOR SALE A cell phone in the developing world gives a person a fixed location, particularly important for those displaced by war or drought.

One morning last fall, I arranged to meet Chipchase in a neighborhood in Accra where he and a few other Nokia people were doing research. At his suggestion, I took a taxi to the general area and then called him on his cellphone. This part of the city, called Nima, was a jumble of narrow alleyways hemmed in by a few major thoroughfares and anchored by a teeming marketplace. The homes in Nima were small, low-roofed and usually one or two rooms made from concrete or crumbling mud bricks, often set back behind a homegrown business — someone’s peanut stand or a shack selling dust-coated secondhand stereos and television sets. The streets around the market were swollen with a slow-moving river of people. On their heads, Ghanaian women toted pyramids of pomegranates, bagged loaves of fresh bread, baskets of live chickens. Trucks belched diesel exhaust; men pushed carts full of sugar cane and fat, purplish bulbs of garlic.

From an unseen distance, Chipchase used his phone to pilot me through the unfamiliar chaos, allowing us to have what he calls a “just in time” moment. “Just in time” is a manufacturing concept that was popularized by the Japanese carmaker Toyota when, beginning in the late 1930s, it radically revamped its production system, virtually eliminating warehouses stocked with big loads of car parts and instead encouraging its assembly plants to order parts directly from the factory only as they were needed. The process became less centralized, more incremental. Car parts were manufactured swiftly and in small batches, which helped to cut waste, improve efficiency and more easily correct manufacturing defects. As Toyota became, in essence, lighter on its feet, the company’s productivity rose, and so did its profits.

There are a growing number of economists who maintain that cellphones can restructure developing countries in a similar way. Cellphones, after all, have an economizing effect. My “just in time” meeting with Chipchase required little in the way of advance planning and was more efficient than the oft-imperfect practice of designating a specific time and a place to rendezvous. He didn’t have to leave his work until he knew I was in the vicinity. Knowing that he wasn’t waiting for me, I didn’t fret about the extra 15 minutes my taxi driver sat blaring his horn in Accra’s unpredictable traffic. And now, on foot, if I moved in the wrong direction, it could be quickly corrected. Using mobile phones, we were able to coordinate incrementally. “Do you see the footbridge?” Chipchase was saying over the phone. “No? O.K., do you see the giant green sign that says ‘Believe in God’? Yes? I’m down to the left of that.”

To someone who has spent years using a mobile phone, these moments are common enough to feel banal, but for people living in a shantytown like Nima — and by extension in similar places across Africa and beyond — the possibilities afforded by a proliferation of cellphones are potentially revolutionary. Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand. This is part of what Chipchase was eager to show me, if only I could spot him. “I’m by the hair-salon stall,” he was saying into his phone. “Next to that goat. Do you see it? See me? Ah, yes,” he said brightly, “there you are.” And then, face to face and sweating in the climbing equatorial sun, we hung up.

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries. As more and more countries abandon government-run telecom systems, offering cellular network licenses to the highest-bidding private investors and without the burden of navigating pre-established bureaucratic chains, new towers are going up at a furious pace. Unlike fixed-line phone networks, which are expensive to build and maintain and require customers to have both a permanent address and the ability to pay a monthly bill, or personal computers, which are not just costly but demand literacy as well, the cellphone is more egalitarian, at least to a point.

“You don’t even need to own a cellphone to benefit from one,” says Paul Polak, author of “Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail” and former president of International Development Enterprises, a nonprofit company specializing in training and technology for small-plot farmers in developing countries. Part of I.D.E.’s work included setting up farm cooperatives in Nepal, where farmers would bring their vegetables to a local person with a mobile phone, who then acted as a commissioned sales agent, using the phone to check market prices and arranging for the most profitable sale. “People making a dollar a day can’t afford a cellphone, but if they start making more profit in their farming, you can bet they’ll buy a phone as a next step,” Polak says.

Last year, the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental research group, published a report with the International Finance Corporation entitled “The Next Four Billion,” an economic study that looked at, among other things, how poor people living in developing countries spent their money. One of the most remarkable findings was that even very poor families invested a significant amount of money in the I.C.T. category — information-communication technology, which, according to Al Hammond, the study’s principal author, can include money spent on computers or land-line phones, but in this segment of the population that’s almost never the case. What they’re buying, he says, are cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards. Even more telling is the finding that as a family’s income grows — from $1 per day to $4, for example — their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing. “It’s really quite striking,” Hammond says. “What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.”

There are clear reasons for this, but understanding them requires forgetting for a moment about your own love-hate relationship with your cellphone, or iPhone, or BlackBerry. Something that’s mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal — land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars — can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information. A “just in time” moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to the rural Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request information via text message from a hospital in Kampala.

Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

It may sound like corporate jingoism, but this sort of economic promise has also caught the eye of development specialists and business scholars around the world. Robert Jensen, an economics professor at Harvard University, tracked fishermen off the coast of Kerala in southern India, finding that when they invested in cellphones and started using them to call around to prospective buyers before they’d even got their catch to shore, their profits went up by an average of 8 percent while consumer prices in the local marketplace went down by 4 percent. A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated the effect even further, concluding that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent.

Text messaging, or S.M.S. (short message service), turns out to be a particularly cost-effective way to connect with otherwise unreachable people privately and across great distances. Public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.

Some of the mobile phone’s biggest boosters are those who believe that pumping international aid money into poor countries is less effective than encouraging economic growth through commerce, also called “inclusive capitalism.” A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship as opposed to more traditional top-down approaches in which aid money must filter through a bureaucratic chain before reaching its beneficiaries, who by virtue of the process are rendered passive recipients.

For this reason, the cellphone has become a darling of the microfinance movement. After Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel-winning founder of Grameen Bank, began making microloans to women in poor countries so that they could buy revenue-producing assets like cows and goats, he was approached by a Bangladeshi expat living in the U.S. named Iqbal Quadir. Quadir posed a simple question to Yunus — If a woman can invest in a cow, why can’t she invest in a phone? — that led to the 1996 creation of Grameen Phone Ltd. and has since started the careers of more than 250,000 “phone ladies” in Bangladesh, which is considered one of the world’s poorest countries. Women use microcredit to buy specially designed cellphone kits costing about $150, each equipped with a long-lasting battery. They then set up shop as their village phone operator, charging a small commission for people to make and receive calls.

The endeavor has not only revolutionized communications in Bangladesh but also has proved to be wildly profitable: Grameen Phone is now Bangladesh’s largest telecom provider, with annual revenues of about $1 billion. Similar village-phone programs have sprung up in Rwanda, Uganda, Cameroon and Indonesia, among other places. “Poor countries are poor because they are wasting their resources,” says Quadir, who is now the director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at M.I.T. “One resource is time, another is opportunity. Let’s say you can walk over to five people who live in your immediate vicinity, that’s one thing. But if you’re connected to one million people, your possibilities are endless.”

During a 2006 field study in Uganda, Chipchase and his colleagues stumbled upon an innovative use of the shared village phone, a practice called sente. Ugandans are using prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money from place to place, something that’s especially important to those who do not use banks. Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission. “It’s a rather ingenious practice,” Chipchase says, “an example of grass-roots innovation, in which people create new uses for technology based on need.”

It’s also the precursor to a potentially widespread formalized system of mobile banking. Already companies like Wizzit, in South Africa, and GCash, in the Philippines, have started programs that allow customers to use their phones to store cash credits transferred from another phone or purchased through a post office, phone-kiosk operator or other licensed operator. With their phones, they can then make purchases and payments or withdraw cash as needed. Hammond of the World Resources Institute predicts that mobile banking will bring huge numbers of previously excluded people into the formal economy quickly, simply because the latent demand for such services is so great, especially among the rural poor. This bodes well for cellphone companies, he says, since owning a phone will suddenly have more value than sharing a village phone. “If you’re in Hanoi after midnight,” Hammond says, “the streets are absolutely clogged with motorbikes piled with produce. They give their produce to the guy who runs a vegetable stall, and they go home. How do they get paid? They get paid the next time they come to town, which could be a month or two later. You have to hope you can find the stall guy again and that he remembers what he sold. But what if you could get paid the next day on your mobile phone? Would you care what that mobile costs? I don’t think so.”

In February of last year, when Vodafone rolled out its M-Pesa mobile-banking program in Kenya, it aimed to add 200,000 new customers in the first year but got them within a month. One year later, M-Pesa has 1.6 million subscribers, and Vodafone is now set to open mobile-banking enterprises in a number of other countries, including Tanzania and India. “Look, microfinance is great; Yunus deserves his sainthood,” Hammond says. “But after 30 years, there are only 90 million microfinance customers. I’m predicting that mobile-phone banking will add a billion banking customers to the system in five years. That’s how big it is.”

When he is not doing his field work, Jan Chipchase goes to a lot of design conferences, where he gives talks with titles like “Connecting the Unconnected.” He also writes a popular blog called Future Perfect, on which he posts photographs of some of the things that amaze him along with a little bit of explanatory text. “Pushing technologies on society without thinking through their consequences is at least naïve, at worst dangerous . . . and IMHO the people that do it are just boring,” he writes on his blog’s description page. “Future Perfect is a pause for reflection in our planet’s seemingly headlong rush to churn out more, faster, smaller and cheaper.”

Clearly, though, Chipchase’s work puts him smack in the middle of this rush, and no company churns out phones like Nokia, which manufactures 1.3 million products daily. Forty percent of the mobile phones sold last year were made by Nokia, and the company’s $8.4 billion profit in 2007 reflects as much. Chipchase seems distinctly uncomfortable talking about his part as a corporate rainmaker, preferring to see himself as a mostly dispassionate ethnographer, albeit one with Nokia stock options. The only time I saw him get even slightly prickly — or indeed behave like anything but a mild-mannered guy who is wholly absorbed by the small, arcane things that serve as clues to bigger patterns of communication — was when I happened to muse that maybe there were still places in the world where technology might not be so vital.

We were sitting under a slow-revolving ceiling fan in a small restaurant in Accra, eating bowls of piquant Ghanaian peanut-and-chicken stew. Chipchase told a story about meeting some monk disciples at a temple in Ulan Bator, when he vacationed in Mongolia a few Decembers ago. (Most of Chipchase’s vacation stories, it turns out, take place in less-developed countries, often in forbidding weather and frequently relating back to cellphone use.) Despite their red robes and shaved heads and the fact they were spending their days in a giant monastery at the top of a windy hill where they were meant to be in dialogue with God, some of the 15 monk disciples had cellphones — Nokia cellphones — and most were fancier models than the one Chipchase was carrying. One of the disciples asked to look at Chipchase’s phone. “So he’s got my phone and his phone,” Chipchase told me. “And as we’re talking, he’s switching on the Bluetooth. And he then data-mines my phone for all its content, all my photographs and so on, which is absolutely fine, but it’s kind of a scene where you think, I’m here, I’m so away from everything and yet they’re so technically literate. . . . ”

This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. Chipchase raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. He sighed, making it clear that responding to me was going to require patience. “People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?” he said. “But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they’d probably say: ‘You’re going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?’ And maybe you can’t put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it’s quite viable as a fundamental right.” He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.”

For the last year, Chipchase has been working on a project he calls Future Urban, the goal of which is to explore what the cities of tomorrow will be like. Which is why one afternoon in Ghana he provided me with minute-to-minute cellphone instructions (“Do you see the sewing stall? O.K., now look to the right”) for finding him at the outskirts of Buduburam, a densely populated refugee settlement about an hour’s drive west of Accra. For the previous 11 days, Chipchase, two of his female colleagues from Tokyo — Indri Tulusan and Younghee Jung — and a small group of hired Ghanaians had been running what they called an “open design studio” in the heart of Buduburam, which is home to approximately 40,000 people, most of whom had fled from the civil wars in neighboring Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.

Nokia’s temporary design studio sat in a rented two-room concrete hut at the intersection of two busy dirt lanes, across from a woman selling chunks of watermelon and peeled lemons and next to a large water tank labeled “Church of God.” There was a sheet of fabric strung up in front, with neat painted lettering that read: “Your Dream Phone. Share it with the world.” It went on to describe how the community was invited to come share ideas and drawings for the ideal mobile phone. Prizes were offered. So far, 140 people had shown up to sketch their dream phone.

“For the first time, there are more people living in urban centers than in rural settings,” Chipchase explained as we sat in the shade outside the studio. “And in the next years, millions more will move to these places.” At current rates of migration, the United Nations Human Settlements Program has projected that one-quarter of the earth’s population will live in so-called slums by the year 2020. Slums, by sheer virtue of the numbers, are going to start mattering more and more, Chipchase postulated. In the name of preparing Nokia for this shift, he, Jung and Tulusan, along with a small group of others, spent several weeks in various shantytowns — in Mumbai, in Rio, in western China and now here in Ghana.

People in the mobile-handset business talk about adding customers not by the millions but by the billions, if only they could get the details right. How do you make a phone that can be repaired by a streetside repairman who may not have access to new parts? How do you build a phone that won’t die a quick death in a monsoon or by falling off the back of a motorbike on a dusty road? Or a phone that picks up distant signals in a rural place, holds a charge off a car battery longer or that can double as a flashlight during power cuts? Influenced by Chipchase’s study on the practice of sharing cellphones inside of families or neighborhoods, Nokia has started producing phones with multiple address books for as many as seven users per phone. To enhance the phone’s usefulness to illiterate customers, the company has designed software that cues users with icons in addition to words. The biggest question remains one of price: Nokia’s entry-level phones run about $45; Vodafone offers models that are closer to $25; and in a move that generated headlines around the world, the Indian manufacturer Spice Limited recently announced plans to sell a $20 “people’s phone.”

Even as sales continue to grow, it is yet to be seen whether the mobile phone will play a significant, sustained role in alleviating poverty in the developing world. In Africa, it’s still only a relatively small percentage of the population that owns cellphones. Network towers are not particularly cost-effective in remote areas, where power is supplied by diesel fuel. “I don’t see cellphones as a magic bullet per se, though they’re obviously very helpful,” says Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net, a nonprofit entity that provides free text-messaging software and information-technology support to grass-roots enterprises, mostly in Africa. “Many people in the developing world don’t yet have a phone — not because they don’t want one but because there are barriers. And the only way companies are going to sell phones is to understand what those barriers are.” He cites access to reliable electricity as a major barrier, noting that Motorola now provides free solar-powered charging kiosks to female entrepreneurs in Uganda, who use them to sell airtime. The company is also testing wind- and solar-powered base stations in Namibia, which could bring down the cost of connecting remote areas to cellular networks. “Originally mobile-phone companies weren’t interested in power because it’s not their business,” Banks says. “But if a few hundred million people could buy their phones once they had it, they’re suddenly interested in power.”

Many of the people in Buduburam who came to sketch their ideas for a perfect phone at the Nokia studio did not actually own one. The community’s power grid had been down for the last month, so those who did have one had been paying to have their phones charged at a local shop with a diesel-run generator. But when I paged through the fat three-ring binders where the Nokia team was storing those sketches, it was evident that the future, or at least some vision of it, had already arrived. Some of the drawings were basic pencil sketches; others were strikingly elaborate, with arrows pointing to different dream features, which were really just a way of pointing — I realized then — to the dreams themselves.

Jung and Tulusan said they’d found this everywhere, the phone representing what people are aspiring to. “It’s an easy way to see what’s important to them, what their challenges are,” Jung said. One Liberian refugee wanted to outfit a phone with a land-mine detector so that he could more safely return to his home village. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people sketched phones that could forecast the weather since they had no access to TV or radio. Muslims wanted G.P.S. devices to orient their prayers toward Mecca. Someone else drew a phone shaped like a water bottle, explaining that it could store precious drinking water and also float on the monsoon waters. In Jacarèzinho, a bustling favela in Rio, one designer drew a phone with an air-quality monitor. Several women sketched phones that would monitor cheating boyfriends and husbands. Another designed a “peace button” that would halt gunfire in the neighborhood with a single touch.

Interestingly, the recent post-election violence in Kenya provided a remarkable case study for the cellphone as an instrument of both war and peace. After the government imposed a media blackout in late December last year, Kenyans sought news and information via S.M.S. messages on their phones and used them to track down friends and family who’d fled their homes. Many also reported receiving unsolicited text messages to take up arms. The government responded with an admonition, sent, of course, via S.M.S.: “The Ministry of Internal Security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any S.M.S. that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution.”

As a joke, Chipchase sometimes pulls out his cellphone and pretends to shave his face with it, using a buzzing ring tone for comic effect. But there’s a deeper truth embedded here, not just for people in places like Kenya or Buduburam but for all of us. As cellphone technology grows increasingly sophisticated, it has cannibalized — for better or worse — the technologies that have come before it. Carrying a full-featured cellphone lessens your needs for other things, including a watch, an alarm clock, a camera, video camera, home stereo, television, computer or, for that matter, a newspaper. With the advent of mobile banking, cellphones have begun to replace wallets as well. That a phone might someday offer a nice close shave suddenly seems not so ridiculous after all.

One morning I followed Chipchase as he waded deep into the Nima market, a hodgepodge of vegetable stalls and phone-booth-size stores selling sundries like candles and palm oil. He was accompanied by a Ghanaian interpreter and two Nokia designers who had flown in from California to test the cultural waters for a phone that — if everything played out perfectly — could cost as little as $5. The $5 phone was still a pie-in-the-sky concept, explained Duncan Burns, one of the designers, something they were fiddling with to see if it might be possible someday probably years from now. Each time the group stopped to chat with someone, Burns pulled out several prototypes — or “physical sketches,” as he called them — for potential phones, handing them over one by one for examination.

These were elegant, futuristic-looking things, just odd enough to seem as if they’d arrived not from California but from outer space. One was long and wandlike, looking something like an aluminum version of a thick vanilla bean. Another was a slimmer rendering of an everyday phone but with no keypad and no screen, just a single unmarked button. A third did not look at all like a phone but rather like a credit card. There were a couple of small digital photos of people’s faces stuck to the front of the card, and it came with a small stylus that could be used, Burns said, to touch a face on the card, which would then dial that person’s number — a pictorial address book for someone who was illiterate. A fourth had a camera that took pictures and deposited them right into the phone’s address book.

A young man selling beans stared at each of the pretend phones uncomfortably, as if he mistrusted the devices or perhaps the small crowd of sweat-soaked foreigners suddenly leaning in close to see how he handled them.

“How would you use that?” Chipchase asked through the interpreter, using a dialect called Twi and pointing to the wand phone. The bean seller tentatively lifted it to his ear. “Where would you keep it?” The young man gestured to his neck. “On a rope?” Chipchase said. The man, still looking bewildered, nodded yes.

Moments later, we came upon an ample-bodied woman dressed in a bright gold wrapper and matching head scarf, sifting rocks and twigs out of scoopfuls of corn beneath an umbrella in a quiet corner of the market.

“Hellllloooooo,” Chipchase said, smiling broadly.

“Helllllooooo, Brudda,” she said back in English.

“We work for Nokia. You know Nokia?”

The woman said nothing, but reached down and from the folds of her wrapper produced a Nokia phone. “Not good,” she said, shaking her head disparagingly. “You call. It switches off.”

Chipchase enlisted the interpreter to explain that her problem sounded like a network problem and not a Nokia problem. Shrugging, the woman went on to inspect the prototype phones, testing their weight in her palm, pressing them against her cheek, punching buttons. She pooh-poohed the stylus phone but said she liked the one-button model if it meant she didn’t need to use a lot of numbers. “Brudda, how do you charge it?” she asked. From his bag, Burns pulled another still-conceptual design, this one a thin metal cylinder with a whirlybird antenna on top. He showed the corn seller how to rotate the cylinder in small circles, causing the antenna to swing, which, he explained, in 15 minutes or so would generate enough power to charge her phone battery.

The woman picked up the futuristic gizmo and began to swing it; the antenna whipped around and around. She let out an enthusiastic whoop. Then a friend of hers who’d been sitting in the shadow of her umbrella started to laugh. Another woman, a spice seller perched on a stool next to small mountains of turmeric and cumin heaped on canvas cloths, began to laugh also. “Very nice,” the corn seller said to Burns and Chipchase, swinging the antenna like a toy. “It’s good!” Then, after a moment, she gathered her composure and handed the charger off to her son, a heavy-lidded teenager who was lounging on a sack of corn nearby. “Doing that,” she said blithely as she returned to picking through her kernels of corn, “can be his job.”

via New York Times