Design 2.0: Introduction
For the last conference I blogged, I posted notes that pretty much followed the flow of the talks. This time, I’m instead going to try to summarize the key points from each speaker. First up, the introductory comments by Core founder Allan Chochinov and moderator Jessie Scanlon from BusinessWeek.
The general theme
The theme of the Core77′s Design 2.0 conference in San Francisco was “Products and their Ecosystems – understanding the power of context in product innovation.” Allan remarked that all products exist in a context, a continuum of products created before and after, and must therefore fit in with these other products. On the other hand, a lot of products challenge and subvert the ecosystem, and it can even be argued that the truly innovative products are those that disrupt existing ecosystems and defines new ones.
Ecosystems
Both Jessie and Allan enumerated some of the many ecosystems in which to consider a product:
- * manufacturing
- * distribution
- * daily use
- * post-use (trash, recycling, re-use)
- * other products used alongside
- * product line
- * brand
- * cultural context
Sony’s example
Jessie nicely illustrated the topic through some anecdotes about Sony. Sony used to be a very innovative company, but has somewhat lost its image as leader in the marketplace. This is due in part to a lack of attention to ecosystems.
Among other things, Sony engineers used to spend a lot of time with English-speaking researchers to understand a new market. As they grew more proficient in English, the engineers increasingly relied on their own information-seeking skills and thus started to miss the cultural context that only native speakers could give them.
Also, Sony failed to consider the full ecosystem of their product line. While Sony never ceased to produce well-designed products, these products did not play well with each other. So while an individual product might work fine, using several Sony products together was not nearly as painless as it could and should have been.
These are but two examples of how Sony lost its top spot as innovation leader in the portable music market to Apple’s seamlessly integrated experience (oh yes, I did just refer to the iPod. How could I not…)
