Social Entrepreneurship

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In his The next step for design: Social Entrepreneurship presentation at Web à Québec Jon Kolko outlined the opportunity for designers to tackle important social issues by abandoning traditional job structures and creating their own companies that harness the power of design.

We’ve made It

• We’re in the middle of an enormous professional shift as designers. Companies now believe design is integral to the success of their products. Today design is at the heart of innovation and as a result important to business. This gives designers a “seat at the table”.
• This is great for designers.
• Earlier design was associated with making things beautiful and later streamlined. During this period design was a big deal to designers. Today it’s a big deal to a lot of other people.

Don’t look behind the curtain

• We’re really good at doing design but we’re quite bad at picking what to design. We spend a lot of time making wood grain textures look wonderful and designing even more social networks.
• These “selection” problems are not always our fault. It’s often not the job of designers to determine what companies do. Designers also have to deal with organizational consensus issues, bill-ability, etc.
• Our industry collectively says we need to “suck it up”. We need to consider business goals as much as customer goals.
• But even big capitalists know that organizations should exist to enable positive change for people.
• We need to get out of the organizational machine in order to work on problems worth solving.

A way forward

• In your lifetime, you will have seen the cost of mass-produced technology go from very expensive (thousands of dollars) to zero. Free laptops, WiFi, etc.
• This changes the conversation about what you can work on. A lot of the infrastructure you need is freely available.
• There are many funds and venture firms that can help you out financially.
• Don’t be afraid of the big organizations. Nest (a start-up of 6 people making a thermostat) is being sued by Honeywell (a company with 2 billion in revenue) because they are scared. Tiny companies are disrupting giant companies all the time.

Problems worth solving

• We feel, we observed, we believe: these word describe insights. Insights come to us in a flash that enables us to put things together that we didn’t think to combine.
• Insights come from having an opinion. To have an opinion, you need a point of view. The insight comes from within you.
• A well-structured problem can be tested, identified, and solved. Computers can solve these problems for us. They are not worth our time.
• An ill-structured problem can’t be easily identified, or solved in a sequence. Most of designers work on these types of problems.
• Wicked problems have no definitive formulation, no criteria on which to determine “solving”. They are typically social and humanitarian problems. These problems are worth your time and hard work.

Social entrepreneurship

• Corporate or consultancy? The third choice: start your own company and use technology and freely available resources to get it going.
• You need a process that focuses on ethnography, synthesis, and prototyping. As a designer, you already know how to do all this.
• Ethnography requires you to leave the studio and go talk to other people. This allows you to find problems worth solving. The goal of ethnography is to gain empathy to understand problems.
• Synthesis is bringing things together to make sense of them. You need to use abductive logic to look at places where there may be an answer. You can make sense of things through story-telling, the use of language, and a series of self/group activities.
• Design is a process for humanizing technology. You can aim that process wherever you want.
• Leave the organizational machine behind. Realize the disruptive power of design. Give yourself permission to start your own company and tackle problems worth solving.

Audi Urban Future at Design Miami: A reactive LED floor installation by BIG.

Launch of Nike’s new FuelStation concept and NIKEiD Studio at Boxpark in London’s Shoreditch March 2012. For more about Boxpark - the world’s first pop-up shopping mall.

7 Entrepreneurial Lessons From "Shark Tank"

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Shark Tank—the prime-time feeding frenzy where successful entrepreneurs fight over promising startups, and ruthlessly chew up the unprepared—provides a wealth of knowledge about what venture capitalists need to hear before they invest in your company.

Shark Tank—the prime-time feeding frenzy where successful entrepreneurs fight over promising startups, and ruthlessly chew up the unprepared—is stirring up much buzz in its third season. To date, the Sharks have invested more than $6.2 million of their own money in a number of companies. With billionaire Mark Cuban, real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran, venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary (aka Mr. Wonderful), and other business magnates sitting in as the Sharks, the show offers a glimpse of pitching sessions gone totally right—or deliciously wrong.

An example: When three ice cream makers first lined up in front of the Sharks to pitch their product, they generated some friendly conversation. After all, the concept of morphing together beer and America’s favorite frozen treat is bound to appeal to our inner glutton. However, when the investors started asking the entrepreneurs tough questions about their finances, the men from The Brewer’s Cow had a minor meltdown. Whether the Connecticut-based founders were the victims of calculated editing or simply unprepared, their presentation lacked a certain professionalism. The final verdict? A flurry of “I’m outs” from the Sharks.

Yes, the episodes are entertaining. But more than that, they provide a wealth of knowledge about what venture capitalists want to hear before they invest in your company—and what will turn them off. Here’s are 7 lessons from the Sharks about learning what it takes to make it as an entrepreneur.

1. Know your numbers. This is the number one lesson from Shark Tank. Whether you’re presenting to a team of investors or simply working to grow your business, it’s critical that you understand how much cash is coming in and out of the business. While you might think that most entrepreneurs on Shark Tank have a handle on their books, many believe that their passion will sell their wares. However, as we’ve learned from many of the Sharks, passion only gets you so far—numbers tell the real story.

2. Be a good marketer. Although the boys from The Brewer’s Cow didn’t get the deal they wanted, there is no doubt that the exposure from the show is extremely valuable. However, as a Shark Tank fan shares on his blog, the company’s website is pretty lackluster for a brand that hopes to go national. If you extend the online search to their Twitter feed, there is very little interaction since the show aired. The Brewer’s Cow currently has a deal with Whole Foods, but on the online front there is a lot more they could be doing just days after the television broadcast to capitalize from the on-air buzz.

3. Be humble. When a young entrepreneur appeared on the show to sell his custom clothing, he expressed the business drive that the Sharks love, but things started to fall apart when he talked about his lifestyle. Aside from asking for a starting six-figure salary (when the company has only grossed just over $315,000), he also lost some Sharks when he declared, “I’m now living the L.A. life.” As Shark Daymond John, founder of FUBU, expressed on his Twitter feed, a statement like this isn’t very appealing to a potential investor looking to form a responsible partnership.

4. Understand good timing. There are good and bad times in your business to ask for investment money. For many of the companies diving into the Shark Tank, they have great ideas but it’s too early on in their businesses to be on the hunt for a large amount of cash. Mom Raven Thomas was one of the most impressive entrepreneurs on the show in terms of leaking out little bits of information about her business to entice the Sharks, one by one. For example, when she shared that Sam’s Club recently put in an order for $2 million for her chocolate-covered pretzels, she had Cuban drooling to seal a deal.

5. Have a good story. When Travis Perry explained his company’s motivation to the Sharks, it tugged on their inner musician heart strings. Perry invented his product Chordbuddy to help new guitar players like his 10-year-old daughter avoid frustration when learning how to play the popular instrument. With a great story and a stellar product, Perry got investment help and now has his Chordbuddy product in more than 100 music stores.

6. Be prepared to walk. Some things are not meant to be, which was the case with entrepreneur Scott Jordan. As founder of the successful brands SCOTTEVEST and TEC, he appeared on the show to sell a percentage of the latter (a technology-enabled clothing patent). The Sharks, on the other hand, were interested in Jordan’s main business, SCOTTEVEST, which is on track to make more than $20 million this year. After a heated debate with some of the Sharks, Jordan was happy to walk away without a deal but with some new publicity for both his businesses.

7. Be personable. While all of the above will get you closer to your dream of running a successful business, it’s also helps to have a winning personality. No one wants to do business with someone who is unlikable, except maybe Mr. Wonderful. As Shark Barbara Corcoran said in a recent tweet, “All the entrepreneurs I’ve invested in have amazing personalities—no regrets.”

Remember all those things you learned about being nice in kindergarten? Those same things apply in the boardroom, no exceptions.

The sculpture, ‘Mapping the Future’, has its shape mapped with projection. The visitor interacts using a smartphone or tablet, where he can drag a virtual “sling” to dribble obstacles and reach the center, triggering a visual performance on the sculpture. Up to 6 players can collaborate to reach the common goal.

The Future of Tablet Based Drawing The Paper App for iPad has been gaining some serious momentum over the last week or two, putting on almost a million views of the app trailer alone. Perhaps better than the drawing tool itself, is the notebook concept, which allow you to showcase and socialize your creative output in a very cool flip-book kind of way.

Interface Origami

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In a previous post, I mentioned a way of thinking about interactions and interface within a framework of depth and space. The ideas were centered around the digital space, but as a designer I find it’s important to remove myself from that space and explore solutions that can originate in physical space.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to break out scissors and paper. With paper you can remove the constraints of working in pixels to fold, tear, flip, curl and manipulate the medium to discover solutions that may have otherwise been missed.

To illustrate this, I created a few examples based on some familiar apps and others based on former concepts I’ve played around with in the past.

Clear & Path

Clear has an interesting interaction where you pinch two list items apart to make room for an additional item. Path allows you to slide a view to the side to reveal additional content underneath.

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Accordion

By folding paper like an accordion, you could see how you might collapse some list items to display content underneath. This could be triggered by a button or a gesture.

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Fold & Peel

You could also use an accordion approach to reveal menu options. If you need to display options on a list item, why not allow the user to peel back a layer to reveal those options.

These are just a few examples of how playing with paper can really contribute to the design process. Whenever I’m trying to communicate an idea or working through solving a problem, I find pushing away from my computer and sliding over to a stack of paper for “craft time” can bring a fresh perspective.

Having a physical prototype also has the added benefit of putting something in your hands you can play with and evaluate. While a final design may end up as pixels, there’s a lot to explore beyond that.

Further article about this on Fast Co: Click Here

Better. Faster. UXier. — AToMIC Design - Jen Gergen

We believe in making incremental changes based on user testing. But there are some parts of the process we’re just not very good at yet. It’s usually still hard to achieve dramatic, site-wide style changes in an incremental and agile way, and most of us still run into “redesign” projects eventually. It’s sometimes hard to collaborate on the nitty-gritty style details with developers because we group and name things differently, and we store and share our work differently. Even though we want to make and test prototypes, we often don’t get around to it because they either takes a lot of effort, or produce highly questionable results, and it shouldn’t have to be so hard. AToMIC Design is an organizing principle, a workflow, and a library that aim to address these three birds with one stone.