If you enjoy playing music on your PC with Windows Media Player (versions 9, 10, or 11) and you love Land Rover than this is something for you!
We have teamed up with the World Wide Land Rover team to develop a Windows Media Player Visualization as a free download!
You can download the file here. Just download the file and install it, additional details on how to get it to work can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/visualizations.aspx
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Land Rover Windows Media Player Visualization | Land Rover Blog
Saturday, April 30, 2011
How Good Designers Think - Simon Rucker - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review
Firstly, good designers don't tend to think about consumers; they think about people and what they want and need. It's a subtle point, but thinking about people as consumers immediately dehumanizes them and makes it harder to empathize.
Secondly, good designers like observing — really looking at what people do rather than simply relying on what they say they do. As Paul Smith once explained, when asked where he got his ideas from: "You and I could walk down the street together and look at the same things, but I'd SEE ten times more than you would."
Thirdly, they bring expertise in other categories and industries to bear on problems in others. They pull together threads from different functions, disciplines, fields, and sectors, and integrate them into a new and (the dreaded word) "holistic" understanding.
Fourthly, good designers look at what might all change in the short, medium and long-term, by engaging with the best trends and forecasting intelligence. Unlike other crystal ball gazers they use this prescience to help them understand how they could bend the future, shape it to their vision.
And lastly, good designers pressure test their conclusions by consulting with other cultural 'interpreters' from a broad range of other disciplines.
via blogs.hbr.org
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Five Ways to Fail at Design - Sohrab Vossoughi - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review
The truth is there's only so much designers can do on their own to make a company successfully innovative. Companies that misalign their expectations — and many do ignore their own part in becoming more innovative — generally fail. They genuinely want good design, and they want it to impact their bottom line, but they want it to take place externally. Their vision of design as a purely third-party service is doomed.
This misalignment expresses itself in many forms. Here are five of the most common ways to fail at design:
- Refuse to change any other part of your business. Treating design as an add-on can work when a company commissions a "designer series" of products to briefly boost the brand's appeal, but this is hardly what we mean when we talk about innovation saving your business. The smartest companies foster an internal culture of innovation, which creative consultants can support, but only if other aspects of the business — management, development, manufacturing, marketing — are open to change. More immediately, requiring a design team to propose only solutions that can be realized with your current process ensures more of the same.
- Design outside of your innovation space. Designers don't implement solutions, companies do. For that reason, the most innovative solution on earth won't work if it's pursued by a company that can't properly execute it. At Ziba we call this capability the client's "innovation space" — the arena in which they've already proven themselves willing and able to lead the pack. Some companies are technology innovators, others are product innovators or experience innovators. Learning which you are in order to direct later efforts is a crucial first step that most companies skip.
- Try to design for everybody. Design works as a differentiator because it responds to human needs, both functional and emotional. Most of us agree that a Ferrari is beautifully designed, but nobody would say it's for everyone. The same could be true of a minivan. Each succeeds in its market because it delivers to a tightly defined group of users. In a landscape where consumers increasingly demand tailored experiences, failing to identify a clear strategic target is designing to fail. The most useful tool a client can give a consultancy is a well-considered, focused profile of who they're designing for. The least useful is a mandate to create something that appeals to everyone.
- Insist on replicating another company's success. "We want to be the Apple of [insert industry]" might be the single most common request clients make of creative consultancies, and it's certainly one of the most damaging. Good design does more than just serve the needs of its audience, it does so in a way that's true to the company's purpose and values. An Apple-like experience delivered by a company that isn't Apple can't be sustained, because it's not backed up by Apple's culture and resources. The result is an inconsistent experience that feels disingenuous to customers, and shatters their loyalty. This is why "me too" innovation almost never works. Not only does it make you look like a copycat, it shows you don't care about your own brand enough to express it in your user experience.
- Compartmentalize design into isolated tasks. It's tempting to treat design as a menu of services, applying it here and there on bits of a project that need sprucing up. To a skeptical client this can feel economical and controlled, but it cripples the design effort by fragmentation. The best user experiences are integrative; they make sure that every touch point is consistent and logical, building trust from the user, and reinforcing the brand's character. Piecemeal design work creates an incoherent experience that users will ultimately reject.
via blogs.hbr.org
Thursday, March 10, 2011
MIT Media Lab: Identity - Interactive (video) - Creativity Online
Shape shifting
MIT Medialab's new visual identity is based on an algorithm that produces a unique logo for each person, including faculty, staff and students. Each person can claim and own an individual shape, based on the three geometric shapes in the design used, and can use it on their business card and personal website. They can also create animations for any video content the Lab produces, using custom software.
The identity is aimed at highlighting the spirit of collaboration the Lab represents, as it celebrates its 25th anniversary with a new building.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
How 3M Gave Everyone Days Off and Created an Innovation Dynamo
Still, it’s a rare perk at most companies, technical or not. For starters, it’s expensive. 3M invests more than $1 billion in R&D alone; 15 percent of that starts to be a sizable outlay. Author Scott Berkun writes about business innovation. He says these policies only work when the outcomes are backed. “Many companies have tried to emulate the ‘20 percent time idea’ but failed because they remained conservative about supporting the new ideas,” he says. And experts agree that this kind of nudging probably works best at companies where there’s a high level of creative competitiveness; that is, where impressing peers is just as important as the innovation itself.
Some have tried to emulate 3M's program but failed because they wouldn't support the new ideas.
3M’s got that in spades. Once a year, about 200 employees from dozens of divisions make cardboard posters describing their 15 percent time project as if they were presenting volcano models at a middle school science fair. They stand up their poster, then hang out next to it, awaiting feedback, suggestions, and potential co-collaborators. Wayne Maurer is an R&D manager in 3M’s abrasives division and calls it a chance for people to unhinge their “inner geek.” He elaborates: “For technical people, it’s the most passionate and engaged event we have at 3M.”
via: fastcodesign
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Harnessing Ignorance to Spark Creativity | Fast Company
Chapter 13 of Weird Ideas That Work offers some guidelines for harnessing innovation:
- During the early stages of a project, don't study how the task has been approached in the company, industry, field, or region where you are working.
- If you know a lot about a problem, and how it has been solved in the past, ask people who are ignorant it to study it and help solve it. Young people, including children, can be especially valuable for this task.
- Ask new hires (especially those fresh out of school) to solve problems or do tasks that you "know" the answer to or you can't resolve. Get out of the way for a while to see if they generate some good ideas.
- Find analogous problems in different industries, and study how they are solved.
- Find people working on analogous issues in different companies, fields, regions, fields, and industries, and ask them how they would solve the problem or do the job.
- If people who have the right skills keep failing to solve some problem, try assigning some people with the wrong skills to solve it,
- If you are a novice, seek experts to help you, but don't assume they are right especially if they tell you they are right.
via fastcompany.com
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
6 Tips for Building a More Creative Company | MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog
- Recognize and reward change makers. Let it be known that it literally pays to make a difference.
- Allow mistakes. Build awareness and encourage learning from mistakes. Making mistakes means you’re learning faster.
- Be assumption intolerant. Just because something is the way it is, does it mean it has to be that way?
- Admit when something is broken, and do something about it. “It has always been done that way” isn’t justification for broken.
- Allow constructive critique of any part of the business. At the same time, encourage solution suggestions, not just pointing-out the problem.
- Encourage mingling between departments. We learn best practices from others as well as understand the bigger picture of how different gears of the company fit together.
via mpdailyfix.com
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