metacool

Brand Doppelgangers

Last week, while strolling through the wilds of Silicon Valley on my way to "work" (I love my job too much to think of it as work; I refer to it instead as "flow central", but that's fodder for another post), I passed by a Muzak cargo truck.  Yes, that Muzak, of tunes and elevators.

The broad tall cargo wall of the truck was emblazoned with the Muzak logo:

 

And I couldn't help but think that the Muzak "m" felt a lot like the "m" logo found on the side of a bottle of Method soap:

Yes, to a graphic designer they're quite different, but to everyone else they're pretty close.  They are, for all intents and purposes, doppelgangers.  I find this notion of brand doppelgangers quite intriguing.  Is this good?  Bad?  Irrelevant?  I'm not sure yet, but I'd like to think more about it. 

Can you think of other examples of brand doppelgangers?  Drop me a line or leave a comment.

Mahalo.

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

The Maybach Fulda Exelero

Design Thinking on Ice

Could this be the oft-rumored winter under-ice exploration HQ of Team Zissou?  Or perhaps the Banzai Institute's secret computational genomics R&D lab?

Nothing so cool.  But on the other hand, something designed with surviving the cool as a key consideration.  Or in this case, being in Antarctica and not getting buried by it.

For this is Haley VI, the latest in a series of Antarctic research stations created by the British Antarctic Survey.  Haley VI is an extremely clever answer to the question, "How should humans live in the cold?".  Among other things, it features:

• A modular architecture which allows multiple units to be combined and recombined
• Renewable energy supplies
• A thoughtful approach to dealing with doo-doo
• Ski stilts which enable the module to avoid burial by layers of snow by being towed away

It's a good example of the holistic nature of design thinking at work.  A traditional, building-centric worldview would have responded to the challenge of snow burial with a "build it stronger and heavier" dictum, because buildings can't move, right?.  But Haley VI shows us that sliding modules gather no ice, and that's a breakthrough informed by a fundamentally optimistic view of the world: slide a building across the ground in the middle of nowhere, then snap it to another modular building?  Let's build it!

And you just gotta love the clubhouse module - it's enough to start an Antarctic housing bubble:

 

Sneezing The Big Moo

Are you a connected maven in a slice of the world that cares about remarkable ideas?

Then check out Seth Godin's influencer campaign for The Big Moo.  Very clever promotional thinking for the insights of the The Group of 33.

metacool Thought of the Day

"To be successful in motorcycle product planning, you need to have enthusiasm and at the same time you need to have an enormous curiosity to dig deeper and see what's behind people's motivation, combined with an open mind for creativity. It is a difficult balance between logic & facts and creativity & vision. I believe you either have this ability or you don't. Just like a good painter, you either have the ability to make great paintings or you don't. This job requires a lot of intuition, which one cannot learn from schoolbooks."
- Masahiro Inumaru

How far? How?... continued

"Atelier De Cannes"  by Pablo Picasso, original crayon drawing, 1958

Yours for only $129,999.99 today at www.costco.com

Yes, at Costco.  I don't know about you, but this changes, at least a bit, the way I think about Costco.  Your brand is an expression of what you put out in the world, and this ain't no bulk pack of toilet paper.

Personally, I'd go for the Miro.

(thanks to Carlos for the link)

How far? How?

If your brand is the sum total of all the things you do in the world, then how far would you go to live up to the expectations of people in that world?

Would you do something like this?

And how would you grow a culture to enable this kind of brand expression?

Good questions to ponder... and act upon.

Design Manifestos: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

This is start of a new feature of metacool, which I'm calling Design Manifestos.  These are pieces of design thinking that really had (or continue to have) a big impact on my own thinking.  Longer than a Thought of the Day, many more words than an Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness entry.

A great place to start is Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a wonderful essay about the "bazaar" (AKA "open source") approach to creating cool stuff.  Please do read it, but in case you can't, here are my favorite bits: 

• "...you often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once."
• "...I think Linus' cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model."
• "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers."
• "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow...  In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you've winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect.  In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena - or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door."
• "Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong."
• "I think it is not critical that the coordinator be able to originate designs of exceptional brilliance, but it is absolutely critical that the coordinator be able to recognize good design ideas from others."

These are great thoughts about the process of creating good stuff.  It's important to keep in mind that this isn't just about software.  The challenge is to figure out how to make the bazaar part of your own way of getting things done.

Shedding the tyranny of the wallet

To echo an infamous statement once made about the lowly shopping cart basket, the wallet is tyranny.  In this age of the mobile phone, the PDA, the RFID fob, the massive automobile locking/alarm/ignition system remote, and the iPod, who can get away with carrying a wallet alone?  Convergence isn't going to happen any time soon, my friends, and clipping that phone to your waist band just ain't gonna cut it.  Aesthetics matter.  The solution is quite clear, and yet... and yet the pressure to conform to societal norms is intense.  Hence the tyranny of the wallet.

You heard it here first: I'm freeing myself from the shackles of walletdom, and I'm going to start toting a man-purse. 

I've been contemplating this move for a while, a long while, in fact.  Back in 1991 my engineering boss at the Nissan Technical Center in Atsugi used a man purse, and it made a lot of sense from a utilitarian standpoint: having everything in one purse made it a lot less likely that he'd leave a stray pack of cigarettes in a chassis dynamometer, misplace the keys to his diesel Sentra, or drop a data log at the test track.  It made perfect functional -- or behavioral design -- sense.

It's the visceral and reflective levels of design which kept me from taking the plunge.  But two recent developments have tipped the balance in favor of the man-purse:

1. When a reputable venture capitalist  makes a very public endorsement of the man-purse, well, that means its societal meaning is changing.  A VC with a purse?  That's a compelling use case, a great story.  And it works well at the reflective level of design.
2. I'm no clotheshorse, but I do care about personal aesthetics. So I can't rationalize carrying a cordura camera bag turned purse.  Or worse, a fanny pack.  Enter the Freitag Mancipation line of man-purses.  They meet all my visceral design criteria, and because they're Freitag they'll work well and stroke my mojo, too.

So watch out for me and my man-purse.  Now I've just got to figure out how to buy one of these Freitag thingies without jetting over to Davos, because I can't find it on the internet. 

Honey, where's my wallet?