Koolhaas Takes on Bad Design Villains in LA
His Möbius shoe shot him to fame in 2003 and Rem D. Koolhaas became widely known as the designer of the first high heel that crossed over from fashion design to industrial design. He was a heartbroken architecture student when he first drew the shoe on a piece of paper a few years earlier. Whether the girl who left him was the inspiration for the feminine object or whether it was his childhood obsession with sneakers, his drawing did not come from a fascination with fashion, but from his interest in spatial design. And he knew immediately that he designed something radical.
“It was an exciting feeling”, Koolhaas recalls. “So I made a prototype.” The model of the hollow loop-shaped high heel was made out of cardboard and tinfoil, and was strategically placed in his uncle’s office: the other Rem Koolhaas, world famous architect and cofounder of OMA. “My timing was deliberate”, admits Koolhaas. “I was helping my uncle with a New York store design for Prada and I was curious if the Prada executives would notice the shoe.” They did, and subsequently Koolhaas flew to Milan to meet renowned shoe maker Sergio Rossi. “He urged me to launch my own label”, says Koolhaas, “because nobody in the footwear industry was doing anything like my looped heel.” When Koolhaas’ search for a partner led him to Galahad Clark of the Clarks shoes dynasty, United Nude was born.
Issey Miyake x United Nude
Möbius became a success and the two partners were perfectly matched to push the boundaries of footwear design and collaborate with other boundary-pushing people such as fashion designers Iris van Herpen, Issey Miyake and architect Zaha Hadid.
Zaha Hadid x United Nude
Koolhaas’ designs have extended way beyond innovative footwear. “I tend to look for solutions for any product with a bad design,” he explains. “Take a car; a pretty dumb design.” He supports this statement by telling a story: “I experienced water damage to my car one day and was astonished to learn that replacing a car radio costs thousands of dollars because the whole system is integrated. And not only that”, he continues, “these components are placed inside a shell that could last a human lifetime, whereas the lifespan of an average car is only twenty years.” This line of thinking got him to experiment with his own car design resulting in the Lo Res car (pictured below) – a simplified, nearly abstract version of an iconic Lamborghini that is compact, not conform the rules of conventional car design and minimalist.
The experimental car has arrived in Los Angeles where it is on display at a large hiphop music video production house. Koolhaas decided to follow his car and moved to L.A. early 2017. “I’ve been here three months now and it’s been exciting. There is an open-mindedness towards design, technology and art that suits me.” Planning to call L.A. home for a while, Koolhaas is collaborating with his distribution partner Evolution Fulfillment to expand United Nude into the North American market. But the main reason for coming to L.A. is to open a new United Nude concept store. “This one will be different from our flagship stores around the world in the sense that it is not merely a display of United Nude’s products”, reveals Koolhaas. “It will be a gallery event space, open on weekends for the public and by appointment for VIPs. I plan to collaborate with local and international artists, musicians and designers and we expect our doors to open at the end of March 2017.”
Stealth Watch
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Fathom Architects | The Pod
Based on the shape of loudspeakers and incorporating the movement of sound into its façade, the Fathom Architect-designed Pod seats six people and can be used as a private meeting space, for interviews, live broadcasts and recordings. Circular windows allow broadcasters and passersby to see in and out of the studio. The 12 square meter structure was constructed off-site and then winched into place overnight. Available free of charge and open to the public, sessions in the Pod can be booked via the White City Place website.
Source: Fathom Architects | The Pod
An advertising agency is making light of air pollution in China | Springwise
This is fucking genius. Anytime you gamify a product, you create stickiness. A Chinese advertising agency has partnered with pollution a mask manufacture to gamify the process of checking pollution levels, offering bigger discounts to the worst affected.
Source: An advertising agency is making light of air pollution in China | Springwise
Avoiding Hard-to-Answer Questions in User Interviews
User Interviews and their cousins the Focus Groups share a few traits across their disciplines. The chief trait is the moderator’s role with the interviewees. This article expertly breaks down the tenants of this relationship via the UX-side. Interestingly, observation is the most successful indicator. The author notes that, “put more emphasis on observing what people actually do rather than on what they say.”
Observing participants in their own context lets them show you exactly what they normally do.
Social app for refugees and locals translates in real-time | Springwise
Instead of complaining or worse using the refugees as a politcal chip, Swedish programmers have created a utility mobile app that works to alleviate some of the frustrations of being in a foreign land.
The developers say the app aims to break down social and language barriers between Swedes and refugees. Welcome! is translated into Arabic, Persian, Swedish and English, and it enables users to create, host and join activities, as well as ask questions of locals, chat with new contacts, and browse events that are nearby.
Source: Social app for refugees and locals translates in real-time | Springwise
Best Agency Kiss-Off Note, Ever
Think Small
Think small.*
Or why its important to think like a child.
The Set Up
As often happens, while I am thinking one idea, another idea (call it an inspiration) jumps up in my head as a tangential expression of the first idea. In this case I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast called, “Think Like A Child,” and a whole line of reasoning about marketing occurred to me.
“I think the beauty of thinking like a child … is that sometimes doing things differently and simply and with a kind of joy and triviality leads you to a really special place that as an adult you don’t get to go to very often.” – Steve Levitt
The Take
As a huge fan of Stephen Dubner, Steve Levitt and their studied approach called Freakonomics, I often lose myself in their podcasts about economics and the hidden levers behind, well, pretty much everything. I am always caught by surprise in their conclusions. And its in these unlikely conclusions that I find to be the best source of seasoning to add my internal cauldron of ideas.
While the whole podcast is worth listening to, I will just highlight 3 points about how thinking like a kid relates to our practice of advertising and marketing.
Notice Everything.
Kids see things in a fundamentally different way than adults. Kids will focus on everything around them. At this early stage of development they enthusiastically are learning about the world around them. Like a sponge, they will absorb anything that is interesting, that changes or that they might learn from their environment. Conversely, most adults tend to put blinders on and focus on what is just in front of them. As marketers, we have been trained to focus and think this way. Through our processes, plans, platforms and campaigns we express solutions with a narrow set of definitions and expectations. At the point when the Creative Brief is delivered, our wide-eyed enthusiasm becomes a narrow determined focus on the solution. Our natural sense of curiosity has been tightly focused and right there, we are missing something crucial.
Think small.
As adults we focus on the big picture, big ideas, trends, anthems and all the rest of it. Current wisdom dictates that ineffective marketers can’t see the forest through the trees. The other day I tried to explain this concept to my ten year old and he just looked at me as though I had just spoken Mandarin to him. Kids just don’t see the world this way. They focus on the trees and the leaves and the bugs on the leaves and so on. Dubner talks about how adults will shy away from answering the small questions because they are looked on as unimportant and focus instead on the big questions. In advertising we tend to fall into this trap over and over. We worry ourselves with solving our client’s large problems but what we should focus on is, perhaps, the consumer and their small problems. Not to trivialize consumers and their problems but often a barrier to purchase of, say, your client’s product could be a small thing: the functionality of the product, access to the product or ability to buy the product. Shifting our focus on the small problems of our consumer may well help us unlock the big problems of our clients.
Be Playful.
I have two kids and they spend an enormous amount of time playing. Whether they are fighting imaginary dragons and beasties with a homemade broadsword or making miniature fairy houses around the yard, they love to play. The logic here is that they love to play because its fun. They are associating fun with problem solving, creating narratives, and breathing life into their ideas. I think that’s an important lesson in life, in general. I don’t ever want them to lose that sense of fun and play. With advertising, we have to solve problems everyday. Brand Strategists and Creative work together to forge a brand’s narrative structure. Creative and Production teams constantly work to breath life into an idea or campaign. Its true, sometimes we do build fairy houses and we do battle with dragons. If you think advertising is just a job and its just work then you should, as they say, get out of the kitchen because the rest of us are having too much fun playing. It’s also worth noting that Picasso said he spent his whole life trying to paint like a child.
* Attribution of the title of this article is a nod to the genius of Copywriter, Julian Koenig + Art Director, Helmut Krone and the ad campaign that introduced the VW Beetle to the United States. Dive deeper here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Small
peter hill ~ pixelicious 