Creative Thinking

Sharp designer Raheel Waqar passes along a nice write up on Creative Thinking from Interbrand here.  The article has a few nuggets on brand focused approach to solution development, but it does come across as a pamphlet for Interbrand marketing.

I always refer to Edward De Bono when it comes to "thinking" based ideation, conceptualization moving into analysis and realization of a solution.  See De Bono books on the subject here.

User Centric Design is Dead

Found at Design Sojourn "User Centered Design Innovation is Dead", details here.  Reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote - "You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new."

Istabsir: Reflect and Contemplate

Following is an interesting videographic and photographic view point on the various aspects of life in the UAE in a weekly series started by the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National here.  It also highlights where the nation has come from and where it may be headed.

In-Context Consumer Innovation

Prith Banerjee, Director of HP Labs talks about the importance of innovation in-context of the consumer's environment, from the McKinsey:

"Today, HP Labs is in seven different locations around the world. We are in India, China, Russia, Israel, and all over the place. And the reason we moved to those locations has nothing to do with cheap labor. By moving a researcher from Palo Alto to India—and maybe the cost is half that in India—it has nothing to do with cheap labor.

It has to do with the researchers in India trying to tap into the talent in India. And the researchers in India are actually working on projects that are relevant to that context. So HP Labs India, its mission is innovation for the next billion customers.

I strongly believe that it is not very easy for researchers sitting in Palo Alto to imagine the problems for the billion people in India, the vegetable vendors in India. What kind of cell phones, what kind of PDA devices would they need to solve their day-to-day problems?

Sitting here in Palo Alto, you imagine that the whole world is developed, and it’s not. So the researchers in India are actually working on precisely those problems. They are looking at rich, intuitive interfaces; they are looking at devices, sort of a smart phone for the Indian market. There are a billion people in India. More than 70 percent of the people have cell phones, but only 5 percent of people have PCs, computers, in their homes. So what we are trying to do is to see how we can enable the remaining 95 percent of people in India to embrace computing.

The challenge isn’t that they can’t afford a computer. It’s true, a computer is $1,000. But they are affording televisions. They’re affording cars. They’re affording scooters. So clearly it is not the price, it is the value. Can we bring value to those people in India? And that’s an example of a project that is going on—it’s a project called a value device, a sort of cloud service and a platform environment that they are working on in India. Completely innovative. And those kinds of projects would not have happened from the researchers in Palo Alto."