PSFK Author:
Molly Rosenberg

For years designers and engineers have been turning to data like The Measure of Man & Woman when designing products made to fit humans and their lifestyles. Designer and Professor Roger Ball, of Hong Kong PolyU, has gone a bit further after learning of Japanese snowboarders who were having trouble wearing US-designed helmets that left them with headaches: Ball has founded the SizeChina project, the first-ever digital database of Chinese head and face shapes.

Despite the fact that Asian heads are shaped differently than ‘Western’ heads, products such as sunglasses and helmets have conventionally been based off of Western anthropometric data, resulting in a poor fit for Asian users. Scanning the heads of over 2,000 male and female individuals from six different regions across China using state-of-the-art 3D scanning technology, SizeChina aims to create a database containing virtual models of heads that will help ensure that the designs of medical, optical, and sports equipment in China will fit comfortably and safely for a population of 1.3 billion.

SizeChina

Gary Hustwit, director of the documentary Helvetica, has officially announced that he is working on a follow up film, Objectified, about industrial design. The documentary, which is set to premiere in early 2009, will explore our relationship with everyday objects, everything from radios to toothbrushes, and those individuals responsible for designing them.

According to Hustwit:

Those of you who followed the making of my first film, Helvetica, know that the reason I make these films is not that I have a comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter. I wasn’t an expert on graphic design, and I’m certainly not an expert on industrial design. But they’re both fields that fascinate me, and that I want to learn more about. I’m interested in industrial designers because their work influences so many aspects of our world yet most of the time it’s taken for granted. And I think that, especially today, it’s crucial for us to re-examine how we make and use consumer products at every level.

And if you could get all of these designers and design experts together at a dinner party, what would they talk about? This film will hopefully represent that conversation.

The film will feature some of the worlds most influential designers including Dieter Rams, Karim Rashid and Jonathan Ive.

Objectified: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit

We are excited to have Gareth Kay of Modernista! at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008. Gareth will be leading our “Making Inspiration Matter” panel with Eric Corey Freed of organicARCHITECT, Josh Morenstein (fuseproject) and Frank Striefler (TBWA\Chiat Day), in discussion over how inspiration can be used to create change.

First, who are you and what do you do?

I’m Gareth Kay and I run the planning department at Modernista!, an ad agency based in Boston. My job is to help create an environment where great ideas are more likely to happen. Primarily this means turning information into inspiration and planting some seeds for great ideas to hopefully grow from.

You’ll be leading our “Making Inspiration Matter” panel. Can you sum up your views on what it means to “take inspiration and create change”?

It’s a cliché, but inspiration is literally everywhere – conversations in the coffee shop, stuff on the street, all over the internet. The trick is to take all this stimuli, spot patterns and collide together observations that were previously unconnected to make you think about people, businesses and problems differently. This is how change is created. In order to do this, the key is the diversity of stimuli you expose yourself to. Working in advertising, far too many people only really expose themselves to the ad awards show books and marketing texts which is one of the reasons there is so surprisingly little innovation in the industry. If this conference can open people’s eyes to look outside their own field of professional interest then I believe much greater change can be created.

Five sites that provide you with inspiration:

City of Sound
Future Perfect
Noisy Decent Graphics
The Guardian
PSFK (and not just because it’s your conference)

(All the above regularly are regularly found on my del.icio.us)

Thanks, Gareth!

Modernista!

Learn more from Gareth at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008.

We are looking forward to having George Murphy, founder of Modo Group, share his insights with us at PSFK Conference San Francisco. He’ll be speaking with John Pollard of Microsoft on our “When Words Are Not Enough” panel about using experience design to enhance communication.

Who are you and what do you do?

I am George Murphy and I am a brand development and marketing management consultant at Modo Group, a marketing management consultancy based in Seattle and Paris. My partners and I help large and medium sized companies manage their brands and increase brand relevancy to new audiences without compromising core values.

You’ll be speaking on our “When Words Are Not Enough” panel, Can you provide a paragraph on how environment and technology help consumers make meaningful connections with the brand?

This is a fairly huge topic and a paragraph would be a disservice. So allow me to butcher the topic further by reducing it to a sentence: Environment provides context, technology provides the enabling element that makes a brand relevant – in some instances.

Four sites that provide you with inspiration?

Silobreaker
Google Trends
PSFK
Bloomberg

Thanks, George!

Modo Group

Hear more from George at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008.

We are excited to have Rohit Bhargava, founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy, speaking at the upcoming PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008. Rohit will be speaking on our “Using It” panel along with George Parker (AdScam), Mark Lewis (DDB), Lynn Casey (Team Noesis) and Adrian Ho (Zeus Jones),discussing the use of social media in business.

First, who are you and what do you do?

I’m a writer, speaker, author, blogger and marketer. I just wrote a book called Personality Not Included which is all about why brands need to have a personality and how to use your personality in marketing to stand out. For the last three years, I have also published the Influential Marketing Blog Influential Marketing Blog which is rated among the top 50 marketing blogs in the world on the Power150 list from AdAge. My day job is to lead the marketing team as part of Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team.

You’ll be speaking on our “Using It” panel. Can you sum up your views on how you see brands leveraging social media to enhance consumer dialogue, evolve product offerings, and improve sales? Where do you see social media fitting in the future of business?

Social media is a tool that is letting organizations make a more human connection with their employees and their customers. One of the biggest impacts on every aspect mentioned above is the real time nature of social media. You can get an instant picture of whether something is working or not. Interaction with customers can be right away and problems can be corrected quickly. Social media is making business faster, in a good way.

Five sites that provide you with inspiration:

Trend Hunter
PSFK (of course!)
WOMMA
Design Observer
Adrants

Thanks, Rohit!

360 Digital Influence

Hurry up and get tickets for PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008 and join us on July 17th to hear more from Rohit.

At the upcoming PSFK Conference San Francisco, Lynn Casey, founder of Team Noesis, will be joining George Parker (AdScam), Mark Lewis (DDB), Adrian Ho (Zeus Jones) and Rohit Bhargava (Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence) on our “Using It” panel. The discussion will examine how companies can use social media to enhance consumer dialogue, evolve product offerings, and improve sales.

First, who are you and what do you do?

Lynn Casey: a passionate student of people, an anthropologist of human behavior, avidly curious trend scout.

I’ve spent years in the ad and marketing biz, where I developed a love of consumer research as a means of arriving at real breakthroughs in strategy. My passion is understanding the WHY of human behavior, and to add human dimension to the nuts and bolts of consumer targeting. Determined to create a fresh one on one dialogue with consumers, I founded NOESIS, a research based marketing firm whose primary foundation is the NOE-IT-ALL panel, an 8,000 member panel with participants ranging in age from 6 to 66. These panelists contribute their thoughts, dreams, ideas and opinions on a regular basis, allowing me to create 360 composites of consumer targets for my clients. This human dimensionalizaton has become a critical piece of the marketing puzzle for companies such as Hilton Hotels and General Mills, giving life and breadth to what has been heretofore a collection of stats. I am a huge fan of looking for unique and creative ways of engaging my panelists, and look to them to lead the way in terms of fashion, shopping, media and family interaction trends. When not working, I spend time running the streets of LA, and looking for offbeat vintage bargains on ebay.

You’ll be speaking on our “Using It” panel. Can you sum up your views on how companies and organizations leverage social media to enhance consumer dialogue, evolve product offerings, and improve sales?

Social media is a critical component in today’s media landscape, and one which is providing companies with a tremendous window into the consumer soul. The most natural place to first look at the effect of social media is those companies that target teens - the workhorses of the internet. Brands have learned to create space on there sites and homepages to allow kids to express themselves, share opinions, design clothes or shoes, and truly engage with the product. This engagement translates to brand loyalty, and as co creators of product, comes a passionate consumer. As with all media, understanding and tapping into your consumer’s play patterns is key- and using social media to interact with teens is a simple ‘yes’ play. The brands that do it well provide their consumers with the tools to create and interact, and then get out of the way. When the message becomes intrusive, invasive or too obvious, it will be rejected. What companies are now learning is the social media is a compelling media vehicle for the older demos as well. Young moms are turning to the internet in droves desperately seeking information and guidance as they begin a new life stage. Again, smart companies are tapping into this ‘digital picket fence’ and are providing both information and the means for interaction to today’s mom. The reward - knowledgeable consumers with an emotional attachment to the brand. Social media will continue to grow in importance as a critical marketing tool as consumers continue to assert their opinions and viewpoints into corporate offerings. Companies who wish to benefit need to understand this animal, and to carefully study and develop the tools to create meaningful engagement.

Five websites that provide you with inspiration:

Boing Boing
MOCA: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angelos
Sneaker Freaker
Thrillist
Flavorpill
Hillbilly Housewife
(Okay - that’s 6 sites!)

Thanks, Lynn!

Come and hear more from Lynn at PSFK Conference San Francisco.

We are excited to have Amit Gupta of Photojojo joining us at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008 on our “San Francisco Snapshot” panel,where passionate locals, including Liz Dunn of FunnyOrDie and Jeremy Townsend of The Ghetto Gourmet (led by moderator Colin Nagy of Attention) will discuss what makes the Bay Area tick and what aspects of SF/Bay Area culture inspire them the most.

First, who are you and what do you do?

Hi. My name’s Amit Gupta. I am a creative, hard-working, honest young man who likes to create fun things online.

I run a company called Photojojo, we’re the world’s awesomest photography newsletter.

We’re also working on a book that will be published by Random House next year, and some new ways for people to have fun with photography online.

I’ve started a lot of different projects and companies, and am always working on something new. Most recently, I started a casual coworking event called Jelly while living in NYC. Since then, it’s spread to 20 cities around the world and been on the Today Show, Wired, NPR (twice), etc.

You’ll be speaking on our “San Francisco Snapshot” panel. Can you explain what you find inspirational about the Bay Area and why? What makes it different than any other place in the world?

People here are not afraid of failure.

There’s a great entrepreneurial spirit here, and startups seem to grow like weeds, but it has less to do with the weather, the proximity of venture capital, or history, and more to do with the culture. Here, it’s okay to try something and fall on your face. You just get up and try again. That’s not normal anywhere else.

Some sites that provide you with inspiration:

Mostly these days my inspiration comes from my friends, almost always through one of these three:
Tumblr
Flickr
Twitter

Thanks, Amit!

Photojojo

Amit Gupta

To hear more from Amit come join us at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008!

We’re looking forward to having Mark Lewis, strategy director at DDB, join us at PSFK Conference San Francisco. On our “Using It” panel along with Adrian Ho (Zeus Jones), George Parker (AdScam), Lynn Casey (Team Noesis) and Rohit Bhargava (Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence), Mark will be discussing how companies can use social media to enhance consumer dialogue, evolve product offerings, and improve sales.

First, who are you and what do you do?

I’m a strategy director at DDB in San Francisco working on brands ranging from Brita to STP to a major alternative energy provider. I’d define my job as introducing interesting things or ways of thinking to people in the hope of inspiring them to do things a little differently.

You’ll be speaking on our “Using It” social media panel. Can you sum up your views on how you are seeing companies and organizations leverage social media to enhance consumer dialogue, evolve product offerings, and/or improve sales? In what direction do you see Social Media taking brands in the future?

While it is great to see companies beginning to use social media and engage in the web in a new way, the number of companies that have truly grasped the true model shift created by the social web is relatively small. Brands have to figure out how to engage consumers in a dialogue where they have something to give beyond entertainment (because very few brands can do that well over the long term) – where their marketing becomes an extension of what they do.

Four sites that provide you with inspiration:

PostSecret
Pandora
Google Labs
GigaOM

Thanks, Mark!

DDB

Have you bought your tickets for PSFK Conference San Francisco yet?

We’re excited to have Andrew Hoppin, co-founder of NASA CoLab, joining us at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008 on our “Collaboration & Co-Working” panel. Alongside Ezra Cooperstein from Current TV, Andrew will be discussing how collaboration can be utilized to engage communities (even ones as big as NASA!).

First, who are you and what do you do?

Though a planetary geologist and environmental scientist by training, I came back to NASA in 2006 because of my experience as a social entrepreneur, Web strategist and grassroots political organizer. There, I helped create NASA CoLab, which builds collaborative communities for NASA, online and offline, in service of a more transparent and efficient Federal government.

I also recently co-founded Brazil’s first online political technology company, and Mission Ad Network, an online advertising network for Socially Responsible businesses.
My volunteer work includes representing the Space Generation Advisory Council at the UN, and the advisory board of the New Organizing Institute.

You’ll be speaking on our Collaborative Co-Working panel -can you sum up your views on how collaborative work is changing how companies engage with their customers, staff, partners, and the community?

Collaborative co-working puts more people on the creative “edges” of workgroups by fostering informal but vocationally relevant peer-to-peer interaction across boundaries of bureaucracy, organization, and in the case of NASA with Second Life, physical geography. Cultural cross-pollination results, making organizations more contextually aware, nimble, and responsive. Co-working creates more human points of contact within an organization, melting bureaucracy away and generating creative juice from the meltwater. Now, after more than a year of building communities for NASA through online, offline, and virtual reality co-working at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, we’re turning our attention to bringing these practices to other NASA Centers around the country, and collaborating with colleagues at other Agencies to share this learning across the Federal Government. There has been a lot of rhetoric about “change” in this year’s Presidential Election; we like to think we’re helping to build the DNA necessary to implement rapid change into the Federal bureaucracy.

Five sites that provide you with inspiration?

Open NASA
CharityFocus
BarCamp
X PRIZE Foundation
Twitter

Thanks, Andrew!

NASA CoLab

Hear more from Andrew at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008 - get your tickets now!