Presenting data to a group of people that are interested in arts, creativity, and narrative.  But, Bloxham, says, this really is about people.

The original VCM study in 2003 made it into the first iDMAa journal in 2004.  How quaint.

And Dr. Holmes killed the microphone.

Dr. Holmes realizes there’s a gap between the data and the creativity.  But the designers at iDMAa are designing and creating for these people being studied.  This research gives you a glimpse into the media world of people and consumers.

1969 – media environment is very simple and limited

2009 – 40 years later; many more platforms; blurred borders

The one thing that hasn’t changed is the length of the day: 24 hours.  Makes it harder and harder to find out what the media consumer is doing.  Multi-platform, multi-place challenge.

The Video Consumer Mapping Study (VCM) helps to tackle this challenge.  Nielsen has funded the Council for Research Excellence (CRE).  They wanted a snapshot of the current media world to give them a sense of what is going on.

What did the VCM do?  Examined participants for a full waking day across 6 cities in the US, following them all day and observing; so cross-platfrom, cross-location.  Data measured every 10 seconds.  An observer stays in the background with a small hand-held palm pilot-like device which tracks the life activity, location, and media consumed (15 major platforms) all day long.

Expensive, time-consuming, labor intensive research.  Allows you to create a graph of participants’ entire day that incorprates all of this information.

Now Mike Bloxham coming back to give the analysis (Dr. Holmes gives the boring data, Bloxham gets the fun part… or at least, that’s how Mike and Michael characterize it).

Analysis divides media use by screen type:

• 1st screen – TV which includes DVD, video games, etc.
• 2nd – computer
• 3rd – mobile devices
• 4th – everything else

This is undoubtedly the largest media research study in the US, perhaps the world.

Common notion is that TV is dead, 30-second commercials are dead, everyone watches video online, and it’s all related to age.  VCM debunks pretty much all of this.

Average time spent watching TV is 309 minutes across all demographics.  65+ have greatest numbers (421 min). 18-24 has least (which is still 210 min).  DVR use is fairly uniform and low across age demos.  DVD/VCR avgs to 23 min across demos (much higher than avg. of 15 min for DVR) – when will DVD advertising take off?  First screen totals 353 minutes per day across age demos.

Web averages to 49 min.  35-44 year olds have the highest use (remember they follow people to work).  Email is also higher among 35-44 and 45-54 y.o.  IM even among 18-24, 35-44, and 45-54 y.o.  Software avgs to 46 min across age demos; much of the use comes from being at work.  Computer video averages to 2 minutes across all demos.  2 minutes.  Flies in the face of conventional wisdom, doesn’t it?  Second screen averages to 143 minutes.  At this point, total media usage is highest among 45-54 y.o.

Third screen (mobile content) averages to 20 minutes across age demos (includes mobile talk, as well).  One of the major findings in this project was that people grossly over-report media usage (more on this later).

Fourth screen (everything else) averages to 8 minutes across age demos.  Most age demos spend 8.5 total hours per day consuming media.  Except 45-54 y.o. that use media for 9.5 hours per day.

Concurrent media exposure (CME) – exposed to multiple media at the same time; when accounting for CME, total media usage time drops by nearly 30% for some age demos.

When looking at media that people spend 10 minutes or more, 65+ have 5 media, 18-24 have 10.

When compared against Nielsen’s 3-screen report, VCM came out nearly identical.

When discussing reach and duration of media use…  Gives a great scatter-plot graph that groups most media to the left, spread between top and bottom; with TV to the extreme right, top corner.

TV users were exposed to roughly an hour a day of live TV ads and promos.  This is the first time an objective study found out (with precise granularity) how much [TV] advertising people are exposed to daily.

Self-reporting.  Most people are grossly wrong of their estimates of how much media they consume.  Some forgot usage of media entirely.  Some give wildly inaccurate periods of use (one man thought he used his iPhone for 2 hours/day and it turned out to be about 25 minutes).  And the amount that is over/under reported is completely random.  There’s no generalization or correlation that can really be made about what is recorded and what is self-reported.

For tons more information on this study, check out this website.  They’ve got presentations, reports, and even raw data.  Lots to look at.

Final thoughts… Again, I’ve heard this presentation (or at least iterations of it) many times, and the data and findings are always fascinating. I think many of the people here in this room watching the presentation are also fairly blown away by all of this.

“Design for the Future” :: Tom Kelley, IDEO

—–

Tom Kelley’s keynote presentation discussed the blurring of the line between design and innovation, and perhaps more importantly, the notion of pace in relation to these two elements.

He begins with a venn diagram that suggests principles that guide IDEO: Design Thinking —> :: People [ desireable ] :: Business [ viable ] :: Technical [feasible] ::

Kelley describes a project analyzing the supply chain for Kraft Foods, and notes that “we start here,” meaning that the Design Thinking venn diagram constitutes an operative framework for tackling professional problems :: begin with the humans in the supply chain :: approach problems from the human side, not solely trucks/infrastructure [ for me, this is similar to the language ~ communication efficacy ~ documentation ~ circulation problems discussed in Actor Network Theory, and in projects from researchers at places like WIDE ].

Kelley discusses The Red Queen effect, a notion from Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass: “if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” The pace of innovation has changed: “Sony didn’t stop innovating,” says Kelley; they just slowed the pace of their innovation, and were passed by Samsung.

The 10 Faces of Innovation

The Learning Roles

• The Anthropologist [ ethnography :: observation ]
• The Experimenter [ taking risks :: make :: do ]
• The Cross-Pollinator [ knowledge work :: distributed work :: homophily + dissonance ]

The Organizing Roles

• The Hurdler
• The Collaborator
• The Director

The Building Roles

• The Experience Architect
• The Set Designer
• The Caregiver
• The Story Teller

Kelley hones in on two of these components of innovation, the first of which is The Anthropologist :: “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes” ~ Proust. “On a per capita basis,” Kelley says, “we’re probably the biggest employer of anthropologists in America.” “Anthropology is too important to be left to anthropologists.”

Kelley is basically arguing that people don’t notice the quotidian aspects of experience design; this is where observational study, ethnography, and applied anthropology come to the fore [ I'm thinking here specifically of Dan Lockton's Design with Intent methods ].

Kelley moves to a discussion of The Experience Architect, one of the faces of innovation which is paired nicely with the work of The Anthropologist. The Experience Designer is concerned with addressing needs, while The Anthropologist is concerned with identifying those needs.

Story :: Narrative :: Discourse :: Rhetoric

From the perspective of my own disciplinary expertise, experience design is always already a conflation between the material and the lingustic ~ the stuff and the discourse about that stuff ~ Stuff + Stories.

Like Herigstad, experience design for Kelley is about the vanishing interface :: the interface mediates, but the effective interface elides that mediation.

]]> http://www.idmaa.org/idmaa2009/blog/design-for-the-future/feed/ 0 http://www.idmaa.org/idmaa2009/blog/tom-kelley-designing-for-the-future/ http://www.idmaa.org/idmaa2009/blog/tom-kelley-designing-for-the-future/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:51:38 +0000 Ryan Carney http://www.idmaa.org/idmaa2009/?p=309 Tom Kelley of IDEO; “help build cultures of innovation” within various industries.

Got started a little late….

8:48 – “Blurring the line between design and innovation”

three things to think about…

• people (desirable)
• business (viable)
• technical (feasible)

Technical factors are not enough (look at Japan with their Betamax and mini-discs; lots of great tech that no one adopted).

The people factor is often overlooked.  IDEO increased Kraft Food’s sales by $700,000 per week by tweaking the human factor; not the trucks or the nodes.

8:52 – Two problems with innovation – it’s important but not urgent.  This is a problem, because there are so many things that are important and urgent.  So then you put it off till tomorrow, and all of the sudden, someone has taken your idea.

8:55 – Other problem is “the Red Queen effect.”  Based on “Alice in the Looking Glass.”  Alice pals around with the Red Queen, who always in a bad mood.  After making no progress on their journey, Alice asks why they’re not moving.  The Red Queen says, “to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”  Innovation moves very fast and you have to outpace your competitors.

8:59 – If you’re on top and you’re the only one in your game, you get lazy.  Your competitors sneak up on you.  Example Tom gives is tire manufacturing in Akron, OH (which used to manufacture 100% of the tires in the US).  The big tire companies had essentially no competition; then comes France with radial tires.  They ignored the “Red Queen” effect.  The whole tire industry folded in Akron because they slowed their pace of innovation.

9:03 – Looking at the “value” of two brands: Samsung and Sony.  Sony was on top of the world in 2000; they got cocky, got lazy, and Samsung made its move.  Samsung started changing its practices (innovating) by listening to their younger workers.  Since 2004, Samsung has been on top of Sony.

9:06 – And Sony did not stop innovating… ever.  They’re a great company, but they slowed down their innovation, which is all their competitors needed.

9:09 – “innovation made personal” … The ten faces of innovation…

1. The Anthropologist
2. The Experimenter
3. The Cross-Pollinator (getting outside your world)
4. The Hurdler (realizes there will be obstacles, but doesn’t slow down)
5. The Collaborator
6. The Director (searches the world for the best talent and turns them into stars, not themselves)
7. The Experience Architect
8. The Set Designer
9. The Caregiver
10. The Storyteller (data can’t speak for itself but stories make lasting impressions)

1-3 are learning roles. 4-6 are the organizing roles.  7-10 are building roles.

9:19 – Tom’s favorite is the Anthropologist.  Tom’s worked with engineers, and he’s worked with anthropologists.  Anthropologists would do something like watch kids fish at a river, and come back to the main office and tell everyone about fishing.  The “single biggest source of innovation at IDEO” because they go out into the field, identify problems, and can figure out a way to fix it.

“The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

Vuja de – opposite of deja vu – you’re in the same place that you’ve always been, but you see something new.  ”I’m not sure who it is that discovered water, but I’m sure it wasn’t a fish.”  In other words, you get immersed in your environment and don’t see the obvious.

9:34 – Ultimately all innovations get copied.

An example about cake…

• Commodity – eggs, flour, sugar, etc.
• Product – Betty Crocker pre-made mix
• Service – cake is already made at the Bakery
• Experience – Chuck E. Cheese birthday party

This is about understanding others better than they understand themselves.  People will be happy to pay more if you deliver a service or, even better, an experience.

Find something that is important to you and design something that “sings.”  In 2000, Westin Hotels came up with the idea of the Heavenly Bed.  As soon as they introduced, not only did their overall market-share increase, but the amount they can charge per room also increased.  And 5 years later, numerous hotels copied the idea.

“Aspiring to the ‘wet-nap interface’” – the instructions for a wet-nap are “tear open and use.”  This is Tom’s goal for all products he designs.  IDEO took the idea of the defibrillator, and made it simple enough for anyone to use in any emergency situation.  And his 6-year old daughter was able to use it properly after giving it the “wet-nap interface.”

Final thoughts… this was an AWESOME presentation.  Very entertaining.  Very informative.  Being a usability nerd, I very much enjoyed his closing idea of the “wet-nap” interface.  Too many interfaces (Tom’s example is alarm clocks, I generally think of websites and software) are clunky and impossible to figure out.  I wish more people would take Tom’s advice on the usability factor.