Missed the webinar? No worries! Here’s the recording:
We’re hosting the first webinar in our inaugural series: “Bsomething2someone” at lunchtime in two weeks – April 23rd, 12-1pm EDT. It’s going to be a peppy discussion chalk-full of insights and inspiration on the design of ordinary to extraordinary products. Bring all your questions, curiosity and get your thinking cap ready cause this is gonna be siiiick!
Bsomething2someone:
It’s chaos out there. Way too much me-too, banal, ugly, meaningless, boring products surround us. We are literally being suffocated and drowned by this avalanche of non-purposeful, commodity products bearing down on us.
Why does this happen?
Most companies set out to design a product that everyone loves…
What they end up with is a product that nobody hates.
Your product has to stand out by its own merit in this vast global market. It just has to be distinctive for all the right reasons. It has to get the job done, both from functional needs side and the emotional attributes side.
How do you plan this methodology?
Rather than trying to please all the 7.2 billion humans on this planet, it makes perfect design sense to actively seek out and identify real-world, authentic tribes of people. Study them, understand their specific needs, wants, desires, and dreams, and then design use-case-specific products that they aspire to. As long as your target tribe loves the product and buys it, you should not be worried if others hate it. We just have to embrace the notion of polarization.
So what’s going wrong?
It’s when personas are fabricated – when people have their product or technology ready, and afterwards, they conjure up a fictitious persona who apparently would like to use their product! If we are to truly benefits mankind with what we create, we have to plan for intensive market exploration, embarking on field trips, going to those points of origin, visiting the real product ecosystems, engaging in observation, rigorous questioning and ethnography in how people are using and misusing our products.
In this first chapter of Sundberg-Ferar’s webinar series, we will share our point of view and our 85-year tested design approach to designing better and more beautiful objects for everyday use and beyond.