A Better Course

I was breaking down the box that my new Pumas came in, and I found this – …which I’d thought was a fun little message to find just before you threw a box away – a second chance to consider whether or not you need more storage for useless stuff you really should have chucked […]

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I came back from dConstruct yesterday, with lots to think about – bigger posts about all of the below coming soon, but in the meantime – Steven Johnson talked about “The eyes on the street”, which made me think about the streets with fewer eyes to see them; the almost unknown pathway through the city […]

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Last night, I went to see a talk by Stephen Butscher of Simon Kutcher & Partners talk about loyalty schemes. I’ve been interested in this since the adliterate post on the basis of loyalty (little love lost for loyalty schemes, there) and wanted to see if anything would change my mind. Simon made a point […]

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There’s been a lot written and said recently about brand engagement – essentially, the idea that if someone uses something related to your brand, they will be more likely to trust (and by extension buy) your product further down the line. Even more problematically, this has frequently been with reference to brand’s Facebook applications. I’ve […]

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Only days after I posted about last.fm and the squeezebox, both my and my father’s sales pitches become a lot more compelling as last.fm announce their partnership with Logitech, makers of the Squeezebox – we’re excited that one of the announcements at the [Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas] … is our shiny new partnership […]

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Mike Migurski has a fantastic post about designing for sustainability, using the example of NIIMI’s Towel With Further Options. From the blurb for the towel (emphasis mine): Towels take every day dirt and gradually become damaged. In accordance with such changes, you can downsize the towel with “further options” from a bath towel to a […]

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Over the Christmas holidays I went home for a week. As is often the case at the end of the year, my family discussed what we’d enjoyed over the last year, which in turn became myself and my father trying to ‘sell’ each other our favourite things from 2007 – in my case, Last.fm and […]

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Originally, I started a generic post on the business or marketing books I’ve read this year. But there’s only really one book I want to write about, because I think the ideas in it are incredibly important to anyone in marketing or product design. These ideas are also the ones that seem to be the […]

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Lovely IKEA adverts (via swissmiss) I like the way IKEA are (or seem to be) responding to the perception of their furniture as entirely generic by placing the home as a site of creativity; as well as the above, the UK “Not For Sale” campaign puts their products in a similar space. It’s an well-timed […]

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The tube station near where I work has had advertising screens installed. The best adverts for these are ones which depend on four screens (about as many as I can take in at once) showing different parts of an advert for the same product. One of those was on the screens today; it was for […]

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