Kul kampanj i alla fall.

Trevlig helg.

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Idea

Aleksandar Andreevski 0709-850231
Regional Sales Manager – Scalae AB
RISK-gillande (både spelet och strategin) och stolt säljare med passion för design, som kombinerar dessa ämnen på Scalae med förtjusning.

1st world problem: Solved! Traditionally, pitting cherries is a messy job. The Talisman Designs Cherry Chomper is compact, fun to use, mess-free, and kid-friendly. It features a plunger-type action that pushes the cherry pit and residual juice into the bottom container of the pitter. To pit a cherry, simply insert it into the Cherry Chomper’s mouth, press down the head, and release. The protective ‘tooth’ ensures that hands and fingers won’t be touched by any of the components. The Cherry Chomper also pits olives. It stands six inches tall and is dishwasher-safe.

Buy $8.71 

Emergency Chocolate

Great item for gifts, handouts or giveaways – or keep it all for yourself. Packaged as depicted in the attached photo. For immediate relief of: Chocolate Cravings, Lovesickness, Exam Pressure, Mild Anxiety and Extreme Hunger.

Buy $49.99

WeWood Jupiter Dual Movement Watch

Feather-light, smooth and made of 100% natural wood, WeWOOD is the eco-chic way to tell time. Born in Florence, the city of art, beauty and creativity, WeWOOD consolidates the Italian ability to architect unique items and the necessity to care for our environment.

Buy $119.00 

Jailbreak Collective Like and Dislike Stamps (Set)

Well, we’ve solved both those problems with our latest product, the Like & Dislike Stamps! Preloaded with enough ink for 5,000 assertions, the stamps give you the ability to emphatically thwack your opinion on tangible objects … in the real world. Second season of LOST on DVD? Dislike! Sarah Palin on the cover of US Magazine? Dislike! Cease and desist letters? Dislike! Parking tickets? Dislike! Pictures of kittens? Dislike! Honestly, we’re critical of most things so don’t pay attention to us.

Buy $11.08

Nikon Lens Thermos Mug Cup

The creative cup design is a 1:1 simulation to the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. Food Grade Plastic with stainless steel interior as a thermos, safe to use for drinking. You can use it to drink coffee, milk, water, fruit juice, ice-cream, and etc, as you can imagine. It’s a model cup, and not an actual lens. Best collection for Nikon fans. An amazing gift for your friends, classmate, colleagues, friends, relations on holidays.

Buy $18.49

See the 15 other products here.

The designer’s (Adital Ela) own words:
A self-sufficient outdoor lamp operated by wind energy Windylight integrates wind collection and a light source into one element. The focus of the design was on the educational and experiential aspects of wind transformation, from a natural energy source into utilized light. The capacity of the wind is translated into light intensity; Through the use of a weathercock that acts as the repetitive energy collecting element. WindyLight proposes a visual translation of the notion that wind energy is accessible and can be utilized even through low-tec applications. This notion is an attempt to illustrate the potential of wind energy and its relevance as a sustainable resource available for implementation.

They write about developments in the field of materials and design, and share some of the many fascinating stories about contemporary and future materials.

The purpose of the blog is to offer online visitors as well as visitors to the physical exhibition a small insight into the vast amount of knowledge about materials that exists around the world. Each week, the experts will post 2-4 new entries, and thus the blog will be in constant development.

Read more here.

The Eco Design Initiative promotes and enables sustainable design as a precursor to social, environmental and economic well-being.

In March 2012, the Initiative hosted a skills and culture exchange and social design intervention in Cape Town, South Africa. The goal was to produce tangible examples of how design thinking and processes can be applied to improving life.

For more information, please visit nokak.com

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Idea

Magnus Göransson 0765-270825
Creative Director – Scalae AB
Snygg motorcykelbyggande och graffitiälskare designer med internationell erfarenhet, som idag är Creative Director på Scalae AB. Driver designavdelningen och hanterar innovationsprocesser för kunder med ett marknadsfokuserat designperspektiv.

Phthalates are one of the common chemicals your government isn’t protecting your family from. Bad news for you, because phthalates have been linked to countless negative health issues. Now, new research shows that phthalate metabolites may increase your risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The research, published in Diabetes Care has linked phthalate metabolites to diabetes prevalence and shows that this chemical results in distinct markers of insulin secretion and resistance. These findings support past research that focuses on how common chemicals may influence major factors that are regulating glucose metabolism in humans. During the study, researchers tested 1,016 elderly subjects, and a total of 114 subjects were shown to have diabetes. After making adjustment for gender, BMI, serum cholesterol and triglycerides, educational level, and smoking and exercise habits, the researchers looked at phthalate levels. High levels of the phthalate metabolites monomethyl phthalate (MMP), monoisobutyl phthalate (MiBP), and monoethyl phthalate (MEP) were all associated with an increased prevalence of diabetes. Mono(2-ethylhexyl) phthalates were not associated with diabetes in this study. Overall, MiBP was most usually related to poor insulin secretion, while MEP and MMP were linked to insulin resistance. So where are these phthalates lurking?

The various phthalate metabolites linked to diabetes are the types that are commonly used in insect repellant, plastic, consumer products, fragrances and rocket propellant. Phthalates are found just about everywhere and are are a prevalent body burden chemical in humans. In fact, EWG’s analysis of biomonitoring data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), shows that at any given time, 84% of the U.S. population is contaminated with at least six different phthalates. Phthalates have been connected to disrupted endocrine system functions, obesity, birth defects, reduced sperm counts, testicular atrophy and structural abnormalities in the reproductive systems of male test animals and even liver cancer. If this chemical is truly linked to diabetes, this means a whole new range of problems, as type 2 diabetes is linked to many long-term health problems like eye disease, kidney disease, nerve damage and more. To avoid excessive phthalate exposure you should try to limit your contact with plastic dishes, vinyl shower curtains, vinyl flooring, scented conventionally made candles, chemical air fresheners, scented cleaners and conventional laundry products, as well as chemically made (usually conventional) perfumes, soaps, shampoos, cosmetics, deodorants and other personal care products

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Internet advertising revenues reached a record $31.74 billion in 2011, representing a 21.9% increase from $26.04 billion in 2010, according to figures released in April 2012 by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. This was the most rapid year-over-year growth since 2007 (26%), and drove online ad revenues past cable TV ad revenues (including national networks and local cable TV), which were $30 billion. Looking back over the past 10 years, the report notes that online ad revenues have a compound annual growth rate of 20.3%, with 29 of 36 quarters since 2003 seeing positive growth.

Q4 revenues rose 20.4% year-over-year to $8.97 billion, also up almost 15% quarter-over-quarter, while H2 revenues accounted for 53% of the 2011 total. The year-over-year growth in Q4 revenues was the fastest since Q4 2007.

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The Other Side of America

These same CEOs cited creativity as the most important leadership quality they look for over the next five years.  “CEOs now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics.  Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation.  To connect with and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways.”

Over the past several years, we have seen a rising emphasis on design, creativity and holistic thinking in business to help us deal with an increasingly volatile, unpredictable complex world.  This is reflected not just in studies and articles, but in the growing number of design consulting firms like IDEO, as well as of design centers in universities, such as MIT’s Media Lab and the d.school in Stanford.

Business is supposed to be all about applying hard, that is, quantitative, analytical approaches to management.  What then do we mean by bringing seemingly soft topics like design and creativity to business and why is it so important in today’s world?

Analytical approaches work well when you have a pretty good understanding of the product you are developing or when you are dealing with a well defined problem.  But, they do not work so well when dealing with highly complex systems with fast changing, interacting components, where it is much less clear what is going on in the present, let alone how things will evolve into the future.  We need different principles and processes to address this class of highly complex problems, many based on disruptive innovations which we have not encountered before.  This is where we need to turn to holistic thinking to pull together everything we know about the problem, and to creativity to try to make sense of what is going on and come up with a working, satisfying solution.  This is where we enter the world of design.

Design principles are particularly applicable to problems that are socio-technical in nature, that is, they involve people and technology, having to deal both with complex technical, business and societal infrastructures and human behaviors.  They are critical for dealing with the Grand Challenge problems we are facing in the 21st century, including health care, urbanization, education, energy, finance, and job creation.

What do we mean by applying design principles to complex, unpredictable, people oriented systems and problems?  Let me discuss three such principles based on my personal experiences.  The first is flexibility and adaptability.  If you look at complex systems as a kind of spectrum, with natural biological systems–e.g., living organisms, ecosystems and evolution-at one end and physically engineered systems–e.g., bridges, airplanes and microprocessors–at the other, socio-technical systems fall someplace in between.

While such systems,–e.g., the World Wide Web; a city’s congestion management system; an infrastructure for mobile, digital payments; a health portal for treating people with diabetes–are clearly engineered, that is, designed, built and managed by people, they share many characteristics with biological systems, in particular, the need to be flexible and adaptable so they can evolve into the future as technology and market requirements change.

This is easier said than done.  There is a continuing struggle between complexity and robustness in both evolution and human design.  A kind of survival imperative, whether in biology or engineering, requires that simple, fragile systems become more robust, that is, be able to continue operating under lots of different conditions, including the failures of individual components.  But the mechanisms to increase robustness will in turn make the system considerably more complex.  Furthermore, that additional complexity brings with it its own unanticipated failure modes, which are corrected over time with additional robust mechanisms, which then further add to the complexity of the system, and so on.  This balancing act between complexity and robustness is never done.

Critical to designing flexible, adaptable complex systems is the use of platforms based on open standards, as well as an extensive industry ecosystem to generate complementary products and services.  This results in a much greater potential for innovation, growth and robustness than could be generated by a single product from a single company.

Quality of experience is the second major design principle I’d like to discuss.  The industrial sector of the economy is oriented toward the production of physical goods.  Product excellence and competitive costs are its key design objectives.  Much of industrial oriented R&D is thus focused on innovations in development, testing and manufacturing that will result in products with increased performance, efficiency and quality.

But socio-technical systems are oriented toward people and services.  While product excellence and competitive costs are also important to services, they are not enough.  The service sector is oriented toward consumption, that is, toward people, who are the consumers of services.  Therefore, an overriding design objective for good socio-technical, service oriented systems has to be a positive user experience.  Ease of use, intuitive interfaces and good overall customer service must be key objectives for a well designed system.

While advances in technology are now enabling us to bring major innovations to services, most of the really hard issues are not technical at all.  They are human.  A well designed, well engineered, and well managed service system must be primarily centered and optimized around people, whether we are talking about a patient in a healthcare system, a customer of a business, or a citizen dealing with the government.

Most industrial R&D takes place in labs and factories, but that does not work for services.  The bulk of research and innovation in services has to take place in the marketplace, where the people who consume the services are.  The marketplace is truly the research lab for innovation in services, the place where new service ideas have to be developed, prototyped and tested.

Finally, let me talk about the central role of marketing and communications as a design principle, arguably the least understood such principle.  To succeed in the marketplace, it is not enough to have a flexible, adaptable system along with offering a high quality user experience.  These are necessary, but not sufficient.  You must also have a well formulated market strategy–that is, a strategy for succeeding in the marketplace–that explains what you are after in the most compelling way possible, as well as an effective communications strategy to get your messages out to all key stakeholders.

This is particularly important when trying to communicate something new, complex and potentially disruptive, which your audience–including clients, employees, partners, press,  and analysts–has not seen before, which they don’t understand, and whose value will take a while to fully play out.  An example I was personally involved with the formulation of IBM’s e-business strategy in the mid 1990s, while the Internet and World Wide Web where still in their relatively shaky early years.

You have to engage your audience in a conversation about the future you are after.  You have to gain their trust by clearly telling them what’s in your mind, your aspirations, your questions, your doubts, your frustrations, what you know and what you don’t know.  You need them to come along with you for the ride and essentially help you deploy your strategy in the marketplace by becoming early adopters, partners and evangelists.  The more powerful, important and complex the messages you are trying to convey, the more important it is to do so by telling a compelling but simple story that resonates emotionally with your audience.

Advances in technology–faster, more powerful, less expensive–are concrete and visible.  Design is subtle, more subjective, more open to human interpretation.  But, as our increasingly advanced technologies enable us to build larger, more capable, more complex systems, the role of design becomes ever more important.  It is the only way to ensure that our technologies will help us deal with our increasingly hectic lives.

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