We are currently designing:

• The future TV
• The future of banking
• The future of mobile
• Ebooks
• The hottest new platform: Windows 8 Metro UI
• A new TV show format

On top of all that, we have a huge new client, a new frame agreement with an old one and a new startup collaboration. We are also consulting several startups, aaaand there’s a bunch of cool quotes out there that could turn into something really nice at some point.

Well done, our business development department, and the rest can tap on their own shoulders too.

We Make Future Happen.

Until next time!

Connected TV

On of the TV projects I hinted about last time is for Connected TV. In this Connected TV project we are designing a TV applications for various hardware platforms. The project is moving a long as planned. Concepts were approved earlier and recently we delivered all detailed designs to the client. The first application is now being implemented by the client’s tech partner and we should see a demo of it really soon.

These somewhat new platforms are fun to design for as the path is not so beaten yet.

#Winning

Few weeks back I mentioned that we on a shortlist in three categories in the Grand One 2011 competition with Scoopshot, a (mobile) tool for photographers and journalists to work together in a crowdsourced manner.

Scoopshot ended up winning one category, The Best Mobile Service. It was a joined effort by several companies and the client was nice enough to list us all as participants. We were involved in the early phase of this product, helping with communications design. To give creadit where it’s due, this was Panu’s strategy gig. Congratulations. We also congratulate the whole winning Scoophot team: Idean, Nordkapp, Exove Design, Exove, Latomo Design, Ezpa, Lingsoft, Rakettitiede, Kinetik, Partaheikki Technologies, Tesnet and Ixonos.

Anyhow, being shortlisted gave us a good reason to revisit the Grand One gala after a few years. We don’t often participate in this competition as it is more directed towards (digital) advertising and most categories are about campaigns and the like. Althought, the times are changing I suppose as there’s nowadays categories like “Best UX Design” and “Best Design”. It was great to see some old friends again and also to make some new ones. Several people also indicated that they enjoy reading our weeknotes, which was great to hear, even though they’ve gotten a little shorter and further paced recently. There’s some personal reasons for that. To remedy this, there might be a drastic change in how we make our weeknotes in the future, but it requires a completely different production flow, so we’ll have to see when and if we get that off the ground.

What’s fun is that we also had a sort of Bi-Winning moment with another entry, but let’s not get into details on that.

Oh yes, and Sami and his friends were individually shortlisted (as in not a Nordkapp project) with their grassroots level social media work for a presidential candidate in Finland in earlier this year. They and other similar groups almost made an underdog candidate the new president, but not quite. Maybe the time ran out. Nevertheless, it was the first time social media and internet were an active part in the presidential campaigns in Finland.

Sami wasn’t too happy about the fact that their efforts eventually lost to some Facebook design-your-hamburger campaign or something. I guess historical importance wasn’t in the jury’s things-to-review chart.

Until next time.

There’s growing amount of rumors that Apple is working on an actual TV. They of course already have the Apple TV hockey buck and it’s a good piece of technology and one of the best ones out there, but still a little limited in its current form. One might wonder if anyone can create a similar or better experience?

Let’s say you take care of the hardware and we design the service concept, experience and software for it. We’d work with industrial designers to merge the hardware tightly with that hardware. Could it be as good as any Apple TV? For sure. You’ll just have to witness the patent lawsuits we’ve been involved with Apple in 2010. Not to mention the recent UI patent case with Google (more about that below).

What’s more current than patents already invented years ago, is our current work. A quick calculation reveals that we’ve worked on more than ten (!) different TV projects within last few months. These include online & company strategies, applications, online TV, video-on-demand, web services, startup sparring and even a concept for an interactive TV show. All this for six different clients, both in Finland and US. What’s great is that these projects and clients are in different parts of the value chain and don’t overlap. We don’t work for competing companies/products, but as it happens we’re getting pretty good at pairing large corporations together for new business ventures.

Got Patent, Google?

A method for unlocking a touch screen device includes providing a touch screen device in an idle mode. An area or region displayed on a screen of the device in the idle mode is contacted or activated to reveal at least one application icon associated with an active/unlocked state of the device. The region is moved, expanded or dragged to an edge of the device to change a state of the device to an active/unlocked mode and activate the revealed application.

That’s what the abstract says about a recent patent that was handed to a nice guy called Phillip Lindberg (ex-Nokia) and our Creative Director Sami Niemelä.

What this is in real life, is a handy slide-to-unlock feature for mobile phones (and other touchscreen devices), where the user can select which application to launch directly from the lock screen. Fairly recent Nokia Bubbles thing was one implementation of this but the actual patent was submitted already in July 2007 so the work was done in 2006-2007.

What’s interesting is that the idea has been copied to another platforms as well, in fact Google tried to patent this in 2011. The Nokia Blog has details on that and the whole story how Nokia eventually, and rightfully so, got the patent for this.

So congratulations to Phillip and Sami for this patent!

For added irony, here’s the original patent in Google’s Patent web service.

Enjoy the spring. Until next time.

there’s again a lot to catch up with.

Laskiainen

We celebrated the Laskiainen, AKA Shrove Tuesday, at the office the other week. Girls made traditional buns and really traditional pea soup, starting from the actual peas and stuff. Excellent food. Thanks. My family also visited the office. Older kid stated that “Dad’s work is difficult”. It sometimes is.

After the younglings left, we also enjoyed some champagne like the small photo set shows. Note: we don’t normally drink champagne on working days, but these bottles were given to us by various clients. Which was nice.

A Glimpse Into the Near Future

Our friends in Berlin, The Third Wave guys, have created an interesting and long article about predictions of near future.

Our CD Sami was asked for his views too, along with six other experts, designers and researchers. It’s a really interesting read as Third Wave have done a good job at clustering views of the future from all these people. Here’s Third Wave’s slideset, but you really want to read the whole thing.

Copycat #1

Copying is the best form of flattery, right? Well, we’re feeling the flattery again with this South Korean SGEN Club site.

Things we are not so flattered about:

• Stealing our website design, then calling it “COPYRIGHT 2012 SAMSUNG SDS sGenClub ALL RIGHTS RESERVED”.
• Leaving our Google Analytics code in the page source.

There’s a screenshot and small thread about this in our Facebook here.

Update: We have to give Samsung credit for taking a quick action in this issue once we brought it into their attention. The website has since been taken down completely. It seems to have been an oversight by some students.

Copycat #2

There was another more serious copycat from LAB3 in Italy recently. Screenshot in our Facebook also.

Things we were not so flattered about with this implentation:

• Stealing our website design, then silently taking the site offline after we contacted them.
• (Again) Leaving our Google Analytics code in the page source.

Shortlisted in Some Competitions, Again

Urbanflow is shortlisted in categories “Service Design” and “Digital Categories” in the annual Vuoden Huiput 2011 design competition. See you in the gala. Forum Virium also has a Finnish post about this.

Scoopshot photography service is shortlisted in three categories (!) in the Grand One 2012 competition. The categories are “Best Consumer Service”, “Best UX Design” and “Best Mobile Service”. We are just one of many companies involved in this, but it’s fun anyway. See you in this gala too.

And a third competition: Scoopshot and Shadow Cities are also listed in Flurry’s Top 20 App Spotlight Finalists. Flurry has picked top 20 mobile apps from 700 candidates and the top three winners will be revealed at SXSW. You can read more about our involvement with the GPS-based Shadow Cities game on our website’s case studies section.

And congrats to all other companies and entities shortlisted in all of these competitions!

That’s it for now. See you next time.

Since the last weeknote our workforce has swelled with the long-anticipated arrival of two new Nordkappers. One is pumped up, buoyant and a little creepy while the other is more lethargic and deflated. Both are settling in nicely.

Research, research

Last week Tia and Kate hopped over to Berlin to present research and participate in a client workshop for an ongoing project. The research period was five weeks long and the main challenge lay in condensing the information gathered from ten interviews (which spawned twenty hours of recordings and 150 pages of transcript). Everyone has their own filtration process and ours involved covering a wall with lots of scribbles. Anyway, the presentation went well, and the accompanying workshop proved that the groundbreaking project involved is well on track.

Design review

As is typical in a busy office, the fast pace means that we can sometimes lose sight of what other teams have been delivering. In a bid to catch up we held an internal project and design review on Thursday afternoon [pictured]. Project boards were displayed and leads gave short fifteen minute presentations of work from the past couple of months, which was then subjected to open review and discussion. The work presented ranged from reshaping businesses at a high strategic level to polishing fine details, and although the majority of our projects are NDA-restricted it was nice just to showcase them internally and congratulate the people involved.

It’s important to us that the standards which our clients have come to expect from our work are upheld, and this is reflected in our new internal design review framework which Sami presented during the session. The framework is a reminder to ourselves that all decisions, large or small, that we make in the course of our work must be justifiable. Blog post to come.

Business as usual

Last week Tia attended an international service design conference in Espoo. As has been mentioned in previous weeknotes, we have established a long-term service design partnership with a new client so the conference provided a good opportunity to see where the industry is heading and how other companies view service design.

This week sees Matti and Akseli wrapping up their major ‘hush hush’ project with help from Jukka and Tia. They gave the rest of us a sneak preview and it’s astonishing how ‘new’ their proposal is. It really feels like they are on the cusp of something exciting: this one is definitely a game-changer.

Jukka and Panu have been rebranding and designing concepts for a renewed customer loyalty programme, during the course of which Jukka was let down by Google Images in his search for ‘bonus model’ benchmarks. They have also been working with Aki to finalise an interesting health industry project.

Teppo and Fabian have been designing services to benefit charitable organisations. With Ilkka they also created a totally new business model that marries two major industries for a huge mutual benefit. Representatives from each of these industries are eager to get started on this joint venture, but there’s still a long road ahead.

Sami was a member for the Vuoden Huiput (Best of the Year) jury for the ‘innovative media and environment’ category and was invited to give a talk about data visualisation as a business case in April. He has also been finalising content for the two day IxD Intensive training programme at Aalto Pro in April. Clients and peers ahoy!

Oh, and a brief immersion in the world of American football also rounded off the week!

Water cooler chat

Conversation in the office this week touched on the Ixonos TV Compass concept, which naturally caught our attention in relation to our SuomiTV project. Teppo made the valid point that implementing such a concept will be difficult without being well-positioned in that sphere: a position already occupied by Apple. Similar ‘internet tv’ offerings from Google, Samsung and Philips were also discussed, as well as the greater umbrella topic of television as a ‘soon-to-be-rethought-market’. We’re keeping our eyes open.

Next week is Finland’s national ski holiday, so if you’re one of the lucky ones heading away we hope you have a good one (we hear Nordkapp is nice this time of year). We have some designer power available for March so if you have a project we could possibly help you with, contact Ilkka.

‘Til next time!

Travelling

Sami’s heading to Interaction12 conference in Dublin to give a compact talk called “Input/Output: Interaction design at the intersection of city and its interfaces” — 10 key findings from our work on designing services for the city of Helsinki. Say hi to him if you’re going to this major event!

Elsewhere, Kate & Tia are travelling to Germany soon to work on a project. German friends, heads up!

Invisible City & WDC

There’s also a big event in Helsinki this weekend. Invisible City gathers people and companies working with open data for a long event that lasts long into the night. There’s workshops for working with data, and a seminar where many organizations like Helsinki Region Infoshare, Apps4Finland, IBM, Fjord and Kokoro & Moi talk about open data, data visualization, trends and designing for a city.

Our participation in Invisible City is two-fold. First Tia & Kate will talk about Urbanflow in the seminar, and later in the night, Matti will be one of the judges in the Cut & Paste Helsinki design competition. This could be a fun competition, so make sure to stay around for it and the party later on.

The whole event is part of a bigger World Design Capital (WDC) Helsinki Open Doors Weekend that features 180 events, in which you can “Sit down with the designer at a pie bar or tea party, participate in the design processes intended for the general public.”

Sounds fun, right? We do that every day. :)

FastCoDesign

Oh, and we also got featured as Infographic of the Day on FastCompany’s Co.Design section with Urbanflow, our cooperation project with Urbanscale. It’s a fun first for us, even though the article writer is (of course) unaware of some of our research findings which have lead to some of the design features.

• Co.Design: Urbanflow Aims To Turn Cities Into Playgrounds For Interactive Infographics

Until next time and next adventures!

Last week I was in the Metropolia Polytechnic to spar students of an innovation course. Another person with me from the “real life entrepeneur / business side” was Perttu Tolvanen, an independent CMS expert and consultant, and of Vierityspalkki.fi fame.

We were both amazed and surprised by the general quality of the students’ work. The best of the projects were really close to professional level in their thinking and implementation. This was probably because these were third year students, with only the last year of studies left, and many of them already worked in various companies. “Innovation” was taken as a loose term, as it should, and solutions included an actually produced full-on premium magazine, a mobile based hookup/party/friend application (think Foursquare API+X), simple & user friendly Google Calendar add-on, student information & memory sharing website, an iPhone game with 8bit Nintendo graphics, and others.

Later on we discussed with the teacher Eeva Meltio over lunch. She told us about what teaching is like nowadays. For example, there’s four (!) different teachers on this course. They all bring in their own special skills, like interaction or graphic design, and teach and spar the students in that field. They also all hangaround all day in specific student groups in Facebook and exchange information and ideas constantly with the students. Eeva told that this kind of shared teaching responsibility is still actually surprisingly harder, not easier, for the teachers, because there’s so much cooperation, shared decisions and communication to do. But apparently the students are happy and get flooded with good mix of influences from various fields at the same time. The students also do real project work for companies and public sector during the courses.

All this might require a lot from the teachers, yes, but somehow to me it sounded like we are potentially witnessing the next breakthrough in Finnish education somehow. Mixing various things in one go can potentionally give the students more realistic view of how (design) work is done in the real world. It’s never just plain graphic design you can concentrate on for example. In real world everything depends on everything else and it’s a sort of balancing act to constantly produce something really good on time and on budget. Honing good skills in your own strong field is important too, but more often than not real (design) work is about understanding other fields too and moving fluently between them when your team needs you to.

What coders and users have been up to

Sauli worked with pitches for clients in the insurance and beverage sector. He also participated in a session where it was the developers’ time to show us how well they have implemented our interaction and layout designs and what is the overall status of the web service project that is due to be launched during the spring. This project is kind of heavy on the implementation side and there is two tech houses responsible for it. Apparently things are progressing well here.

Tia, Johanna, Sauli and Panu went to another city in Finland to observe and analyze how people move and behave while spending time in our client’s premises, and how are they using the available services. Of course they couldn’t just stand there looking, instead they had a little fun for themselves too. You could also call this Mystery Shopping.

The team will soon present their findings and new concepts to the client. They’ll describe how to improve the existing space and its services so that the whole experience would be better for the users and how our client’s business would improve as a result.

We have committed to collaborate with this client for a long time and that’s a good thing because there is a lot of work to be done. If only for the fact that the client has several similar spots all around Finland. It would be good to observe all or at least several of them. Not to mention that they have a huge web service that we are just waiting to get our hands on.

Boom!

Boom boom baby boom. Production of next generation of Nordkappers is again on the way. There’s three (!) new babies expected to arrive this year. One of us will be a second-rounder and then there’s two newcomers to the parenthood business. All the best, congratulations and good luck to all of them! Let’s get back to this topic at later date.

Until next time.

Kate and Tia have been interviewing people for one very secret project recently. According to them they’ve had a good time sitting in cafés and talking to some very enthusiastic people. Sometimes design work rules, huh?

Kate says that Tia has made research interviews into an artform, and that she’s been learning a lot while working with Tia. Kate (who’s Irish) also says that “the Irish will talk to a wall if it seems to be listening”, and that actually being silent for a change and listening to these people has been eye-opening. I’m sure she’s exaggerating.

Kate is also involved in a copywriting/content case. Yep you guessed it, can’t say much about that either. This content is coming to a huge and visible website, but that’s about it.

Tia’s also organizing two days of research interviews and on-site observations outside of Helsinki. These are for that new big client of ours. This should help us get to grips with their users in their locations in different times of the day. This hints that the observations will continue late into the evening/night, which also means that it will again be another kind of a day at work for those who are going.

Tablets Tablets

A tediously negotiated iPad case is progressing finally. Hopefully the final budget can be agreed on soon, so that we can get started on this. I believe that this time we’ll actually get proper reference rights, and we’ll finally get to show you something tablet-y sometime during Spring. Wohoo! The project should be first of its kind in Finland.

There’s some other tablet pitches in the air currently. We’ve invented really good new business case for these clients already, even though the projects haven’t even started yet. That’s how excited we are already about these.

Quickies

Jukka + Sami went to Augmented Reality camp and came back with a cool, yet early, demo of an audio based AR app. A good approach to already-boring AR field, where in general everybody always wants — and has wanted to for the last several years — to build a visual layer/icons on top of a video feed. Gosh, even we’ve designed things like that years ago. The visual AR has been in the works for so long that it’s good to see at least our guys coming up with something new already.

Teppo is going to Metropolia University of Applied Sciences to review student projects from an innovation course on Thursday. There seems to be quite a variation in projects from magazines to iPhone games and social media services. Should be interesting.

We recently got the number one spot in an app store. As usual, we can’t say which app it was. Oh well.

By the way, an engineer friend recently commented our blog in a chat: “The blog is really fun. Reading about interesting things is a great break from the chores of engineering work.” Good to hear and perhaps this is so, but please try to make your work interesting too. There’s no reason engineering work should be boring by definition. The whole world was built by engineers. Go build something exciting!

Until next time.

Photo credit: Old Irish wall in Ireland

Late last year that revolutionary project got that seal of approval go-ahead and Akseli & Matti have been working hard on that. They spend much of their time at the client’s place to be close to the action. This is not a common way we do design, but sometimes it is just easiest and fastest that way. Since we are very flexible in general, this is doable for us as well. Sadly there’s nothing we can say about this project, really. Except that the feedback in design reviews and otherwise have been really good.

Another project has reached a high-level review stage as well. This has included quite a lot of travel, especially for Sami. The project continues through Spring most likely. Not much we can say about this either, except, that feedback has again been super good.

Elsewhere, a WP7 application for another client was designed quickly, and is also in the review pipeline. This should be released some time quite soon.

Late last year also saw the release of the second platform of a tablet thing done by Fabian and Teppo. These both gained an apparently immediate adoption by the users of the respective service. Regarding these; a good quote for your next design-sales presentation from a user was:

“Because of this app, I will NOT end my subscription as I was planning, but stay as a user!”

A text book example of the importance and benefit of good design, huh?

So all and all, there’s been quite a lot of mobile application work recently. But we haven’t forgotten about mobile websites either. In fact, there’s several on-going discussions about high-class mobile websites for clients who absolutely need to target a larger audience, or who have tight timelines where app development is simply not feasible.

A bit of a different case is a medical web service project for professional health care. This non public service is targeted for the Nordic countries. Team here is mostly Jukka, Panu and Aki.

Remember that huge public entity we won a multi year deal with? Those projects are slowly starting to start [sic]. Possibilities here are interesting as there’s so much elements outside of screens. There’s floor plans and architecture involved, for example. Instead of starting designing straight away, we plan to see how we could help the client first sort out their internal processes for maintaining their existing services. Then progress to processes for developing new services, and only then actually to developing those services. But let’s see how this goes, we have only begun to scratch the surface of this huge entity.

By the way, if you missed Sami’s recent post 10 things for 2012, please continue to reading that, and you’ll know what you’re supposed to be doing this year. :)

Until next time.

Photo credit: Blues by Panu

Previously, we proposed year 2011 being the year of the mobile. It’s happening, albeit not quite as fast as we expected mostly due bad economy. Here is our take on 2012, divided into three themes —larger contexts, if you wish— we see as the most dominant catalysts for the change for the industry and ordinary consumers alike.

1. The year of the mobile web

As mobile devices with a proper browser—smartphones, dumbphones and tablets— will gain momemtum, corporations face a situation where their existing and potential consumers will be able to access web from everywhere, not just from behind their computer.

The Joe Average being more aware of mobile means also less opportunities to sell individual screens to home — many of the energy monitors are failing already. People don’t want additional screens in their homes, especially when most of the tasks handled by them can designed to be accessed anywhere through a mobile device.

More;
• Trendwatching.com: 12 trends for 2012 / Screen culture

2. Redux of location-based commerce

Hyperlocal targeting has for a few years now been the wet dream of advertisers. While it’s hard to imagine a feasible mass market scenario around this, the smartest companies will see this as an opportunity to offer better and more relevant service to their customers. Others try to jump the moving train but fail miserably when using the same tactics as in paid advertising. The ones who play this right by being respectful towards the context and understanding the necessary hyginene factors such as privacy will rise up as champions in both business sense and as increased commercial value linked directly to their tactful interaction with their customers.

3. Diversification of mobile

Android and Windows Phone will offer iOS an alternative. iOS will remain the strongest commercial platform but WP will catch up due MS+Nokia marketing effort. Elsewhere, browser-based hybrid application will start taking over iOS gates. In order to compete with this, Windows Mobile will up the ante by revamping IE Mobile for WP Apollo.

THEME 2: From data to making meaning

Open data movement has been gaining steady movement throughout the year, and the public eye has seen many great visualisations which will bring them more aware of the potential that lies in making the invisible visible, and yet better, meaningful.

4. Everything that can be software, will be.

The airline industry is changing enterprise systems to tablets, cars become cellphones where you sit in, and all is connected through ubiquitous wireless networks. Fiction? Not quite, but the today here and now. This change will have huge implications to industries it hasn’t disrupted yet — mostly enterprise solutions and any physical goods that either are outdated fast or require shipping long distances. Also related: 3D printing and scanning.

More;
• CNET: Marc Andreessen’s view of the world boils down to software

5. Quantified Self

Most of the things us humans do can now be measured in numbers, in a way or another. We are in essence becoming information organisms, our location can and will be tracked through mobile devices, transactions and browser logins. We know the air quality around us, the nutrition we have daily and so forth. The devices we carry start being aware of when we sleep, walk, run and sit still for too long.

As GigaOM’s Connected Consumer-whitepaper states, “Part of this shift means that the body is shareable, at least in terms of information and data.” Anthropologists refer to this as “biological citizenship, and social networking platforms enable even those individuals with rare disorders, such as Crohn’s disease or Huntington’s disease, to reach out across the world and find others who share their conditions.”

This all presents a huge opportunity space for designers and companies to tap into. How can we make our lives better by understanding the implications of our everyday actions to our lives as a whole? The key here is to not concentrate on just narcissitic self-observation but to step up a few notches from just pure data into making the mundane meaningful. How might we best remove the complexity of apps, platforms and manual input from here? And as Jawbone’s failure with their smart bracelet UP shows, the interaction design around connected personal objects isn’t easy.

• More: Nike+, Jawbone UP, Withings
• The Internet Gets Physical @ NYT

6. Conversational Computing

Us humans tend to project ourselves to inanimate objects such as interfaces and interactive systems. We feel software is more human than it really is, and humanize the interactions we engage in. Computers behave badly, ATMs have a teasing character. Designers and software developers are already taking advantage of this through designing behaviour and dialogue into interactive systems. Apple takes this even further with Siri, a powerful speech recognition algorithm with huge variety of hand-tailored answers for added quirkiness and — human feel.

More;
• Apple Siri
• BASAAP
• Think: Product personas

THEME 3: Magical realities

By tapping into the two previous themes, designers and companies are able to offer new magical realities to people. In some this means increased opportunities in transactions — monetary or otherwise—, to some new ways to interact with the world around us.

7. Personal commerce

The data available from the transactions and in the cloud offers merchants more and better opportunities to connect with their customers. Ideally,your merchant knows enough of you to serve you better. For example, Square’s Cardcase enables two-way, personal dialogue with the customer and the merchant. Other, bigger companies will find to tap into this as well— some through replicating Square’s model or utilizing technology such as NFC.

More;
• Square Cardcase
• The Verge: Paypal trialing NFC retail system in Sweden

8. Augmented reality

…but not the way you think. As a concept, AR has much more potential than just contextually overlayed POIs on top of live image. The best way to describe this is reality can be seen a platform to leverage the context by anchoring it to real world constraints.

Dentsu’s Suwappu explores augmented storytelling through using toys as markers. Shadow Cities use the real world location as a platform for MMMORPG and magic. Sky View app for iOS amplifies the real world with near-magical information we didn’t expect to be visible.

More;
• Suwappu
• Shadow Cities
• Sky view

9. Added computation

Like we anticipated a year ago, sensorial interaction is gaining momemtum. The year 2011 has seen a lot of new products and services taking advantage of different personal sensors and display devices. The basic sensor technologies are now fairly well-developed and stable, so the time is right for software-led innovation. NFC is on its way already — big merchants like Visa are waking up to smaller challengers such as Paypal and Square. Urban informatics and the data cities collect is being opened up. For designers, this means a lot of new opportunities to innovate. The easiest way to do this is to rethink existing objects and technologies through added computation and combining many single-bit interactions into new interactive systems.

More;
• Twine @ Kickstarter
• BERG’s Little Printer

To sum it up, what do these themes mean then?

For brands and companies this sets interesting challenges: as the branding has to carry throughout different platforms, the devil is even more in the details and how the brand behaves, talks and interacts with your throughout different digital, physical and spatial touchpoints. As sustainability is dead, replaced by cradle-to-cradle thinking and renewability, just inventing and producing new physical things isn’t sustainable for any longer.

For content providers it will both a threat and an opportunity. It is now easier than ever to reach out to new and existing customers, but as the world gets more complex, the absolute control is harder, and competition tougher. The winners will go back to basics; quality, transparency and courage to find their soul and project it to every touchpoint over interaction with people.

For designers, the world is wide open. The world opening up it’s onion-like layers of data and behaviour presents opportunities to both improve the existing and invent new, disruptive things. Despite the economy, there are lots of opportunities to be had.