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100% design fair in Rotterdam big success for innvire.

2008-06-25T22:51:00Z

The 100% design fair, held in the inspiring van Nelle factory in Rotterdam, is a well-known interior design event for the professional. With an increase of again 10% in visitors it was crowded in a good way. innvire had its maiden stand on this fair. We were very proud to introduce our new Sketchalot 2.0, the new Pouvlov XL and the WXL. From the first day on we had a lot of people on the stand, ranging from architects to facility managers of large corporations.

We received a lot of praise for the beauty of the new Sketchalot which has a more impacting design, is stronger, lighter and easier to transport and store. The feature of zero installation against walls and the ability to put them straight to glass walls and walls that cannot be touched is found remarkable. We are still following up on all the leads and had some great opportunities. We welcomed several new clients, got in touch with Solunite that allowed a great photoshoot and met new partners and prospects. The vibe of the fair and the good weather made this a 100% innberg experience. We are in the process of expanding our collection this fall and will be featured in some key magazines this fall. We can’t wait to get in touch with you to work together on changing your work environment in a more inspiring creative space where your company’s innovative spirit can move freely.

innberg wint innovatie prijs voor innovatie werkplek. Premier Balkenende deelt uit..

2007-12-07T15:12:00Z

innberg is sinds een aantal maanden bezig met het introduceren van haar nieuwe product innvire. Het geïntegreerde concept om vergaderingen en ontmoetingen in bedrijven en instellingen effectiever en creatiever te laten verlopen heeft zijn vruchten afgeworpen in een Nederlandse innovatieve werkplek wedstrijd van het NCSI. innvire was zeer verguld met de uitreiking van de prijs door Premier Balkenende, voorzitter van het innovatieplatform. Het was een mooi evenement met ca. 500 gegadigden in het Rotterdamse World Trade Center.

innvire participated in the event during the whole day. We were invited to have a stand with our product/service proposition. During the whole day from 13:30 tot 18:30 we have received a lot of interested people on the stand. The innthebox knowledge kits worked like magnets and we had to even police a little because people grabbed them from the pile of boxes. We connected with lots of people; customers, co interior/creative companies and institutions. We are delivering to the first customers in Europe and really look forward to 2008, were we have great plans to improve your business creativity!

Thanks for all people voting for us. Imagine, Inspire, Innvire!

Kind regards,

Team innberg.

Destination inspiration

2007-11-06T13:39:00Z

The fall at innberg has been very busy so far. We are entering winter but also entering the spring of our new brand: innvire. This fall we have been putting a tremendous amount of energy in the go-live of our new products. But we also connected to new customers, had the time to share our vision on the Dutch Innovation Seminar 2007 at the Baak. Launched a new but still secret charity project with one of the strongest brands in the world. Read more

We started exchanging visions on creative collaboration with Fortune 500 companies but also strong small creative brands. We sold the first innvirements and are working already on new services and products around it. It has been a very inspiring fall. We look forward to the winter! And hope to inspire and be inspired by our partners, customers and our surroundings to create even better products in 2008.

"We have a lift-off..."

2007-08-15T15:58:00Z

After hiding out on a staging server for a few months we can finally deliver you our new product. innvire is the name of the brand that delivers a simple but powerful promise. We deliver a set of products that together turn any space into a creative collaboration room.

Today’s typical meeting room is good for, well, meetings. To really get your team on the same page, and be productive in creating practical solutions for your everyday challenges you need something better. With Sketchalot, Pouvlov and Inn-the-box you will be doing just that; innovating. We made it something you can just do, here and now. We made it a verb again.

Our innovative sketch panels (Sketchalots) deliver a large sketchestate, store 12 markers and hold magnetic tools. They can be used anywhere where you have some wall large enough to hold them, and they don’t need any installation so your toolbox can stay closed (and facility management does not have to show up).

Together with our Pouvlov seating system you can easily make small or very large spaces where you can draw, sketch, discuss, try-out plans, ideas or any challenges. The real cherry on top is the fact that all Sketchalots come included with the “Innthebox”. The little box, with great ideas hidden in the kickstart cards, a colorful set of markers and a magnetic wiper make your panel a gravity center of innovation.

With Sketchalot, Pouvlov and Inn-the-box you will be doing just that; innovating. We made it something you can just do, here and now. We made it a verb again.

Please take a look at www.innvire.com and get more insight on their design and characteristics.

From service to surface..

2007-07-24T18:10:00Z

innberg has been engaged the last 2 years in many different projects. Ranging from branding & corporate identity, user interface design, interior design and business design. Our added value remains the same; we continuously strive for great user/customer experiences that match the companies (new) strategy and goals. We are now pursuing one of our own goals, the design and realization of a new productrange for a new company that we will establish…

The recurring truth that we encounter is that we add value because we deliver visual insight into all kinds of problems and get our customers of their feet to join us in sketching their new reality. This in itself demands a space that gives you the right vibe to do so. Lots of space, versatility and useful brainstorm ideas help us in doing so. But we do not always encounter these environments with our clients. So we decided to design a portable creative environment of our own. Who would not want to change their dull meeting room, halls and workplaces into a place where you can endlessly can sketch on the walls, sit anywhere with your team to solve the challenge and get visual insight out of the box on how to do that? The end is near. We took a considerable amount of time to deliver you just this. Simple, elegant and powerful tools that together make any place into a setting where you can co-create with your peers and partners. In 4 weeks we will reveal all about this new product and company. Stay put. It’s almost there…

Learn from the great...

2007-05-21T19:12:00Z

Between so much mediocre, repetitive, outdated, obsolete seminars and congresses out there, one truly inspirational comes by now and then.. (and unfortunately, you can’t get in so easy..)

Sometimes you want to be somewhere but you can’t get there (yet). This is the case of TED, an event in Monterey, California where the great inspirators of the world come together and share ideas. Maybe one day we might be invited but for now, join us in digitally being at this great event: TED

Pixar & Jay Shusters...

2007-03-31T22:33:00Z

On saturday morning Jay Shuster, concept designer at Pixar Animation Studios, enlightened us with a brilliant presentation on the creative processes going on at pixar, and a LOT of his sketch- and artwork. Ever since i muddled with renderman in my college days i knew Pixar is one cool company. On this saturday Jay proved it once again, but what can we learn from Pixar?

Jay Shuster had the good grace to show up on Saturday morning to speak to a congregration of certified ASID interior designers and two creative designers that cannot be put in any one category from the Netherlands.

Jay spoke about where he comes from, and why designing cars is in his blood. From his brilliant furniture creations (from salvaged airplane materials) it is clear he is not only about cars.

What was most inspiring for me was the power and expression in his sketches. An important lesson is in the way Pixar operates. There is a whole big team of super gifted creatives, designers and crafts-men (left brain / right brain in the words of Jay) but there has to be a design dictator (at pixar it is John Lasseter), to bring all the efforts together.

It was just great to hear his cool speech, see his awesome art-work, and get a Jay Shuster original sketch in my Moleskine :).

SF Trip innberg

2007-03-30T21:30:00Z

A tradition in the making is our yearly visit to San Francisco. Why SF? There is more than one reason to mention; For a US city, it comes closest (cultural and social) to a Dutch city like Amsterdam.. Secondly, it is close to the center of (digital) Design gravity, which makes it a good place for interesting seminars, conferences, companies and people.. This year we took a different subject, the opposite route and experienced new things.. A visit to our friends at Adobe at Townsend street appeared to be the only constante..

Our visit to SF was mainly focused on out attendance to the Interior ‘07 from the ASID organisation . This interior design gathering was for us a change to meet people from the “metier” and gather new insights. As discussed in the other posts, it was most memorable and we got insights from Ideo to Pixar and Psychology to Sustainability. We met a lot of interesting people and had vivid conversations with most of them.

We always like to feel at home in a city, so to get that feeling you have to conquer the city piece by piece. We had dinner this time in little italy and around Embarcadero and took this trip at bit more time to go outside the city to see some of the icons of this region. We never visited Stanford, Palo Alto and Cupertino (Apple) so we decided to take a look there. Being at Stanford was really impressive. The spacious and beautiful surroundings together with its reputation and the sunny morning made it a nice experience to walk around there. Studying there is in many ways a privilege. We also visited “as they like to call it, the Mothership” the Apple Headquarters in Cupertino. Surprisedly for Apple fans, I was more impressed by walking around in a Whole Foods supermarket . The amount of choice in these kind of supermarkets is beyond imagination. I am a bon vivant and know my culinary treasures in Europe but “WoW”, the assortment, the fresh salads, the fresh sushi, the 20 different types of salt, the kitchen where you can order a custommade Burrito, etc. etc. was really amazing. It was seeing capitalism and service at its peak in a supermarket.

We also passed by Mountainview to surf the free Google Wlan (headquarters of Google) and went on to Santa Cruz, Monterey and ultimately Carmel, where we stayed one night before we flew back. For some who do not know, Carmel has a special Mayor, Clint Eastwood. We ate in a restaurant where the waiters wife was one of Clints employees and where he came in and eats some time…useless info, but a kind of funny though..

Our trip was in one word very successful. We met new people, got new insights, saw new places and got a lot of good exposure on our new to be launched “innterior” concept.

Interior design and psychology

2007-03-28T07:31:00Z

I attended a class at the conference about “ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AND INTERIOR DESIGN”. It was given by David Kopec, writer of the book Environmental Psychology for Design . It had some nice anecdotes..

David Kopec handled some of the insights of how the brain and therefore behavior effects how an interior or environment around it is perceived. Some of the prime real estate locations and it’s value is still derived from the fact that people have (hunting) instincts from 10.000’s of years ago. E.g. we liked to be in the forest but oversee the fields, giving us cover but still providing a view on the grazing game. Secondly, we like to be higher up to oversee if there is any enemy coming. This results in that the 3 top real estate locations are still: 1. Wide and open view from home, 2. Penthouses that have oversee cityscapes and 3. Houses that look up to hills or mountains which also gives a good overview of the area in front of it..
Another nice thing was that is has been researched that rooms with windows even in creative rooms do more good to the brain than distract people. The unconscious part of the brain remains stimulated to think about the creative problem even if it is bothered with distracting views in between. So do not lock yourself up to think freely, go outside!
Some of the more known rules also past by; That combination of colors, shapes and lines can dramatically influence your mind about how big a space or room is perceived; Man like more square shapes and women more rounded shapes; Women concern about details, man focus on big picture.
One thing I liked about improving design and user experience of a space or building is having key people mention all the associations with the old space; How does it smell, what main colors do you assoiciate with it, what sounds do you remember, etc… This whole holistic experience of how people perceive e.g. a Hospital. The atmosphere of sterile smell, white / mint colours, the alerting beeps from machines puts them straight away in a mood than locks them up. Before 1970’s people came to a hospital to die, after this era, medical knowledge and treatment improved and made hospitals a place to recover. This social change should also reflect in the ambiance of a Hospital.

This is also an important element to address in our new product. The change of mood to enable free and objective thinking.

Visit to Ideo and thinking about Hybrids

2007-03-25T07:16:00Z

Our first day at the ASID interiors ‘07 started with a very good keynote by Fred Dust, the leader of IDEO’s Smart Space group. Later that day we visited Ideo and participated in a mini workshop. Both the keynote and the visit confirmed our beliefs; IDEO is a cool company, empathy matters, fast=future

Fred Dust really started the interiors ‘07 conference for us with his keynote on “predicting the future”. He shared with us 10 rules that can help you determine which developments might turn out to become BIG in the future.

I had already met with John Ravitch of IDEO when we started innberg in 2005, and he had some great insights and tips for us. The rules that struck me most are “Good technology changes people”, which speaks for itself. But rule 6; “Behaviors are best” really rung true. As you might know we are designing a product, and a lot of its intrinsic power comes from behavior we see day in day out around us. Also the trends that these behaviors result in will be amplified when people will use our product. Some of these trends have to do with business creativity, right brain-left brain thinking, and how innovation comes about.

In the afternoon we visited IDEO on pier 28 in San Fransisco. For me it was the second time I could inhale the atmosphere, but for Eelco it was a first, and it was as nice as the first time. Inspiring. We got a little tour from Patrice (human factors), and Beth (business) around the building. And then we had a little workshop. For some of our ASID companions it was a very new experience to work this way, but we felt very at home.

We first had to get a feel for a person by looking at some photo’s the person made. Empathy all the way. It was good to be forced to only work with this subtle feeling. We then had to develop a little scenario on how this person would go about acquiring a car (customer journey). The third part consisted of detailing the experience that occured at the dealership, and that turned him from a prospect into a owner. Our solution zeroed in on the fact that one can get tax benefits for driving a hybrid, but the paperwork is not as easy as could be. Therefore the dealer has specialized folks on site that help you fill out the lengthy forms, and on top of that, the dealer planted trees for a percentage of each purchase.

The day ended with us strawling over the beautiful embarcadero. And then it was off to the ASID Auction, where I whisked away the Alvar Aalto blue vase and the year long subscription to the building museum in Washington DC.

check out some more pictures

It was a great day.

Interior 07 and innberg product..

2007-03-24T12:17:00Z

We visited the interior ‘07 in San Francisco for 3 reasons: Gain insights about interior design in relation to sustainability and psychology, talk to our peers in the US to get feedback on our new product that we will launch in September 07 and last but not least enjoy keynotes from Pixar and Ideo. Experience what we found out..

The interior ‘07, organized by the ASID Chapter of San Francisco is a 3 day conference where interior design professionals and producers meet and exchange thoughts, honours and network. It was held in the San Francisco Hyatt Regency, your typical 80’ish style hotel with Massive atrium. The trip was really successful, we met a lot of people, mingled nicely into the many cocktail events.

The courses varied in quality. The visit to IDEO was lots of fun as was the presentation about Psychology and interior design on which more in another post. The big, varied crowd was a perfect opportunity to have an “unfocus” group about our new concept that will improve incompany creativity and innovation. We got only positive response and came from interior designers till VP level of one of the largest software companies in the USA.

We did not yet encounter any cultural differences on this other continent which we might face when we would also launch this product to area’s as Asia or South America. Let’s first conquer Europe and North America ;-)

The ASID did a good job in keeping the quality up of the speakers, have a good organization around it and provided excellent catering and parties. We will be back next year in New Orleans..

At the other side of the pond...

2007-03-08T12:37:00Z

Next week Ilya and I will go to San Francisco to visit Interior 07, with keynotes from IDEO and Pixar Animation studios. In the same trip we will visit our friends at Adobe. This trip will also be a moment to test our new product that we will introduce by setting up a whole new company. This office oriented environment will turn heads and we have the fortunate commitment from some multinational customers before we have even finished it.

The product will for always change how larger and intermediate companies interact and collaborate. We took all the simple elements that make people truly understand each other in a working or study environment and productized that into an set of products that make you happy by even seeing them, let alone use them. We hope to launch it in September 2007 and have a prelaunch with some major customers on forehand. You will undoubtedly notice it when we hit the market. It brings innovation & creativity closer to your employees, peers and offices.

innskines: A global success story...

2007-01-31T12:45:00Z

Our little product concept that once started as an internal give away to customers really start to take off. Is it that our customers are so international or are innskines just immensely popular? Lets hope both. They are already spreading to all corners of the world as in the coming weeks they are taken to….

Hello, Hola, Bonjour, Hallo, Ni Hao, Buon giorno, Gidday!

In the first month of the public existence of innskines it is amazing where they all travel. In the coming period you will find innskines in the strangest places. Take a little tour with us; - Madrid, Spain - Palermo, Italy - Bordeaux, France - Kenia - Tanzania - Australia - New Zealand - Zadar, Croatia - San Francisco, USA and of course all over the Netherlands…

We are considering new innskines with more features for e.g. how about a “City critter” for your Moleskine cityplanner (with a holder for your passport or digital cam?) or a “rugged reporter” with leather interior because crawling through the desert in Iraq is no walk in the park.. We will keep you all posted!

innberg at Interior '07 San Francisco

2007-01-17T06:51:00Z

In march of this year there is an inspiring event in San Francisco organized by the ASID, the Interior ‘07 .

This 3 day event combines knowledge sharing about new technologies, visions, concepts and ways of doing business in interior design. With session of peer companies like Ideo and a tour by commercial buildings in San Francisco it will be inspirational.

With our internal development of a global new interior concept it is a good moment to soundboard some of our ideas and to massage the west coast for our new productrange.

Just a few more months before we can tell you all about it!

In march of this year there is an inspiring event in San Francisco organized by the ASID, the Interior ‘07 .

With our internal development of a global new interior concept it is a good moment to soundboard some of our ideas and to massage the west coast for our new productrange.

Just a few more months before we can tell you all about it!

Web 2.0 innberg style.

2007-01-10T22:41:00Z

We have always had a lot of good reactions on our www.innberg.com. But we had two drivers to improve our message on the web, one being a changing focus of innberg towards more design management and secondly: less text is more. We hope you like the website better.

We added a more visual reference to some of our clients and projects and simplified the view on our design process. The dutch version had to go because we have an international clientèle and focus. We changed technique to the more flexible Ruby on Rails so we can serve you easier, which means more up to date content.