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Pixar & Jay Shusters...

On April 1st, 2007 ilya wrote:

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

On March 30th, 2007 eelco wrote:

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

On March 28th, 2007 eelco wrote:

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

On March 25th, 2007 ilya wrote:

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..

On March 24th, 2007 eelco wrote:

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..