Prepaid power to sensitise kids to energy consumption
I’d like to share our 3 weeks project I worked on while being at the School of Design Thinking. Together with my fellows Jan Grippenkoven, Anna Ißelburg and Olga Scupin a concept for a service product named ›Tally‹ was created dealing with the question of “How can we sensitise children at the age of 7 to 12 to energy consumption?”
In-depth interviews with kids, parents and teachers revealed that energy and its usage are too abstract to be understood by both the young and the old – especially when provided in kilowatt hours.
A two-part service concept addresses that. Instead of kWh ›Tally‹ translated the children’s currently consumed energy into comprehensible use hours and allows kids to manage the weekly rationing given by their parents. A hardware plug counts the amount of energy being used and communicates wirelessly with a software. The application visualises and forecasts the remaining use hours for each device as well as a compiled overview of all appliances.
Here is how ›Tally‹ is suppose to work:
During the 3 weeks of the projects using Design Thinking we went through all six phases of the process in which we got great insights through several interviews and an intensive testing stage. Our final prototype included an iPad clickdummy got very positive feedback of potential users — both parents and kids — nevertheless we didn’t continue working on ›Tally‹, but maybe this blog post attracts someone’s attention …
So please let me know if you want to see any more of this:
Fail often. Fail early. Fail cheap.
“Prototyping is failing forward”, I was taught recently at the School of Design Thinking. Though the institute mainly focuses on the creation of products and services prototyping early to fail faster is a significant advise for the field of communication design, too …
… and a lesson the German car manufacturer Audi had to learn just in these days.
It’s latest ad campaign is build around a caption only engineers can come up with: *
Since I’m not a physicist or car enthusiast I’m not familiar with the term of “traction”, so I didn’t get it at all. Two days later and in broad daylight I was able to spot two more letters I missed earlier and to finally get the wordplay “Maximale (At)traktion” (similar to English “Maximum (at)traction”).
The visual problem was a simple one: the first two letters came in red outlines instead of full colour which made it impossible to read on a backlit poster at night. So after a couple of days Audi, its ad men and probably a few confused customers must have seen the same so the posters were changed to this design:
An earlier test of the poster in a more realistic environment including backlight would have revealed that the caption is illegible and truncated due to technical and cognitive challenges. This would have saved some money for the changes and avoided an unpleasant situation for the agency in charge.
So again: “Prototyping is failing forward” — a relevant rule for communication designers too as proven above. Insightful prototyping to all of you!
(* — no photoshop, just a backlit poster at night)
Finding shapes & telling stories
Sometimes branding is really about finding shapes. But it’s the least part. Most of the time the process is about understanding the client’s problem, observing his real needs and defining the task which is quite often different from the one given you in the very first encounter or original brief.
So I was surprised finding this older sketchbook picture on my hard disk which is obviously documenting the search for geometric shapes. Although this being a rare double-page spread unfortunately I cannot recall the organisation behind the acronym and therefore guess those sketches never led one to any visual solution.
In one of the recent projects with Thomas Manss & Company there was the necessity to create a visual identifier for the start-up of two media consultants.
While understanding a client’s business, there is always the quest for what is special or even peculiar about it and for a story worth to tell. During this process with the consultants of Kasper & Notbohm it became clear they are best at advising their clients which media to use and guiding them how to orchestrate all the different channels. The consultancy then helps balancing the volumes of those.
Having found such a narrative nub there are basically three ways to tell the story visually. The identifier can be whether a logotype, a initial or a symbol — plus the combinations of two of these. Turning up and down the diverse media channels was an image most forthrightly conveyed in a graphic mark and led to a very neat and appropriate symbol for Kasper & Notbohm’s practise.
The reason I do not remember the purpose of the recovered shapes is that geometric letters forming an acronym can barely tell you anything which consequently might direct to a completely different task in the wide field of branding …
Sign of Life
Yes, it has been quite some time since the last blog entry, but the frequency of thoughts will finally increase again. Since receiving my Diploma in communication design in December there is eventually enough time to continue sharing thoughts and observation with main focus on communication, design and services. The topic will remain the idea of branding, but enlarged and with a broader perspective.
And before I will have time to share some projects of the recent past here too, I have to refer to the new website of Thomas Manss & Company, a London and Berlin based design consultancy I work with for two and half years now. Their lately re-launched website features some projects I’ve been working on in the recent past and you might be interested in.
Hoping to rewin you as regular reader again I’m wishing you happy easter days and to continue very soon.