The news has been heartbreaking.

After shaping the 20th century with brilliant technology, Kodak is bankrupt.

Six years ago it wasn’t. But many executives there were in denial about how much trouble they were really in. Posters could be seen in the hallways asking employees to “Imagine New Ways To Work With Film!”

Kodak had let themselves slip badly in the digital camera battles. So, among other actions, at the 11th hour they asked how design could help them turn around a war they were losing. So, they invited my team at BIG to start the visual redesign of their company.

Working with their good people in Rochester, we went to work. Kodak’s lack of vision in their business strategy was reflected in their lack of vision in their design strategy. Decades of confusing, sloppy, meaningless branding, graphics, iconography, and cheesy imagery covered everything like diseased barnacles. These layers had to be stripped away. We worked to get Kodak back to what made the company and their products astounding in the first place: radical simplicity.

I am proud of what we did. And our team members, including Allan Hori, Weston Bingham, Christian Cervantes and David Hartman among others, were remarkable to work with.

At some point, I’ll explain our approach to that work. It’s a good, if ultimately sad design story.

But today is not that day.

A few hours ago I came across a heartfelt essay by Bob Lonsberry, a writer and talk show host and resident of Rochester, home to Kodak’s global headquarters.

In light of Kodak’s sad news, he provided a good reminder of just how important Kodak was.

_____________________________________

My work is done.

Those words were some of the last penned by George Eastman. He included them in his suicide note.

They mark an ignoble end to a noble life, the leave taking of a truly great man.

The same words could now be said for the company he left behind.

My work is done.

For all intents and purposes, the Eastman Kodak Company is through. It has been mismanaged financially, technologically and competitively. For 20 years, its leaders have foolishly spent down the patrimony of a century’s prosperity. One of America’s bedrock brands is about to disappear, the Kodak moment has passed.

It is as wrong as suicide, and, like suicide, is the result of horrifically poor decisions, a fatal wound of self-infliction.

But George Eastman is not how he died, and the Eastman Kodak Company is not how it is being killed. Though the ends be needless and premature, they must not be allowed to overshadow the greatness that came before.

History testifies of the greatness of George Eastman.

It must also bear witness of the greatness of Kodak.

Few companies have done so much good for so many people, or defined and lifted so profoundly the spirit of a nation and perhaps the world. It is impossible to understand the 20th Century without recognizing the role of the Eastman Kodak Company.

Kodak served mankind through entertainment, science, national defense and the stockpiling of family memories.

Kodak took us to the top of Mount Suribachi and to the Sea of Tranquility. It introduced us to the merry old Land of Oz and to stars from Charlie Chaplin to John Wayne, and Elizabeth Taylor to Tom Hanks.

It showed us the shot that killed President Kennedy, and his brother bleeding out on a kitchen floor, and a fallen Martin Luther King Jr. on the hard balcony of a Memphis motel.

When that sailor kissed the nurse, and when the spy planes saw missiles in Cuba, Kodak was the eyes of a nation. From the deck of the Missouri to the grandeur of Monument Valley, Kodak took us there. Virtually every significant image of the 20th Century is a gift to posterity from the Eastman Kodak Company.

In an era of easy digital photography, when we can take a picture of anything at any time, we cannot imagine what life was like before George Eastman brought photography to people. Yes, there were photographers, and for relatively large sums of money they would take stilted pictures in studios and formal settings.

But most people couldn’t afford photographs, and so all they had to remember distant loved ones, or earlier times of their lives, was memory. Children could not know what their parents had looked like as young people, grandparents far away might never learn what their grandchildren looked like.

Eastman Kodak allowed memory to move from the uncertainty of recollection, to the permanence of a photograph.

But it wasn’t just people whose features were savable; it was events, the sacred and precious times that families cherish. The Kodak moment, was humanity’s moment. It was that place in time where there is joy, where life has its ultimate purpose.

From the earliest round Brownie pictures, to the squares of 126 and the rectangles of 35mm, Kodak let the fleeting moments of birthdays and weddings, picnics and parties, be preserved and saved. It allowed for the creation of the most egalitarian art form. Lovers could take one another’s pictures, children were photographed walking out the door on the first day of school, the person releasing the shutter decided what was worth recording, and hundreds of millions of such decisions were made.

And for centuries to come, those long dead will smile and dance and communicate to their unborn progeny. Family history will be not only names on paper, but smiles on faces. Thanks to Kodak.

The same Kodak that served is in space and on countless battlefields. This company went to war for the United States and played an important part in surveillance and reconnaissance. It also went to the moon and everywhere in between.

All while generating a cash flow that employed countless thousands of salt-of-the-earth people, and which allowed the company’s founder to engage in some of the most generous philanthropy in America’s history. Not just in Kodak’s home city of Rochester, New York, but in Tuskegee and London, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He bankrolled two historically black colleges, fixed the teeth of Europe’s poor, and quietly did good wherever he could. And Kodak made that possible.

While doing good, Kodak did very well.

And all the Kodakers over all the years are essential parts of that monumental legacy. They prospered a great company, but they – with that company – blessed the world.

That is what we should remember about the Eastman Kodak Company.

Like its founder, we should remember how it lived, not how it died.

My work is done.

Perhaps that is true of Kodak.

If it is, we should be grateful that such a company ever existed. We should rejoice in and show respect for that existence.

History will forget the small men who have scuttled this company.

But history will never forget Kodak.

2012 marks the 40th anniversary of my favorite song from childhood: Three Dog Night’s “Black and White.” This thing became a national phenomenon, selling over a million copies and reaching number one on the Billboard 100. In late 1972 you could go nowhere without hearing this. My best friend David Glickman and I would clap and sing along whenever we heard it on WRKO-AM. (Yeah, radio. Get over yourselves.)

The hit was inspired by the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed racial segregation of public schools. The original folk song was first recorded by Sammy Davis Jr. in 1957. His version had opened with a verse in reference to that decision:

Their robes were black, Their heads were white,
The schoolhouse doors were closed so tight,
Nine judges all set down their names,
To end the years and years of shame.

This version sung by Three Dog Night did not include this lyric, but retained the emotional potency of those ideals. The song eventually became poignant for me as I became a teenager. We lived near Boston during the city’s school desegregation crisis and what my family would see on the news and in the papers would shock us. http://bit.ly/ZQWz4

Yeah, forty years later music like this may sound cloying and simplistic. Today, with tales of poverty, crime and injustice, rap music now comes closest to crystalizing the issues being expressed here. In fact, rap has more in common with real folk music than anything contemporary.

That said, simple, memorable songs – songs about generosity, commonality and courage – are still worth celebrating. Folk music can transcend class, ethnic, generational and even temporal boundaries. A renewal of these values in big, pop music is overdue and will, hopefully, arrive far before the big election in November.

Here’s hoping that the muses of Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson or Three Dog Night will blow in a song writer’s ear in 2012.

Soon.

Businessweek refers to it as one of seven retail “Wonders of the World”. Although not a perfect piece of design by any measure, it quickly became a touch-point for a discussion about the evolution of marketing from traditional, one-way communications to building great brand experiences that people can immerse themselves in and share. The remarkable success of the Hershey Store was just more proof that what people do is more important that whatever they are simply told. It was marketing that people seek out – and pay for – instead of avoiding or turning off.

A good brand experience is when a brand does what we expect of it. A great brand experience is something we tell someone else about. In short, a great brand experience is a story, in which the brand user – not the brand – is the hero. A great brand experience is direct and transformative. It’s not a stunt or a fantasy. It’s not a campaign. It’s not the idea of something. It is something, something worth writing home about – or at least texting a friend. Brand awareness and engaged consumers are happy by-products, but not the point. The test for a great brand experience is result. Something new created. Something changed. A bell that can’t be un-rung.

I’ve made a career out of creating brand experiences, a few of them great. In an effort to make more of them great, here are eight principles that my team and I have found helpful.

1. A great brand experience begins where the script ends, because it’s not the brand’s story. Experience is user’s story. The brand is only the stage manager. The most potent experiences are open-ended. They are worlds that people can explore at will, and that permit a multitude of outcomes. The outcomes belong to the user, not the brand. We call them memories.

2. Meet on new ground. Great brand experiences are exceptional. They occur when the brand and its user are both participants in something new, acting in ways that are outside their usual roles in the brand relationship. It’s their day off from being seller and consumer. It’s a shared adventure.

3. Make the user count.Don’t just count users. People want to be recognized. They want to be the heroes of their own lives and to connect with others and have an effect on their world. A great brand experience is one that is not only personal, but that makes people individually indispensable to the result. Give them more than a voice, give them a stake in the outcome and a meaningful role to play.

Scale is deceptive in New York - even more so in Times Square. From Broadway, the Kisses look about a foot high. To get the impact we wanted from the street, we made scores of them. Each one is over eighteen feet tall.

4. Aim to build bonds, not just brands. Traditional marketers think of the brand as the destination in every story. An experience that makes your brand the agent of discovery or connection or change in people’s lives can create ties that last a lifetime. What aspirations can you and your users share? What can you do together to realize those aspirations? Ogilvy’s Steve Hayden ( who I ran into at JFK last night ) puts it this way: Big ideas come from big ideals. Ideas only give you share of mind. Ideals give you share of culture. A great brand experience can put ideals into action. In the experiences we designed for CNN, the New York Public Library or Dove, people felt they were doing something important just by coming in the door.

5. Place and time matter. Now more than ever. Fabulous digital experiences can happen anywhere and anywhen. But the moments that truly rock our world are more precise. People measure the potency of events by memory: by where we were when. Experiences that are anchored to a place and time carry a greater emotional charge precisely because so much of our entertainment and engagement is now unstuck in time and mediated by technology through screens.

6. There is no campaign. There is only now. Most engagement strategies are an elaborate series of hand-offs that guide people along to a sale. A great brand experience doesn’t happen downstream somewhere. It is created at the point of contact, and designed to make this contact, with this person, matter. A great brand experience is not a promise. It is its own proof – on the spot –  and its own reward.

7. Determine and use the touch points that matter most. The most powerful media channels in existence are sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Every sense you can engage doubles the number of consumer brain cells that register your brand experience. This is why a great lover will send you roses instead of emoticons.

8. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Every marketer knows the importance of that last word, “repeat.” The most valuable brand experiences are those, which the consumer can repeat with equal delight, or that inspire continued exploration, connection and sharing with the brand. Otherwise, what you have is simply a transient stunt. The trick we strive for is to create an immersive experience that has the unexpectedness of such a stunt, but with a surprise that lives – and grows – forever.

You can order Chris’s new book, called JUST DESIGN, at Amazon.

My essay follows.

Seek.

Innovation doesn’t pop out at the end of a PowerPoint presentation.

Innovation is personal. It happens at the extreme margins of enterprise, where no one knows what the exact problems are because the maps are blank. Send a designer out there and they’ll come back with something nobody’s ever seen – or a prototype that fulfills a need you didn’t even know existed.

You never really know what’s out there. That’s what’s the problem with hiring problem solvers – a definition for designers as crippling as it is outdated. The great problems, the ones really worth solving, aren’t already on the agenda. Innovation is personal: if we are open, curious, and empathetic, the great problems find us.

The water problem found me in 2007, although I didn’t know it at the time. John Bielenberg had invited me to go down to Greensboro, Alabama, with his remarkable program Project M. Project M is like a self-guided Outward Bound course for socially conscious designers. A team of young designers parachute into a poor or challenged area and then are left to discover a problem that they can solve in 30 days. Nobody tells them what to do. Or even what the problem is. They live with local families, look around, talk to people, and find something they can put their hand to that will do some good.

They become problem seekers.

In Hale County we discovered that one family in four had no access to safe water. Some of them were going to the local Texaco station with buckets because the water they had pumped from their back yards for generations had become full of foul waste from the county’s biggest employers. A thousand families couldn’t get clean city water because they couldn’t afford the $425 hook-up for a water meter. Getting these people meters was what the designers decided to do. They created communications and a website to bring national attention – and money for meters – to Hale County. They’ve connected over 100 families so far. That’s not a bad month’s work for a brand new design team.

After my experience in Alabama, I started seeing water crises everywhere. Half of China’s cities have water shortages and 700 million people drink contaminated water daily. The World Bank calculates that 30 million people will have to relocate by 2020. 30 million “water refugees.” In Mexico’s Tehuacán Valley, where humans first domesticated corn, there is no longer enough water to grow corn. In rural Africa, one woman in five spends two hours a day fetching water on foot from wells miles away. There are Hale Counties all over the world.

In 2008, NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger and I shared some of these water stories at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Four months in orbit aboard space station Mir, looking down at Earth’s shrinking river systems made Jerry a water hawk, too. Although water wasn’t at the top of the agenda in Davos, it quickly emerged as the axis that connects many of the other problems that were. By itself, the lack of safe water unleashes all four horsemen of the apocalypse: death, famine, pestilence, and war. In fact, the U.N. predicted outright conflict over water in the next five years.

So Jerry and I, with the support of the driven journalists’ organization Circle of Blue, invited a group of global thought leaders to explore this issue in a quickly organized work session at Davos. They already knew the global to-do list was pretty full. We needed to come up with our own resources to put more effort into fighting these water crises. Design students are one of Earth’s abundant resources, so we set out to engage them. Working in partnership with INDEX: Design to Improve Life and AIGA, we invited 10,000 of them from around the world to participate in The Aspen Design Challenge: Designing Water’s Future.

These students would be our dandelion seeds. More than 700 students from 28 countries sought and provided 225 water solutions that did not exist before. The best of them were then shaped for venture capital and presented at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Efforts like Project M” and The Aspen Challenge are creating an architecture of participation outside of traditional silos. Today, an increasing number of influential networks of designers are emerging with a desire to make a tangible difference in people’s lives. As a discipline, design is transcending the traditional “service” roles of the institutions that employ us. Designers work at human scale. For a designer, the obligation to make life better with workable, tangible solutions is immediate, personal, and direct. And while institutions are very good at making lots more of something that already exists, they are not as good at inventing the new.

Fortunately, rapid prototyping systems have transformed the designer’s role. Now we can move out of the Concept Business and into the Real-World Solutions Business faster than we had ever imagined.

Within a single generation of designers, the cost of creating innovative solutions for small groups of people has become almost trivial. Now every designer can be a factory where the future is made.

What we can see, we can solve.

And we’ll all see a lot more far beyond our office walls.

Tad Toulis from Teague writes a smart post at Core 77:

“Design discourse often strikes me as analogous to a family get together. It sets out well enough; optimistic with an undercurrent of reconciliation, but it can turn sour. A casual remark or offhanded comment cuts quick, unearthing volumes of unresolved conflict and lingering baggage. It can be disquieting and, at times, maddening. But generally speaking, it’s okay because after dessert is served and the plates are cleared, we get to leave the family table, and return to the business of doing design.

When I leave the ‘table’ my thoughts turn quickly toward incorporation: How do I filter through the chatter and weave the good stuff into a viable practice of design; one that bridges the here and now with a hopefully grand tomorrow? Where do we place our bets? Where do we invest? How do we incorporate the disparate soundings offered up by design into a practical set of tools that can empower a team’s results, elevate its relevance, and if we’re lucky, safeguard its future?”

Catch the rest here.

For the first time in history, Americans don’t believe their children will enjoy a better life.

This is bad news for business. The currency that sustains brands, businesses and governments is trust – and it’s never been in shorter supply. If the American consumer wrote a letter to management, it would go like this:

Dear Sir,

Disintermediation and deregulation haven’t worked out very well for us consumers, lately. Okay, we got used to being our own travel agent, health-plan manager and tech support. But now we’re feeling insecure. We don’t like being hostage to hiccups in the global economy. There’s salmonella in our spinach. (Or is it the tomatoes?). Oil clogged the Gulf of Mexico. Russians are trying to steal our identity. Our parents’ arthritis medicine turns out to cause heart attacks. Our home and our 401k are worth a lot less, and my job is still up for grabs. Birds fall from the sky and dolphins wash upon the beaches. Oh yeah, scientists say the planet is on fire.

Now, what was it you were trying to sell me?

Marketers are buffeted by the same forces. Traditional advertising models are failing just as consumers are withdrawing their trust. Everyone’s looking for a hard spot in the swamp.

So what’s a wise marketer to do?

One new model to explore is what I’d call “re-integration”. In short, it amounts to standing accountable for more of the value-chain than competitors. Many of Fortune magazine’s “most admired companies” of do this, starting with Apple. In the 1990s, Apple’s determination to control both hardware and software design was a competitive disadvantage. Now it’s their ace. The company delivers an intuitively seamless platform for computing, communications, and entertainment, along with one-to-one technical support by appointment at its retail stores. They put the world back together for consumers.

Target earns admiration for taking care of customers body and soul. The company’s design panache extends to pharmacy packaging that makes medicines safer, and Target leads the retail sector in community giving: nearly 3% of revenues. This seems like odd behavior for a discounter. Traditional price competition impels marketers to do less for consumers – (Wal-Mart, airlines) – but price is only a fractional component of trust. Reintegration involves doing more for customers. Offering end-to-end accountability for the infernal complexities of IT establishments, including for competitors’ products, is now IBM’s biggest business. Automakers are well-positioned to serve more of the value chain, but don’t, except on a sporadic basis for promotional purposes. Consumers have seen offers for extended warranties, routine maintenance, roadside assistance, and even gasoline price support – but no automaker has taken on the role of personal transportation supplier to the consumer.

They’re all stuck in the hardware business.

Trust flourishes when each party in a relationship has an obvious stake in the other’s success. An unbranded example is the growth of Community-Supported Agriculture contracts, in which urban consumers subscribe a farmer’s produce in advance. CSA members get direct-from-the-field delivery and the farmer sells his product before he plants.

Banking used to work this way. Local lenders and mortgage holders knew each other and neither could franchise away their obligation. Today’s financial consumers don’t understand how this shared waterhole was poisoned or why what they thought was “their” bank can’t help them.American Express, the only consumer financial outfit in Fortune’s most admired 20, makes a practice of interceding on consumers’ behalf. “Use our card and we’ll go to bat for you” is their promise, and they do. Being a cardmember counts for something beyond the transaction. As at Costco, that word, member, is a clue to the new model for marketing.

Reintegration is more than an implicit agreement on “brand values”, it is a fundamental contract between the marketer and consumer, in which each has an obviousand explicit stake in the other’s success.

In tough times, the brands we count on, and even revere, have four factors in common:

1. Accountability for more of the value-chain than competitors
2. An obvious stake in the customer’s success – and vice versa
3. “Admirable” behavior in the public sphere
4. Use of design to make brand values tangible at every customer interaction

Most of Fortune’s 20 most admired companies are design leaders. From the clean functionality of Google’s interface and P&G’s Swiffer, to the taut sheet-metal of BMW or UPS’s iconic, undauntable brown trucks, design helps make promises truth in the user’s everyday experience.

Marketers seeking trust need not only walk the talk, but erect what amounts to a medieval walled city around as much of the consumer’s life as they can serve: a safe space where potential dangers are held at bay, and that vendors themselves inhabit – sharing the risks as well as the profits of commerce.

]]> http://www.briancollins1.com/?feed=rss2&p=2148 0 http://www.briancollins1.com/?p=2366 http://www.briancollins1.com/?p=2366#comments Sat, 07 May 2011 19:25:19 +0000 Brian Collins http://www.briancollins1.com/?p=2366

I just finished watching “Hackers”, a old but still revealing documentary produced over a decade before the advent of the Internet. All the interviews were shot over a long week end in 1984, at the first Hackers Conference, hosted by Whole Earth Catalog editors Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, in Sausalito, California.

The event was inspired by Steven Levy’s book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”.

It reminded me that there is always an edge of every creative domain where things are sloppy, unfolding, dynamic and, importantly, wide open for reworking and reinvention. Hacking.

The margins are always where the real action is.

One year ago in Wired, Steven Levy updated his story in his article “Hackers Revisited.” He frames a new dynamic in hacking that accelerated invention over the last decade:

Unlike the original hackers, Zuckerberg’s generation didn’t have to start from scratch to get control of their machines. “I never wanted to take apart my computer,” he says. As a budding hacker in the late ’90s, Zuckerberg tinkered with the higher-level languages, allowing him to concentrate on systems rather than machines.

For instance, when he played with his beloved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Zuckerberg wouldn’t act out wars with them, like most other kids. He would build societies and pretend the Turtles were interacting with one another. “I was just interested in how systems work,” he says. Similarly, when he began playing with computers, he didn’t hack motherboards or telephones but entire communities — manipulating system bugs to kick his friends off AOL Instant Messenger, for instance.

Big business may stumble upon and commodify their breakthroughs, but hackers will simply move on to unexplored frontiers. “It’s like that line in Last Tango in Paris,” O’Reilly says, “where Marlon Brando says, ‘It’s over, and then it begins again.’”

A talented friend of mine recently posted this invitation from the Richmond city association, RVA:

Show us your talent, and your creativity could be displayed all over downtown RVA. Just use the new RVA Downtown logo, or some variation of it, to create original artwork showcasing your love of RVA or what creativity in Richmond means to you. You could be one of the top designers chosen to have your art turned into a street pole banner displayed in downtown RVA—along with up to $500 in your pocket.

You can check their site out here: http://bit.ly/f292zo.

I noticed that the VCU BrandCenter is listed among the organizations that will judge this work. As a VCU board member (and designer of the school’s identity system) I wish I could support this well-meaning endeavor. But I can’t.

My post on Facebook about spec work generated over 130 “likes” and 50 comments today. It’s clear that speculative work is despised in the design community. The AIGA’s stance – and ours, too – is simple: Work developed without fair compensation will “compromise the benefits of effective design for both clients and designers.” When an organization seeks speculative design work they demonstrate a profound disrespect for the design community and the value of experience and creativity.

My suggestion to RVA? Take that $1000 they have for prize money and offer it as an honorarium to the best designer they can hire in Richmond. Or, if they want a range of options, offer a $500 honorarium to three different designers – perhaps someone new, someone established and a promising student.

They should not harness the web as giant pool for free work, but instead as a way to gain insight from people on the designers’ proposed solutions. It would be a great way to spark a dialog about the role of creativity and design in the city’s revitalized downtown.

So why am I picking on a simple, well-meaning crowd-sourced design competition ? Emerging systems of web-driven participation are changing the dynamics of the profession. And timeworn distinctions between producers and consumers of design are blurring>new models of creation are exploding everywhere.

I also recognize that individuals have the right to pursue any creative endeavor they wish.

But our roles as creative leaders are different. We must be the voice that always defends designers, building a more public and professional understanding of the value of their unique knowledge and abilities. We should reject any project, even well-meaning ones, if they turn designers into exotic menials seeking “prizes” of “up to $500 in your pocket!”

I found this claim on the RVA website:

Richmond’s past, present and future is the story of creativity in action. Today, it’s home to some of the nation’s most innovative individuals, businesses, organizations and neighborhoods.

That’s true. Among other proof, The Martin Agency walked off with the Ad Agency of the Year title in 2010, besting agencies in New York as well as Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And every other city in the country.

If RVA also hopes to be another champion of Richmond innovation, making sure the hard work of the city’s designers gets paid for wouldn’t be a bad start.

After I posted the work of Michael Schwab for the National Park service and the Golden Era travel posters for the WPA, I came across these. They’ve already bounced around the web a bit, but I thought I’d re-post them here in one place.

Created by designer / illustrator Steve Thomas, there are remarkably well-realized pastiches.

I only wish the damn prequels were as carefully crafted.