The Warm Feeling of (Someone Else’s) Design in Context

Last day in Ahmedabad - and an opportunity to push a little and see what gives, heading out into the Old City with design team colleagues Duncan Burns (co-author on the recent Street Hacks presentation) and Josephine Gianni. (A fourth team member from our LA design studio Tom Arbisi is here in spirit in the form of appearance models, we left them safely secured at the hotel). India is the kind of place where the ‘not from around here’ is a passport into most situations, including any number of work or boy-its-hot-here sweat, shops. Along the way we walk into a plastic bag print works.

A pleasant surprise was in store - the owner owned two mobile phones including one industrial designed by Duncan .

When you work for a big-corp it’s challenging to point to a “I did that’ on what is shipped out the door - so many people being part of the process. I can imagine it’s especially grating for employees of companies that play on the cult of personality or project the notion of the star designer in that even if you can point to something you created, someone else steps in and takes the credit. But back here in the midday heat of Ahmedabad - I’m standing next to a glow of quiet satisfaction.

To be honest it was surprising to find such a business looking phone in this very manual workspace. I don’t know whether his profile matched the market segmentation model for an expected consumer, but I doubt it. Whilst the six degree of separation and its shorter variants have been well documented for human relationships there will be a day when the nth degrees of separation are measurable for a wider range of objects. The implications are significant: for some it will place an increased value on the notion of the ‘new’; others will want to play up the reused or upcycled ; there will be a shift from our current idea of what constitutes ‘ownership’. Bear in mind the backdrop to this is the gradual shift from selling a product to selling a product + service + service upgrades. Newness redefined.

Ten+ days on the road. It’s time to head home.

(Via Jan Chipchase)