TED2007: Designing by sketching and prototyping vs street-up innovation

Running notes from the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California - Session 10 (TED site; backgrounder; past TED videos; other bloggers at TED)

Artist, filmmaker and designer Eames Demetrios is the grandson of Charles and Ray Ames, the modernist designers couple that created some of the 20th-century design icons (think just of the Eames Lounge Chair, pictured at right). This year is the 100th anniversary of Charles' birth. Charles and Ray were a team, he says -- and he tells their story, through pictures and videos. They sketched and tried out and prototyped a lot of ideas, and they never delegated understanding. About furniture, they thought that the role of the designers is about anticipating the needs of the guest and make them feel good.
Eames also briefly tells about a three-dimensional storytelling project he's running, called Kymaerica, a sort of fictional parallel universe with fake "real places" to visit (they put fake historical plaques on buildings and such things).

Jan Chipchase, a user anthropologist for cellphone maker Nokia, lives in Tokyo and travels the world studying how people use mobile phones and other devices, and turning these insights into new applications and services. Soon three billion people will be connected (through cell phones). He did research in Uganda on how people use a service called Sente, provided by a Ugandan operator, that allows to transfer money from phone to phone. The way it works is: person A wants to send money to B in a distant village where there is a third individual owning a cell phone, who basically functions as the "village operator". Using Sente, A sends the money into the telephone account of the "village operator", who takes a commission and pays off the rest in cash to B. This brings a rudimentary banking infrastructure where there is none. Despite all the resources at my disposal, says Jan, I could not have never designed something as elegant and totally in tune with the local conditions. There is no central authority trying to control this: this is pure street-up innovation.
Which is his central point: streets are a never-ending source of inspiration for cell phone designers and beyond. He sees four key principles for looking at the future:

• the immediacy of ideas (the speed at which ideas go around is increasing, and a "big idea" means now embracing everyone in the planet);
• the immediacy of objects (the speed of adoption of things becomes much more rapid);
• street innovation (streets will figure out ways to innovate, as long as it meets real needs, in ways that we can't anticipate);
• conversation and our ability to listen

Singer Tracy Chapman goes onstage and sings four songs -- three of her successes, and a not-yet-released one which, she says, is "TED-inspired". Then novelist Isabel Allende ("The house of the spirits") tells three stories of women, three tales of passion.

End of day 3 at TED2007.

Comments

[Stafford-Ames]

We would like to do a story on Charles and Ray Eames and thier Ames Chairs for our membership. Also to include their family roots.