Mario Gagliardi | Home

Copying is a learning route to innovation. When I published my first article dealing with the topic in 2001, this seemed to be a counterintuitive idea to most. In another article in 2005, I proposed a model of development phases after the imitation stage. And indeed we have now reached a live example of a transition to the next stage: Chinese copies do not any more compete by price alone, but start to compete by new features.

Let us look at an innovation. There is a "long nose" in which the innovation brews, but does not quite reach a critical mass. Bill Buxton states the example of the mouse:

"Think of the mouse. First built in around 1965 by William English and Doug Engelbart, by 1968 it was copied (with the originators' cooperation) for use in a music and animation system at the National Research Council of Canada. Around 1973, Xerox PARC adopted a version as the graphical input device for the Alto computer.In 1980, 3 Rivers Systems of Pittsburgh released their PERQ-1 workstation, which I believe to be the first commercially available computer that used a mouse. A year later came the Xerox Star 8010 workstation, and in January, 1984, the first Macintosh—the latter being the computer that brought the mouse to the attention of the general public. However it was not until 1995, with the release of Windows 95, that the mouse became ubiquitous."

So there is a potentially long time in which the next hit is, in some form, already around (but you likely don't know). Then the innovation reaches critical mass. And then follows the long tail.


What I call the "coathanger" model of innovation combines the long nose, the innovation peak, and the long tail

In the "long nose" there can be several attempts, sometimes in different markets. Here the innovation is in the waiting. The boost comes along in the form of a change in the market environment. This can be 1) an external economic factor, such as he oil crisis of the early seventies which boosted fuel-efficient Japanese cars. This can be 2) another, previous innovation which changed the playing field so that a follower innovation can take place, shown at the example of Windows 95. Or it can be 3) a latent demand condition - an innovation which taps into a latent demand. This is the route to innovation which does not intrinsically depend on external change or another innovation - it sees a latent opportunity and changes the market by itself. The iPhone is a single product which out-innovated the telecommunications electronics competition and is now the dominant design for others to follow.

Innovations change the market environment and make way for other innovations: Windows 95, for instance, changed the playing field for computers worldwide, but was itself a follower innovation emerging from the long tail of the Macintosh. The Macintosh served as an inspiration, and Microsoft changed a fundamental feature: It was made available without a the need for a corresponding piece of hardware. This difference proved crucial, as it allowed Asian manufacturers to mass-produce computers with a useful GUI by simply licensing Windows.

In the long tail, the innovation changes the playing field and results in a multitude of derived products and services. There are principally three routes: Enhancing, competing with related products, and copying.

For enhancement to work, there must an option provided by the innovator to enhance the original (for the iPhone this would be the "made for iPhone" tag or the iPhone apps): This works as long as the secondary producer agrees to the rules set out by the original producer/innovator. If this is not available, or it appears preferable to compete, there will be a competition with related products. These are the related products which have been inspired by the original innovation and need to offer alternatives to compete with the original product: Since the arrival of the iPhone, competing manufacturers came up with similar products such as the Sony Ericsson Ixperia, BlackBerry Storm or Samsung i900. The chance to achieve a follower innovation is only given when competing with related products, although to get there the related product will need to provide a fundamental advantage - a mere tweak of the original will not do. And then there are the copies: Despite being in theory illegal, they usually compete by much lower prices, or, as recent developments show, by new features.

For copies, the price route- think Rolex fakes - works as long as the market knowledge is underdeveloped and a clone is easier accepted. This route is still taken by many smaller producers in China who target developing countries where consumer knowledge is lower. The more interesting clones compete by features. There is an array of Chinese iPhone clones, some of which have features differing from the ones provided by the original: For instance, one has a dual SIM card slot, ideal for people who frequently travel and want to avoid roaming fees.

The iPhone clones' new features do not yet fundamentally improve on the original. Rather the opposite, they struggle with details. Remember, the iPhone was out-innovating the Nokias and Ericssons not because it provided even more additional features, but because it radically improved on user interaction by removing clutter. It is not only the hardware, it is the combination of hardware - also the original iPhone is assembled in China - and smart software which makes it such a pervasive product. Still the iPhone clones which compete by new features are creating new, sometimes local niche markets in the long tail.




iPhone clones: Meizu, iOrgane, CECT Dual Sim, HiPhone, SciPhone.

How does globalization rewind? This interesting question comes to light in the recent affair surrounding the global assets of fallen giant GM. Multinational companies and national governments have decidedly different interests: The former need to make profit, which naturally pushes them into places where labor is cheaper and taxes are lower; The latter need to secure jobs and make tax money from companies, which naturally pushes them to attract and subsidize large companies so that they provide jobs and pay tax money.



That is fine as long as a company actually makes profit. Which is, since too long, not the case with GM. With the management of the world's largest carmaker now essentially in government control, government rationale is applied to a multinational. This will ultimately make the former multinational into a multiplied national - a company distributed over several countries under the contol of more than one government. The illustration is happening right now with the Opel affair. The US is arguing that American taxpayers cannot pay for a foreign subsidiary (which of course does not create either jobs or taxes in the US). It does so in Germany though, so it is in the interest of the German government.

There is of course more to it. GM's German subsidiary Opel has access to innovation and engineering capabilities in Germany, capabilities which would now be even more interesting for an allegedly streamlined GM in the US. It has knowledge in small, fuel-efficient cars, which in the SUV-obsessed times in the US before the crash had been deemed interesting only for the European market. So how can GM retain some control over these innovation assets which happen to be in Germany? The answer will be a business deal between governments. But who will steer this multiplied national after the crash?

It should not be governments. Much of the trouble of GM could have been avoided if it would not have been running much like a government organization all along. Rick Wagoner, the now chucked out General of General Motors, remained in his job for 8 long years through rudimentary cost-cutting and short-termist concentration on the immediately profitable, while avoiding any decisive intervention into the convoluted organization which would, at his time, certainly have brought him a sizeable opposition from more than one government. He was deemed OK because he was nonconfrontational, while his actual strategic decisions (boosting SUVs and killing the EV-1 electric car) had been decidedly lacking.

This was not even the first time GM had substantial trouble with the size and smartness of their cars: In the oil crisis of the early seventies, Toyota surged in the US by selling the small, fuel-efficient cars GM could not deliver, produced in a just-in-time production system called the Toyota Production System. A little longer memory span would have been helpful this time around.

Back in 2002 and 2003 I experimented with a few approaches towards sketch - and gesture-driven art generation. One idea was that users would, with a few strokes and gestures, be able to create expressive graphical animations. The resulting engine takes in user-generated strokes and, depending on gestures made with the mouse, generates animated variations. See here an example animation.

The prototype interface is very simple with two sketchpads, below the generated animated graphics:

Try the basic functions for yourself with this online version which I called Sumi-e botany for its graphic effect. Sketch something into the top and bottom sketchpads (stem and leaf), move the slider at the bottom (environment temperature) and hit "create plant" - voilà! The mouse gesture input for controlling the animation movement is here a slider located below the resulting artwork. 

Architectural fantasies: Constructive variations on a cube - click the thumbnails to see the large images:

George Akerlof, Nobel prize laureate for Economics in 2001, found out something consumers are confronted with rather often: How do you know if product X is OK, or, as Akerlof puts it, not a “lemon”? Take, for instance, the purchase of a used car. The chap who wants to sell the used car most likely knows more about it – if it had a previous accident, for example. This is an "asymmetric" market situation which is solely based on information – the party which has more information can skew the information and thus the prospective sale for his advantage. But you as a prospective customer know that, therefore you are suspicious when you buy a used car. That again makes it more difficult to sell it.

When this kind of situations occurs, one way to go about is “market signalling” which was described by Joseph Stiglitz: you inform the market about your product. You can also try to elicit information from the seller and other sources to know more about your potential risk. When you check a used car, you open the hood and look for suspicious leaks; you open and shut the door and listen if it sounds right.

But do you know what is going on in the car engine? Or in your computer? Couldn’t there be malicious programs running which record everything you do just to send it to your competition? Isn’t there the danger of viruses, worms and Trojans everywhere?
We realize via our senses. But we think that they don’t help us in checking out the complex machinery and intricate systems we surrounded ourselves with, while our way of making sense is the same our ancestors, the cave people, used. This way of making sense is still working quite well with many products - things you can smell, chew, taste and touch, for instance. Such as cheese.

But we get cheese tightly wrapped with extruded and laminated plastics.

If we don’t want to become paranoid, we have to afford a minimum of trust in our transaction partners that what we want is what we get. In historical terms, it afforded much less trust to go to an old-style grocery than it does to go to a supermarket. Every supermarket visit is an act where we need to afford a great deal of trust into what we might get when we buy this particular toothpaste or that particular cheese.

The signaling of a product has undergone interesting semantic changes. Just a generation ago, there was a simple way to find out if a product such as cheese was OK or not - you took a sample and smelled and tasted it. Now you watch a TV ad and buy a branded, packed cheese, and only at home you will be able to taste it. You cannot compare different cheeses by what would make sense - its taste, but by a replacement signal: its brand and packaging.

So an important, and problematic, aspect of design is mediation - to mediate between what you as a consumer don’t know and what the seller wants to make known. These can be very different things, of course, and in that respect, design can also be an ideal device to cover up.

Passage from de_sign, lecture by Mario Gagliardi at London Business School, January 25th 2002, updated May 24th, 2009.

In the traditional brand development process, a brand needs to transport its own set of values. It is developed as a static sign to mark out and "brand" on paper, packaging, car hoods, computer cases etc. These brands are essentially sign stickers put on any medium, irrespective of the inherent qualities of a medium. That worked well enough as long as all media have been by definition static - catalogues, name cards, car hoods etc. While working well enough on static backgrounds, these brands appear superimposed on dynamic media. The standard brand development process remains little changed and is still essentially geared for static backgrounds, mostly paper. However, less and less information is actually consumed on paper - one of the reasons why even quality newspapers such as the New York Times are in trouble.

To create an identity which is not superimposed, but blended into the medium, I experimented with parallel development. The identity for Design Zone Qatar was developed from the start across three identity devices in three different dimensions: A community application in 3D, a website in 2.5D and the logo in 2D with the added dimension of time. The advantages of the process is that three parallel developments interweave in time, and during the creative process ideas for one medium cross over into the other two developments. Thus the brand is not just stuck onto the surface, but driven by underlying visual narratives and interwoven into the dynamic media.

The first step is to explore underlying narratives which can drive the message from within the media which carry it. To visualize the meaning of Design Zone Qatar - the initiative and organization to grow and support a creative industries sector in Qatar and the Gulf region - I started with the idea of an abstract "landscape of creativity" - a virtual space of imagination. Below the first rough concept renderings of this "imaginative space", colored in hues of turquoise:

The second development was the sign. It started out as a collection of different animated signs rather than a single logo, as the idea was to express the diversity of creative expression on the basis of Islamic art and decoration: geometry. From there the logo developed into a single sign which yet is many signs: Over time, driven by an algorithm, the sign takes on different shapes and colors. Here some of the the initial concept graphics:

Below the final design and here a close-up movie of the dynamically changing logo in action.


For the site, I wanted to suggest the mission of Design Zone as a catalyst for creativity through a visual narrative. The logo, representing the spirit of Design Zone, should appear as an actor with character. In the visual narrative, the logo helps to realize and bring forward creations. It does that by by bringing them out from the depths of imagination into reality, helping to make them into actual expressions. This narrative is told by making the logos accompany and slightly push information windows from the depths of the "imaginative space" into clear view - a narrative for the experience of consciousness in which we form imaginative artifacts from "blurry" sensory impressions.

The idea of an "imaginative space" also served as the basis for developing a creative community site. I called it "Creative Beach" to suggest a positive, playful approach.On Creative Beach people can create, exhibit, and interact. It is currently in beta - below two screenshots showing one of the features, an embedded 3D creation application running in "the cloud", designed to be intuitive to use.

The primary advantage of this parallel design process is the transfer of design ideas between parallel developments. This favors the embedding of underlying metaphorical design ideas across all media used. For more about rethinking brands also have a look at the user-generated brand concept: DIY marque development

A short photo documentation of a "shared space" design process I conducted in November 2008 within the framework development for Design Zone Qatar, a development project for the creative sector in the Gulf and center of Qatar Foundation. The "shared space" process idea is based on one expressive medium which has to be shared by all participants. Thus the shared space becomes a canvas to enable a shared understanding and create a frame of reference for the instant prototyping of complex design projects. To focus the efforts of the participating architects on an actual result within a very short time frame, I had the building site printed out (thanks to Anders Graae and Jakob Ipland who put together over 100 screenshots of Google Earth in one long Photoshop session).

Within one very intensive week, we came up with an advanced concept for a zero-carbon pedestrian-friendly environment. This "creative resort" or village is envisioned to provide an inspiring, happening work and living space for creative people and locals.

The secret to success for creative workshops such as this is of course both in the people and in the process. Architectural talent is hard to come by in bunches. Good building designers mostly work alone or in small studios and therefore mostly don't have the capacity for more complex projects. Large architectural firms, on the other hand, are primarily focused on commercial aspects, a focus which tends to take attention away from design quality. "Starchitects", finally, are under pressure to replicate their own signature style in every project worldwide, an approach not adequate for designing a varied, inspiring and human-scale community.

The workshop participants here have been prize-winning international architects with smaller practices who showed high attention to design quality in previous projects. The shared space was the process to make it work: it transforms the tendency to compete against each other into a "shared competition". The shared space focuses efforts on enhancing each others contribution through collaboration while maintaining everybody's individual approach.

The output is not a rigid, fixed guideline which imposes a fixed architectural style, but a well-considered, flexible basis for further detail development, supported by a host of ideas for processing the detail design.



The sustainable energy concept: The community runs only on the sun and the sea

Spaces of Memory: A photographic travel through space and time, with visits to Bangkok, Beijing, Brasilia, Cairo, Colombo, Graz, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Paris, Rarotonga, Salzburg, San Francisco, Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo, Venezia, and Vienna.

The places here are places where things once happened. These are spaces of memory  - spaces where something was. This can be spaces where something was anticipated, but did not arrive; Or places where something, which was there, is gone. Brasilia is a case in point, a place of a grand ambition which was stopped, yet the ambition still lingers. In Beijing and Shanghai history happened again and again, but was - and is - repeatedly replaced. Vienna is full of past and the present at times tries to fit in. In all these places there is something which is not seen, but remembered - in the light, in traces and artifacts, and in the minds of people.

F O R M A L P O P Superstructures is the result of a process of random selection. First I created the images as stand-alone graphics. Following a creative technique pioneered by the Surrealists, I then wrote a short narrative to connect randomly selected images through keywords taken from news media. It features, of course, both the financial crisis and global warming, the two topics governing the news. It also features investors and the windmills of your mind, in a comic strip picture book with the aesthetics of old postcards and school infographics, connected randomly by a somewhat surreal-dystopian dime novel narrative.
http://formalpop.mariogagliardi.com

I am giving a Keynote on March 3rd at 9:45 at the Icograda Design Week in Doha. The topics revolve around collaboration and globalisation. To suggest a perspective I wrote a short text:

1. Globalization, otherness, and locality

Globalization is essentially a formation process of a particular large-scale system based on the exchange of goods and services. This is not new –throughout the better part of history, goods such as textiles, pottery, spices etc. have been transported from culture to culture and over large distances. People had been well aware when things had been from other places – it was something interesting and sought after for its special value. The difference in the last wave of globalization is that products from elsewhere are often not any more made and bought as if they are from elsewhere. In having no connection to where they are designed and made, products inevitably lose a good part of what makes them interesting: Difference and otherness.

When we look at the role of design in the development of economies in the last 20 years, otherness, locality and globalization are closely connected. In the initial phase of an emerging economy, a local market is gradually more involved in international trade. In this phase, local consumers have a high regard for imported goods, either because they are not available locally, or because they are of better quality, or because they are more interesting. Consequently, in this first phase, local producers tend to imitate and interpret foreign designs, both to retain local consumers and to win new customers abroad. This phenomenon happened 20 years ago in Taiwan and South Korea, and in the recent years in China. This is the phase when “otherness” is absorbed locally and exported again. However, this is a learning process which only starts with imitation. Over time, when an economy is maturing, manufacturers and service providers move on from imitation to gradually acquiring the knowledge to create their own design language, usually based on intrinsic qualities of their own culture. See also Alchemy of Cultures (2001), and Imitated, Commodified, Experienced (2005).

Emerging economies in the last years went through a similar phase, which is one reason why newer buildings in places far apart can look quite similar. They take on “dominant designs” such as, for instance, the steel skyscraper. Originally a 19th-century American concept, it became so much a 20th century symbol of technological progress that it is now, over 100 years after its creation by William Le Baron Jenney and Louis Sullivan, a dominant design which can now be found all over the planet, in the process having pushed aside much of the traditions of local architecture. Design, however, is not about sameness, but about making a positive difference.

2. Collaboration and design as black box and process

We desire difference because we are different. People naturally have different world views, expectations and ways of accomplishing tasks. These differences increase: as professional disciplines get increasingly specialized, people get increasingly locked into their domain knowledge. This is because modes of working are prescribed within a particular domain which over time adapts to different external environments. In the course of these adaptations, increasingly specialized tools and languages are developed. For example: Mathematicians and architects both use white sheets of paper with symbols on it. They can interchange their concepts (= communicate) as long as these concepts are fairly simple. However, once these concepts become more advanced, they inevitably become more complex, less intelligible without particular specialized knowledge, and hence less interchangeable.

As a result, collaboration is easy within simple tasks. However, where we need advanced collaboration is in complex situations, to solve complex problems. But the more advanced the required knowledge, the more difficult is cross-disciplinary collaboration, because domain knowledge involved becomes increasingly specialized.

Is design a solution to enable collaboration? It depends how you approach it.  When you describe design with a traditional art school approach, design is a “black box” where talent is put in and a design, somewhat miraculously, comes out. In this approach, we don’t really know how design comes about. Design is thought to emerge from a special artistic trait which you either have, or you don’t. However, you can also describe design differently - not as a “black box”, but a piece of software. In this model, the process makes the design. Once the process is understood, essentially everybody can be a designer.
The process approach makes design a way of thinking and solving problems. To enable design as  process, it is a good starting point to acknowledge difference while focusing on common aims – here an illustration of common aims between the design and the management profession.

Design as process comes in as a fundamental tool to rethink and improve. The future of design, then, is to advance economic, ecologic and social models, systems, and services.

ACH (Ansichten zur Architektur) is an architecture publication against the stream of glossy magazines. It comes as a newspaper and puts emphasis on quality content with intentionally very few pictures.

Published by the Institute of Public Buildings at the University of Stuttgart, the latest issue, No. 33, is out now with a delightful article of architect Max Baecher together with my images of the Tomba Brion-Vega by Carlo Scarpa (pages 2 to 5).

A little bit of earlier writing on design history:

On history and its rewriting in Vienna, about the Eiffel Tower and modernity, about the beginnings of industrial design and the influences of functionalism and Art Deco, about a famous struggle in the Bauhaus (PDF) and about the history of design organisations (PDF), also in Korean (Monthly Design): "세상과 멀어지는 디자인"

For something contemporary on design and organisations, here (doc) a few of my articles (Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations, University of California, Irvine).

The latest issue of Harvard Business Review features an article titled "Design Thinking". The message of the article by Tim Brown of Ideo is not new for designers, but it is for conventional managers. The innovation here is not design thinking per se - it was practiced and explored by designers since there is design - but that it makes its way into the business mainstream. In terms of trend research, the fact that an article on design thinking is published in Harvard Business Review shows that it is finally coming out of the fringe. It took some time - business guru Tom Peters was advocating for design since at least 10 years, which makes him already part of the avant-garde.

Less discussed, but perhaps the most challenging goal for design thinking is how to transfer its approach into everyday organisational practice. This is because in everyday organisational life it is often the unquestioned, taken-for-granted attitudes and reactions which turn out to be barriers to design thinking. What to look out for? I have started to put together a list:

Preconception: "My idea is GREAT"
People love their own ideas. On the one hand, this motivates people to come up with something. On the other hand, it makes people fall in love with their ideas although they might not be that good after all (the TV series American Inventor is a great illustration). This is an issue which also regularly comes up in design teaching, when students stick to an idea simply because they are convinced that it is good.
Design, although it has much to do with art, is not art. Art expresses individual viewpoints and relies on the approval of a select few. Design, on the other hand, needs to appeal to a wider, and often very wide, audience.

Prejudice: "These guys are wrong, I am right"
Prejudice, unfortunately, is an everyday encounter, but it's a particularly bad trait for designers. There are are some whose work probably was rejected once or a couple of times, and they consequently blame their audience, or managers. In fact, lots of good designs have been rejected throughout history - but mostly there is a rationale why a design gets rejected. A design thinker is required to find out and understand this rationale.
In the corporate realm, the one side is the "suits", the other side are the people "with the long scarf". However, both sides are needed to make design thinking work and actual design reality. The "suits" are interested in, among others, planning and efficiency, while designers, among others, look at things such as aesthetics, harmony, and effects on society (see also here).

Patronizing: "That does not work. I tell you what works"
It might work, it might not. It pays off to listen to different opinions, but it also can pay off not to give up right away and to show that an idea can work. Be aware of the sort of specialists who pretend to know their job so well that they have found the only one way of seeing a problem and insist on sticking to it - they are just (see Preconception above) people who are in love with their idea and nobody in the last 20 years questioned it.
Design thinkers and innovators do not defend their first idea to the bitter end, but welcome constructive critique, are ready to take a risk and a second look - in short, try to see things through the eyes of others.

Procrastination: A tried and tested response of organisations when faced with a new idea is to delay it (see also here). An effective way to get rid of innovation, but also an effective way to get your own company behind and right out of the marketplace.