Kaleidoscope - Innovation-Driven Product Development

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Kaldeidoscope in ME Magazine

ME Magazine, a mechanical engineering publication as the title suggests, spoke to our very own Chris Hammond recently for an article they published on user interface. Here's what he had to say:

Apple also did something else unusual. It kept the iPod controls simple. It included the commands necessary to play music, and it made them intuitive and obvious. (Later, it added equally intuitive commands to display photos and movies.)
This took enormous discipline, said Chris Hammond, design manager for the Cincinnati-based design shop Kaleidoscope. "Complex interfaces happen with consumer electronics all the time," he said. "You start with a sheet of features and you look at how many bullet points differentiate you from the competition, and try to include as many features as possible.
"But look at the iPod or the Blackberry personal digital assistant," Hammond said. "It's an integrated, rich experience that people become addicted to. Think about Apple's iPhone. You can access all those features and never use a single drop-down menu. Now, think about the clunky interfaces on your TV and VCR. They are among the most unintuitive products ever designed."

Read the full article here

Labels: links, press

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Cincinnati Enquirer quotes Kaleidoscope on "green giving"

Last week, the Cincinnati Enquirer interviewed us for an article on "green giving," or eco-friendly Christmas gifts. The article came out this morning on the front page of the Business section, and you can also read it online. They came to us because of our new project, The Greener Grass, which you should check out if you get a chance. Here's what we had to say:

That widespread appeal is a reason environmental awareness is reaching critical mass, said Finn McKenty, a strategist at Kaleidoscope, a product design and development company with an office in downtown Cincinnati.
Kaleidoscope has recently unveiled The Greener Grass, a seven-part project that shares the company's experts and resources with the public to initiate positive change "to design a better future."
"You generally see that people become aware of these issues when they affect the middle-class consumers and their pocketbooks," said McKenty.
In the last year, rising gas and heating costs, tainted pet food and toy recalls mean the middle class is starting to "tangibly feel the impact of a lot of these issues," he said.

Check out the full article here

Labels: links

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Kaleidoscope launches The Greener Grass

We're pleased to announce a new project that's an extension of the Kaleidoscope banner, The Greener Grass.

In a nutshell, we think of The Greener Grass as our way of "collaborating to design a better future," as the tagline says. It's a web-based platform where we interview experts about a 7 of the most important aspects of our collective, global future. Each unit in The Greener Grass will follow this format: 4 or 5 weeks of interviews and research, followed by our analysis, and finally our concepts for products and services that embody the key takeaways from the interviews and analysis.

The Topics
Health & Wellness (Oct-Nov 2007)
Energy (Dec-Jan 2008)
Family & Community (Feb-Mar 2008)
Leisure & Entertainment (Apr-May 2008)
Education (Jun-Jul 2008)
Globalization (Jul-Aug 2008)
Travel & Transportation (Sep-Oct 2008)

As product developers, it's what we do every day for our clients, and The Greener Grass gives us the opportunity to apply our skills toward designing a better future for all of us- we hope it can be a way for us to give back to the community.

Please visit The Greener Grass, and help us spread the word. If you see a link that someone you know might be interested in, pass it on to them. If you or someone you know would be interested in participating in an interview, let us know. Either way, tell us what you think and how we can make it better!

Labels: links, work

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Propel Biofuels launches Cleandrive with help from Kaleidoscope

We're happy to announce that our friends at Propel Biofuels launched a program called CleanDrive, and Kaleidoscope was proud to be a part of it. We worked with Propel and their high-caliber Web firm If/Then to define how to visualize the emissions reductions made possible with biodiesel, communicate it to their customers, and what that means for the Propel brand. And we think it's a really cool program.

Every time you fill with biodiesel, it improves our planet and our community. CleanDrive members receive personalized emissions reports, and see the positive change they are making. Register today to start tracking. Reports begin in November.

Visit the Propel site to learn more about them and CleanDrive.

Labels: links, work

Saturday, October 06, 2007

The Cathedral & The Bazaar

For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about Eric Raymond's classic essay, "The Cathedral & The Bazaar". From his abstract:

I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of the surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral'' model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar'' model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow'', suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.

This paper is one of the seminal works of the open-source software movement. I'm not sure exactly how old it is, but I first came across is some time in the late 90s. If you haven't already read it, you should take a look now.

I believe that it encapsulates not only the core beliefs and values of the open-source movement (who brought you Wikipedia, Linux, Firefox, PHP, Apache, MySQL, and a very large portion of the other core technologies that power the internet), but also defines the value system of the leading creative minds of our culture in general. Although they're not open-source or Free (with a Big F), the various user-generated content sites that have largely redefined the media landscape are more or less an extension of the bazaar model (MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, blogs, etc).

It's a short read, but highly thought provoking, whether you work with software or not. Think about how the points it raises could apply to your line of business- because I guarantee they do.

Read it here.

Labels: links

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Jack Welch on managing creativity

I've been a big fan of Jack for a long time, and I'd never question his ideas when it comes to managing a gigantic, Fortune 100 company with dozens of layers of bureauacracy and a dizzying array of business units. When it comes to managing a creative organization, though, I always kind of figured his limits would be obvious.

Turns out I couldn't be more wrong. It seems that the wisdom of Jack Welch knows no bounds.

The latest Welch Way (the column he writes with his equally intelligent wife Suzy in Businessweek) asks if managing creative people is different from managing other kinds of people- and the answer is a resounding "Yes!" Jack and Suzy refer to the challenge of managing creatives as "Wielding The Velvet Hammer," which couldn't possibly be more accurate.

First of all, you should listen to the podcast, because it has a lot of excellent tips on getting the most out of creatives without upsetting the rest of the company. Second, it's a good reminder of exactly how much experience counts in business. There's really no substitute for sweat equity.

Don't ever doubt Jack.

Listen to the podcast here

Labels: design management, links

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

7 Lessons from the iPhone

One of the things we always use as a guiding principle for creating products is that the user comes first, the technology second. That doesn't mean technology isn't important- it is. It just means that technology in and of itself doesn't mean anything to the user. Technology is only meaningful to the extent that it fulfills an unmet need. This sounds obvious, but the truth is that it can be hard to keep the technology wolves at bay. It's all too easy to succumb to featuritis and throw more and more technology at a problem without ever actually solving it.

There's a great post over at poetpainter that looks at this struggle through the lens of the iPhone development process, distilling it down into seven lessons. Check out the slideshow below (RSS readers click here for the slideshow).

Labels: links, product development

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Back from YPulse Mashup

Demetrius and I spent a few days in San Francisco last week attending the 2007 YPulse Mashup. In the words of YPulse founder and organizer Anatasia Goodstein:
The 2007 Mashup is produced by Ypulse, the leading independent blog for youth and teen media and marketing professionals and Modern Media, which builds, produces and markets highly-engaging business events for leading media brands and media entrepreneurs.

We had a great time, and learned a lot. The two-day event was divided up into a variety of lectures, panels, and roundtable discussions, all centered on how teens are talking and living online. We don't do a lot of interactive work, but we do work on tons of products for Gen Y consumers, and we figure that we need to have a detailed understanding of their world- and online is definitely a huge part of that.

One of the most interesting pieces was the teen entrepreneurs panel, featuring half a dozen teenagers that founded companies like myYearbook, Emo Girl Talk, and Scriptovia. They offered As I suspected, the teen panelists all said that they use email exclusively for business communication, and use MySpace, Facebook, or texting for personal communication. You can read more details on that at the Yahoo recap of the panel.

Other interesting pieces of the conference included Melanie Strong, US brand manager for Nike iD discussing their online strategy and Nike iD's role within the company's portfolio as a whole; an "Old School to New School" panel featuring representatives from various old-school print empires like Harper Collins and Hearst talking about their transition to online presences; and the keynote the discussion on "convergence culture." It's way too much to summarize here, but if you subscribe to the YPulse podcast, I'm sure there will be some clips up shortly.

Thanks for Anastasia at YPulse for putting together an amazing conference, as well as all the sponsors, panelists, and attendees that made it happen. We hope to be back next year!

Labels: branding, links, marketing

Monday, April 23, 2007

Awake At The Wheel

Earth Day is a few days behind us, but that doesn't mean we're done thinking about responsible product lifecycles, lowering our carbon footprints, and other issues surrounding sustainable development. Clean energy is really at the heart of the whole discussion, with considerable press devoted to it over the past few months. It's one of, if not the hottest, places to invest right now, and it's clear that this train has left the station.

Our friend Rob Elam, CEO of Seattle-based Propel Biofuels maintains a great blog on all things biodiesel by the name of Awake At The Wheel. The purpose is clear, the information is great, and it's on our daily reading list:

Our mission is to provide the most accurate, up to date and practical information to biodiesel drivers. We drive biodiesel, our friends drive biodiesel, and our customers drive biodiesel. That's a lot of biodiesel feedback! Awake at the Wheel is the forum for us to publish this information.

Labels: links, sustainability