Kaleidoscope - Innovation-Driven Product Development

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Kaleidoscope selected as IDEA finalist

Kaleidoscope's LINC phone concept was selected as a finalist in the IDSA/Businessweek-sponsored IDEA awards. We're proud to have made the cut, and to be in the company of so many excellent competitors.

Check out the rest of the IDEA awards here, and read more about the LINC concept at The Greener Grass.

Labels: press

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Kaleidoscope at the Greener By Design conference

Kaleidoscope's Chris Hammond, along with Eric Wilmot from Frog Design, Aiden Petrie from Item Group and Clark Schaffy from IDEO, led the final panel at June's Greener By Design conference in Arlington, VA. From Greener Design's coverage:

After Eric Wilmot laid out the reasoning behind asking clients to consider the waste from products they're requesting, Makower paraphrased the idea to "You may have to change more than you think ... or else you may not be here," and which Wilmot shortened to "Do you have the guts to go through with this?" and Chris Hammond likened to the pioneer's saying for addressing a world of scarcity: "Fix it up, wear it out, make do or do without."

...

Chris Hammond aptly summed up the importance of sustainability in design: "What used to be a nice-to-have feature is now going to be your ticket to the dance, and if you don't have it, you'll be left out in the cold."

Labels: press, sustainability

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

PartnerUp interviews Demetrius Romanos

Megan Dorn at PartnerUp recently interviewed Kaleidoscope's Demetrius Romanos on how to develop and design new products. It's a nice overview on how we work as design consultants to help our clients bring a new product to market.

Q: Once your customers come to you, where does the process go from there?
A: This depends on where we’re engaged, but the primary point of entry is that a client needs to enter a market with a product. We’ll do research and strategy to define the consumer needs, positioning and business opportunities, with the outcome driving design concepts. We’ll then start broad then focus in on the design and engineer of those concepts, working our way down to the direction for manufacturing. At that point we may even assist in selecting the appropriate vendors and may serve as a liaison during the manufacturing process to maintain design integrity.

Thanks to the PartnerUp team for their support. Check out the whole interview here.

Labels: press, 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