: Chris Haycock

Pre-experience design refers to what some advertisers work to convey before the product is in the consumers hands. It is usually communicated through advertising, giving the potential user of a product the sense of how the product can benefit them. Over time, there has been some key examples, and in some of these cases, they’ve changed certain product realms completely.

Russell Davies recent essay points out a few of these examples. First noted, George Eastman’s complete simplification of the photographic process:

“One of the stories at the heart of the presentation was about the way George Eastman reinvented photography with Kodak by massively simplifying the photographic process (as far as the customer was concerned). Unlike the messy and complicated procedure that had gone before would-be photographers only had to “Pull the Cord (to prepare the shutter), Turn the Key (to advance the film), and Press the Button (to release the shutter)”. Mr Merholz is completely right about the way Eastman achieved so much by conceiving of what he was doing as a service rather than a product. Brilliant stuff. And an example to learn from.
But I think it’s also worth looking at the way Eastman used advertising as ‘pre-experience design’.

The slogan Eastman adopted was ‘You Push The Button, We Do The Rest”. Which is pithy, persuasive and memorable but not, on the face of it, true. As described above, the process was rather more complicated than that.  But it got to the essence of the simplicity involved and, significantly, by altering expecations about how the experience was going to be, made it feel simpler than it actually was. (I imagine, I’m guessing here.)”

The Apple iPhone certainly changed the communications market, just as Apple has generally adjusted the emotions related to other products in the past (portable music / iPod, computing in general). Beyond the how to pinch, how to point, how to check email, how to answer a call sequence communicated in the early commercials, there is something more subtle in these ads that should be pointed out:

“Other phone manufacturers will tell you that doing the stuff you need on their phone is objectively, measurably just as quick as on an iPhone, but that people report the iPhone is quicker. I suspect quite a lot of that is because the music on the ads makes the pace the iPhone moves at just feel right.  The ads are a component in the experience, they provide an implicit soundtrack to your experience.

Reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational made me think about this all over again. He tells of a number of experiments which illustrate the effect expectations have on experiences. Coffee served with fancy condiment dispensers nearby is reported as tasting better than the same coffee served next to tatty condiments. The price you pay for a drug alters it’s efficacy. If you want people to enjoy the wine you serve you’re better off investing in elegant glasses than decent wine. This is not new news. This is just how the brain works. Our feelings, our ‘experience of experiences’ is shaped by our expectations and it would sensible, if we’re trying to create great experiences, that we align the expectations to help the case we want to make.”

Should we expect to see more examples of pre-experience design surface moving into the future. It makes sense that this would be the case, but, corporate processes are very difficult to break.

Read Russell Davies full essay here.

Compilation of Apple iPhone ads can be seen here.

(source PSFK)

Project: We Are All Stars Poster for The Warhol Museum
Client: Uber

Cognitive Surplus: “the idea that automation gave us an enormous amount of free time to think and cogitate, and that sitcoms and other light entertainment from the past century were a way of absorbing that surplus, something we’re just shaking off now”

“So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.”

Read the entire article.

Source: BoingBoing

PF1 (aka Public Farm 1) is an installation slated for this summer at P.S.1 in New York represents a common idea as we move into the future… how close are we to the urban farmland?

“Could this be a glimpse of what could be in our city’s future? We’re looking forward to visiting PF1 (Public Farm 1 is the official name for the installation), and seeing how the project works when it’s in an actual space with actual people and yielding actual vegetables. In other areas of the world vertical or step farming happens in the countrysides where terrain or flat space constraints (mountains) have necessitated this way of growing.”

Source: Apartment Therapy

Read the full story here.

“Silent Energy is an interactive exhibit designed by Jannis Huelsen that enables participants to visualize energy consumption and discover new ways of converting kinetic energy into electricity.”

Read the full article here.

via PSFK

The advancements in plastics recently can be seen in new applications, especially in automobiles. Auto designers have pushed pushed the need for more wide-ranging and complex uses of the material:

“Sabic’s new Visualfx resins use two-shot molding and hydrographics. The former (photo below, in an Opel Corsa) is a method of layering resins with hardware or wiring embedded inside, which can enable glowing switches and knobs with translucency and internal light sources. The latter is a method of “immersing a part in an ink pattern floating on water like a film. The pattern adheres to the part [and] can wrap around the part to provide better coverage than with traditional in-mold decoration applications.”

Read the full article.

via Designcentre

Photographer Ilkka Halso’s latest series ‘Museum Of Nature’:
“explores the isolation of nature that comes along with the efforts to protect it, and includes compelling images with the use digital structures that enclose nature and protect it from pollution and the other actions of humans.”

Source: anamorphosis

Sony releases another amazing commercial to follow in the tradition of the super balls and paint bombing.

The hi-res version can be found here (suggested)

or the youtube low res:

France’s Enrovia is developing a temperature sensitive concrete varnish that will change color for certain conditions:

“Problems caused by disappearing traction when roads get icy will be solved when we all get our flying cars - it is the 21st century, after all. Until that long overdue promise is fulfilled, we’re all relegated to putting rubber to the road to reach our destinations. The way winter road conditions are currently mitigated involves lots of salt and many trucks. The trucks are pretty much necessary for removal of heavy precipitation, but salting exacts an environmental, as well as financial price. Motorists, too, could benefit from a warning that road surfaces are less than optimal. To that end, France’s Eurovia is developing a temperature-sensitive varnish that changes color to provide a visual indication to all road users that the pavement is freezing. Once it warms back up again, the varnish returns to its default hue. Durability trials are underway in several areas of France that experience severe weather, and if the coating holds up well, we could all be watching out for pink stripes in the winter. ”

By Dan Roth
Source: Autoblog via Coolhunting