It seemed only natural to say yes when my friend and bike-riding partner, Ilan Dei, asked me to curate a design exhibition at his pop up retail shop focused on human-powered movement.

Ilan is a Venice-based furniture and environment designer. We share similar passions and run in the same professional circles. We’ve been riding buddies for 20 years, and for a long time we’ve wanted to collaborate on something. This seemed like an opportune time to finally do it.

We decided to bring design to the streets, sourcing the most innovative “people-powered” products designed and or manufactured in SoCal and highlighting them in Ilan’s pop up store on Abbot Kinney Blvd., where crowds perusing this strip of funky high-end shops and gourmet restaurants could wander in to view a colorful collection of products all available for purchase.

Our goal was twofold: to educate people about the innovative design happening here in our hometown, and to improve the health of our community. With that, we came up with the name “Moving LA: People-Powered Design.”

The double entendre encapsulated everything we wanted the exhibition to be about: the people of LA are physically moving about/around with the products on display, and LA moves us, or inspires us, to create and design.

Focusing the exhibition on physical movement was a perfect connection to my personal passion, as well as to Karten Design. My consultancy has been innovating in the health care industry for over 28 years, creating products that meaningfully improve people’s health experience.

The products on display at Ilan’s store are designed to get people moving across or in Los Angeles, from bikes and skateboards to hula-hoops and yoga equipment. They engage people to physically move and be active in their bodies and in their communities as they enjoy a healthy lifestyle. At Karten Design, my team and I are made aware every day through our work that not everyone has his or her health. To further promote wellness in our local community, Ilan and I decided to dedicate a portion of the proceeds from the exhibition to the Venice Family Clinic – a community health clinic that provides affordable, quality health care to 24,000 low-income, uninsured, and homeless patients each year – so they can help others operate a full power.

As a business owner and innovator, I also appreciate living and working in a hot bed of innovation. Los Angeles, where I’ve lived and worked for nearly 30 years, has deeply influenced my creativity, my perspective, and my mindset. The city is a hub for trends and groundbreaking ingenuity; it breeds freedom to create and innovate unlike anywhere else.

It wasn’t difficult to find fitness, health, and recreation products that are designed and manufactured in Southern California. This place is an incubator for innovation, particularly in these categories. Our temperate year-round climate and miles of beaches and mountain paths as well as the athletic community our environment has fostered drive creativity and ingenuity.

Over the past month, I’ve enjoyed learning about and meeting local, leading innovators who are creating positive experiences for active people. The common narrative, I learned, amongst these innovators is that they turned their hobby or passion or an experience they were missing into a business. The advantage with having this kind of story is that they are true insiders; they are incredibly in touch with their users and the values of their communities. In turn, they create meaningful, useful products that they themselves need and want to use. Some who participated in the exhibition even created new experiences through their products, such as surfskating and elliptical cycling.

The products we selected not only keep us active and introduce new functionalities, but they also look good. As seen in this design exhibition, Southern California innovators have combined the best of functional and aesthetic innovation; these are the kinds of creative thinkers powering LA.

To read more about the inspiration behind the exhibition and the innovation that came from local companies, check out the featured coverage in LA Weekly.

And thank you to all the companies who participated: Arbor Collective, Athletic Propulsion Labs, Carver Skateboards, ElliptiGo, Ellsworth, Hoopnotica, IntelliSkin, Loaded Boards, Malibu Kayaks, Poseidon Boards, Predator Cycling, Quickblade Paddles, Scott Anderson Surfboards, Sip N’Go, Valo Brand, and yogitoes.

This post originally appeared on Fast Company’s Co.Design

If you’re like me, you discovered design as a career option later in life–in college, or even after graduating and working in another field. By that point, most of us had already lost the mindset most beneficial for creative design. I find that life teaches us some bad habits as we grow up that get in the way of our creativity. Chief among them are perfectionism and professionalism. They have their proper place and time, but such control-based habits need to be put aside during the early phases of an innovation project, when raw creative power is essential.

We start to learn these habits in school. Leading thinkers such as Ken Robinson have reported extensively on how schools kill creativity. With an emphasis on performance and mastery, they encourage perfection at the expense of the ability to experiment and possibly fail. Then comes the workplace, where corporate professionalism requires that business be dealt with rationally and dispassionately. Before I founded Karten Design, I worked as an in-house designer in the corporate world. I quickly realized that to succeed in this type of environment you couldn’t display any type of emotion. People never got mad or excited in meetings. They wore tightly controlled masks that hid their core, unpolished selves–their source of creativity.

With perfectionism and professionalism instilled in people early in life, how do we ensure that designers of the future enter the profession with the right mindset? Catch them while they’re still young, before they learn many of those inhibiting rules in schools and in the workplace.

Recently, I decided to do something about it. Karten Design partnered with the Da Vinci Design High School, an independent charter school in the South Bay of Los Angeles with a hands-on, project-based learning model, to teach the freshman class about product design. In a project aimed at combining physics curriculum in electromagnetism with a humanities unit on social-change poetry, we presented students with a set of driving questions: What would headphones look like if they were meant to transmit a message of social change? How would they look if they were intended to appeal to a certain target audience, so they could deliver their message to the right set of ears? To answer this question, students would design and build a pair of working headphones to address those questions.

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“In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through,
but rather how many can get through to you.”
Mortimer Jerome Adler – American Author and Philosopher

Recently our studio instated its first official book club, which we have coined Book Klub to give it a more personal touch. I had been thinking about starting one for quite some time, as I felt it was important to inject learning into our culture more directly. And in full disclosure, I thought it’d be a good way to motivate me to finish books.

Karten Design has long fostered a culture of learning – we not only hire those with an innate thirst for learning, but we also make sure to provide outlets to learn in our studio through events like our Conversations series and Lunch N’ Learns. But a book club provides an entirely different learning venue for us. We get to seek knowledge, explore current thinking, and learn together.

The books we’ve chosen thus far incorporate relevant, tangible practices that are near and dear to how we operate and what we deliver to our clients. They inspire us to further design ourselves personally and as a design firm to be better at what we do.

We’ve read three books now, and, for me, the best part hasn’t been reading – though I like that too – but rather the group discourse that has transpired. These talks remind me of what I loved most about my lit classes in high school and college: really digging into whatever book we were reading. That same level of in-depth analysis and dissection that took place in the classroom is taking place on the patio of our studio.

Similar to a classroom, we’ve formed a place to gather and share thoughts, ideas, and emotions. I am able to see how my team thinks, what stood out to some people and what stood out to others. I learn more about my employees and what they care about. What was the most refreshing, though, was the honesty and insights that were brought to the table. Our monthly Book Klub meetings are a time when we can truly blend together, build community, and cultivate our office culture.

The net effect of this discourse? We end up turning the mirror inward. Book Klub becomes an open forum where anyone can weigh in. It is an organic opportunity for our entire organization to share their opinions, ideas, and rants in a non-judgmental environment. In this setting, we are able to examine and dissect, relate and compare these cited case studies and practices to what we are doing and what we are not doing, for good and for bad. As the principal of a studio, it is pretty cool to hear everyone’s perspective on how to implement change and successful practices that we’ve read to our work.

Much of Book Klub was founded out of the collective desire to continually grow and eventually change for the better in the workplace and in our personal lives. And I can see this beginning to happen. By reading about habits in Charles Duigg’s The Power of Habit, for example, we learned how our behaviors could be distilled into one “keystone habit.” At Alcoa, creating a keystone habit of safety revolutionized every facet of its business. This example opened up a dialogue on our habits – good and bad – at Karten Design. Another example of this is from our last meeting on Imagine by Jonah Lehrer. In the book, Lehrer writes about Pixar to illustrate the power of group creativity. Teamwork, he writes, and the belief that you can learn a lot from your coworkers have been the secrets of Pixar’s success. This got us thinking about how we work together in the studio, and what we can do maximize our creativity through more collaboration.

We are still learning how to adapt and implement these lessons into our daily routines, work habits, procedures and processes, and culture. With time, I am confident that this unique forum where we can gather together and engage in a higher level of conversation than we normally have will benefit us…stay tuned as we discover how…

Over the past six years working with Starkey Laboratories, we have learned more about the unique emotional and physical needs of 65- to 85-year-old end users than any other demographic/end user we’ve designed for. We know that as people age their physical and emotional needs change, and, in turn, so do the products and services they use. It was this focus on serving aging Americans that linked us with The Aging Technology Alliance.

The Aging Technology Alliance, or AgeTek, is a consortium of companies that create solutions to fit the emotional and physical needs of older adults. These companies have joined together because they, like Karten Design, believe that innovative products and services can improve people’s lives and change the way they can thrive as they get better, not just older.

As part of AgeTek’s mission to provide professional education for its members, Director of Design Strategy and Research Ron Pierce and I presented a webinar as part of their webinar series on how to design products for older users. We discussed how to use Design Research to discover unmet needs, and keep the end user at the center of the product development process. I wrote a blog post to follow up our webinar, synthesizing what we shared into four insights that are detailed below. I hope there’s something that you can take away, as well.

OPPORTUNITIES IN THE AGING TECHNOLOGY SPACE 

Many growing companies are focused on technology. They’ve developed something with the power to change lives and, consequently, they fall in love with their technology. A mature product has to have effective technology, but then must move into the next stage—applying technology to the human context. This requires a holistic understanding of the user—their behaviors, rituals, ceremonies, preferences, delights, and their limitations. Don’t just fall in love with your technology; fall in love with your end users. Learn what emotions they experience when they interact with your product, or even when they think about purchasing it. Getting inside users’ heads was the starting point for Karten Design’s relationship with Starkey. We quickly discovered that older people associate hearing aids with age, disability and weakness, and as a result they put off purchasing a hearing aid, living in isolation for almost a decade. Many products associated with aging have the same stigma that’s important to understand. At the point where someone needs an assistive product, he or she often already feels disabled. It’s important that technology products empower users rather than making them feel weaker.

R.O.I. ON DESIGN 

There are more ways to measure return on investment than quarterly financial gain. Consider also returns like customer relationships. We believe a well-designed product can be a brand ambassador. Good design can help your product to be distributed in new channels and reach new consumers. It also has the potential to strengthen relationships with your existing channels and end users. One of the most exciting results of our design partnership for Starkey’s executives was the improved image that the company gained within its existing sales channels. Each new product introduction has created a stir at international trade shows, building Starkey’s global reputation for design leadership. Audiologists have gone from simply carrying Starkey products to being evangelists for Starkey products. Even end users, who may have initially been reluctant to adopt a hearing aid, have become enthusiastic advocates for Starkey’s products. Building relationships between your customers and your brands is a long-term investment with long-term returns.

DESIGN RESEARCH

Karten Design spent three months in the field conducting design research with hearing professionals and hearing aid users before translating our insights into design for Starkey. During this time we examined all of the factors that would affect a hearing aid’s market impact: manufacturing process, sales channels, and most importantly end users and their ceremonies. Get to know your customers’ ceremonies and habits. As you develop a research strategy, consider whether your product fits in with those ceremonies or requires users to develop a new habit. Successfully implementing a paradigm shift, as we did when introducing the industry’s first gesture control, requires a higher level of research in order to create and evaluate the product’s value and introduce the right metaphor to make it easily understood by users.

SENIORS’ RELATIONSHIP WITH TECHNOLOGY

A common myth persists that seniors are afraid of technology. In my experience, this is not the case. Seniors are ready and willing to adopt technology that provides a benefit in their lives. When we helped Starkey develop a capacitive gesture control for its hearing aids, we were adopting a ceremony from iPhones, which inspired a slew of touch screens in consumer electronics. We questioned whether a modern technological ceremony would be relevant and easily understood by older users and the answer, with a few qualifications, was a resounding yes. Gesture control was relevant to users not because it represented a cool new development, but because it satisfied a need—to control a hearing aid discretely with a simple motion. Our strategy was to focus the technology on meeting the need. When it does this in the simplest possible way, the technology becomes transparent. The iPad is another example of transparent technology that has been enthusiastically adopted by older users. The iPad fulfills an emotional need to connect and engage with family and friends. The product is so easy to use and understand that the technology fades into the background; all you see is the benefit.

There are two areas that technology companies can focus on to improve their relationship between their products and senior customers. For any user, but perhaps most importantly for seniors, a successful product relationship is based on mutual respect and two-way communication.

I find it disrespectful when companies dumb down products either visually or technologically for older users. Today’s seniors have more sensitivity to quality and design than previous generations. Just because someone becomes physically disabled as they age does not mean they become aesthetically handicapped. When we designed hearing aids for Starkey, we leveraged inspiring design imagery from luxury automobiles and modern architecture to create a sophisticated image. Aesthetically re-framing a product this way—respecting seniors’ aesthetic sensibilities and the self-image they’ve built throughout their lives—has done much to chip away at the stigma associated with hearing aids.

Seniors’ relationship with technology benefits from frequent dialog between person and product. Pay attention to the feedback your product gives its user. The success of gesture control hinged in part on fine-tuning its feedback to let users know not just when there were problems, but to confirm that they had successfully made adjustments.

If you’re interested in additional research on the Boomer Generation, you can download Karten Design’s Orange Slice, a mini report on the lifestyle, economic and psychographic trends that will affect this generation as they move into a new stage of life.

You may have noticed something hairy happening around our studio. This year for the first time, Karten Design has formed a team to participate in Movember. During the month of November, 11 of us “Mo Bros” have pledged to grow a moustache for 30 days, becoming walking, talking billboards for men’s health causes– specifically cancers affecting men.

This is a cause near to my heart. I’ve had friends and even employees who are survivors of testicular and prostate cancer. But beyond those experiences I’ve witnessed directly, I see an unmet need for men to take more ownership of their health.

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With the introduction of Timeline a few weeks ago, Facebook emphasized the importance of life stories in human interaction. This interface taps into the way that people innately understand their own lives with a narrative structure that allows users to express a whole identity, rather than a fragmented view of events and photos.

Timeline is just one example of how companies can tap into the power of narrative to communicate with customers on a meaningful level. Recently, my team found inspiration in an unlikely source: health care. The USC Body Computing Conference 5.0 highlighted organizations that are blurring the lines between medicine and entertainment to change how consumers view their health. I asked Karten Design’s resident storyteller, Anne Ramallo, to expand on what our designers and researchers took away from the event.

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A few months ago, I talked to Linda Tischler as she researched her introduction for Fast Company’s Master’s of Design issue, available online today. As she prepared to deliver the “State of the Union” on American design, she asked me, essentially, what is the soul of American design? What is design’s role in a struggling global economy?

It got me thinking. I talked it through with some of my team members and we came to a conclusion that has been very important to our way of thinking about our work at Karten Design: Good design is about the power to create positive experiences between people and products, spaces or systems. That’s what gets people excited– that’s what gets them engaged as learners, participants and consumers.

Design’s power lies in its ability to create not products or artifacts, but experiences. People are always seeking new experiences—it’s a part of the human condition. Design creates new experiences through products, spaces and services.

(more)

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I live and work in Los Angeles, the land of celebrities and special effects, where I’ve witnessed the battle for big box-office draws and learned something from it. As product innovators, we also strive to create standout products that catch people’s attention. In our efforts to differentiate our designs from all the other stuff on the market, we might learn a lesson or two from Hollywood and the writers, actors, and directors who manage to hook their audiences by crafting narratives that tap into people’s primal emotions.

Grabbing consumers’ attention is getting harder. Johanna Blakley, a researcher at USC Annenberg School’s Norman Lear Center, theorizes that as we’re inundated with exponentially increasing amounts of information, the competition for eyeballs intensifies. In what she calls the “attention economy,” consumers access an abundance of information in the form of media, games, and advertisements. In fact, five exabytes of data are created and collected every two days! Product manufacturers have to compete with all of these other forms of entertainment, and it’s their job to make their products visible.

Working like Hollywood entertainers, Karten Design has investigated how to tap into raw, primeval emotions — fear, sex, humor, surprise, and desire — to garner attention. Here’s just a snapshot of where the strategy has succeeded in entertainment and design. (more)

(ARTICLE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON CO.DESIGN)

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Last year, Karten Design had the opportunity to work with Hitachi Global Storage—a company that challenged us to re-imagine the external hard drive for “Digital Natives.” This generation of customers sees no boundaries between the digital world and what older Digital Immigrants call “the real world.” Their viewpoint opens new opportunities, and challenges designers to create unlimited possibilities for new products, interfaces and experiences.

As I look at all of the new technologies and products being unveiled this week, I think the lessons we learned during our LifeStudio project with Hitachi GST are particularly poignant: good consumer electronics design makes experiences more accessible and enjoyable. That’s what I hope I will see at CES.

Can Tech Newbys Design Products for Tech Natives

Most designers are digital immigrants–and yet their target audiences are digital natives. That poses a serious challenge for designers.

Originally published on Co Design, August 26th, 2010

Ever wonder why the email icon on your computer looks like a postage stamp or an envelope? Think about it: email has almost made the postage stamp irrelevant, so why does the icon cling to an antiquated ceremony?

Some of the research we’ve been doing at Karten Design has clarified such seeming paradoxes and made me wonder how our products and interfaces will take shape in the years to come. Until recently, many objects have taken cues from established ceremonies, whether mailing a letter or filing a piece of paper. Much of this has to do with the sensibilities of a product’s target audience: Digital Immigrants. CONTINUE »