Author: MARK WILSON

01.10.20

FC Most Innovative Companies Awards: How Nike nabbed Design Company of the Year 2019

BY MARK WILSON 3 MINUTE READ

Cool-looking shoes garner most of the attention when it comes to sneaker innovation, but Nike has nabbed Fast Company USA’s 2019 Design Company of the Year award for something else: A savvy retail strategy that blends analog stores and digital platforms to drive its business forward. At Nike’s House of Innovation store in New York, United States, mannequins are fitted with QR codes so phones can identify each item on display, and reservable lockers are stocked with new shoes in your size if you’ve ordered in advance. Last year, Nike invested more than US$1 billion in new capabilities and consumer concepts. Today, 170 million people are part of Nike Plus—the digital loyalty programme behind Nike’s retail and fitness apps. After admitting in 2018 that the shoe industry still lags behind most others in digital retail, Nike grew its digital business 35 percent in the last fiscal year and had its first billion–dollar digital quarter in 2019. According to CEO Mark Parker, digital commerce will generate at least 30 percent of Nike’s revenue by 2023. Here, he tells Fast Company about the company’s evolving strategy for connecting with customers—and why this sometimes requires taking a stand in today’s increasingly partisan world.

What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in retail during your 13 years as Nike’s CEO?
Retail has really become more of a two-way dialogue. Instead of just selling products, we are actually interacting, communicating, gaining knowledge, then using that to create even richer experiences. The speed at which we do that, it’s always been there on the product side. But we’re applying that to the whole consumer experience, whether it’s on mobile or in a large-scale, showcase-format store like Nike House of Innovation.

How does something like Nike Fit, which is an app that scans your foot to size your shoe, sit within this retail model?
Half the population is in footwear that is the wrong size. This scanning techn allows us to go right from measurements on the foot to an accurate sizing in the store. It’s those types of things that we try using to allow the consumer to spend more time with our experts in the store going deeper [than sizing], getting more information on the product, [enabling us to know] what they need and what we have to best meet those needs.

How would you describe the role of design at Nike?
Design is an incredibly critical differentiator for any brand. I think you’ve got to move more quickly in terms of the innovation cycle, and it’s about presenting something that’s meaningful to people, relevant, and unexpected. But our focus has always been on the athlete. What do they need to perform at the highest level? That drives a lot of the innovation at the company. And that innovation takes on different forms, different looks. The aesthetic, obviously, is very important, as well as the function. But we’ve tended [toward] function-based innovation that drives a new aesthetic. People may not be drawn to the function. They may be drawn to the aesthetic. But the aesthetic is based on function and performance. And
I think that’s always been our touchstone.

It’s not just function driving Nike’s design, though. The women’s football kits that Nike designed for the World Cup seem like examples of design emanating from social awareness. Each team had a design that meant something to its members. The Australian team, for instance, had a jersey that almost looked spray-painted, as a nod to Melbourne’s graffiti culture in the  Nineties. We’ve always drawn from a huge spectrum of sources for design inspiration. Certainly, when you’re designing a national team kit, you’re looking at the history and heritage of a nation. Those are incredible bits of inspiration. But we’re layering that on top of a fixation and obsession with fit, form, and function, and it’s also a part of the storytelling of the product. I think really good design speaks to you. It tells a story. We can obviously amplify that through communications and merchandising, and how we display and think about product online, in store, and then certainly on the fields of play in competition. But, as a designer, you’re always looking for relevant bits and pieces of inspiration that drive meaningful design and tell a compelling story.

Nike doesn’t seem to avoid tough conversations. The company has delved head-on into them, such as aligning itself with figures in the sporting world who are outspoken about inclusivity, including Colin Kaepernick, Serena Williams, and Megan Rapinoe—and Nike has been criticised for this. It seems like you are choosing sides, actively and openly, as part of your identity. There are values that are important to the brand and the company that we’re not going to shy away from. We support the views of our employees, our athletes. And yeah, we will put a stake in the ground and take a stand. I don’t want
to suggest that we don’t. I think it’s probably pretty obvious that we do, and that’s a part of who we are as a company.

And you take it on the chin from both left and right. That’s not a reason not to have a voice. It’s important for me personally, but also for the company, to stand for some values. We don’t shy away from that.

Article originally appeared in Fast Company SA’s December/January edition. 

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11.22.19

The next generation of wearable and liveable tech: It’s more about survival than communication

BY MARK WILSON 2 MINUTE READ

Our air is getting dirtier, and our world is getting hotter. It all adds up to a very unpleasant future, especially in cities, where a simple stroll outside could become a sweaty and toxic task.

To combat this dystopia, the design and innovation studio Seymourpowell has developed a provocative concept that’s meant to hang on your neck and provide a microclimate around your head. It’s called Atmosphère. Yes, the metal concept very closely resembles one of those personal air conditioners sold in the Sharper Image catalog circa 1998. Indeed, Atmosphère is meant to operate along the same lines—like a big heat sink, dissipating some of the warmth away from your body.

But the device’s more experimental features include sensors, which can read your vitals and information from the air at the same time. With this data, the Atmosphère can activate air filtration, add vapor to the air to raise the humidity, or even mist beauty products at your face (like sunblock). In this sense, it’s a very strange hybrid gadget we haven’t really seen to date—a real time beauty product that’s also actively monitoring your health. It’d be like if the Apple Watch weren’t just a pedometer or heart rate sensor but it sprayed self tanner onto your pasty arms and provided a jolt of electricity were your heart to ever stop. Seymourpowell envisions the device as part of a collection of similar devices like a chaise lounge. The metal furniture would cool your body in a too-warm home and provide all the same benefits to your personal microclimate as the worn device.

Of course, Atmosphère is a work of virtual science fiction, but its capabilities aren’t so far beyond the reach of current technology. We have the sensors, the air filtering, and all sorts of other methods to vaporize liquids already. Perhaps this collar is a bit small to pack all those technologies inside, and it would need to be recharged too often to be practical today. But Atmosphère certainly seems feasible, which is one reason it’s so haunting.

In 2018, a variety of fashion designers presented runway collections inspired by hazmat suits and other elements inspired by sheer survivability. Now with Atmosphère, we’re seeing that same concept of resilience in the face of environmental destruction playing out in the industrial design space. Perhaps it should feel reassuring that so many creators are considering climate change not as an abstract thought but a reality to actively prepare for. But if all these provocations demonstrate anything, it’s that our comfort and safety in the world of tomorrow may directly correlate to the expendable income—and our ability to mitigate climate change’s impacts at a range of just a few inches from our person. It’s as if designers and companies have tacitly determined that we can no longer save the world—but maybe we can save ourselves for a while.

Article originally appeared in fastcompamy.com

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10.30.19

Inside Google’s innovative Design Lab

BY MARK WILSON 2 MINUTE READ

There’s a building on Google’s Mountain View, California, campus that’s off-limits to most of the company’s own employees. The 6,503-square-metre Design Lab, which opened last June, houses around 150 designers and dozens of top-secret projects under the leadership of VP and head of hardware design Ivy Ross, a former jewellery artist who has led the company’s push into gadgets that range from the ground-breaking Google Home Mini speaker to the playful line of Pixel phones. Inside the lab—and away from the cubicle culture of the
engineering-driven Googleplex—industrial designers, artists, and sculptors are free to collaborate. “Google’s blueprint for how they optimise is great for most people [at the company],” says Ross. “Designers need different things.”

Each space in the lab was constructed to help Ross’s team marry tactile experiences (understated, fabric-covered gadgets that feel at home in any space) with digital ones (Google’s unobtrusive UX). In the two-story, skylit atrium entrance, for example, a birchwood staircase leads to a library filled with the design team’s favourite books. “We’re the company that digitised the world’s information,” says Ross, “[but] sometimes, designers need to hold things.”

Inside, the Lab has entire rooms devoted to colours and materials, along with curated collections of outside objects to inspire designers as they decide on Google’s palette and textiles. There are also Garage rooms (for working out engineering challenges), the Model Shop (where designers build prototypes), and an area with a pair of “refuelling station” beds, where staff can lie back, don headphones, and recharge.

The one thing in short supply: Conference rooms. Most business meetings take place in other buildings. The Lab, stresses Ross, “is a sanctuary to get the design work done”.

Designers hash out product schematics in one of the Lab’s Garages.

Hardward design chief Ivy Ross (right) and designer Leslie Greene compare colours across Goolge product lines – from Nest stands to Pixel phones – in the Lab’s Colour Room. 

Google designers, who  often draw inspiration from everyday objects (including socks and carabiners), look at swatches for an unreleased  wearable the team developed for the Milan Furniture Fair. 

The two-storey entrance to Google’s Design lab serves as both a library and a gathering spot for the building’s 150+ employees. 

Sketches of the company’s last iteration of the Pixel phone hang on the walls of a Garage.  

A pair of mesh Adidas by Stella McCartney Pureboost sneakers are on display in the Materials room. 

Article originally appeared in Fast Company SA magazine. Read more in our October/November 2019 issue, now on shelves. Photographs by Cody Pickens. 

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10.09.16

How Domino’s Is Using Technology To Drive Pizza Sales

BY MARK WILSON 2 MINUTE READ

Pizza chains have long courted customers with gimmicks like stuffed crusts and meat-heavy specialty pies. And while Domino’s also offers its share of shameless waistline expanders, the company has distinguished itself by emphasizing technology and experience design. The goal: to make transactions as frictionless as possible. “In that instant when our customer is thinking, ‘What should I get for dinner?’ an easy ordering experience can make a world of difference,” says Dennis Maloney, Domino’s chief digital officer. Domino’s has been at the vanguard of pizza tech since at least 2008, when it launched its popular tracker function, and lately it has been increasing its digital efforts. In May 2015, it introduced emoji ordering, which lets customers summon dinner by tweeting a pizza icon. Less than a year later, it became the first fast-food company to release an Amazon Echo application that enables users to order via voice command.

Pizza shouldn’t be creating angst with our consumers. It’s supposed to be a fun food.

The company’s latest breakthrough takes effort reduction even further: no-click ordering. Save your info and preferred order ahead of time, and you can summon food simply by opening the app. A timer appears, counting down from 10. At the ding, your order has been placed. That’s it—no additional buttons to push, no decisions to make, no effort whatsoever. 

All of these innovations are driven by Domino’s AnyWare system, a cloud-based hub with customer profiles that can be accessed from a range of platforms. With AnyWare, Call of Duty addicts can order on their PS4, for example, and Ford drivers can use their car’s Sync system. While the number of purchases on some of these emerging platforms is small, “a lot of this is about exploring technology and staying on the forefront so we’re there ahead of our competitors,” says Kelly Garcia, VP of digital development. “We’re learning so that we’re ready when they break out.” 

Overall, Domino’s digital strategy is paying off, with the app and website pulling in more than $2 billion in digital sales a year—more than half of its delivery revenue. In the second quarter of 2016, same-store sales jumped almost 10%, a spike the company attributes in part to its tech efforts. The next step with Zero Click will likely be to make it more customizable, and Maloney says Domino’s is experimenting with other ways to improve the delivery process. “Pizza shouldn’t be creating angst with our consumers,” he says. “It’s supposed to be a fun food.”

Click here for the 2016 Innovation by Design Awards finalists and winners.

A version of this article appeared in the October 2016 issue of Fast Company magazine.

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The Most Popular Color On The Web

BY MARK WILSON 2 MINUTE READ

You may have heard that if you average together all colors on the web, you get orange. That may be true. But when you pull away the photographs of sunsets and the peachy skinned? You’re left with the visual framework of CSS, the text and menus and other graphic design elements of the web.

And that? That’s not orange. That’s blue.

It’s a sentiment we’ve heard before; in 2014 John Herrman cataloged the subtle differences in blues among widely trafficked websites. The latest evidence comes courtesy of new visualizations by Paul Herbert, spotted byBoingBoing. He scraped the color codes from the world’s 10 top websites—which include noted blue aficionados Google, Facebook, and Twitter—and plotted them here.

See the full series of graphics here. [Image: via Paul Hebert Designs]

And it’s not just the default #0000EE (hyperlink) blue, which I believe you can spot as that big orb in the upper left of the circle, tipping the scales. There’s a waterfall of blue that starts somewhere around sky blue and saturates all the way into black. It would seem that web designers are starting with blue to pick their next color—saturating or desaturating it to create black, grey, or white—since all these colors are related in a solid stream on the graph.

Aside from this blue-valanche, there’s a fair amount of red, and predictably to anyone who has tried to draw a sun in yellow crayon on white paper, just about no yellow. But it begs the question, where are all the other colors? No teal, purple, or pink? It’s like the 1980s never even happened in here. And, dear internet, all your throwback album covers and pixel art video games tell me that’s not true.

So we’re left wondering: Does the rest of the web look different, and more colorful? Or does it just follow the blue standards developed by the top 10? If only Herbert could expand the scope of his fantastic project to the top 50 or top 100 sites, we could find out.

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Why Google Changed The Most Recognizable Logo On The Web

BY MARK WILSON 2 MINUTE READ
Perhaps you didn’t notice when Google updated its logo last fall. The changes were relatively subtle, with a cleaner, sans-serif typography replacing the original’s highly ornamental lettering. But the revamp was actually a big deal, and not just because the logo is viewed trillions of times a year on Google’s search page. It reconceives the logo as an interactive visual device that adds functionality, using a clever animation of dots to communicate various responses to user actions. We spoke to Jonathan Lee, a Google creative director who helped spearhead the redesign, about how he approached the changes.

Co.Design:Why change the logo now?

Jonathan Lee: We wanted to future-proof the brand. There are things we know are coming: We’re designing for wearables, to have our brand work on a watch face or in Android Auto in cars. That was the core momentum builder.

The logo is designed to react to users. It employs four animated dots to help people grasp what’s going on while they’re interacting with Google products. Why was that important?

The intention was to allow a new level of expression in our interface and for our brand. We’ve been investing heavily in using motion. The way the dots move communicates more than just, “Hey, we’re dots.” How something behaves after you interact with it gives you a better understanding of where you are in an application. Right now, the primary expressions are that it’s listening to you speak [in voice search] and is showing that it’s actually catching some sound from you. It also can show you that it doesn’t understand what you said.

Co.Design: Why change the logo now?

It was so nerve-racking the day of, knowing that we had worked for months and months with the collective effort of so many people. I was frankly ecstatic and relieved that people responded so well. It’s kind of a complicated thing to ask the world to understand.

Click here for the 2016 Innovation by Design Awards finalists and winners.

A version of this article appeared in the October 2016 issue of Fast Company magazine.

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