Rail Interiors Berlin

The Rail Interiors Conference was held in Berlin in the Scandic Hotel on the 13th and 14th of December. The programme included presentations from Alstom, Siemens and Austrian Rail as well as from Martin Darbyshire of tangerine and Paul Priestman of Priestman Goode. The speakers are listed here.

What is clear is that the rail sector is fighting hard to become more customer focused and to be a viable alternative to air travel. Somewhat ironically, it is therefore trying to see how lessons on customer experience may be transferred from aircraft cabins to railway carriages. Some examples are beginning to emerge. Austria's operator OeBB has introduced the Railjet service with three passenger classes (Economy, Business and Premium) to choose from and particular attention paid to passenger flow and airline-style 'comfort seating'.

Alstom Transport is building a stronger design focus in its innovation strategy to create compelling passenger experiences and trains that can lead the sector. For Alstom, the key interior design issues were presented as Access and fluidity; Brightness and lighting; Modularity and Perceived quality. When creating the AGV the concept was of 'a tube to design' with a focus on the passenger experience as 'connected, easy and exclusive'.

Giving the second keynote of the two days Martin Darbyshire spoke about tangerine's distinctive innovation process and how processes and similarities within the airline sector could offer value and insight for train operators and manufacturers alike.

The rail sector is beginning to discover and utilise in new ways the power of design to drive user-centred, non-technological innovation. The urgent need is to raise quality overall to a new level; to drive in creativity to meet future passenger and operator needs and to increase passengers' perception of quality.

Only by doing this, can the rail sector hope to attract an increasingly demanding and sophisticated travelling public away from other modes of travel.

Catch up

Well. It's been quite a while since I have had the chance to write here. Life has been busy.

I completed the development and facilitation of the DBA's new Executive Leadership Programme, 'Re-imagining Leadership' held over two days in York with 26 very senior participants at the beginning of November. It has been recognised in participants' evaluations as an overwhelming success which is a powerful testimony to the contributors, Jon Teckman, Toby Scott and David Lomas of the Penticle Business School, Emma Collins, Sarah Benton, David Baker and Marco Steinberg. Great work everyone. Well done DBA. Thank you participants for making it such a success.

Since then I have been in Geneva and Lyon although a spot of the flu prevented me from both attending a cities conference in Cite du design in St Etienne and subsequently chairing the education session at the Design & Learning conference held in Brussels and organised by the EU Commission on 25th and 26th November.

Last week I hooked up with Matt Rudd of Rudd Studio. Beautiful work. And last night was a chinese meal in Soho with Massimo Pitis of Pitis in Milan. A week of graphic design and visual communications.

Tomorrow I head off to Berlin to meet with Embassy Experts and then catch up with Erik Spiekermann at Edenspiekermann on Friday. (I used to work as a business development consultant for MetaDesign in London). Next Monday and Tuesday sees the Rail Interiors conference also in Berlin with Martin Darbyshire of tangerine giving a keynote. He will be speaking about tangerine's experience in the airline sector and spotting points of relevance in innovation behaviour that might be of value to the train sector. Should be interesting.

The following week sees me back in la bella Italia, firstly with the wonderful Massimo Iosa Ghini in Bologna and then back to language school - this time in Arezzo in Toscana.

And then it will be Christmas.

Leadership in York

I went to a Halloween fancy dress last week togged up as the Duke of Wellington, (the theme was 'dead famous'), and this week I find myself thinking of the Grand old Duke of York.

I am at the wonderful Cedar Grand Hotel in York, about to lead a two-day Executive Programme on leadership for director-level personnel in design companies that I have had the opportunity to put together for the Design Business Association, (DBA).

The DBA's goal is, 'to accelerate the growth and increase the sophistication of design businesses through improved leadership practice'. This is to help them further strengthen their capability and capacity to compete more effectively in a globalising world.

For the 26 participants, the two-days is intended to, 'elevate and enhance their view and understanding of leadership and provide ideas, insight and tools to take back to their businesses to create greater impact through improved leadership practice'.

We have pulled together a great team of UK and international contributors. When this is combined with the experience and knowledge of the particpants who have come to York tonight from all over the country, (and with attendance from Scandanavia as well), I know that we are in for an exciting, insightful and transformative two days.

Well done DBA. More anon.

Down memory lane

I visited the V&A last weekend and went to see the new ceramics gallery. I did this as I wanted to see the graphics created by Cartlidge Levene and I was not disappointed. The work is very clean, very understated and very integrated across the galleries.

In one of the showcases I was amazed to see this 1970's ceramic tea service. It was introduced to the market when I was still at College. I had not seen it for many, many years and when I saw it, it was like meeting an old friend. It might be hard to believe now, but way back then as a young student, it's lines inspired me to design and make a sterling silver tea service - a tea pot, sugar bowl and milk jug. I will try to find a photograph of it.

Thanks now to Martin Hunt of Queensbury Hunt for inspiration then.

Barcelona Design Week - Day 1

Tuesday 21st October saw the start of the Barcelona Design Week.

I was the last speaker of the first session following on from great presentations from Paul Jeremaes Director of HP Innovation Centres , (on the business of innovation); Liz Sanders from Make Tools in Ohio, (on design driven co-creation) and Steve Rogers UX Director for Google EMEA, (on the relationship between creativity and data).

Paul spoke about the system that HP have put in place across eight centres to help their top 2000 clients engage with innovative thinking and processes supported by HP. All CEO’s believe in innovation and that it has strategic importance. But it is still difficult to do. Especially as the lifecycle of innovations is getting shorter. (HP generates 6-700 product or services a year with most revenue generated from those delivered in the last two years).

The innovation activity in HP is categorised in four containers: for HP (internal); for customers, with customers and enabling customers. Paul’s focus was on innovation with customers.

The HP Innovation Centres form a platform for HP Execs to help them be creative, focusing on business breakthrough to expand their visions and pull through to business results. And it is is 'killer innovations’ , (a significant and highly profitable departure from current offerings or practices that is difficult to imitate), that are being sought. The Innovation Centres provide personalised, immersive environments and tools such as graphical facilitation and rapid concept prototypes. In meeting the innovation imperative, HP works with their clients to design innovation experiences in an immersive environment.

Liz Sanders spoke to us about her work in the field of co-creation, starting with a history of the language we have been using for people in the field. This started with customer, consumer, (1980’s); user adapter, participant, (1990’s) and co-creators (2000’s). In other words it has moved from expert driven through user-centred to co-creation.

Make Tools works with people to help them enact and act out in the generative, ‘intentional design space’ to solve wicked problems, inviting co-creativity. On whether or not designers should 'lead innovation', she prefers to think of design as 'seeding innovation'. Designers provide the fertile ground to enable others to be part of the creative process.

Steve Rogers told us that Google’s top principle for creation is, ‘focus on the user and all else will follow’.

Steve then talked us through the role of data at Google asking the question, ‘should creativity be reduced to data?’. Referencing the recent discussions on whether or not it is 'possible judge a shade of blue with data', Steve’s view on data to support creativity was “Why not?...". If data can help support creativity and better design, then it should be embraced. And of course, one of Google's key assets is its ability to scale because of the magnitude of its data collection and analysis.

The role of data was then described in Google’s process to develop one of their latest innovations for Google Mail, the Priority Inbox. This related to maximising the benefits available through usage data and with customer insight, to create and rapidly test (globally) the an automated filtering system for emails. The filtering process identifies and separates ‘important’ emails and ‘all the others’. And key to that process was the definition of being able to connect ‘relevance plus recency’.

Steve closed with an animation of new ways of visualising data showing a very elegant 'living' plant form on the screen in visualising the battery state of a mobile handset when charging (and not a simple little battery icon with bars).

Barcelona to Palo Alto in twenty minutes

On Tuesday afternoon Isabel Roig of Barcelona Design Centre brought the four speakers from Day 1 of Barcelona Design Week on a design tour to the creative enclave located in the beautiful area of Palo Alto in @22 to the East of the city.

Palo Alto means tall stick and the creative area is in an old factory complex with three tall chimmneys - hence Palo Alto.

We had the chance to visit three amazing design companies.

It was really great to meet Javier Marsical at his studio and to speak with him and Tono Errando (co-director and younger brother) about his new animated movie 'Chico & Rita' (to be released in London on 19th November). Directed by Javier and Fernando Trueba, Javier told us it is a love story set in Cuba in 1948 between a woman from New York and a man from Havannah. But it is also a love story about the two cities and with the evolution of jazz. It took three years to write the narrative and scripts and three years more to animate the story. Animating with thick lines is very challenging and in addition to this, over the three years, the technology available to animators keeps changing. The movie has been very well received in Cannes and Javier told us that it is 'a very moving story of the heart' and promised us that we will cry when we see it.

Following this wonderful half hour, we then met with the guys at Equip a multidisciplinary architectural practice founded in 1990. They have three key premises in their philosophy: permanent reinvention in our approach to understanding; being closer to people and redefining approaches to respond to situations as they arise.

The practice is particularly multi-disciplinary as they are working on hugely diverse projects including high rise buildings; cutlery, jewellery, bathroom taps and, through a subsidiary company, on the design of the Galactic Suite Space Resort. Marc Zaballa Camprubi of Galactic Suite Design talked us through the development of the project.

It was interesting to hear this in the light of Richard Seymour's presentation on Virgin Galactic in Belfast earlier this month. (See my Blog for October 14th).

Space tourism is a reality.

Finally, we went to visit Josep Morera CEO and Creative Director of Morera Design, one of Spain's leading packaging & branding consultancies that specialises in the premium & luxury segment covering fragrance & cosmetics, luxury waters & beverages and wine & spirits. Also based in a beautiful building in the Palo Alto complex, Josep graciously gave time to speak with us even though he happened to be particularly busy at that moment in time (we arrived a little late) and definitely not helped by the fact there had been a power cut earlier in the day.

Thanks Josep for so graciously taking time with us to tell us your great story.

Mike Rawlinson rocks up

Barcelona Design Week has been inpsiring and it's not over yet.

Mike Rawlinson Director of City ID and I are attending this morning's mobile design conference 'Designing for the Networked City' with presentations from Kevin Slavin (Starling, New York), Matt Jones (Berg, London), Usman Haque, (Design + Research, London), Fabien Girardin, (Lift Lab, Barcelona).

This to be followed by a workshop on co-creation for the networked city led by Liz Sanders (Make Tools, Ohio).

Back to Gatwick tonight.