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Replenish is a fantastically innovative household cleaning product, not based on some new magical formula, but rather the bottle’s design. Founder Jason Foster explains in an interview with me about the story behind the bottle, and how its continuous reuse through easy-to-use pod at the bottom, saves people money, waste, and the planet from associated carbon emissions by shipping water. An elegant and intuitive solution indeed! Learn more at http://www.myreplenish.com

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Why are faces so special? Because while some may be lovely and others unsightly, we do recognize them instantly. Like seeing faces in abstract art, nature, and space photographs of the moon. They’re an apt metaphor for the near instantly perceived elements of a design that we can interact, perhaps delightfully notice and want to play with (well, isn’t that every designer’s hope?!)

Gretchen Anderson takes us on journey through this topic, because it’s an important one that deserves attention. Not for usability sake, while that is a noble goal in itself, but for attraction sake. That which naturally invites people into the experience you’ve designed. While perhaps physical form design may be the easiest to conjure up, it also extends to graphic and information design.

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Real sustainability can best be achieved by creating better-made products designed to be re-used as well as recycled. Replenish’s flagship product, available later this year, is an eco-friendly, multi-surface household cleaner in a reusable bottle that makes concentrates easier to use, is safer for the environment and saves money for consumers and retailers.

I met the engineer/founder Jason Foster earlier this year at Sustainable Brands 10, where I also did a video interview. The bottle works and the refills look like a Glade (brand) cartridge. Self-explanatory, no? Don’t ship water, buy only what you need, everyone reduces affiliated carbon emissions from weight reduction.

Fun presentation and collection of thoughts from Frog Design’s David Sherwin and Justin Maguire on the required attitude and traits for innovative leaders. I agree with much of it. I’ll stress a desire to see the big picture from a balanced perspective, the willingness to step forward and say “We can do better!”, the desire and aptitude to foster ideation with a diverse team, active listening skills, and doggedness to pursue and actualize a vision.

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Great set of ideation cards from IDEO here. Nuff said - browse and enjoy!

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As quoted from the project website and the various guides:

Introduction

Introduction (PDF): This toolkit is the result of a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The BMGF brought together four organizations — IDEO, International Development Enterprises (IDE), Heifer International, and the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW)—to partner in the creation of a method for guiding innovation and design for social enterprises and NGOs. These successes are the outcome of an extraordinary collaboration of partnerships on three continents—and the individuals that went above and beyond to prototype and field test these methods. Working on-site with IDE teams in Ethiopia, Zambia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the US, as well as with Heifer International in Kenya, IDEO the HCD process was adapted for use in developing contexts.

Human-Centered Design is a process used for decades to create new solutions for companies and organizations. Human-Centered Design can help you enhance the lives of people. This process has been specially-adapted for organizations like yours that work with people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Human-Centered Design (HCD) will help you hear people’s needs in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

The reason this process is called “human-centered” is because it starts with the people we are designing for. The starting point of the HCD process is to examine the needs, dreams, and behaviors of the people we want to affect with our solutions. We seek to listen to and understand what they want. We call this the Desirability lens.

It is the lens through which we view the world through the entire design process. Once we have identified the universe of what is Desirable, we begin to view our solutions through the lenses of Feasibility and Viability. We carefully bring these lenses in at the later phases of the process.

Scenarios

Week-Long Deep Dive - This mode of engagement forces the design team to work quickly to gather and analyze data, then move rapidly to solutions, prototypes and plans. The one-week timeframe is a familiar timeframe that is long enough to gain good understanding, yet short enough to allow a stressed organization to put limited resources against a challenge. This format is good for early-phase learning and for spurring new thinking.

TIP: Know the limitations of your data and your early prototypes when doing a Week-Long Deep Dive. If validity is necessary without much time for research, use secondary data to triangulate your findings. Build a plan for iterating early prototypes for future refinement.

Several-Month Deep Dive - A longer Deep Dive can last several weeks to several months. This mode of use enables a deeper, more nuanced understanding and theorization of a complex challenge or problem. With a longer time frame, more locations can be examined and more stakeholders in the value chain can become participants in the process.

TIP: When you have more time for a Deep Dive, it may be tempting to spend the vast majority of time doing more research. Pay attention and notice when you are hitting decreasing returns and stop the research when you are learning little new information. Remember—in the early stages, you are doing research to understand the problem and inspire the team.
There will be time to validate later.

Activating Already-Existing Knowledge - Often organizations have a great deal of research and already-existing information but are unable to translate all that information into actionable solutions. In this case, the processes outlined in Create and Deliver can help your team transform what you know into things you can start doing.

TIP: Even if you have the information captured in a different form (in Word documents, for example), take the time to translate that information through the Story Sharing methods outlined in the first part of the Create booklet.

Complementing Long-Term Activities - Many HCD methods are applicable at different times to the challenges your organization will face in Technology Adaptation, Monitoring & Evaluation, etc. We hope that you will find some of the techniques useful in infusing the spirit
of innovation in your day-to-day activities, even when there is no explicit Design Challenge at hand. Pick and choose your methods as you wish to help complement your daily work.

TIP: For example, if you’re working on adapting an existing technology and have already-existing information about the context you want to adapt to, use Steps 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the Create book to guide you through several iterations of opportunity identification, brainstorming, prototyping, and user feedback. On the other hand, if you are looking for help in gathering data for M&E reporting, use the exercises in the Field Guide to supplement your current activities.

Hear Guide

The Hear guide (PDF) will help your design team prepare for fieldwork and understand how to collect stories that will serve as insight and inspiration. Designing meaningful and innovative solutions that serve your customers begins with gaining deep empathy for their needs, hopes and aspirations for the future. The Hear booklet will equip the team with methodologies and tips for engaging people in their own contexts to delve beneath the surface.

At the end of the Hear phase, you’ll be prepared to go into the field to conduct design research by completing the worksheets in your Field Guide:

• Recruiting Plan
• Research Schedule
• Identity, Power & Politics
• Group Interview Guide
• Individual Interview Guide

Steps:

1. Identify a Design Challenge
2. Identify People to Speak With
3. Choose Research Methods (Individual and Group Interviews, In-Context Immersion)
4. Develop an Interview Approach (Guide, Scenario-based questions, Techniques)
5. Develop Your Mindset (2 exercises: Beginners, Observe v. Interpret)

Field Guide and Aspiration Cards

The Field Guide (PDF) and Aspirations cards (PDF) are a complement to the Hear guide; these are the tools your team will take with them in order to conduct research.

Create Guide

The Create Guide (PDF) will help your team work together in a workshop format to translate what you heard from people into frameworks, opportunities, solutions, and prototypes. During this phase, you will move from concrete to more abstract thinking in identifying themes and opportunities and back to the concrete with solutions and prototypes.

Steps:

1. Share Stories
2. Identify Patterns (Extract Key Insights, Find Themes, Create Frameworks)
3. Create Opportunity Areas
4. Brainstorm New Solutions
5. Make Ideas Tangible
6. Gather Feedback

Deliver Guide

The Deliver Guide (PDF) will help catapult the top ideas you have created toward implementation. The realization of solution includes rapid revenue and cost modeling, capability assessment, and implementation panning. The activities offered in this phase are meant to complement your organization’s existing implementation processes and may prompt adaptations to the way solutions are typically rolled out.

Steps:

1. Develop a Sustainable Revenue Model (Customer Value Proposition, Revenue Sources, Stakeholder Incentives)
2. Identify Capabilities Required for Delivering Solutions (Distribution, Requirements v. Capabilities, Potential Partners)
3. Plan a Pipeline of Solutions



4. Create an Implementation Timeline
5. Plan Mini-Pilots and Iteration

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Personal Review

The toolkit is great for any type of user-centered product development program, with some particular notes for the developing world. Check out each of the PDFs for further case studies, questions to ask, considerations to make, and many more details that I couldn’t fit into the space here. At the very least, it’ll provide you with a structured process for developing and launching successful products.

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Rick Chin, Director of Product Innovation, gives a demo of the Sustainability Xpress add-on module for SolidWorks. It allow designers to quantify in real time the projected environmental impacts of the parts and assemblies that they create. Developed by German firm PE International GmbH in collaboration with SolidWorks, it’s currently available as beta release for testing and debugging.

As quoted from this release:

This software will provide valuable information for designers and engineers, enabling better informed decision-making that could significantly reduce the environmental impact of the products they design. SolidWorks Sustainability is built on PE International’s GaBi software and database, the world’s most comprehensive tool for quantifying the environmental performance of materials, processes, products, and infrastructure.  PE International is the largest and one of the oldest networks of sustainability experts in the world and has performed product life cycle assessments for two decades, continuously gathering detailed data about materials and processes to improve the GaBi database.

The Sustainability software will be available in two product forms with this fall’s release of SolidWorks 2010: an “Xpress” version included with every license of SolidWorks 2010 and a professional version. Both the Xpress and professional products will display a dashboard at the bottom of the SolidWorks user interface that illustrates a design’s prospective carbon footprint, air impact, water impact, and energy consumed throughout the design’s lifecycle.

These impacts will automatically update as the user modifies their design. The Professional version will roll up the impacts of all parts within a product design and also add details regarding energy consumption during the product’s use phase. SolidWorks Sustainability is the only CAD-integrated software to provide a comprehensive view of a design’s environmental impacts. Its analysis accounts for details such as where the product will be manufactured and used.

Regional choices effect environmental factors such as: where and how raw material is mined; transportation impacts; energy sources (e.g., coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, etc.); and power consumption. The resulting analysis may then be exported to a report which can easily be shared with non-SolidWorks users. Project Sage is being developed in collaboration between Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corporation, PE International and its North American division, PE Americas.

Nice!

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Where do new ideas come from? Produced by the global innovation consultancy Continuum, this film is about design strategists and how they identify the right ideas. The notes below are golden nugget excerpts from the script, edited by me for conciseness while adding my own perspective logic for flow, and to fall within the boundaries of fair use. So while I didn’t indent the text, make it red, or place it in italics, consider it their thinking and a wee little bit o mine.

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Sometimes people’s needs are to be surprised and delighted. The challenge is that they can’t tell us what that entails, so hence the role for dialogue, inquiry, and creativity. The goal being: to find the Right Idea.

What is Design Strategy?

Design Strategy is a way for a company to identify, claim, and act on a business opportunity. To build and enact such strategies requires a very eclectic mix of people with backgrounds in design, business, technology, social sciences who works together in a very flat organization. Roundtable-esque, if you will. Attempt to take every team member’s different perspectives and bring them together around a cohesive idea. It’s about using the multidisciplinary view and figuring out what the right solution is between all the different tensions that exist out there.

A good design strategy is Actionable. You look at it and know what to do next; the project plan is intuitive. In the course of ideation and inquiry, you end up with the Insights instead of the Ideas, whereupon the knowledge about the customer is deeper, but the question of what to do next looms.

An Insight is a really good Question - An Idea is a really good Answer. So even the best consumer insight is really only a question.  Oh the consumer’s really trying to do this. Great, that’s a good question. How do we help them do that? The fact that we question and keep coming up with new tools for each part of the process is important, but then it’s the people (team members) applying the process that makes it all work.

The healthy approach to take as a design strategist is to deliver what people need and want, not about what we think we can provide them. Once we figure out what that entails, the role and importance of creativity jumps to the top rung; How should we deliver that? The difficulty lies in creating for a future orientation.

The Right Idea

Getting there is a dual path whose mutual destination has to answer the working questions:

• What problems do we need to solve?
• What solutions best address them?

At this point, we’ll know what features need to be designed. Following this path can often lead to technical innovations. This is the objective/technical side of the equation.

On the subjective/humanistic side, we’re trying to channel into what people value. What are people really trying to do, understand, or achieve in their lives? Their aspirations tell us more than their past product choices do. From here, we can envision what the future looks and feels like for them. What the ideal experience should be.

Truly resonant ideas marry both sides of the framework: Objective/Technical and Subjective/Humanistic.
Always starting with the values keeps innovation connected to what people care about.

Going from insights to ideas is a creative and iterative exercise that relies on the ability to connect diverse learnings into a cohesive story.  It’s a lot like solving a riddle, where you have to figure out which clues matter and which ones don’t, and make some leaps in logic. Or like putting together a puzzle. Not all the pieces gathered end up mattering in the end.

What we do have at the end is a clear direction that aligns the team. This is the idea in words. Frame the idea as a question; in doing so, we challenge ourselves to figure out what form the answer should take. Maybe it’s a new service, rather than a new product. Perhaps it’s a whole new business. Envision the idea to the point where it’s real enough that somebody can experience it. The reason we prototype stories, experiences, and products is so one can problem solve in real life. Tinker, challenge constraints, and make the ideas work.

It’s very easy to hide behind a 100 ideas, and that’s why we [at Continuum] choose to stand behind One Idea. The right idea that works best. The only way we know it works, is to test it with people. So after we envision it, we evaluate it with our consumers because they hold us accountable.  Is it understandable, relevant, different, believable? We don’t always get it right the first time, so we use feedback to iterate until we have the confidence to go forward into design & development.

What Should We Do Next?

Once we know the idea resonates, we’re ready to make it real.

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I found the video to be one insightful way for an innovation & product/service development process to work, whether it be from an in-house team or a third-party agency. Now, to be results oriented, there are some essential elements not discussed in this video for time constraints reasons, and also because this is partly a marketing video for Continuum.

Project Management baby! Now while I’ll assume that the ideation aspects are covered, what need to be further stressed is the fit analysis in terms of: technical, customer, financial. Secondly, the business case has to be drawn. The project’s alignment with its innovation capabilities and portfolio fit has to be examined.

Now to be fair, the line of reasoning I’m taking here deals particularly with New Product Development (further info from a Stage-Gate perspective). In the larger scheme of things though, we may just simply be trying to make incremental changes to the way a product/service performs. Perhaps we’re doing a bit of R&D, which carries a bit of a freewheeling nature, as opposed to NPD. Either way though, time is money. Therefore, objectives, timelines, and participant roles need to be defined. I don’t want to make this all seem militaristic and cookie-cutter. The process needs a lot of air to breathe so that creativity may roam, unabounded.

That’s just what I think…

What about you?

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Every year, DuPont hosts a competition for various sustainable packaging designs & innovations, as decided by a jury of various individuals (none of which are DuPont employees). Hope you enjoy seeing some of the cool items

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on how Mars was teaming up with Terracycle to create new products along with some commentary on the role of sustainable products not just being useful, but also desirable for the long term. It’s one thing to create a relatively “green” and socially responsible product, but it’s also important that we try and extend its useful life as far as we can before likely being landfilled/incinerated, or maybe recycled.

So into Facebook comes a reply from Greg who works at Terracycle, addressing my questions:

Hey Mario,

First, thanks for writing about TerraCycle! I noticed your post and I thought I’d write to answer your questions.

Naturally there are constraints on products made from trash – it’s challenging because it’s never been done on this scale before! With every new product, and the subsequent redesign of each product, they become more refined. That process will absolutely continue.

Now, the branding question: some of our products are branded, and others aren’t; this is the case at around a 1:1 ratio at present. The cool part about developing this new business model is that we can take it in any direction we like. We’re currently testing new ways to work with these materials for consumer and industrial purposes; when these products go into production it will drastically shift the balance toward unbranded materials. Based on the prototypes, you won’t even be able to tell what the material source is.

McDonough’s “Cradle to Cradle” is a huge inspiration for TerraCycle, as is Hawken’s “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution.” The principles found in these brilliant books are in mind throughout our whole process. We do let people know that if they get tired of their drink pouch lunch box, for example, that they can return it to us.

As we continue to scale this crazy idea, TerraCycle becomes more of an inspiration to people around the world. Whether it’s the kids who learn to waste less via our brigades, or people who apply our ideas to other waste streams to create sustainable products – there’s an almost limitless supply at this point – the fact is that we’re making an impact on the marketplace, as well as generations of people, whether they buy into our idea enough to purchase TerraCycle products or not.

I hope this helps answer some of your questions, and I hope we’ll have a chance to discuss in greater detail soon!

Cheers,
George

There you go.

By the way, Terracycle’s Founder Tom Szaky will be speaking at Sustainable Brands 09 on Wed. June 3rd, on the panel: Inspired by Trash, alongside Ron Gonen, CEO - Recycle Bank, and Paul Ligon, Director - Upstream, Waste Management.

Related Articles:

• Integrated Resource Management: Paul Ligon