Open up your mind and say, ahh...

El Anatsui, the artist behind more than 30 works at Brooklyn Museum this month, will knock the wind out of you. There are two ways in which this will happen; you’ll be stunned either by the shimmering, monumental beauty of the work or the weighty historical narrative that blasts through Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui. Or both.

Anatsui–who is Ghana-born but Nigeria-based–is that rare kind of artist whose work is both beautiful and critical, ornate and intellectual. He is best known for his hanging sculptures made out of bottle and can tops he collects from around Nsukka, pieced and patched together by a group of workers in his local studio. These are “non-fixed forms,” meaning that the jingly aluminum sheets are transported to the gallery in a suitcase and hung according to the whims of the curator. Each time a piece is shown, it looks different, folds in novel ways, and reflects thousands of light points in new ways. “I don’t believe in artworks being things that are fixed,” Anatsui says. “You know, the artist is not a dictator.”

After building a successful career based on appropriating local Kente cloth symbology (and, for a time, sculpting with a chainsaw), Anatsui started collecting liquor bottle caps in the 1980s. The caps–which come from local Nigerian distilleries–offered him what The New York Times calls “a locally made, in ready supply and culturally loaded” material. Rum, you see, is a by-product of the slave trade. The triangle of trade between Africa, the Caribbean, and the colonial powers went like this: Europeans bartered for slaves using manufactured goods. Then, the slaves would be sent to the New World in exchange for sugar (and other raw goods). In the Americas, the sugar was turned into rum, which went back to Europe to fund another round of the cycle. Soon, distilleries popped up along the Gold Coast, including Nigeria.

Colonialism asserts itself in subtle and obvious ways, both in the names of the liquor brands (Dark Sailor, Chelsea) and in the titles of the works themselves. In Drifting Continents (2009), eight luminant, gold textiles hang on the gallery wall, connected by a single continuous thread of colorful tops. Other works address problems within Nigeria and Africa itself, like the towering Waste Paper Bags, a standing sculpture made from discarded commercial printing plates. As the curators point out, the plates look a lot like a loaded symbol of Nigerian-Ghanian conflict. “The forms resemble large woven bags that became known as ‘Ghana-must-go’ bags in the early 1980s, when Nigerians hostile toward Ghanaian refugees who had fled political and economic unrest suggested they pack their belongings in such sacks and return home,” they explain.

Anatsui’s work reverberates off of works from African-American artists in Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection, creating feedback loops between American and African experiences of postcolonial identity. The museum owns several Basquiat paintings, and though their life experiences couldn’t be more different, it’s hard not to think of them while wandering through the show–Basquiat and Anatsui tread the same thematic ground. The triangle trade is something Basquiat obsessed over, repeating words like “gold,” “sugar,” and “rum” again and again in his paintings. Anatsui’s tone–his rich, rococo wall hangings–is completely at odds with Basquiat’s. But you get the sense that they’re grappling with the same thing, these ghosts that take the form of consumer goods like liquor bottles and sugar bags.

Check out Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui until August 4.

Voting wasn’t the only way millions of Americans participated in the 2012 presidential election. Coverage by major networks and cable channels garnered legions of social media mentions throughout election week.

But even though 14 total broadcast stations and cable news networks raked in about 1.5 million social reactions each, music truly ruled the week. The single program with the most activity on social media was the MTV Europe Music Awards on MTV2, which earned more than 5.5 million mentions. By contrast, CNN had the most socially active audience during its election coverage, but at just less than 2 million posts, it didn’t come close to touching the star-studded awards show, which featured Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and viral superstar Psy.

And as the second season of The X Factor nears its end, FOX’s vocal competition showed it can still draw attention and participation from its audience. The X Factor registered more than 4 million mentions in its penultimate week, an uptick of 50% over the week before. FOX announced in October that the successful show will air a third season in 2013.

The data is courtesy of Trendrr, which measures social media activity related to specific television shows (e.g. mentions, likes, check-ins) across Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue and Viggle. To see daily rankings, check out Trendrr.TV.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, subjug

Bjarke Ingels Group’s latest project is a museum and visitor’s center in a subterranean bunker built by the German occupiers during World War II. The abandoned bunkers dot most of Europe’s coastlines, barnacle-covered hulks that remind us of the embattled continent of our grandparents’ childhoods. Other architects have thought to repurpose them, as temporary camping sites or even data storage centers. Denmark’s largest bunker, called Tirpitz, was left incomplete by the Germans in 1944. Right now, concerts and art shows are held within its moss-covered walls. Soon, if all goes according to plan, the bunker will be part of a 7,500-square foot development called the Blåvand Bunker Museum.

Tirpitz is embedded into sandy, coastal hills next to the coast of the North Sea. BIG proposes maintaining the continuity of the natural landscape by embedding most of the proposed exhibition space beneath the dunes. Four open-air troughs will connect the four subterranean spaces, terminating together at a square courtyard space nestled below the sand. Each of the cut-outs leads to a separate exhibition hall, which will function independently when the museum opens.

As for the hulking bunker itself, the architects imagine something more obvious: a glass-and-steel recreation of the stationary gun that might have sat on its concrete turret. Inside, the gun’s two barrels will host telescopes, rather than artillery. It’s a “ghost or reflection of the war machine it was meant to be,” write the architects, “at once critical and respectful of the bunker architecture.” More pragmatically, it’s also a skylight, flooding the bunker with light. A transparent staircase leads down into the gloom below.

Some are questioning whether the museum’s four-pronged plan could have been better chosen, suggesting that the cut-outs are reminiscent of a swastika. That seems a bit hasty, since right now in plan we see only a square courtyard with a straight line jutting from each corner. The past two years have been filled with similarly unintentional faux pas, like MVRDV’s “9/11 tower” scheme in South Korea. But in both cases, any shared likeness with symbols of tragedy seems completely unintentional. Some might argue that if contemporary architects should be condemned for anything, it’s their devotion to such unironic literalism. Someone needs to get Robert Venturi or Denise Scott Brown on the horn and ask them to weigh in on this.

H/t DesignBoom

Shortly after his arrival in early 2002, Nick Wilkinson, as managing director of Dixons Retail, one of the largest consumer electronics retailers in Europe, actively tried to combine an already high level of internal competition by adding a team reward. As a consequence, many of his best salespeople left, discouraged by what they felt was a system intent on watering down their individual contributions.

However, to cater to the spirit of competition that is part of the young recruits eager to progress up the career ladder, he designed a plan in which stores were encouraged to compete against other Dixons stores of a similar size but in a different region. He also encouraged recruits to be transparent about their career ambitions via an internal, online application system. Everyone had access to whatever anyone else was planning as a career. Internal competition wasn’t so much eradicated as reoriented: some of it toward other stores, and some of it channeled toward career development rather than competition for the next customer.

As Wilkson’s story shows, getting the balance between competition and collaboration right is one of the most difficult team-leadership challenges.

Greed and Altruism

The tension between greediness and altruism among team members is subtle.

Intuition tells us that selves individuals should be popular; after all, they give a lot to the team yet ask little in return. It is equally obvious that selfish behavior is undesirable: if people were into it solely for themselves, they might free ride if given the chance, leaving some tasks either undone or poorly done. Here, the selfless might pick up the pieces and compensate for others. However, a surprising finding from recent experiments proves intuition wrong. Who would have thought that team members value charitable individuals much less than we (or even they) might expect.

Psychologists Craig Parks and Asako Stone came to this entirely unexpected finding after an experiment designed to study the expected ostracism of cheaters. Early results showed that team members were as likely to select the generous minded for exclusion. Using a computer simulation of a simple game, participants were given ten points per round to keep or place in a “public goods” kitty. Whatever points they put in the shared pool would double, after which participants could withdraw up to 25 percent of the pool (irrespective of their original investment). There was an incentive to withdraw less than 25 percent, namely, a bonus would be paid if the pool exceeded a certain threshold after an unspecified number of rounds. After the game, the psychologists asked the participants which of four players (one of whom was either a Scrooge or a martyr) they would like to play in another round. Unsurprisingly, the selfish person proved unpopular, but so did the selfless. So bewildering was the result that they reran the experiment four times while simultaneously testing alternative explanations.

So why is it that people are as likely to exclude selfless people as those who are greedy? Might it be that people are inherently bad at correctly estimating the contributions of those around them? So, if you take a smaller share, it reflects on you as having given less in the first place. Or, similarly, if you take less than others, this indicates the value you place on your own contribution, meaning that if you don’t value yourself, why should team members? The researchers’ first explanation–that the selfless person was perceived as incompetent or unpredictable, or the kind of person psychologists know will be disliked in this sort of game–proved to be false. When questioned, participants reported that seeing others take less than their fair share made them feel bad, and that the only way to rescue their own reputations (and make themselves feel better by comparison) was to eliminate the martyr. Virtue had become vice.

The Downside of Trust

Trust and vigilance coexist in varying degrees, as trust comes in different guises. For instance, it could signify confidence in team members’ technical competence, in their reliability, or in their benevolence. In much research on trust, the concept remains relatively poorly defined and referring to some combination of these three varieties, making it difficult to pin down. Nevertheless, some researchers exploring the topic of trust in teams have offered interesting suggestions. Penn State professor Kimberly Merriman, for example, thinks that low-trust teams are best rewarded according to individual effort. The fact that an estimated 85 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies use some form of team or group-based pay would thus suggest that they either think their teams have transcended the low-trust barrier or hope that pay might promote trust. If the latter is true, it seems ironic that cooperation is far better fostered by shared perceptions of fairness, of which the allocation of specific roles and individualized rewards are key features.

More trust isn’t necessarily better. One can have too much of a good thing. A recent experiment with teams of executive MBA students given two hundred colored-plastic bricks (from which they were asked to craft nothing more sophisticated than a coat stand) finds that trust can be the death knell to creativity. While trust is associated with creativity–not least because it signifies a psychologically safe space in which people can tinker freely without fear of losing face–this really only applies up to a point. Beyond this, trust becomes a liability. Team members placed a higher premium on harmony than on solving the problem at hand. The creative tension that results from questioning each other’s suggestions gives way to trying to please one another.

Tensions Ignite Outstanding Individual Performance

These seemingly contradictory forces coexist, in a perfectly natural way. Competition weeds out inefficiency in an otherwise collaborative environment. Trust can lower transaction costs but also lead to free riding if not paired with some degree of vigilance. Control can prevent waste, particularly when dealing with less experienced team members, yet autonomy is what allows them to make mistakes and learn from them, or to handle difficulties with clients they know well rather than those more senior but also more detached. Charisma can become manipulative if those who are more analytical do not rein it in. Analysis without charisma can fuel cynicism. Patience is a virtue but, if too widely shared, could cause a team to be indecisive; hence it helps to have someone on board who is more decisive, even if being too decisive can lead to hasty choices. Granting colleagues autonomy provides scope for personal growth and flexibility, yet too much autonomy enables them to build their own empires.

This means that control is required, although too much control can be seen as autocratic, off-putting, and ineffective. Open-mindedness allows for flexibility and creativity, but too much of it can render teams indiscriminate. Loyalty to key ideas, to ground rules, or to those in charge might balance that out, but loyalty that is too strong can cause teams to miss opportunities.

These tensions can quite easily make a team of high performers seem fragile, even if it is perfectly functional. The tensions can make even the most effective teams feel off-balance occasionally, as teammates work to reconcile, or reconcile themselves, to the contrary pulls. The potential for conflict is never far away, not just because those team members often fall prey to their own insecurities, but because they believe things should be done in particular ways.

The point is clear: what feels dysfunctional need not be. Tension may be unpleasant–but not illegitimate.

Image: Flickr user Kai C. Schwarzer

A few days before I grabbed a beef chilli lunch in London with Sunghan Kim at Samsung Design Europe’s office, the South Korean giant had posted some stellar financial results. As well as chalking up 81 percent growth in net income for the first quarter of 2012, it also overtook Nokia as the world’s top supplier of mobile phones. Its margins now rival those of Apple’s (between them they accounted for 99 percent of the mobile phone industry’s profits in the same period). Still Sunghan underplays Samsung’s triumphs, focusing instead on the challenges ahead.

He is approaching the end of a five-year term as chief of Samsung’s European satellite office and will return to the Seoul mothership in August. Sunghan has held the reins during a transformational period. It has become the biggest technology company by sales, as its traditional rivals, Sony and Nokia, have faded. The rules of the game have also changed: As well as competing with Apple in hardware, it now competes with a new set of competitors such as Google and Facebook in software and services. To help retool for new these challenges, Sunghan has recently completed an MBA specializing in service innovation. His strategy: capturing the value in what he calls the “platform economy.”

These current projects are more akin to building new businesses.

Sunghan makes a broad distinction between OS platforms, such as Android, iOS, and Windows, and service platforms like Facebook, Amazon, and iTunes. Not so long ago, Samsung controlled the whole product experience around their phones and TVs. The headache now is that, while it has its own fledgling mobile OS platform called Bada, most of its products and services now slot into ecosystems of interdependent partners owned by others. At one level, this all sounds rather familiar to the corporate-strategy MBA types who have been excited about business-model innovation since the dotcom boom. But what credible role can designers play in this next push?

Sunghan gives a glimpse of the complexity Samsung now faces in this new competitive landscape. Each ecosystem partner is jostling to maximize the value it can capture along the customer journey. Not only are many of their platform stakeholders also competitors, some that don’t pose threats today might become forces to be reckoned with tomorrow. Even platform owners have to walk a fine line: They have to open their product enough to attract partners and profit while ensuring that they retain control. This multisided market of buyers and sellers of hardware, software, service, distribution, and advertising then needs to be re-created for new areas for innovation. Samsung’s growing scope of operations–it recently announced a move into generic pharmaceuticals for example–means that the combinations of potential stakeholders are immense, and developing new offerings often entails building brand new ecosystems. Sunghan likens the projects he now works on to building new businesses rather than developing the products he was designing not so long ago.

As well as buffing up on ecosystem economics, there are also new craft skills to master.

The big design leadership challenge is the familiar one of managing design’s input and role in large cross-functional teams. “Design is more of a community-based activity now,” he reflects. For designers to succeed, they need to be able to collaborate with team members from different disciplines. We mull over to what extent product and service designers need to become with familiar with business modeling, or merely work effectively alongside business analysts. For Sunghan, it’s both. Just as in the Noughties, many product, UX, and service designers taught themselves how to code, in his view, designers in the coming decade will need to have a working knowledge of business modeling, especially at the concept stage, and learn multidisciplinary collaboration for the development phase.

As well as buffing up on ecosystem economics, there are also new craft skills to master. Designers have long played a pivotal role in mocking up or prototyping new ideas. This talent for making intangible ideas and discussions more concrete for multidisciplinary teams is even more valuable when talking about complex platform systems. However, Sunghan notes, the design communication tools he uses for current projects do not look like the prototypes of yesterday. He prefers to call early manifestations of concepts “boundary objects”–a term he borrows from sociology to mean a common body of information that separate disciplines understand but use in different ways.

In his modest but ambitious way, Han has set himself and Samsung’s designers a challenge that will define the company’s future success.

According to a leaked memo acquired by The Verge, retailer Target is instructing its staff to remove Amazon own-branded hardware from its shelves. That means the Kindle suite.

Target’s memo says simply that it’s reviewed its product lineup and decided not to carry any further Amazon hardware. Stock will be replenished through May 13th, Mother’s Day, and the memo notes that the Kindle Touch will be in an ad campaign for the week of May 6th. Staff are instructed to follow best practices to “remerchandise” remaining stock, and to explain to customers who ask that it’s all just part of the normal flow of business, continually evaluating products they stock and so on.

A swift and decisive halt, then, carried out even as the store tries to maximize customer interest and, of course, its revenues by popping the Touch on an ad promotion just before Mother’s Day. The Internet has a pretty clear idea of why Target is doing this, and it comes from Target’s own words: The move is due to a “conflict of interest.” That conflict is Apple.

Target and Apple got all chummy with each other recently to launch some of those in-store “mini” Apple stores–also seen in other U.S. retailers and big-box vendors elsewhere around the world. No matter that Amazon’s Kindle Fire has snapped up over 50% of the Android market in the U.S., Apple products are selling like crazy right now–and for higher price tags. They also have an identifiable cachet which will attract customers to Target stores where–whadya know?–they may spend a little extra cash on other items too. That is to say: any one of the hundreds of iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac accessories. Ironically, Target’s keeping Amazon-compatible accessories on its shelves for exactly this reason: They may be impulse purchases, ensuring stores like Target get a steady dribble of cash from low-value items sold in bulk.

Would Apple have insisted, though, that Target only sell Apple’s tablet devices (and other hardware) because Amazon is aiming squarely at Apple’s markets in tablets, music, video, and so on? It’s not beyond the pale. Apple does, after all, have a thing about controlling the market space.

As an interesting counterpoint, it’s common in Europe to see an in-store mini Apple store right alongside a shelf of rival tablet PCs from competitors, which could be a hole in this logic. But the Kindle isn’t really a presence among these devices because Amazon’s taking ages getting its international thinking straight, and while there are a ton of peer tablets, none is quite as much a “threat” as the Kindle (at least, right now).

And if it is an Apple dictate that Kindles don’t get sold alongside its precious tablets, then there’s one very good reason Target could be persuaded to go along with it. It’s because Apple isn’t a threat to Target’s business model in quite the same way that Amazon is. Amazon has oft been credited with the death of the physical bookstore, and nowadays sells all sorts of equipment and hardware that are typical Target stock. So much pressure on prices and convenience is exerted by Amazon that it may be one of the main factors behind Target rival Best Buy’s decision to close many big-box stores and totally alter its strategy. And while Amazon just needs efficient, low-staff distribution centers, Target needs a whole infrastructure, sales staff, and space. It can’t afford to “pile it high and sell it cheap” in the same digital way Amazon does.

Target’s just trying to avoid Best Buy’s fate. Or perhaps it also thinks e-readers aren’t the wave of the future.

Image: Flickr users Team Traveller, Tony Buser

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

Guest post by James Stewart, Director at Geneva Film Co

The debate surrounding 3D’s viability across all platforms continues to rage. Nay-sayers maintain that 3D is merely a “flash in the pan”… a “fad”… soon to fade into technological obscurity. Yet visionary artists and innovators continue to drive 3D technology deeper into the very fabric of our screen-based culture. For brands, agencies, and content creators, is it worth it? In a word: YES.

THE 3D REVOLUTION

James Cameron’s Avatar set the stage for 3D’s emergence in 2009 by showcasing, to a global audience, the true potential of this immersive technology. From that time, a 3D revolution has been slowly changing the media landscape, project by project, day by day, year after year. Once considered a hollow gimmick, 3D has matured into a full-blown phenomenon. In fact, of the 10 movies that have ever crossed the $1 Billion mark, 6 are 3D films with Avatar topping the list. And there is little sign of this trend slowing down. 2012 will see blockbusters like The Hobbit, Men In Black, The Amazing Spiderman, and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus hitting theatres in three dimensions. The format continues to gain greater acceptance by audiences and critics alike. The epic 3D adventure Hugo by cinematic master Martin Scorsese is a prime example, topping this year’s Oscar nominations with 11, winning 5.

One Wall Street analyst decried 3D to be “over” in 2010 when only 38% of the $1Billion grossing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides box office could be attributed to 3D (down from the standard 55% – 80%). If 38% of your customers were demanding a 3D feature would you consider it dead, especially if that feature was selling at a 15% premium? Hugo’s opening box-office was 75% from 3D screenings. The latest box office hit is another 3D re-release: James Cameron’s Titanic. The 3D reboot debuted in China and earned the second-highest opening day ever in the country, selling approximately $11.6 million worth of tickets. It’s a hit across the UK and U.S. as well.

3D COMES HOME

The 3D revolution is no longer being waged on the sliver-screen alone. The real in-roads are being blazed by the growing list of 3D-capable devices that allow consumers to experience the brands they love in 3D, anytime and virtually anywhere. This is no accident. The success of any technological innovation can always be traced back to the moment it found its way affordably into the hands of the consumer– from the personal computer, to High Definition TV, and now 3D. At the center of this surge is the 3D TV market, which showed promising growth in the 4th quarter of 2011, and is tracking for even larger gains through 2012. According to Research and Markets, the global 3D TV market size is expected to exceed $100 Billion by the end of 2014. Which begs the question: in what industry would a product worth $100 Billion in sales be considered “a passing fad”?

3D GOES MOBILE

2011 saw the launch of several “glasses-free” 3D mobile devices, including the LG Optimus 3D Max, the HTC EVO 3D (both of which offer the ability to record and take photos in 3D using dual cameras) and more recently, the Gadmei 8” 3D Tablet. These relatively inexpensive devices offer consumers the full 3D experience in the palm of their hand. This evolution of 3D technology has opened the door for a wide variety of 3D creative needs, from mobile games, to applications, to advertising geared toward the mobile 3D market. The stage is set for brands and their agencies to leap off the screen and into the hearts and minds of the customers in ways never thought possible before. My company, Geneva Film Co., has produced 3D spots for Lexus, Sprint and others, bringing global brands into this next dimension. These projects– produced mainly for cinema– will next find their way to 3D TV and mobile platforms. As the popular YouTube 3D channel has shown, mobile user-generated 3D content can be an immersive experience with huge “viral” potential. In fact, YouTube not only allows stereoscopic 3D footage to be uploaded online, but also offers users a chance to convert their 2D HD footage to 3D with a click of a button online. It’s almost too easy.

3D CONTENT = RETENTION

Another exciting avenue currently being explored is 3D content in the classroom. Several schools across Europe have already started utilizing 3D projection. Astudy conducted on behalf of Texas Instruments showed a 17% increase in test results for those students who viewed 3D content as part of their normal curriculum. It also found attention-levels soared, with 92% of the class paying attention, versus 46% in the traditional 2D learning environment.

This type of 3D retention and engagement is not limited to the classroom. A similar study also conducted by Texas Instruments showed that viewers presented with 3D advertising content were as much as 20% more likely to retain that information than those who saw a 2D counterpart. These promising statistics bode well for Brands who develop 3D content as part of their marketing activities, as well as for agencies and content creators who offer this type of 3D impact to their clients.

3D’s GOT GAME

On the front lines of the 3D revolution are the Gamers: fearless consumers who are always ready to embrace new technology to elevate their gaming experience to a more immersive level. The Nintendo 3DS has sold over 15 million units worldwide and continues to gain traction in the US market thanks to a price cut that saw sales numbers soar. 3D-ready game consoles like Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 now feature franchise titles like Grand Turismo and Call of Duty in immersive 3D splendor. This in turn propels 3D TV sales as gamers scramble to update their home systems to be 3D ready. By its very nature, gaming and 3D technologies are a match made in heaven, tapping into the very essence of what makes 3D so exciting: it just feels real.

3D CONTENT IS KING

Ultimately, content is still king. Like the HD revolution that preceded it, 3D now has the platforms to support widespread use in every aspect of daily life. However, without content to bring these devices to life, consumers will have little reason to buy. As a presenter at both TED, and Cannes Lions, my experience has been that the enthusiasm for 3D has been palpable. Despite initial trepidation by production companies and agencies, overall 3D content continues to expand. 24/7 3D channels like ESPN3D, 3net and Sky Channel are paving the way. 2012 will see the London Olympics broadcast in 3D, with the opening and closing ceremonies, men’s 100m dash, gymnastics, swimming, basketball promising 3D action. Hollywood is also offering more Blu-Ray 3D movies than ever. As more and more content enters the market, giving a greater number of consumers a reason to introduce the growing list of 3D devices into their daily routine, 3D will quickly become a primary format for content across all media platforms. For the brands and agencies bold enough to lead the way, the sky is the limit. Is it worth it? Let’s just say we won’t have the Star Trek holodeck without 3D.

Via Brian Solis: http://www.briansolis.com

A toddler stands up proudly in their high chair, they lose their balance and they take a tumble. The result can cause some traumatic injuries. In response, every high chair sold in the U.S. is required to come with a safety harness.

But how does just adding on a harness ensure that a busy parent will remember (or be willing) to use it every time? Or, for that matter, how does including a harness in a box even ensure that a parent will even install it in the first place?

The BabyBjörn High Chair, a Red Dot winner dreamed up by Ergonomidesign, cleverly solves these problems. Rather than harnessing in a child to be fed from a high chair’s tray table, the tray table simply becomes the harness. The surface locks the child down like they’re going on a roller-coaster ride.

“We wanted to make a chair where you, the parent or caretaker, automatically make sure the child is securely fastened,” project lead Håkan Bergkvist tells Co.Design. “On our chair all you have to do is flip up the adjustable table and the child is secured.”

In other words, if you want to feed your child–the whole purpose of putting them in that high chair in the first place–you’ll need to flip up the harnessing mechanism. By tying safety to the BabyBjörn High Chair’s primary function, smart design necessitates that the chair will always be used safely. There’s simply no alternative.

Yet ironically, the BabyBjörn High Chair’s safety mechanism is so invisible that it doesn’t meet U.S. regulations. “Because of standard requirements in the U.S., the chair is also equipped with a traditional harness there,” Bergkvist tells us.

It’s a shame. Bergkvist’s team was “left free to start from scratch” with the design, to dream up a better solution to chairs with complicated straps. (Which they did.) That design will be unadulterated across Europe, where no such harness standards exist. But in the U.S., parents receive an overbuilt solution, wasting both their time (the very existence of a strap implies that it should be used), their money (someone has to pay for this extra component), and material resources (if BabyBjörn sells 20,000 of these chairs, that’s a lot of fabric that we never needed to produce).

The purpose of iterative design is to approach known ideas in a better way. By their very nature, the most watershed designs probably won’t have been considered before–they’re new ideas because they’re new ideas. So how can anyone be expected to dream up the products of the future when they’re boxed in by the semantic limitations of the past? Or, maybe more importantly, why should they?

The Sheraton Skyline hotel in London (out by the airport) had the word “belong” plastered everywhere. If you’ve seen my speeches in the last little while, one of my favorite points to make is that “business is about belonging.” I thought to myself, “I wonder how Sheraton attempts to make me feel like I belong.”

I did a little research and found that Sheraton has been working on helping me feel like I belong since 2006. Evidently, they used to hand out 10 minute phone cards to encourage you to stay in touch with home. There were other touches in play then, too.

My experience wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t so much about belonging. The front desk process was pleasant. I was upsold into the Club area, which cost a bit more, but afforded me access to wifi (rooms only had wired internet), where I was served some drinks, some snacks, and could watch TV and the like (it looked a bit like the first class room at most airports- US level of quality, not Europe, which is to say, not as good).

What Is the Promise You Make and What Is the Reality?

I’ve been thinking about this as it applies to my own business and efforts. I promise to give people quite a useful and energetic and entertaining keynote. I have to deliver on that, or people won’t want me back. I promise to give my clients useful and actionable strategic consulting around business (primarily sales and marketing), communications, and technology, and if I don’t, then they don’t ask me back.

What are the promises you’re making, and what is the reality of what is delivered?

Now, think about that with regards to social media efforts. Just because you have a happy dappy intern talking sweetly about your whatever company on Twitter, does that relate to the experience people will have in your stores? If no, why promise one thing in your online channel and not deliver it when you get offline? How will these experiences match up?

Are you ready to make the promise that people BELONG at your business? And if so, what are you doing about it?