Articles from the current issue
| Innovation not a new thing |
| Issue 1 Oct 2007 - Satire | |
| Written by Harvey Trumbonsky | |
|
Page 1 of 2
 Sinnovid: Innovation is the only way to go! Although it sounds very much like it, “innovation” is not a new thing. Innovation has been implemented in many other sectors globally prior to the term reaching the design community. Now that the term has reached the manufacturing sector, massive change is predicted.“The important thing is that people are actually talking about innovation & that IS something new”, Richard Lauritz, the head of the business-design collaboration authority commented gleefully yesterday. “We hope that with all this talk, some action may actually follow, as is quite often the case, with the obvious exceptions being ‘world peace’, ‘making poverty history’ & the biggest white elephant of them all ‘sustainability’.” BDCA foresees manufacturers foregoing their traditional tried & tested practices of designing new products through industrial espionage, reverse engineering & educated guesswork & adopting more innovative techniques such as innovation. “There is a lot of work in taking apart a competitor’s product & trying to work out how the hell they came up with it & how all the buttons work, & then thinking of how to re-package it so as it looks different to the customer, but obviously better. Besides, someone has to be the pioneer in the first place, so that the rest of industry can imitate their technique.” Dr Lauritz (PHD Psych.) went on to say, “with innovation, we can engage designers, who can do all this ‘new’ thinking for us. All we have to do is tell them what colour we’d like to see it in.” It seems that manufacturers have an added incentive to start up a design department of their own. “All you need is a bit of space & approximately 3% of the budget that you need to run your entire finance & accounts department. In most industries when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, but in the design community you pay peanuts & you get real nutcrackers!” With all this talk of innovation, the Society of Innovative Industrial Designers (Sinnovid) has been started, predicting that true innovation is just around the corner. A Sinnovid spokesperson, Brett Wrightley, had this to say, “Sure, we’ve had innovations in design from time to time, but I mean, no one’s really come up with anything significant since the wheel. We feel that something as big as the wheel, is only just around the corner & it’s going to change all of our lives forever more. We don’t exactly know what this is going to be, or even what sector it is going to come from, or for that matter how it will affect us, but you can feel it, can’t you?”, Mr. Wrightley asked shaking my shoulder violently. “There’s a certain hype in the air, & this is just the sort of atmosphere that we need for innovation to occur. We’ve got a lot of smart designers out there, & there always thinking… all of the time. It’s got to be imminent!” he muttered, wiping the froth from the corner of his mouth. |
|
Print issue, Oct '07 (A3 PDF) Download
©2008 Sidelong Magazine. This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence. If you are interested in licensing it or getting hold of any of these designers or their work let us know, I'm sure we can come to an arrangement. sidelong@sidelong.com.au This is a Joomla! site. Original Joomla theme design, Haiku by rockettheme.com. Quite a few changes made by Sidelong Magazine.