In his new book, Glimmer, Warner Berger brings forth the idea that the process of design (as practiced by the greats) can and should be applied well beyond the confines of its perceived role as the basis of “fashionable clothing or handbags, distinctive typefaces, elegant Philippe Starck furniture or Michael Graves teakettles”. Berger makes cases for design as a transformative influence on business, the social sector, and even life. One of his primary muses in the book, Bruce Mau, seems to have designed writing a book right out of his life, hence why Berger is the author here and not Mau! But that doesn’t matter, the book will give you plenty to think about, especially if you, yourself, are not a designer.
This is not a book about product design or website design. It is about, as Bruce Mau puts it “the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes.” Berger shows how design has helped solve such interesting challenges as how to make certain that senior citizens take the right dosages of their medicine, how to bring portable computing to the developing world, how to create an effective stop-smoking campaign for teenagers, and how to inspire a company to rally behind their products by redesigning the product as a passion.
Berger brings forth 10 Glimmer Principles that serve as the blueprint for transformative design and are the primary chapters of the book. Some are actionable. Others are conceptual. Here they are:
Ask Stupid Questions: What is design?
Jump Fences: How do designers connect, reinvent, and recombine?
Make Hope Visible: The importance of picturing possibilities and drawing conclusions
Go Deep: How do we figure out what people need – before they know they need it?
Work the Metaphor: Realizing what a brand or business is really about – then bringing it to life through designed experiences
Design What You Do: Can be way a company behaves be designed?
Face Consequences: Coming to terms with the responsibility to design well and recognizing what will happen if we don’t
Embrace Constraints: Design that does “more with less” is needed more than ever in today’s world
Design for Emergence: Apply the principles of transformation design to everyday life
Begin Anywhere: Why the small actions are more important than the big ones
As someone who has to create (dare I say design) presentations, concepts and programs in my job, I enjoyed the read and the book gave me plenty to think about (several inspired blog posts have already been drafted). Although the subtitle of “how design can transform your life, and maybe even the world” feels pretty lofty, the concepts that Berger presents definitely have the potential to make a big impact on the way you think about your job and the world around you. If you are already a designer, I don’t think this book will offer much except maybe for some inspirational examples. And I will caution that Berger’s reuse of many of the same examples throughout the book can make finishing it a bit tiresome. All that said, if you could use a little creative inspiration in your approach to a challenge, a peek at the way a designer thinks cannot be a bad thing. Check out Glimmer.
posted by julia in Just Plain Interesting | No Comments »
tags: Tags: books, design
Sally Hogshead’s book, FASCINATE, is a compelling journey into method and madness of persuasion. The concept is that whether you are pitching a new client, inviting a friend to lunch, luring a cranky toddler to sleep, or marketing a product, you are using triggers to elicit a certain response. Sally has narrowed these down to 7 (power, trust, mystique, prestige, vice, alarm and lust) and the book demonstrates and explains how dialing these triggers up and down can help you more effectively influence your relationships.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the role of fascination with references to sex, facial recognition in babies, the Salem witch trials, the Mona Lisa, and amnesiacs with a similar approach as the super-popular Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Stevel Levitt and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Fascinated yet? I was. Sally makes the point that we have moved from a goods-based economy to a service-based economy to an information economy to an experience economy. We are now in a fascination economy where companies and individuals that are fascinating or can make someone else feel fascinating as a result of their relationship with them will win.
I think this is an interesting point. Particularly in our field of digital marketing, experiences are now a dime a dozen. Gone are the days of wowing a consumer with some visually brilliant Flash zinger. Today, much of our marketing is based on social media which is predicated on the idea that people want to be the most fascinating thing out there with more followers, comments and retweets than anyone else. And if not that, they are trolling around to see what others find fascinating for entertainment. So Sally, I am in.
The second part of the book describes each of the 7 triggers in detail. This part reads like most advertising books and for the seasoned marketer, won’t be that revolutionary. That said, as any aspiring golfer (like me) will tell you, the fundamentals of the game don’t change but you don’t hit a hole in one until you find the visualization that works for you. Meaning, even if Part 2 feels a good bit like other marketing books, when considered in the context of a new concept like fascination, you are bound find some valuable nuggets that you can carry with you and influence success.
For me those nuggets were most closely related to my role in agency business development. Positioning an agency and its offering in such a way that potential clients are fascinated by it is the hole in one. The concept crystallized all kinds of ideas that had previously been just clouding up my brain like one big, amorphous lump (Sally, I’ll let you know if our new business win rate goes up as a result!)
The third part of the book is probably my favorite. My number one pet peeve about business books is that they always promise to tell you how to be more successful but they never actually give you a formula for doing it. Rather your are left with a bunch of stuff to consider and no real action plan for putting it into place. Sally’s book is the opposite. She gives her readers a clear plan for becoming more fascinating. I’ve already cracked the book open once this week when a concept we were planning to pitch to a client was falling just a little bit flat. I have a feeling I’ll be doing that again and again.
So in sum, read Fascinate by Sally Hogshead. You can finish it in an evening or two and you’ll come away with loads of actionable strategies for making yourself or your company more captivating to the people who matter the most. It’s available on
Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.
posted by julia in Just Plain Interesting | No Comments »
tags: Tags: books, marketing strategy
