We are working on a total integration process that we call the Power of X with our friends at Boy’s Don’t Cry. On the highest level, its a cross-disciplinary approach that everyone talks about, but its also a fractal model that can be easily understood and used for every meeting to extract the specialized knowledge and needs of each attendee user, that is fast to facilitate and synthesize into the overall process. It’s about asking the right questions at the right time, and reinterpreting those questions as the project becomes more informed with time. We have started to use this process on ourselves, together with our network partners such as Storylab, and are developing it even further into a user manual.
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Imaginary Life is brand, design & communications consultancy. At Imaginary Life, we see brands as partnership platforms...
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In China, when you are sick, they don’t add poison to kill to cure. They work with fine-tuning your energy, and give you herbal teas to flush out the poison. Working acupuncture style means you don’t amputate a leg in order to walk.
Acupuncture change management means you don’t need to add an army to an army, or add mountains of white papers to growing mountains of power points. You just have to create a few of the correct tools to drive forward your business vision, across silos in the company. And have a few knowledgable enterprise engineers to facilitate the process. Sounds like what most companies are doing right? But usually there work is based on a static business model, rather than one equipped for change. One that is dynamic by nature and designed to design change. Integrating every company silo for business focused results. We see this process in place in parts of a company, product development and logistics of product to market, for example. But rarely are these efficient models taken through to communications as a value generator. We take resources, make stuff and push it out to landfills. With the profit in between coming from volumes or premium profit margins. Take, make, waste.
The non-cyclical farming approach eventually runs out of land. Companies farm onions, that takes nutrients from the soil, and then instead of farming apples the next year, they move onto to new pastures to farm more onions. But these apples are sweet, and hard to find. The sweetest innovation spot of all is what we call a “service dominant logic for business”, applied with an “acupuncture change management” approach. Well, more later. For now, Shanghai is calling.
We are here in China with (Sino) Swedish Design House presenting Imaginary Life. It’s really an honour to be here, and the hospitality we are shown is amazing. We landed in Shanghai a few days earlier to get acclimatised and explore the local cuisine. We work to eat and there is plenty of opportunity to do that here! After a couple of days we had already learnt how to negotiate our way in the basic everyday life situations in broken Chinese. Asking taxi drivers where to go, ordering food and drinks, and of course bargaining down the prices down on the market.
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When we were first invited to present “Sweden design for better business” to Chinese companies and government officials, it seemed an unlikely task. How can we to tell them what to do? The population of Sweden is less than the city we are in now. Rendering meaningless sales lines like: “We have worked with Sweden’s biggest bank, petrol company, etc.” But it’s not a colonial “know it all” attitude that we come here with. And in our case, not even a “business as usual” offering: It’s a strong belief that only collaboration and teamwork with a vision of serving human needs can design a prosperous future for us all. If we can combine this approach and process with the Great Power and Common Sense of Chinese industry- anything is possible.
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Elizabeth Redmond is a 23-year-old inventor and entrepreneur whose POWERleap flooring converts human energy into ready to use on-site energy. She envisions its use in urban settings: city sidewalks, dance clubs, airport terminals, fitness clubs, campuses, office lobbies; in short, anywhere that lots of people walk. We LIKE!
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LIVE Singapore! provides people with access to a range of useful real-time information about their city by developing an open platform for the collection, elaboration and distribution of real-time data that reflect urban activity. Giving people visual and tangible access to real-time information about their city enables them to take their decisions more in sync with their environment, with what is actually happening around them.
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A trailer for a documentary about Mark Hogancamp, who suffered brain damage after a horrendous street attack by five thugs. After coming out of a nine day coma with his memory wiped clean he made a meticulous new world for himself – Marwencol – using action figures, miniature sets and an old camera.
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This innovation got our pulse up. Commuters’ surplus body heat can now be used to warm an office building thanks to Swedish Jernhusen, a real estate company that has devised a way to use just such an energy supply to warm an entire office building.
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Earthaid.net is a site and an iPhone app dedicated to helping people monitor and reduce their total household consumption, whether that’s electricity, gas or water. Users of the system, which has been called the “Mint.com of Home Energy,” can earn cash rewards from all types of retailers for reducing their energy consumption! A great incentive to users started. We expect to see more joint Customer Loyalty Programs integrated into this type of platform, encouraging us normal people to shop and save wisely.
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Can beautiful Turbines help critics embrace wind energy? That’s the question posed by Fast Company in their article spotlighting the Dutch architect’s designs that merge the idea of public sculpture with wind energy. Would certainly make our cities prettier and more energy conscious, even if the birds are thrown a bit off balance.
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