Designing for Parody

People have struggled for years to find ways of explaining the product or "brand experience" and how it can be created. It's been explained by Pine and Gilmore as a theater with props (drawing with no doubt from Erving Goffman), as a mindshare, and in many other ways.

My personal constructionist view of brand is that the best brands are a combination of design and emergence in real communities, but i won't take the time right now to explain (perhaps a later post).

Perhaps the best way to analyze one's brand, though, is to gauge its ability to be parodied. For those of you who have a product or a business, unless it can be parodied in a video like this one (apologies in advance for the questionable content), your product probably doesn't have a strong enough brand. Where does your business or design fall on the 0-10 "parody-able index"?

As an example, the current version of BigTreeTop.com (a company i co-founded) achieves around a 1 or 2 on the index (low) - a problem we're working to solve by making much stronger, fearless statements about who we are.

Innovation in Business

For those of you who are missing it, the business world is starting to embrace and even develop their own design stance, as a result of their awareness of the need to true innovation. One of the guys who has gotten lots of eyeballs of late is David Armano, a Creative VP at Digitas, who recently wrote an article for Business Week on "It's The Conversation Economy, Stupid."

I posted a similar concept back in November about the designer as novelist. http://briggzay.blogspot.com/2006/11/designer-linguist-not-novelist.html

David and the whole creative business culture are pushing hard to understand design as it plays out in the business world, and are coming along nicely, i think, given the immense challenge of marrying our modernistic industrial revolution ethos with more post-modern societal tendencies. In my experience, this is an exciting, challenging space.