IDSA DesignAbout : New York City!!
Reviewed by Ian White

At a pre-conference reception and seminar, Alex Manu of the Axis Group/Alm Design and world-renowned expert on the history of toys and playing, shared ways to get clients and designers to access the most important ingredient for thinking innovatively: the imagination. His supposition is that as adults, our creativity has been stifled ("The Organized Death of Imagination after Childhood") and effectively replaced by work; we need to unlearn this dichotomy and reclaim play as an "ageless and indispensable condition of every human being," i.e. a key tactic for strategic innovation.

In a very animated and humorous presentation, Mr. Manu referenced Sacha, his young son, as an archetype of creativity: by asking "what would Sasha do?" to better understand ourselves. This was also reinforced through the use of a Balero, the age-old Spanish cup and stick game. Mr. Manu dived into his suitcase of toys, showing different Balero from Venezuela, China, Columbia, Brazil, Japan and France, posing the rhetorical question: why do people obsessively play with these toys for over 2000 years? What is it about play?

Just because Apple or VW sells products to consumers doesn't mean industrial products have to be ugly. Tomo Razmilovic, CEO of Symbol Technologies, sees design as a competitive differentiator. A manufacturer of mobile data transaction systems, the company has evolved with its customers by understanding its customers. For example, while bar code data capture technology allowed Symbol to make smaller input devices, UPS would not have been able to decrease shipping times without understanding the shipping business. From this perspective, Razmilovic sees it critical to envision future product needs: "scenario visualization is necessary to develop new applications." The company's New York design laboratory is such a place to research, design, prototype and test new applications for emerging needs.