This weeks creative outburst is courtesy of Tore Rosbo, member of the danish national football team (he wishes).

Here you will find a short aticle with a few inspiring examples of creative communication in public spaces. But be warned – it’s in Danish!

We returned from Euro IA summit last Saturday. We have been busy since then. That is the reason why we have not published our thoughts about it before now.

However there’s plenty of good reasons to spread the message: The conference this year was a great succes. Both in terms of content and quality, atmosphere, people and location there is no doubt that this was the best summit so far. The only thing to point fingers at - seen from our very narrow danish perspective - is the number of danish attendants. Last year Denmark was surprisingly well represented, this year we were very few.

Of course some presentations were more relevant to us than others, but generally speaking the professional/academic level was just perfect. I will not go through all the insights (and we did not go to all presentations), so this is just a brief note on the speakers who gave new ideas to include in our next projects.

Playful IA (Kars Alfrink)

Extremely interesting presentation on adapting ideas from game design to IA. We are currently designing a new intranet for a big danish company, and I believe we are going to adapt some of the ideas – eg. what happens when you think of an intranet as a game, with real challenges, tokens, rewards etc.? This could be a very obvious way to motivate users to participate and take ownership of the site.

How to (Really) localize an Information Architecture (Peter Van Dijck)

Peter presented a simple framework to address the questions that always arise when creating internatioal sites. It’s not that the content of the presentation was new to us, but it was the kind of presentation that inspired me to go back home to produce the 6 generic questions and slides to use at client presentations.

Service Design (Claire Rowland)

Service Design is in growing demand in Denmark. It was very interesting to hear that the same is true outside Denmark – or at least in the UK. Just like the presentation Peter gave, the most interesting part of Claires presentation was the methods and the way of presenting them to clients.

There was many other presentations that deserves to be mentioned: The Core and paths: Designing from the inside out by Are Halland and the one about the new site for Heathrow Airport by Georgio Venturi and Jonathan Culling were also excellent… and all the rest was good too…But this is all for now… :-)

Enjoy the EuroIA2008 photoset on Flickr

Yesterday we launched yet another website to be proud of - and this time it’s our very own!

For several months we have been wishing and working on a website that shows 1508 in a more visual and comprehensive way. Have a visit on the site and go on a journey into our past and present to get to know the true story of 1508.

We would love to hear your opinion about the site.
 

The national identity of countries can shift radically and at a speed that leaves their inhabitants gasping. As the United States continues to suffer from low approval ratings all over the world, Paula Scher, one of the world’s leading graphic designers and a principal at Pentagram in New York, talks to Monocle editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé about how the US needs to overhaul its image, brand promise, name and messaging.

Watch it here

This important and rather comprehensive question is raised in a newly published report by FORA

The answer in the report is ‘concept design’ - a new discipline that combines social science, business and design.

In the past most questions for consultancies has been ‘HOW? How do we develop a new product? How should it be designed?
Concept design is viewed as the means to answer the questions that a lot of companies are facing today: WHAT? What should we focus on? What problems should our products solve?

The FORA-report is based on an international study identifying a small number of ‘design hubs’ where companies working with concept design are located. The report concludes that San Francisco, New York, Chicago, London, Munich and Denmark are leading hubs - and 1508 is among the consultancies identified as a “concept design” company. Examples of other companies are Frog Design, IDEO, ReD Associates, LiveWork and Philips Design.

If you have read the publication, we would like to know your view on concept design. Is this really a new field? Do you see its potential? What are the potential (business) barriers of concept design?

The report is available for download in PDF.