I can understand 3DS wanting to hitch their wagon to āā¦a pop culture influencerā¦ā and to āā¦leverage will.i.amās international creative industry networkā¦ā but do these things actually work?
uuummmā¦More power to him, but to me this whole setup continues the myth that any sort of creative process is about the sole genius with an āideaā and not the hard work and process and the many people involved. He can swan into a meeting and spout a few buzzwords and name drop and somehow that is designing a product that ends up on the store shelves.
I want to say he comes across as a hyperactive over-privileged teenager, who thinks his opinion matters, and someone needs to have a quiet word to him to pull his head in - sort of a cross between Verruca Salt, David Brent and Mugato, but that would be very unfair of me, so I wont.
I found that whole trend really odd. I worked with a few of star athletes while at Nike. Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade. All of them had great input on what their performance expectations were and feedback on what fir their personal style. The tone Nike spent was when we work together on show we collaborate as peers. I always felt a lot of respect and appreciation for what we did on the product side and an excitement to be involved, and we echoed that back as it was pretty exciting to be working with them. Even though they were spokespeople in some regard, they also had to work in the product. The product had to perform and a bad product could lead to a career limiting injury. In fact, they would be putting the product through some of the most extreme performance conditionsā¦ even with all of that none of them seemed to feel the need to be called creative director.
So the whole celebrity creative director thing just baffled me. It feels so ā¦ tawdry. Now if any of them stopped performing, recording, or acting and sat with the team every day and actually designed phones, that would awesome, but a title does not make a person, a person makes a title.
At least at Nike the athletes/celebrities providing input had a huge amount of experience in that field to know what the performance issues were, what they wanted improved and that in turn would influence their play, making it extremely valuable advice to apply to the design process.
Even if they had stopped performing to help full-time to work on product design, do they use technology so differently that their input is more valuable than what regular consumers provides? Basketball shoes I understand absolutely how pro input influences shoe usability and the brand itself. A phoneā¦not so much.
Would I buy some basketball shoes because Michael Jordan helped design them? Sure, he backs up his input with experience.
Would I buy a phone because Alicia Keys had some kind of input? Nope.
I donāt know how it is at Nike, but at CCM (albeit 12 odd years ago), all the product managers were ex-hockey players. I think it does help to bring the VOC into the development process.
On the other hand, my impression was that they were more skeptical of new technology than the average consumer.
Have to resurrect this one with some shocking news:
Will.i.amās technology company i.am+ is running out of money, according to current employees, company emails, and documents obtained by The Verge. As a result, two current employees of smart home platform Wink ā which i.am+ acquired in 2017 ā tell The Verge that workers havenāt been paid in seven weeks, and that their office in Schenectady, New York has been temporarily closed.
Letās get Will.i.am that much deserved Core77 design award before itās too late!
Yo: I would have assumed they sold a lot of the patents to cover down-sizing costs, but I guess they managed to hang onto enough to keep the revenue flowing.
They still own QNX which from what I understand is a pretty big player in the embedded computing space. Basically they make an operating system for use on devices that arenāt PCs like cars, planes, medical devices, etc.
Iāve seen quite a few job openings with them over the years in Kanata (Ottawa suburb). Especially relating to autonomous vehicles in recent years, Apple also opened an office literally next door which is also reportedly working on autonomous vehicles.