Comments on: Customers sometimes do not know what they want

By: colin shepherd

colin shepherd — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:35:36 +0000

Surely it is a mistake to think of customers as a homogeneous group?
Some customers would make brilliant contributions to innovation – many would add rubbish.
If we react to the wrong data we’ll come up with the wrong solutions.
I do think it is a good observation that customers generally don’t know what they want – otherwise we wouldn’t need retail service.
This is true in many obvious categories such as technology,clothing,health food, auto,appliances.

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Are we in control of our own decisions? | FreshNetworks Blog — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:50:29 +0000

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By: Joseph

Joseph — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:16:51 +0000

You have started a very interesting discussion on kitchen design. I’m a cabinetmaker who really does not want to make kitchens for a living, because the most of what is done in the US is just boxes with a “choice of doors and drawer fronts,” the most of which are made in a factory somewhere. Boring. I want to do something else if I can, but what?

Last year I started a blog site with a fellow cabinetmaker and have since been exploring this very subject. European design just absolutely blows my mind, and I find myself doing quite a bit on it, even though these are often modular kitchens that one would simply send away for and have installed by a local craftsman. But what fascinates me is the utter innovation of those designs, so I find myself returning to them quite a bit.

I am also looking to design a kitchen for my wife in a too small space in a tract home, which necessarily lets out those wonderful European designs that excite me so. And whenever I find myself going out on a limb with some idea or another for our kitchen, my wife always grounds me by saying, “If you stick with the classics, you won’t grow tired of them.”

So, what do you do that is different and yet timeless and practical and stimulating to make if you’re a cabinetmaker? Damned if I know, but if I ever figure it out, I mean to make it for us and splash that baby all over the Internet!

What you’ve written, though, has given me quite a bit to think about, and I thank you for sharing your concepts.

By: Alison Macleod

Alison Macleod — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:33:31 +0000

I haven’t seen formal co-creation work terribly well, although I do think it depends on the product area and the audience – as in, there are some problems which it is terribly easy to solve collaboratively and others which are very difficult.

I think it has to be several things at once: listen (or watch), engage, test. One approach I’ve found useful in the past is to test the outliers i.e. to make up some examples of concepts which push a central idea to one particular limit – testing the ‘exaggerated’ thing, if you like. Feedback can then be very interesting in terms of defining the working area.