Kristen Baumlier

Today I attended a lecture by Christine Enderby, the Creative Director of Ziba that was part of the  Design Matters Lecture Series at the Weatherhead School of Management. Enderby 
works at the design company Ziba, which is a globally respected design and innovation company based in Portland. At the lecture she shared some examples of guiding multidisciplinary teams.  Her clients range from working with Rubbermaid, Procter & Gamble, Kandoo, Pampers, Olay, Borghese, and Costco and Kirkland Signature.

In her lecture, she talked in depth about a case study with a company that wanted to bring their product to Japan. She could not officially say the name but it seemed like it was Tupperware.  She talked about how design is people-centric, and that getting insight into the consumer is integral to the design process. Her team identified it was important to work with a group of the Japanese population called the professional housewife to determine what was their values, habits, and aspirations.  They gave some of the housewives an assignment to document their day, write about their relationship to food and their family, and learned some interesting things.  In Japan space is at a premium – and it is considered a “vertical” society.  Many of the women would file plates in a drawer, and storage and things fitting in the fridge and other places that they had was important  They also learned that using ceramic and quality pieces at the table was important.

The outcome of their study was a profile of who their customer is,  what is their cultural background, and what latest trends they find interesting.  The outcome was that the housewives valued performance, precision and tradition and had aspirations of care, order, and to successfully complete the task of preparing and storing food.

The team also learned that the current Tupperware containers were considered to be high quality in Japan, but they did not fit into the storage and refrigerators in the home.

We did not see examples of what was going to be developed for the Japanese market out of this research – but Enderby mentioned that it would be smaller and out of new materials that might look like ceramic or other quality materials.

Enderby in her presentation mentioned several times the idea of “attract, engage, and extend” and that it is necessary to get awareness, to give more than an initial benefit, and to create depth and ways to extend awareness past a item or product.

I am currently starting a new project called Food Font Food which is a project comprised of food and design workshops, font making activities and the use of the interactive online design tool Food Font.  The project supports education, interaction, and communication about food, health, and design.  The talk today had some good food for thought about building a brand, doing research, and  getting inspiration which I plan to think about applying in the development of my design tool and project.

Image Source:
Tupperware – Japanese site and Kristen Baumlier

Links:

Tupperware – Japanese site

Ziba