The highlight of London Design Festival PinterestXConran brought two giants together in an experiment.
Conran
Sir Terence Conran is one of the greatest designers working today. He began life as a hip designer of wicker cone chairs before becoming the pre-eminent designer of lifestyle.
A highlight of the event was a tasteful real life pinterest board posted with gorgeous examples of good design. The plain, the simple, and the useful.
Crowds walked through a forest of pins and sat on smart chairs. Good design – digital or craft – is only good as the conversations it starts and the communities it develops. On these terms the evening was a massive success.
Pinterest, launched in 2010, enjoyed a meteoric rise in the early part of the decade before experiencing a dip. It’s a bit of an obscure social media platform today but it is the eight most popular platform according to revive.digital.
On Pinterest you pin images from other websites and create pinboards. These pinboards are collections of different images which can be organised by theme. The most popular categories in 2012 were home, arts and crafts, style/fashion, and food. The popular image is of bridezllas using the service for wedding inspiration. Anecdotally the average user was thought to be 30-49 year old moms. There is some truth in this. Although women predominate (81%), 40% of new sign ups are men.
50% of US millennials use the service every month. Business Insider reports that millennials use Pinterest as much as Instagram. The bottom line, apparently 87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest.
Issues around copyright are both notorious and invisible. Individual users are liable to potential legal action. Businesses seeing the power of Pinterest to lure customers are unlikely to respond by legal action but what about design companies.
The main difference between Instagram and Pinterest seems to be that you can easily post other people’s works in Pinterest and you can organise images. It is clearly a powerful tool for businesses, especially those involved in aspirational services.
PinterestXConran
A new Conran app was tested at the event. You needed to download the app before attending the event (a useful thing to know which I missed on the invitation). You could then tap your phone on an items price tag and the item would join a pinterest board.
Alternatively you could hover your phone over pincodes and the item would be pinned.
I swapped my MP01 for my iPhone, but sadly I could not download the app. Possibly this was a way to weed out the less financially salubrious amongst us. Ultimately though tech needs to meet the needs of users, where the users are and using the tools users use.
The potential value of this tool is immense, but it would be good to return to it next year to see if the business has enjoyed a noticeable difference in sales.
Summary
An excellent evening which showed how technological and design innovations can support and foster innovation in the real world.
Simon Bralee 