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Gifts for the designer in your life

Are you wondering what you could give a designer for Christmas? It's not always the obvious choice that gets the best reaction, so we canvased the studio for some ideas......

What do you do on Fridays?

Here at The Imagination Factory we have always believed that creative people don't switch the creative part of their brains on and off, when they are in and out of a formal work environment. Many of our team's best ideas come to them at moments walking down the street or chatting over a drink. Sometimes these ideas have nothing to do with projects we are working on for our clients. So, instead of requiring our designers to focus on ideas other people have had, every month, we encourage them to ...

5 ways IoT is changing product design

Jennifer Aiden is a tech enthusiast writing on innovation and how it continues to transform how people live, work and play. Here, she writes exclusively for The Imagination Factory, looking at the impact of IoT on design thinking....

Starting out in product design

Mark, co-founder of The Imagination Factory recently spoke to The Designer about his career and what inspired him to be a product designer. He said: ‘I didn’t realise I could actually be designing and making for a career – but as soon as I discovered that was a possibility, I knew that’s what I wanted to do...’...

The Athletic Brain in the Pool

It won’t have escaped any triathlete that training in the pool lacks the immediate feedback that technology can provide when running or cycling. “Real time feedback for athletes is really helpful for a number of reasons,” said Amit Katwala, author of The Athletic Brain. “When you are pushing at the edge of your ability to improve performance and get ‘in the zone’ it’s the real-time feedback that is crucial for an athlete to see the impact in the moment.” So it’s welcome news th...

Living up to the hype

Anyone following this year's announcements at CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Las Vegas, will have noticed the event was overflowing with smartglasses. There were new products from well-known companies like Vuzix, Epson and Samsung and a whole load of new entries such as ThirdEye and Lucyd. All of these products promise the consumer the superhuman-like ability to see information in their eye-line that would otherwise be invisible. Some, like Solos, are aiming at the sports market, others such a...

New Year's resolutions and an Escape from Alcatraz

We asked Julian Swan, one of the SwimAR creators, what's on his mind as he looks to 2018. "I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions but I do like to take some time to plan my year ahead and review my bucket list.  When it comes to sport related achievements, I know I have to set targets or goals, to keep focused on my training. Last year I didn’t sign up to any triathlons and this massively affected my training. There was always a work or social commitment that took priority here and there. ...

Adidas Nemiziz boot is sensored

Considered by some as one of the biggest innovations of 2017, the new Adidas Nemeziz boot is a superb piece of technology, with so many new and unseen ways of constructing a football boot. So what have they done that’s so different? Adidas has tapped into a common practice in other physical sports and arts, which involves wrapping feet or hands in elastic tape. Boxers do it to stay strong and nimble, ballerinas do it for stability and to feel light-footed and martial artists do it to enhance t...

Tough tools for a tough job

The BBC made a series a while back following three young Brits as they left their homes to pursue the world’s toughest jobs. These included Canadian Forestry, Cattle Ranching and Skyscraper Window Cleaning. There is no doubt these are a hard way to make a living but there's one more we would add to the list following a project we recently completed – being a UK Border Force officer. It’s a tough job because of the environments they have to work in and the politically charged atmosphere tha...

In the spotlight at Innovate 2017

Innovate UK's flagship event, Innovate 2017, highlights The Imagination Factory as 'one to watch'.   Following the launch of our SwimAR project at last year's show, the response to SwimAR, from interested visitor, enabled spin off projects like this heads-up display for a real-life Iron Man and the development of the first SwimAR prototype for testing in a pool.  Surpassing our wildest expectations, Innovate 2016 was the perfect environment to share our idea, standing alongside so...

A more real Virtual Reality

A marketing agency that specialises in creating Virtual Reality experiences approached us recently with a challenge that we found fascinating. A project they were working on needed people to be supported in a particular position and moved around smoothly to enhance the digital immersive experience. To provide a truly engaging piece of virtual reality it seemed that a bit of genuine reality needed to be injected back in!  ...

Open Design

Love them or hate them most businesses have a tag line of some description or another. When we set up The imagination Factory we did our best to avoid having one. But people kept asking what single phrase summed up what we are about. So in the end we relented and spent some time figuring that out. We decided to set ourselves the challenge of expressing our essence not just in a single phrase, but in just two words. It made us think hard about all the things we could be: pioneers, innovator...

Sign of the times

Yesterday I was visiting a relative in hospital when I came across one of those doors that is locked by a magnetic latch. So, as usual I looked to the wall expecting to find a push button that would release the door and came across the scene above. Visiting someone in hospital is never an easy thing but when it's a stroke rehabilitation ward it's particularly stressful and your mind is full of all sorts of questions. So, the last thing you need is to be confronted with something as confusing as ...

How to avoid looking like a plonkAR

Dave Lee, the BBC's North America technology reporter pronounced 3DTV as finally dead this week. This followed reports from LG and Sony who have stopped making 3D TVs hot on the heels of Samsung who made the move last year. What's interesting about the report is the analysis that one of the key drivers for the failure of 3D TV, was that wearing the glasses makes you look…well…a bit silly really. No surprises there, then! It's a great example of why Human-Centred Design has to be integral ...

Fuelling the Circular Economy

In this article we hand over the keyboard to our good friends at Cradle to Cradle Marketplace who have become a vital partner in our quest to embed cradle to cradle principles in our work as designers. Brendon Rowen shares his thoughts with us about how to make the circular economy work....

Why we Love to Hate Innovation

Innovation is one of those divisive buzz-words that you either love, hate or love to hate. You can't get far nowadays without some mention of innovation whether it's on an advert on the side of a bus or used in the headline for a conference. Businesses, governments & entrepreneurs are all convinced of the need for innovation and a recent study claims that 93% of executives are looking to it to drive growth (source: PwC). The big four GAFA companies (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) ar...

A Better Way to Innovate

In another article, we looked at why innovation can be a dirty word for businesses. Doing something new involves high levels of risk and the impact is not always easy to measure. But most people accept that to succeed they need to embrace innovation technology in one way or another. So how do you manage the risks associated with product design innovation, services, policies, spaces, infrastructure and so on? There is a growing understanding that an approach called Human-Centred Design (HCD)...

Grow Your Business Cost Effectively

If everyone is telling you that you've got a great product or service, but you are not seeing that enthusiasm mirrored in sales, then expanding your audience might be the answer. Generally speaking, audience growth is a tough, painful, expensive and time consuming. Often delivering little in return for your efforts. Innovate UK has put together a great video and shared some tips that we've shared below. Innovate UK works with people and companies, to find and drive science and technology innov...

The Imagination Factory - As seen on TV!

Every commuter fears hearing the tannoy announcement that their train journey will be delayed. And the fact that this is often attributed to 'leaves on the line' seems incomprehensible. How could leaves possibly cause a problem for a massive passenger train? Can't the rail companies just sweep them away with a leaf blower or something like that? This piece on ITV News featuring co-founders of The Imagination Factory, Mark and Julian, explains what the real problem is, why it's difficult to solv...

10 Tips for Having Great Ideas - #10 Turn on the tap

Someone recently asked us how the design team at The Imagination Factory approaches repeatable idea generation in the projects we work on. It made us stop and think and we ended up with a list of 10 top tips for having great ideas which we thought might be useful to share....

10 Tips for Having Great Ideas - #9 Let go...

Someone recently asked us how the design team at The Imagination Factory approaches repeatable idea generation in the projects we work on. It made us stop and think and we ended up with a list of 10 top tips for having great ideas which we thought might be useful to share....

10 Tips for Having Great Ideas - #8 Imitate Nature

Someone recently asked us how the design team at The Imagination Factory approaches repeatable idea generation in the projects we work on. It made us stop and think and we ended up with a list of 10 top tips for having great ideas which we thought might be useful to share....

10 Tips for Having Great Ideas - #7 Deal with the Saboteur

Someone recently asked us how the design team at The Imagination Factory approaches repeatable idea generation in the projects we work on. It made us stop and think and we ended up with a list of 10 top tips for having great ideas which we thought might be useful to share....

10 Tips for Having Great Ideas - #6 Get Physical

Someone recently asked us how the design team at The Imagination Factory approaches repeatable idea generation in the projects we work on. It made us stop and think and we ended up with a list of 10 top tips for having great ideas which we thought might be useful to share....

10 Tips for Having Great Ideas - #5 The Adjacent Possible

Someone recently asked us how the design team at The Imagination Factory approaches repeatable idea generation in the projects we work on. It made us stop and think and we ended up with a list of 10 top tips for having great ideas which we thought might be useful to share....