The design dictum "Form follows function" was coined by Louis Sullivan, a US architect (1856-1924). During the last century function began to have a practical or technical meaning best expressed in the work of modernism and began to be associated with 'boring'. This led to Frog Design's dictum "form follows emotion" and later to "form follows fun".
I am thinking that maybe another viable dictum is "form follows communication". What story do we want to tell through the form and function of our new product or service? What opportunity does our new product and/or service offer to the potential consumer... how easy is it for them to create their own stories?
At the weekend I went to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and walked through the exhibition called
Objects are part of our own lives, and also have lives of their own. Like people, objects have biographies. Inspired by the work of the anthropologist, Igor Kopytoff, this exhibition reveals how an object’s identity is not fixed but is shaped by contexts in which it is exchanged, owned and used. Most of the objects here circulated as commodities, with an exchange value before they entered the Gallery’s collection.
However, once removed from the world of commodities, they become 'singularised’ and are valued for their cultural significance rather than their market price. These changes in their lives reveal an uncertainty of identity.
So how do we go about creating a "consumer story" we can share with our innovation team? and how do we design our offer in a way that allows the consumer to narrate their experience of using our goods/services?
One model we used is to take the [strategy]>insights>ideas>concepts>prototypes> products/services flow described here. Leaving aside the strategy aspect by assuming (big assumption) that our innovation project aligns with business strategy, then we can draw a diagram of consumer story development and technical solution as:
INSIGHTS
thepenetrating understandingfrom which many ideas can be generated; usually a consumer benefit could be a technology opportunity.
IDEAS
apossible consumer storyor a possible technology/business
solutionthat could become a concept
CONCEPTS (or Schemes)
a plausible consumer storylinked to apossible technology/
business solutionthat could become a product.
PROTOTYPES
avalid and viable consumer storydelivered by a
valid technology/business solution. (modified from here to reflect recent experience)
PRODUCTS/SERVICES
avalid and viable consumer storydelivered by a
valid and viable technology/business solution.
As the consumer story is interactively developed using Design Fast Action techniques, continually asking "Does it fit with strategy?" versus "Is the consumer motivated?" can help ensure more radical ideas can be supported by the business as they are engaged in the story itself, rather than thinking how different from previous stories this is.
Eventually we set free our creation and the consumer takes over and determines, through their own stories,
"how an object’s identity is not fixed but is shaped by contexts in which it is exchanged, owned and used"
Picture uploaded bymatthewsim . Used with thanks under CC.
Arriving at the MRI hospital in Manchester this (Thursday)morning reminded me why, in spite of spending billions on the National Health Service we still have major problems with hospital infections such as MRSA and C.difficile! It is a routine appointment for my daughter... we have been going for 20 years or so now and we have progressed from a run down victorian heap to a new building... unfortunately the public toilets are still in a terrible state... with the odd used sticking plaster thrown on the floor and toilet paper on the floor, not to mention no paper towels to dry your hands on.. and the dryers don't work properly! ... this is 9.00 am in the morning just as business is getting going.. just outside is the snack bar queue with surgeons wearing stethoscopes next to people off the street waitng for out-patients. The tea is good and I sat and watched a snack bar assistant cleaning the display cabinets, very thoroughly amidst all humanity pushing past her to get a sandwich! It seems to me that whilst we allow the internal and external processes to come into contact like this then the osmosis at the boundaries will ensure we do not solve the problem of hospital acquired infection. I wanderd over the rpoad to the Whitworth Art Gallery and entered a Victorian building which had just been cleaned ( I could smell the cleanliness!), went to the newly refurbished toilets and switched the taps on by non-contact actuators, used the cleanser and dried my hands under the dryer... ah now I feel clean again! There is a lesson here somewhere.
I think it has something to do with RACI. As a large organisation we were wondering how some quite important actions took so long to happen or didn't happen at all, in spite of people knowing it should happen. It reminded me of:
"There was an important job to be done, and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought Somebody would do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody would not do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done."
We were introduced to RACI Analysis as a diagnostic tool:
Who is Responsible for making it happen? (who says "Lets do it"?)
Who is Accountable for getting it done? (who gets kicked if its not done?)
Who do we Communicate with when it has been done? (who needs to know that its been done?)
Who do we Inform that it has been done? (Who gets told its done HR? PR? peers?)
It is amazing how it can be difficult to tie down the R's and A's; and finding that C and I can be a challenge too!
The beauty of the analysis is that we can then start bringing clarity to roles for people and highlight that there are areas of initiative that people can take action without asking permission. Of course what happens is that the levels of bureaucracy become transparent. Often RACI shows that the R and A can be separated by a level or more, and the C is somewhere else. The gravity effect kicks in and we see that commands drop down but as queries, ideas, problem reporting, etc. doesn't defy gravity and go upwards. So those with R get no feedback from A and C and I get neglected... does wonders for morale!
So RACI can be used help sort out roles and responsibilities rather than jobs and tasks, so that people think "this job needs doing, I know what needs to be done and how to do it, so I will. Then I will tell these people who will be pleased to let everyone know that its been done!"
Then maybe hospitals will concentrate on important activities that contribute to good health of its "consumers" rather than make them nervous about entering the hospital!
They could start by nipping over the road to see how a Museum can be clean and ask "How do we do this?"
I am not apologising for repeating the definition of innovation that Kevin Roberts wrote in Lovemarks:
“Innovation is something that changes the life of the customer. It changes the life of the customer in some way or the world in which the customer experiences things. That’s innovation”
So an innovation is as great as the insights that inspire it and as poor as the weakest link that delivers it.
Reflecting on this a business group president observed:
“Understanding our consumer will of course produce product ideas. Good understanding, logically will generate good ideas. But in our battle for share at the margin good ideas alone are not enough. Success will come from something more than an idea. It will emerge from insight. And in my view insight derives from an intimacy of understanding. So we have to become expert in, indeed competitively the best in, sensitive observation of our consumer and his or her world.”
More pragmatically, we can define a consumer insight as the discovery of something interesting or enlightening about the consumer's needs, beliefs or behaviour. This penetrating understanding can provide hooks or clues to help us to identify opportunities to address the needs of consumers in new and competitively superior ways.
One of the challenges is to observe our consumers through a new lens
Picture uploaded by MegElizabeth_. Used with thanks under CC.
What are they discussing? Is it relevant to our strategy of bringing new benefits to the cleaning task? If I am a surface chemist does it inform me in any way? If I am a tool designer? a marketer? Deconstructing the whole experience over time might be revealing! But what are they discussing?
"Second-hand information has its charm, but gossip and expensive French cheese are about the only things that get better the farther you are from the source.
If you want to make sure that your customers are happy with your products, you have to communicate with them directly: get out of your office, go to the place where they use your software, watch them, and listen to them, and listen to them. Plus, there's nothing like a change of scenery to clear your head and make room for some astonishing new insights to move in and take over.......
Listening to customers is rewarding in so many ways. That's why we go to great lengths to do it."
But listening to customers mean thay talk of now which can limit our horizons if we are innovating for tomorrow.
"Directly witnessing and experiencing aspects of behaviour in the real world is a proven way of inspiring and informing [new] ideas. The insights that emerge from careful observation of people's behaviour . . . uncover all kinds of opportunities that were not previously evident."
So, ideas are potential ways to respond to a consumer insight.
The problem is that, in our highly pressured global environment, organisations find it too tempting to view a reflective way of working as time-wasting and so significant opportunities go unrecognised until an upstart organisation, suddenly destabilises the market with an offer that allows existing consumers to move their attention and purchases to something more exciting and in keeping with their aspirations.
"Everything you see and touch was once an invisible idea until someone chose to bring it into being. Any powerful ideas is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it." [Richard Bach]
Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the "things" that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.
The academic, Mohan Sawhney, defined insight ans consumer insight in this fashion:
Insight – Conceptual definitions
• Grasping the inner nature of things intuitively
• Clear or deep perception of a situation
• Clear (and often sudden) understanding of acomplex situation
• A feeling of understanding
Consumer insight
A customer insight is a fresh and not-yetobvious understanding of consumer beliefs,values, habits, desires, motives, emotions orneeds that can become the basis for acompetitive advantage.
– A not-yet obvious discovery
– A unique and fresh perspective
– A penetrating view of the obvious
– A competitively-advantaged idea
– Grounded in consumer understanding
– Not a number, a fact, or a quote from a consumer
A colleague once said "discovering insights is like fishing...
Picture uploaded by jurvetson. Used with thanks under CC.
you can sit there all day and not get a bite; or only land a tiddler. Another day you might catch a big one in a matter of minutes or after several hours. Insights are like those big fish... they are worth discovering but it can take time." But we need to find that time.
It is easy to see technology as an end to itself. I remember 10 years ago when people got really excited about RFID chips and began to talk about their potential as if it was a fact.... "chips with everything" but reality began to kick in and most of the hype has gone away.The technology key performance indicator has become " "Innovation' isn't what innovators do....it's what customers and clients adopt." as Michael Schrage put it. Susan Abbott has posted here and here about client experiences at her Curves fitness centre; this resonated with me as my wife's favourite centre recently closed and the one she now uses (not for much longer!) which among other indulgent practices has doughnut treats on special occasions (a birthday, for instance) which does not seem to fit with a fitness and weight reduction ethic!
I have written on the Design Pyramid (after Maslow) and the Kano model and it occurs to me that Curves could have discovered the points Susan Abbott makes by observing a single centre equipped with RFID. They could change the offer a little and then elicit feedback from their existing clientele; they could have a non-members evening to see what non-clients think too. This means that thay could have plotted the experiences on the face of the pyramid and thought of the technology, communication and packaging of the offer on the other faces in terms of these existing and potential clients. My feeling is that Curves would have picked up on existing clients' concerns and gone for a system solution rather than an object (RFID fob) solution.. maybe issuing a key to everyone but only doing printouts for the ones that subscribe to the full service. Also the group inolvement in heart rating could still be orchestrated by a human.. so was this a bottom-line cost cutting measure or a topline growth inducing innovation that just might have a topline negative effect? The blue line on the graph above looks like the RFID hype plot over time!
The technology hype graph reminds me of the client experience at Curves... which is the point of the post!
Picture uploaded on katielips. Used with thanks under CC.
Added 17/10/2007: Cheri Jimerson, Curves owner posted a response to Susan Abbott's post here. The problem with designing for experience is that it is very difficult to replicate the intent everywhere in the network without a large investment in training and mentoring. My wife's (UK experiences) (not in Curves... but there is one nearby!) have brought that home to me. It reminds me of that saying:
Picture uploaded by qmnonic. Used with thanks under CC.
I read today that France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for a breakthrough in nanotechnology that lets huge amounts of data be squeezed into ever-smaller spaces. Their independent discovery, around 1988, of a physical effect called giant magnetoresistance has enabled the design of such things as the iPod. Prof Ben Murdin, University of Surrey, said: "GMR is the science behind an ubiquitous technological device; without it you would not be able to store more than one song on your iPod.
IBM led the way in turning a scientific discovery into a workable device- a hard disk with a large memory capacity. IBM wrote
What is it?
The "giant magnetoresistive" (GMR) effect was discovered in the late 1980s by two European scientists working independently: Peter Gruenberg of the KFA research institute in Julich, Germany, and Albert Fert of the University of Paris-Sud . They saw very large resistance changes -- 6 percent and 50 percent, respectively -- in materials comprised of alternating very thin layers of various metallic elements. This discovery took the scientific community by surprise; physicists did not widely believe that such an effect was physically possible. These experiments were performed at low temperatures and in the presence of very high magnetic fields and used laboriously grown materials that cannot be mass-produced, but the magnitude of this discovery sent scientists around the world on a mission to see how they might be able to harness the power of the Giant Magnetoresistive effect.
IBM Research Arrives on the Scene
Stuart Parkin and two groups of colleagues at IBM's Almaden Research Center, San Jose, Calif, quickly recognized its potential, both as an important new scientific discovery in magnetic materials and one that might be used in sensors even more sensitive than MR heads.
Parkin first wanted to reproduce the Europeans' results. But he did not want to wait to use the expensive machine that could make multilayers in the same slow-and-perfect way that Gruenberg and Fert had. So Parkin and his colleague, Kevin P. Roche, tried a faster and less-precise process common in disk-drive manufacturing: sputtering. To their astonishment and delight, it worked! Parkin’s team saw GMR in the first multilayers they made. This demonstration meant that they could make enough variations of the multilayers to help discover how GMR worked, and it gave Almaden's Bruce Gurney and co-workers hope that a room-temperature, low-field version could work as a super-sensitive sensor for disk drives.
.......Searching for a useful disk-drive sensor design that would operate at low magnetic fields, Bruce Gurney and colleagues began focusing on the simplest possible arrangement: two magnetic layers separated by a spacer layer chosen to ensure that the coupling between magnetic layers was weak, unlike previously made structures. They also "pinned" in one direction the magnetic orientation of one layer by adding a fourth layer: a strong antiferromagnet. When a weak magnetic field, such as that from a bit on a hard disk, passes beneath such a structure, the magnetic orientation of the unpinned magnetic layer rotates relative to that of the pinned layer, generating a significant change in electrical resistance due to the GMR effect. This structure was named the spin valve.
.....We've just explained our astounding new technological achievement and announced [1998] our new 16.8 Gigabyte product. Now we'd like to tell you how we envision its effect on your future. Computers are no longer simply relegated to the desktop. They are in our cars, our TVs, VCRs, Stereos and toasters. Increasingly, we are doing business and accomplishing everyday tasks over vast computer networks -- including, but not limited to, the internet. Our world is changing from the physical to the digital. This transformation is no small task and the transition from the present world to the digital one is highly dependent on smart, inexpensive and abundant digital storage.
There are simulations of how GMR works here . It took IBM 10 years to take a Nobel-potential scientific discovery, do the technology research and design and launch a product. Most scientific discoveries take over 20 years to make it to market, in Great Britain they might never make it!
This slide, from a presentation about the Design Council's Humanising Technology Programme (now called Designing Demand )that I was part of, shows the challenge facing business in Britain to bridge the gap between science, technology and sustainable business success.
Although we have managed more than that 2%, driven by "The City" todays announcement by the chancellor flagged a slowdown. So how can design help connect sciencific intellectual property with the marketplace to benefit everyone involved?
Ellie Runcie and Gill Wildman talked about the programme at the 2002 Doors of Perception conference and presented this slide representing the journey from science to a product or service
There are two chasms that act as barriers to exploitation of science; the first is the transition from a discovery into a technology- GMR opened up a way to build much smaller magnetic heads, says Claude Chappert of the University of Paris-South. The discovery revolutionized consumer electronics.
"I think this triggered the common use of MP3 players," he notes.
The first people to realise the potential were Compaq's Systems Research Center and the Palo Alto Advanced Development group--essentially a bunch of engineers from Compaq's laptop division who realized that hard drives could replace flash memory in MP3 players and enable them to hold far more music. More details here.
The transition from technology into a useable product/service is the next chasm to be bridged... so creating the iPod is the result of many iterative experiments
Companies that are making the journey from left to right include
Ceres Power has used design to grow from a three-person research operation to a £144million company that’s set to launch a revolutionary domestic boiler powered by its fuel cell technology.
Newlands Scientific: A team of scientists knew their fledgling technology had potential, but needed a dedicated innovations partner to develop commercially viable products and create a sustainable brand.
Seven years on, Newlands Scientific has become FeONIC plc, a company with a strong, clearly defined brand that adds weight and coherence to its range of groundbreaking products.
Neither the successful branding of this new technology, nor the products developed to commercialise it happened overnight. Indeed, creating a clearly defined brand did not seem like a priority until quite a way into the commercialisation process, when suddenly there seemed to be a profusion of different names, brands, licensees and distributors all vying for attention. Read on
Peratech: SPACE robots are to use a remarkable material to give them touch sensitivity, enabling them to detect, measure and respond to a range of pressures from the "lightest touch to the heaviest hammer blow".
The contract for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) will help to boost the reputation of Peratech, a United Kingdom company that developed the unique technology. The agreement with Peratech means that Nasa will use award-winning quantum tunnelling composite (QTC) technology to give its robots touch sensitivity.
This is just one of 50 licensing deals that Peratech has arranged with other companies to use QTC technology since its launch three years ago.
The aspects that leap out as I read these stories are:
The way organisations successfully adapt and grow are culturally driven and the discipline of design gives them a greater chance of becoming successful earlier. The weaving of design into the culture is a challenging one but the positive results heavily outweigh the negatives, and would have to be faced upto eventually anyway. The social aspect of design is important as well as the constant search for the right solution that comes from having the right prototype in the right hands at the right moment. As I said above there are two transitions (chasms or barriers) One is the conversion of a scientific discovery into a technology; building the technology into something that will deliver innovative benefits to the person experincing it. That will do for now!
[picture from Apple.com]
[The post award announcement audio of an interview with Albert Fert is here and a partial transcript here.]
I was thinking about the C word earlier- Creativity - and how it can transform a boring idea into an energising concept that transforms into the cool thing that people want lots of!
I have no idea where ideas come from. I remember presenting a technique that I had put together using a framework from one book and some advice from another.. it turns out the sources are rubbish! I went back to both books to find neither had the material. But, they had ideas that I remixed to create my technique but only in hindsight!Nicholas Negroponte put it like this
“Where do good ideas come from? That’s simple! From differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximises differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.”
So I have decided not to worry about it, and accept that creative ideas bubble up when the conditions are right, so the thing to do is to be in the right condition more often! Then the ideas will come more often.
So what is a creative idea?
“A creative idea is just an idea until something is done with it. You must do something or you are not creative.”
“Creativity is just connecting things. You ask creative people how they do something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. “It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.
And the reason why they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they thought more about their experiences than other people”
So back to my technique.... Many years ago I managed a stress analysis group... We had three or four hundred percent work overload of analyses that had to be done... so the timeframe was getting ridiculous! I had the bright idea of going to the chief designer who was responsible for most of the jobs and asked for clarification on the order of execution of the top 10 priority requests. I emerged with a list of 13 priority jobs!
How did we prioritise in the group? Well, I auctioned them off by asking for who was interested in having a go at job 1, 2,3...etc.
Fast forward ten years and I unveiled by iceberg technique:
picture link.... the story is a webmyth, by the way!
What I did was to take a story by someone at A. L. Gore about having many things to do but only time to do three tasks a day: a story about what we can actually tackle within the day and what is a long-term project and needs to be drip fed. I made all my Things To Do visible with post-its stuck on an iceberg poster-sized print (as I thought I had read in one of these articles). At the start of each day I took a look at the post-its stuck below the waterline and moved three up to become tasks-of-the-day. If somebody senior came in with a request I showed them the poster and asked what could be put below the waterline to accommodate the new job, or could it wait. The picture engaged their attention and changed the conversation, as it was not the routine Gantt chart conversation they were used to!
So Stephen Bayley's definition still holds good:
Nothing defines creativity better than “the ability to defeat habit by originality.”
One hundred cities met to discuss creativity and created the Memphis Manifesto on creative clusters. The principles below are from that document.
Principles:
The Creative 100 are dedicated to helpingcommunities realize the full potential ofcreative ideas by encouraging these principles:
1) Cultivate and reward creativity. Everyoneis part of the value chain of creativity. Creativitycan happen at anytime, anywhere, and it’shappening in your community right now. Payattention.
2) Invest in the creative ecosystem. Thecreative ecosystem can include arts and culture,nightlife, the music scene, restaurants,artists and designers, innovators, entrepreneurs,affordable spaces, lively neighbourhoods,spirituality, education, density, public spacesand third places.
3) Embrace diversity. It gives birth to creativity,innovation and positive economicimpact. People of different backgrounds andexperiences contribute a diversity of ideas, expressions,talents and perspectives that enrichcommunities. This is how ideas flourish andbuild vital communities.
4) Nurture the creatives. Support the connectors. Collaborate to compete in a newway and get everyone in the game.
5) Value risk-taking. Convert a “no” climateinto a “yes” climate. Invest in opportunity making,not just problem-solving. Tap intothe creative talent, technology and energyfor your community. Challenge conventionalwisdom.
6) Be authentic. Identify the value you addand focus on those assets where you can beunique. Dare to be different, not simply thelook-alike of another community. Resist monocultureand homogeneity. Every communitycan be the right community.
7) Invest in and build on quality of place.While inherited features such as climate,natural resources and population are important,other critical features such as arts andculture, open and green spaces, vibrant downtowns,and centres of learning can be built andstrengthened. This will make communitiesmore competitive than ever because it willcreate more opportunities than ever for ideasto have an impact.
8) Remove barriers to creativity, such asmediocrity, intolerance, disconnectedness,sprawl, poverty, bad schools, exclusivity, andsocial and environmental degradation.
9) Take responsibility for change in yourcommunity. Improvise. Make things happen.Development is a “do it yourself” enterprise.
10) Ensure that every person, especially children,has the right to creativity. The highestquality lifelong education is critical to developingand retaining creative individuals as aresource for communities.We accept the responsibility to be the stewardsof creativity in our communities. Weunderstand the ideas and principles in thisdocument may be adapted to reflect ourcommunity’s unique needs and assets.
It is worthwhile remembering your organisation is a community too.
I mused on GLW and his influence on me here. As a member of the RAeS I have access to the full obituary of Geoffrey Wilde, published on the Aerospace Professional Oct 2007. To complement my thoughts I reproduce relevant passages here
Not only was he a great innovative designer but he admired good engineers, especially young ones, and his enthusiasm and drive to seek fresh and inventive ways of improving engines inspired all those round him,…….. [including me]
The RB211 three-shaft engine was brilliant in concept but its detail design (for which GLW was not responsible) was flawed and, like all the high bypass ratio engines of the time, suffered serious in-service problems. One of the most serious was the short life of the HP turbine blade. Following the bankruptcy in 1971 Stanley Hooker returned to the company and recognising the HP blade problem, with financial assistance from Sir William Cook, set up the high temperature research unit under the leadership of GLW. GLW immediately set up a team of engineers dedicated to understanding the whole science of blade cooling and design especially the thermal stresses induced by cooling. This involved a series of very advanced test programmes using highly sophisticated measuring techniques in static cascade tunnels to understand thermal fatigue problems. At the same time under his leadership the team designed and built a high temperature demonstrator unit (HTDU) which, with the new materials becoming available, eventually demonstrated the ability of HP turbine blades to run safely at temperatures hundreds of degrees above those currently in use in service at that time. This work laid the foundation for the design of the turbine blades used in the Trent engine family of today.
I remember a year of demonstration runs of the HTDU under GLW's tutelage. The objectives were to get up at least 10 and hopefully to a 30 hour run on one design of blading so that we had considerable test data to demonstrate the start of a successful series. We had 103 turbine blades for 100 slots- so we had 3 spares. As we ran the HTDU on the High-altitude Test Facility (HTF) and it was winter we had to run at night. The National Grid pylons ran upto the facility to deliver electrical power and it was rumoured that we ran at night because during the day the choice was power to the city of Derby or us! As the stress engineer on the HTDU I would receive phone calls from the HTF at 1.00 am to discuss the distress detected by endoscopes poked into the HTDU innards. I would suggest blades 3 and 5 could run another hour but 33 needed changing and go back to sleep. Then the next day I would see the replaced bade and physically measure the damage and plot on a carpet plot I had created.... After 10 hours I said we were on the limit, having used up all our blades and we pulled the HTDU back to the fitting shop.... this went on over 10 months and we began to celebrate, as I recall, achieving our time objectives at 1500, 1550, 1575 degK turbine entry temperature and so on eventually reaching well over 1600 degrees. I still smile as I recollect that we had cooling air for the blades that was entering the blades at 500 deg C! As we reached each objective GLW had agreed we could be issued with a "club" tie for the 1500 club, 1550 club and so on. We collected many ties that year and most, if not all the team were promoted to other challenging roles at the end of that phase. GLW had encouaraged us to deliver what seemed daft at the beginning of the period!.. but we had the ties to prove to the rest of the company that we could still deliver in spite of the bankruptcy deliberations.
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