Don Rickert Research & Design Blog

The NEW Don Rickert Research & Design Blog

This is the blog that accompanies the main site for Don Rickert Research & Design.

Don Rickert Research & Design, a DBA for Wiederholt & Rickert Partners, LLC, is a full-service multi-disciplinary design research and product design firm with TWO lines of business. It is essential that you understand this. We are located in Atlanta, GA.

Consulting Services: Learn More...

Focus is on solving your most challenging product development problems through observation, research. Don Rickert Research & Design Consulting provides New Product Development (NPD) services to companies that want to create a successful new and/or breakthrough product (or fix a flawed or outmoded existing product). Services include: Usability, User Experience, Design, Product Development and Ethnography.

Our Own Product Development (Primarily Ground-Breaking Musical Instruments): Learn more...

Doing business under the name Don Rickert Design(tm), we invent, design, produce and sell innovative musical instruments under two primary brand names:

1. Don Rickert Design: Mostly electric and electronic musical instruments, but also some cutting-edge modern acoustic instruments, all designed by Dr. Don Rickert or in collaboration with other top musical instrument designers.
2. Old Mill Musical Instruments: Mostly acoustic instruments of a more "traditional" (but cutting-edge) type, all designed by Dr. Don Rickert or in collaboration with other top musical instrument designers.

Don Rickert Design operates two primary online stores.

1. The first is The Adventurous Muse Store (motto: "Working to be the most interesting musical instrument store in the universe!"). The informative website and blog and "landing page" is The Adventurous Muse.
2. The second store, actually a department within the Adventurous Muse Store, is called Musicians' Sutlery and exists to serve the needs of 19th Century "living historians", selling authentic replicas of mid-19th Century musical instruments and accessories.

Nimble Retreat from a Recent Business Miscalculation

At the very end of December, 2009 I posted an article on this site. To summarize the basic gist:

"While we will continue our work in the area of ground-breaking musical instrument (Adventurous Muse) and high-performance rowing craft designs, we will also be renewing our emphasis on being a full-service multi-disciplinary design research and product design firm."

This Was a Mistake!

I will be the first to admit when I was apparently wrong...well sometimes anyway.

The business climate for product design consulting is getting worse! At the same time, prospects for the musical instrument initiatives of Don Rickert Research & Design seem more promising. Don't know when we are going aggressively enter the high-performance rowing craft and other adventure product arena; they will remain on hold while we do everything possible to capitalize on the positive signs in the musical instrument business.

The reasons for this turn of economic events are a bit murky. Once I have a good well-informed theory, I will let you know.

Bottom line:

Postings on this site will deal more with a musical instrument businesses than the consulting business. We will try our best to keep the material on this blog unique from the the numerous daily postings on our Adventurous Muse blog. There will only be cross-postings when the topic justifies such.

For the most part, this site will deal with new developments; whereas Adventurous Muse will continue to focus on information, education and musical instruments that we are actually selling via the Adventurous Muse Store.

End Note:

Potential clients for our new product design consulting business should NOT expect discounted rates or free demonstration projects.

One last thing:

Our sincere empathy for all of the great small design firms that have had to throw in the towel or have been taken over by their venture capital investors owing to lack of work. A good reason to generally avoid venture capital, but that is another topic.

New Musical Instrument Designs at Adventurous Muse

At the center of the Don Rickert Design business plan revisions is our musical instrument operation, The Adventurous Muse. There will be radical changes in the coming weeks to Adventurous Muse and its associated Adventurous Muse Store. These changes will definitely involve dumping product lines that have failed to attract good customers...a good customer is a loyal customer who actually buys stuff. One set of musical instrument products that we WILL NOT be dumping are instruments of our own design.

In a recent post our Adventurous Muse blog we described our collaboration with Aalborg University on the Overtone Fiddle, pictured here, which will very likely be commercialized in time.

Of course, our Octave Violins, historic pochettes and modern travel violins are gaining world-wide renown and we intend to win some design competitions with some of these instruments in 2010...so those instruments are safe from the chopping block. In fact, we have a new Octave Fiddle on the drawing board as well as a really skinny (but full 4/4 length) travel fiddle that is extremely durable for the most punishing environments.

We have some concept sketches of the new travel fiddle, which we are currently calling the Rickert Mountaineer Backpacker Fiddle in a new post at Adventurous Muse.

Don Rickert Design Getting Back to its Core Business--Design!

Note: Cross-posted at DonRickertDesign.com

The adventurous business climate has prompted us to rethink our business model and tactics. While we will continue our work in the area of ground-breaking musical instrument (Adventurous Muse) and high-performance rowing craft designs, we will also be renewing our emphasis on being a full-service multi-disciplinary design research and product design firm.

For those who need details, you'll just have to wait until we figure out which of our business enterprises are worth moving forward with as the economy improves and which ones simply have an insufficient number of good customers to be worthwhile pursuing.

Dr. Don Rickert ponders our business future...

Click on the photo for a larger view.

  

For the observant Industrial Designers among you, that sure as heck is a genuine Eames Chair!

We will be posting to this blog a lot more in the coming weeks

Recently, our musical instrument operation, Adventurous Muse, has sucked all available energy from our initial vision of creating a true cross-disciplinary research and design firm.

We look forward to revealing our plans for getting back to what we set out to do, which includes musical instrument design (but not so much musical instrument retailing), but many other product areas and services as well.

Let's put it this way, our plan is to focus more on our musical instrument inventions via Adventurous Muse and less on the retailing of other company's musical products in an economy where musical instrument retailers are dropping like flies. We intend to overcome the damage already done.

Stay tuned for our re-birth plans.

Collaboration with Aalborg University, Denmark on Next Gen Synth Violin

Don Rickert Design is collaborating with the Aalborg University Department of Media Technology (Copenhagen Institute of Technology), section for Medialogy (media.aau.dk/) on the next generation of violin synthesizer. The instrument, an outgrowth of Professor Dan Overholt's extensive work in "active acoustics", is unique in that all processing occurs in the instrument and is not MIDI-based, nor does it require a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), such as Ableton Live!. It will be called the Overtone Fiddle.

For the details of how it all works, you will have to wait for Dr. Overholt's initial research papers early in 2010. Dr. Don Rickert of Don Rickert Design is designing and building the instruments that the musician actually plays and also house the electronics for this groundbreaking project. The initial instruments will be slightly larger than the travel violins sold by Adventurous Muse but smaller than conventional violins. Nevertheless, the instruments will have all of the critical ergonomic features of a standard violin.

Since all of this work is occurring in the public domain, we will have drawings very soon and photos a bit later of this new electronic bowed instrument.

Stay tuned, and all will be demystified ultimately.

D.R.

Cross-posted at Adventurous Muse

Elaboration of Don Rickert Design In-House Product Development

In addition to work for clients, we invent many new Don Rickert Design^(tm) products in-house, being very careful to avoid conflicts of interest with our work for clients.

Some of our in-house New Product Development is self-funded and some involves joint ventures and limited external funding. We tend to avoid external funding, as primary ownership of our inventions is key to our business plan.

It is no secret that Don Rickert Design has unique expertise in the design, manufacture and marketing of innovative musical instruments, primarily bowed instruments (acoustic and electric violins and synthesizers with a violin-like interface). In fact, Dr. Don Rickert is internationally known in the field of musical instrument invention and innovation.

Some might find this musical instrument angle surprising. It is no different, however, than Cox Enterprises owning the world's largest used automobile buying and re-selling (to dealers) enterprise, Manheim Auctions. Nor is it different from Clabber Girl, a brand of baking powder, baking soda and corn starch, which also owns and operates the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Indy Racing League.

Would you really want a product development firm that does not invent, manufacture (through a complex network of boutique CNC, laser-cutting, carbon fiber fabrication and violin-making workshops in the U.S.) and market its own products helping you in your own product development efforts?

A key business partner in our musical instrument arena has been Fiddarci Lutherie (lutherie is the proper name for a stringed instrument making workshop), located in Helena, AL. Another critical business partner has been International Violin Company, which serves as a broker to specialty workshops in Germany, Eastern Europe and Hong Kong for the manufacture of some of the parts, such as the distinctive necks used for Don Rickert-designed violins.

The current main website/blog for Don Rickert Design musical instruments is www.AdventurousMuse.com. There are several online retail outlets where both Don Rickert Design, as well as instruments and accessories from other makers are sold. The primary online store is www.AdventurousMuseStore.com; however, we also own storefronts on Amazon.com and Etsy.com.

Other In-House Product Development Areas:

In addition to the musical instrument development described above, Don Rickert Design has considerable expertise in rowing craft design and construction. We are "sitting on" three original designs for high-performance boats intended for ocean, bay and rough river rowing until we can get the rest of our business running on a new "troubled times" business plan.

Another reason we are waiting is that high-performance rowing craft are "luxury" items and launching them now (no pun intended) would not be prudent, even if investment resources were available, which they are not.

Don Rickert Research & Design Consolidating Its Websites

You can go to the main Don Rickert Research & Design site to get all of the details, which can be summed up as follows: We are a design research and product design firm that also sells some of its own products online. We have been operating the online store, www.FiddleandBowStore.com for almost two years. This store sells our original specialty violins and fiddles, as well as accessories such as bows from other makers. Our own design portfolio includes one of the largest collections of travel violins (a.k.a. pochettes, kits, backpacker fiddles) in the world.

Some of these travel violins are historic reproductions and some are completely modern, achieving sound quality approaching that of a decent fiddle, despite their 3 inch width. We also sell our own purpose built octave (baritone) violins, which are made to be tuned an octave lower than a regular violin but fit into a standard violin case and produce astonishingly powerful sound and projection volume. Our instruments are played by some of the world's best musicians.

Website Proliferation

In addition to new acoustic violin designs, we are involved in other innovation areas, notably electric and electronic (synthesizers) as well as high-performance rowing craft. Over the past two years, we have established a number of specialty sites, focusing on octave violins, electronic musical instruments, rowing craft, our online portfolio, and so forth. We are in the process of consolidating the content of these websites and blogs into a single site, which will be called www.AdventureandInnovationBlog.com (it is not active yet). We will freeze the current crop of sites and keep them alive for some time to come, as there are many links to them. To each will be added a message referring readers to the new www.AdventureandInnovationBlog.com, once it is up and running in the next week or so.

New Online Stores

We will also be establishing two new online stores. You can read about that in the next post.

Don Rickert Research & Design Establishes Email Opt-In

Our Promise: Spam Zero Tolerance

Many people do not realize that it is quite illegal, with stiff penalties, to send email spam. Spam includes email newsletters, no matter how informative they are, without having a prior established business relationship with the recipient...for us, "prior established relationship" means our clients and customers, OR have opted-in to the mailing list. We are vigilantly anti-spam!

Double Opt-In

We follow an even more stringent practice called double opt-in. This means that when you click on one of the obvious email list opt-in buttons on most of our websites, you get an email that asks you to opt-in once again...just to make sure that you understand that you signed up for a mailing list.

What do we use our mailing list for?

Basically one thing and one thing only: to send informative newsletters targeted to your interests, which you indicate on one of the opt-in screens. We, under no circumstances, sell our mailing list. This would be pointless anyway, as it is now illegal to use purchased email lists for mass mailing campaigns.

Please Help Us!

We need as many people to know about Don Rickert Research & Design and its various divisions as possible during these tough times (and they are tough on small business...you can trust me on that!). It IS OK (i.e. legal) for you to forward newsletters that we email to you, which all have a link for the forward recipient to opt-in as well.

We promise to try our best NOT to annoy you with pointless marketing materials...only useful information and marketing materials that will actually be useful to you.

Oh, and one more thing... (re: the "New Frugality")

We will no longer accept any consulting contracts until we have been shown proof that the funding for our work is, indeed, for our work and not from some other budget that happens to have some money left in it. Everyone at Director level and above knows exactly what I am talking about.

This pretty much rules out "proof of value" (of what we do) or "skunk works" projects. Call us when it is part of the corporate strategic plan to REALLY include our areas of expertise, especially obtaining insights from actual consumers AND customers, in your Product Development Process.

What Don Rickert Research and Design is Doing About the "New Frugality"

In the last posting, you got to experience a highly edited version of my rant about the media-fueled "New Frugality" and probably irritated just about everybody, as just about everybody is now part of the "Nouveau Frugal" class. Hope that I did not make you too mad.

Anybody who really knows me is well-aware that I would rather shovel manure (which is not simply an abstract notion, as I have friends who own a Clydesdale horse farm) than revise our business plan yet one more time. We are revising the entire Don Rickert Research & Design biz plan. I will limit my commentary here to highlights directly related to the part of our business related to consulting in the areas of User Experience, Design / Design Research, Usability /Ergonomics, Consumer Insights and Product Development services.

• We have reduced our rates slightly
• All contracts will now be on a "retainer basis", in this context meaning that 50% of the cost of a consulting engagement is paid up-front...this is so we actually get paid in a timely manner.
• Ramp up our marketing and networking to an unprecedented (at least for us) aggressive level and pitching our message to higher levels in our target client organizations...we have found that it is a waste of time to talk to people who do not have spending authority.
• Ramp up our ongoing reputation-building efforts...see the many endorsements on this site.
• Stay diversified, continuing to aggressively build our other divisions that produce our own products.

We are really good at what we do and it is essential that you either fund your in-house teams appropriately (we know that most companies don't) or hire us to protect you from product development nightmares that will show up when it is too late to do anything but clean up the mess.