What happened to the IDEO shopping cart?
At the beginning of Tom Kelley's book on IDEO, The Art of Innovation, there's a story about how an IDEO team redesigned the shopping cart for ABC's Nightline.
The IDEO cart, with built-in scanner, custom baskets, and loads of other nifty features. (Photo from IDEO.)
In just five days, as the story goes, they transformed an ordinary cart into something extraordinary. Here's how Kelley tells the story:
The old boxy cart we all know and hate had been replaced by a sleek, gleaming creation. The main frame sloped down on each side in to a curve that tucked back, with more of a sports car line. Gone was the main basket--the feature that made carts desirable for black market barbecues. The open frame was designed so that six standard handbaskets would neatly nest inside in two layers. Shoppers could use the cart like home base, darting down an aisle with a basket. At checkout, clerks could pack the groceries in plastic bags that neatly hook within the frame. As far as we know, no one had done anything quite like it before. To me that's the heart of it, a real innovation that redesigns the shopping experience.
Nightline was impressed, and so were their viewers--more than 10 million people watched the segment (watch a clip). The critics agreed, too. In 1999 the shopping cart won an IDSA IDEA Silver award.
So here's a question: what happened to the IDEO shopping cart?
Is anyone using it? After six years, my local grocery stores are still using wirebasket carts. Superstore, the groceropolis around here, has carts that fit plastic baskets--but they have more in common with ordinary carts than the IDEO cart.
(On a related note, it's worth considering why something as ugly and obtrusive as the Verlok locking system is as widely deployed as it is, while the IDEO cart is nowhere to be seen--to my eyes, anyway.)
