The Official Ralph Lauren 4D Experience – London from Ralph Lauren on Vimeo.

Every category, product or service, has its conventions. Things that are done over and over again either because they work, because we can’t think of anything new, or because not doing them would risk a tantrum from the otherwise slumbering executive floor. For fashion retailers and brands like Ralph Lauren, one of those conventions is the fashion show.

Earlier this month, RL managed to reinvent the conventional fashion show in honour of the tenth anniversary of their e-commerce site.

The effort (and this entailed considerable effort) was deemed “the world’s first 4-dimensional show” by the folks at RL. While this description is somewhat disputable according to many comments I’ve read around the blogosphere, in this blogger’s humble opinion it was nonetheless a spectacular re-imagining.

A 10-minute light show was projected onto the façade of Ralph Lauren’s stores on Madison Avenue in New York and on Bond Street in London. The façade of the two stores came to life with projected images of models and polo players towering over the crowd, amid ambient sound and a mist of Ralph Lauren fragrance.

Even more powerful, for me at least, was the behind-the-scenes story of how it was pulled off. A team of about 150 people worked for months: First, intricate architectural renderings of the New Bond Street and Madison Avenue stores were created using 3D scanners and human modelers. Then ¾ scale replicas of the stores were built on a Hollywood-style sound stage so that real models could be shot in front of the façade. The film was then pulled into a 3D software environment where a team of animators (some of whom worked on Harry Potter) designed and melded visual effects. Finally, projectors – of even higher resolution than IMAX – were positioned so that the finished 3D film could be lined up perfectly with each of the real life, flagship stores on Bond Street and Madison Ave.

In terms of reach? Hundreds experienced it live in each of the respective cities, while millions got to witness and share the spectacle across the web. PR, as you can imagine, has been considerable as well.

How well does Ralph Lauren’s 4D Fashion Show score for reinvention of this well trodden category convention? I’m thinking at least a seven, but that may owe to the fact that it marries my past life as a theatre tech with my current career as an advertising creative.

I’d love to hear what you think.

People often ask me the differences between design and advertising. Seeing as I’m a designer in an agency context, the delineation isn’t as obvious as it may seem. But when I attended a recent DesignThinkers lecture by David Turner (of brand design agency Turner Duckworth) I got the one-liner I was looking for: “Design delivers what advertising promises.”

Design is the physical or experiential side of a brand. Advertising is what speeds those things into the world. The two hold hands, working in complement to achieve that elusive combination of reach and allure.

In his talk, Turner presented his principles of iconic design with supporting case studies. Abercrombie and Fitch, the go-to uniform for expensively underdressed millenials, has meticulously designed their mysterious and exclusive teen flavour. Billboard and print advertising use provocative, black and white images of toned male midriffs shot by Bruce Weber to promise an adult experience dressed in teen clothing. The mall experience delivers on this promise with darkly-lit stores and shuttered windows – a complete contrast to the bright, busy and colourful windows of the Gap, Old Navy and Forever 21. At every brand touchpoint, AF sets itself apart by offering up a simmering brew of sexuality and disaffected teenage style.

AF is an example of branding in isolation, but what role does design play in elevating co-branding campaigns? Turner Duckworth faced this very problem when Coke, an iconic brand, co-branded with the Winter Olympics. Their solution: develop collectable cans that leverage the swoosh of the iconic logo as a ski hill, a snowboarders’ pike and an ice skater’s swirl. The cans, beautifully designed, used the logo to make a clever connection to winter Olympic sports. Wieden + Kennedy closed the loop with TV ads that animated skiers, snowboarders and skaters to carbonated bubbles mixed to sound like fresh carved snow and ice. Linking the product redesign with delightful animated ads successfully created a second-nature link between two unrelated experiences.

Earlier this year at The Rotman School of Business, artist and writer Douglas Coupland and Roots founders Don Green and Michael Budman presented their thoughts about their recent creative collaboration. In a telling moment, an MBA student and budding entrepreneur asked the Roots boys where she should spend her small marketing budget. Green greeted her question with a passionate declaration that the best money they ever spent was on their logo and branding elements. He explained how (now defunct) design firm Cooper Hines had stressed the importance of investing in every consumer touch point to ensure a luxurious consumer experience across everything from receipts to shoe boxes to shopping bags. The strategy worked: Roots went from selling 7 pairs of their Negative Heel Boots on day 1, to opening 75 new stores in the next two years. Roots’ experience is entirely their own, and remains fresh and iconic 37 years later.

Sometimes we at ad agencies get caught up in delivering the “big idea” for a campaign, when the more powerful insights come from how the brand fits into our consumers’ lifestyles and identities. When thinking about experiences, sometimes simplicity and tactile design is the most powerful place to connect with your consumer.

An iCal reminder popped up on my computer on August 16, reminding me that Design Thinkers 2010 was going to take place in November. Yes, I did have my iCal remind me almost four months before the conference was scheduled to occur.

This is why.

We all work in an industry obsessed with sharing ideas, learning how to think, learning how not to think, accepting that maybe how not to think is actually how we should think – all in the interests of making an impression on our peers and the world at large. To my mind, two speakers at Design Thinkers were compelling representations of where design is going. The first, Don Lindsay, a man determined to change the face (quite literally) of technology. The other, Scott Thomas, changing the face of the world as we know it.

One spoke of selling a product and the other spoke of selling a change.

Lindsay represented the product angle of things. His pedigree includes time at Apple (working side-by-side with Steve Jobs for 6+ years), then Microsoft, and he is currently at Research in Motion, working on the launch of the Blackberry 6 and Blackberry Torch. With an entire career dedicated to researching what consumers want, he had this to offer: “It’s not about designing a moment. It’s about designing all moments.”

On the other end of the spectrum we have Scott Thomas, the designer behind the amazing design done for Barack Obama’s political campaign in 2007. The attention generated by that campaign gave America its first black president and the highest number of votes (over 65,000,000) in presidential history. It may not be that design won Obama the presidency, but it surely changed the way we viewed the American political system. Scott Thomas and his team didn’t help to design a moment; they helped to re-design a country.

Both men have made their names in the industry and will continue to do so. I urge you to go out and find out about them for yourselves. Read Scott Thomas’ new book, find out who they are, how they’ve affected the world that you live in, and more importantly, what they have done and how they’ve done it. Because it very well might affect what you do tomorrow.