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Advertising Entries from October 1, 2007 - November 1, 2007
Wednesday
31Oct
Wednesday, October 31 Are Your Riches Filthy?
The Save Darfur Coalition has taken over the Montgomery Street Station of BART (subway) in San Francisco with some hard-hitting ads with lines like “Are you making a killing on the stock market?” and “Are you invested in your future or theirs?”. Normally it’s companies like Gap, Apple and Target that take over the station this way, with soothing and pleasing ads of consumer products. It’s startling (and effective) to be confront by images of amputated limbs, women and children in poverty, and militia carrying rifles, all in grainy stark black and white.
Wednesday
31Oct
Wednesday, October 31 The Myths of Design Thinking
Attending a couple of talks at the World Design Congress crystallized some of my concerns about how design thinking gets talked a lot about these days, and how designers are ascribed almost magical powers because of it. The talks by Tim Brown of IDEO and Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Business, each touched on three “myths” about how designers think, and how designers can play a role in innovation and business.
- Myth One: Designers think systemically. The notion here is that designers think “outside the object” to look at the system surrounding it. Ideally this leads to a broader understanding of the problem and a more comprehensive solution.
- Myth Two: Designers like constraints. According to Martin business people hate constraints while designers like them, and I’ve heard variations on this before.
- Myth Three: Designers are user-focused. According to this myth, designers are by inclination and training empathic to users and are eager to understand everything they can about in order to design better products
The reason I’m calling these myths is that they are ascribed to designers as though they are universally-held skills. For better or for worse, this is inaccurate. Absolutely some designers, maybe even many, are fluent in one or more of the above areas, but definitely not all.
There are many designers who would like nothing more than to craft products that are conceptually and aesthetically wonderful, but which are not hampered by constraints of BOM costs, ergonomics, or component packaging. One of our most talented industrial designers at frog was talking about constraints recently, and how he has only recently come to embrace them as catalysts for innovation - like many designers he used to see them as impediments.
Some of the most revered star designers work this way, some of them were even speaking at the Congress.
And don’t get me wrong - often you need someone who can reliably the envelope and crank out inspring ideas. Design is a constant balancing act of embracing and ignoring constraints, of focusing on the micro product and zooming back out to the broader system and user context. There’s too much detail to deal with everything in one go, so having people who specialize in one level is not in itself detrimental if balanced out by others looking at different levels.
But by the same token there are designers out there who either due to inclination or education fit the stereotype of the auteur creative who wants nothing to do with business or engineering constraints and are not particularly good at collaborating with engineers and marketers. This type of designer feels that beautiful aesthetics are justification enough for whatever other problems they cause. They are not particularly interested in what users want, and instead assume users are just like them and have the same values and priorities.
Undoubtedly this stereotype is slowly diminishing in frequency, but it is by no means gone (and we probably don’t want it to disappear, the world would be much less interesting). It’s only quite recently (last ten years or so) that design education has started looking beyond the object in how it trains designers at the bachelors level. (For most designers, bachelors is as far as they go, relatively few designers have masters and I have yet to meet one with a PhD.)
My fear is that two forces will collide and cause a backlash against design thinking:
- Designers who are more the auteur type will jump on this design thinking thing because it’s the hot thing to do, and seems to be a way to get business people to pay attention to design. Unfortunately they do not have the training or the natural skills to deliver it. This will hurt their credibility, and that of other designers.
- Businesses are hearing all this hype about design thinking and will assume (not surprisingly) that all designers are design thinkers. They may hire a designer who is not very skilled at it, and be disenchanted by the lacklustre outcome. They will not hire another designer again.
IN CATEGORIES... Design, Innovation
Design, Innovation Sunday
28Oct
Sunday, October 28 With Malibu, GM Pokes Fun at Itself
Judging from photos the 2008 Malibu is a huge break from the previous dull model. It’s much more stylish (though still fairly conservative), the proportions and fit/finish look a lot better, and the interior is worlds apart in aesthetics and materials treatments. Only first-person experience will bear these things out, as well of course how it drives. But what also is impressive is GM’s TV campaign for it.
The tag line is “The car you can’t ignore”. While this may not be true on an absolute level (compared to a Lamborghini Gallardo for example), it is definitely true compared to the last Malibu. And what I love is that GM is addressing that head on, and poking some fun at itself in the process. It’s a gutsy move.
One of the ads features a gang of robbers sitting in their getaway car outside the bank they’ve just hit. They are still wearing their masks, and stare out the windows as police cars scream to a halt outside the bank steps. The police run straight inside, by passing the robbers in the car. The gag - they are so anonymous because of the car they are in that the police ignored them.
In another spot, a jogger runs down a sidewalk and then crosses over the street. She runs smack into the side of a car parked on the other side, not having seen it because it was so boring.
The car so anonymous it’s invisible in both cases? A late 90’s GM! It’s actually an Oldsmobile Cutlass, though it also looks very similar to the outgoing Malibu in profile.
Good for you GM, not taking yourself too seriously and fessing up to the fact you’ve made some mighty bland vehicles in your time. The Malibu is a significant mainstream vehicle for GM, so let’s hope it lives up to the early hyep.
Robbery ad on Jalopnik
Jogger ad on Jalopnik
Video interview with the 2008 Malibu designers
IN CATEGORIES... Design, Automotive, Advertising
Design, Automotive, Advertising Thursday
25Oct
Thursday, October 25 Did the World Design Congress Connect?
The World Design Congress wrapped up last week, a gathering of 200+ speakers and 2000+ designers. For various reasons my time at it was more limited than I’d hoped for, but it was interesting to check out the putative state of the art.
The highlight for me, as I think it was for many, was Ken Robinson’s all-too-brief talk on the importance of teaching creativity in formal education, giving it the same level of importance as conventional intelligence. Both, he argues, are equally important to thrive in today’s complex world. I’m going to do a follow-up post on this talk as it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and Robinson’s inspiring and hilarious talk crystallized some issues.
I missed Janine Benyus’s talk on biomimicry, though have seen her before, and that appears to have been another high point for many people. This is gratifying to see. Biomimicry is the notion that we should look to understand how nature solves engineering and materials problems in order to better inform our own designs. This does not simply mean mimicking the look, but understanding at a deeper system level how nature solves problems. Instead of “heat, beat, treat”, as Benyus puts it, nature has other means of production that do not require landfills or involve toxic chemicals that are harmful to the organism producing them. Benyus has been working on this area for a long time and actively reaching out to industrial designers, so it was good to see that the attention reciprocated. What was also good to hear is that she is now able to talk to a wider array of concrete examples in practice, whereas a few years ago these were still hard to come by.
In fact, sustainability and green design were a prominent theme throughout the congress and was addressed by a range of speakers. First time I’ve seen that at an industrial design conference.
One question I took away from the Congress was: Can you even have a conference just about industrial design any more? Should you? Tim used the phrase “museum exhibits” to describe how some of the themes were treated, and overall the conference felt rather old school in its definition of industrial design, like it was trying to preserve the past and fending off the Cuisinart blending of disciplines that is happening right under our feet. Frankly this is surprising as the conference chair, Bill Moggridge, has been a pioneer at crossing the boundary between hardware and interface design.
Product design is an incredibly interesting field right now because it is all about combining hardware, software and services in a three-prong convergence that requires tight collaboration of many disciplines and a graying of historical boundaries between them. Keeping industrial design as a subset of product design isolated from this larger swirl is artificial and not representative of the cutting edge. Bruce Sterling, a non-designer, was one of the few to address it. Yves Behar showed the $100 laptop, but he didn’t have a hand in the concept or the software he discussed them only superficially. In that sense the Congress provided only a peek into the current state of the world.
The other thing I was struck by was how “Web 1.0” the conference was. It was lacking a strong social component that is part of what makes these events so engaging, and which you would think is inherent to the “connecting” theme. The schedule was tightly packed allowing little mingling, and as a result it also felt highly controlled and not open to spontaneity. The formats of the plenary talks and the panels were geared toward talking heads rather than conversations and debates with the audience.
Beyond the confines of the event itself there was a distinctly unconnected web presence. The website itself is rather old school - an animated splash page with “skip intro button”, and an overall aesthetic that is rigid and flat. But more significantly it lacks any of the elements you would expect from a conference site about connecting - a blog, tags, user participation, customization, even a search function. There was enough content on there that it could have benefited from these capabilities, and the very long pages describing the programs could have used some Ajax-y treatment.
The program certainly contained quite a diverse set of speakers, but the impact was more like an RSS feeder - it aggregated but did not provide an editorial voice or a point of view. It did not come out and say “We think this is important because…”. Disparate presentations were scheduled back to back, lending it more an air of “and now for something completely different.” It would have been nice to have had some provocation, and then allowed the speakers and the audience to build on and react to it.
One last thing: IDSA/ICSID did not comp many of the speakers their conference fees, so far as I know. This is long-standing IDSA practice, and is really unfortunate. Every conference I have spoken at, even some small ones that have far tinier budgets than this Congress did, have always comped my entrance to attend the conference in full. After all, they are not (usually) paying me, so it’s only fair given the amount of time and effort that goes into preparing a talk. Let’s lobby IDSA to change this practice, as really all it does is reduce the likelihood of good speakers (who are invariably busy) coming to present.
Related Items:
- frog colleague Tim Leberecht’s post on our Cnet Matter/Anti-Matter Blog
- Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on TED
- Janine Benyus’s talk on TED
- Hans Rosling’s talk on TED
Tuesday
23Oct
Tuesday, October 23 Fire map
Fires are ravaging Southern California at the moment, appearing almost out of nowhere and being fanned by seasonal Santa Ana winds. Right now it’s about one mile from my sister-in-law’s house (2.5 miles yesterday), but so far she hasn’t been told to evacuate.
The website of the San Diego Tribune has produced this very helpful - and well-designed - map that shows where the fire is, pictures and links to videos of houses, where the evacuation areas are, and where shelters are. Nicely done mash-up with Google maps, and quickly done too.
IN CATEGORIES... Design, User Experience, Nifty Stuff
Design, User Experience, Nifty Stuff