The way we are making and selling design is becoming generic and confusing. One of the challenges is that design, as creativity, is described as a product, an end goal. When the fact is that neither design nor creativity is a result; it’s a description of how we get there, not what we will end up with.
The presentation discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of design today, as I see them. The content has previously been posted as three articles on popsop.com and linked to from this blog. The presentation tries to put it all together, make it more internet consumption friendly (read: packed with sound bites), and offer it as a pleasant and enjoyable printable document.
The third and final part of an article on creativity, design and identity was published last week on popsop.com. This last installment discusses the amount of sameness and identical thinking behind our processes for discovering new ideas. And proposes one alternative solution…
“[The] linear model argues that the process of insight ends before the first idea has been conceptualized, that all the questions have been answered before any real ones have been asked. The problem of similar identities does not start with the sketching of ideas; it starts with the structure of exploring knowledge and discovering insight.”
“If you fill people with rectangular knowledge they are going to create a rectangle, if you give them the idea that we are building a geometric shape, the whole organism of the team will work together to explore opportunities in the width of geometric shapes.”
“We need to include our clients in the articulation of design, if not products will become unsophisticated and conservative (research proves that people not articulate in an expert field will prefer products that they themselves eventually find uninteresting and boring).”
Are we challenging the status quo just to settle for an updated version? Is this even a time for status quo?
One of my personal mantras has always been: “Never stop, as soon as you’ve found a solution – start questioning it”. In an ongoing email discussion William Channer, he asked me to elaborate. I thought the answer would be well worth posting on the blog:
WC: Why is this important to you?: “Never stop, as soon as you’ve found a solution – start questioning it”
Two reasons:
1. This is not the time for status quo’s. Working in an environment where the pattern of platform usage, media consumption and technology awareness in the general public is in constant development means that the currency of our products needs to meet this change. As we have not yet “landed” on the next big thing but finding our way there (we are currently in between generations), settling down can quickly either leave one stranded or result in the loss of a big opportunity.
For our clients this is the time to gain market opportunities through new business models, utilizing technology and behavior in tailored ways (like Amazon has done for the book industry or Google for the media industry the last fifteen years). If we are not helping our clients discover and develop new opportunities, but milk old ones, are we doing our job?
2. Deconstructing concepts, taking them apart and challenging each fragment is a way of exploring and discovering ideas. Amongst others described by Stephen King in the book A Master Class in Brand Planning: Find one idea and then try to destroy it.
The benefit of this process is both a chance to polish the final concept and make sure every detail is perfect, but also to understand how and why the details work, and uncovering new insight in the process. Deconstructing something you’ve already did that worked gives you great ammunition not for copying it, but for finding out why it was a success, and then understanding which specific details in it made it work and why other details did not.
As an example advertisers have always known what types of communication gave an intended effect, but it is only in the last twenty years brain science has been able to tell us exactly why. Which has led to an offspring of brand new ideas based on the specific knowledge of how the brain works as opposed to just copying known “advertising rules”.
To put it briefly: People constantly adopt and implement new ways of communicating and of fitting technology into their everyday life. By deconstructing our big ideas into smaller fragments we have a better tool for knowing what will work when building solutions on new platforms for new behaviors – and by that the “risk” or “guts” people often talk about when explaining creativity becomes rational and logical – even safe.
This does not make marketing and design boring, but it demands more thinking about thinking. – And it demands as much creativity from the strategic department as from the creative department.
I’m not a big fan of the term Social Media. It might be that it translates poorly into Norwegian, the fact that it sounds like its the technology that is social – not how it enables interaction between people or identities, or that I find the term itself invites us to a limited set of ideas in regards to what it can facilitate.
Either way, the following question was sent to me, and several others, from a student, Trude Stokstad, this week:
What will social media be in two years?
Having a blog makes one fortunate enough to answer a lot of questions from readers, students, enthusiasts or people just being plain curious. This gives you an opportunity to search for answers outside your original train of thought and is surely one of the most important benefits of having a blog.
With the assumption that we will still use the term social media in two years, as media and platforms become more nuanced, difficult to categorize and are having their functionality integrated with each other. I still found three things I think will make a difference:
Three things:
1. There will be no social media but social operating systems. There will be an integration of participation and dialogue into everything – or, where it benefits core business models or goals (no more being on Facebook for Facebook’s sake).
In the short time span of two years there will still be destinations and sites like Facebook, youtube, linkedin. But one or more of these databases will own your information and it will be fed out and made accessible on a range of other destinations and services.
This is interesting both in what we are already seeing from services like Facebook Connect, connecting 60 million people to Facebook outside Facebook.com, or the fact that half of all Twitter activity is already taking place off-site.
2. In the future our objects will become our friends. We don’t necessarily need to communicate exclusively to people, we communicate with identities that might as well be objects(people follow the Tower Bridge twitter feed or get SMS’s from their plants that their running out of water).
In the future the stuff around us would want to communicate with us and we would in some way interact with that communication.
One could already ask the question if it is people or objects that help us communicate and organize on Nike+ (the sensor in the shoe and the iPod are the ones collecting and creating the data that connects us)?
3. The language will expand. Today we focus on conscious, tangible communication like the written word or uploaded videos or music. This will change and future communication will be in richer forms. Social Media is not about exchanging words and opinions, it’s about sharing ideas, expressed through any language or data.
Digital is expanding yet again, from the first editorial version, to a second social version and now the third installment; integration.
Some arguments:
1. Integration is not merely about offering services where people are, it’s about implementing connected technology within our everyday objects, or designing new objects based on the new opportunities and additional meaning introduced by technology.
Which gives that this could introduce a completely new generation of needs and behaviors: In the words of Donald Norman;
“Need is created by technology, not the other way around.” Link.
2. With integration we are not only moving from destination sites to aggregate sites, from horizontals to verticals. We are moving from screens to objects, from input devices to sensors and from keyboarded instruments to everyday life.
Jesko Stoetzer’s RFID Sleeve prototype for the Betacup project is a good example. Showing how digital technology, using no screens, no keyboards, just an electronic augmentation and a redesign of an existing object, the cup sleeve. Can improve the coffee experience for enthusiasts, create new business opportunities and increase product sustainability.
“The use of Internet on PC’s will decrease from 95% today to only 50% the next five years.” – pdf
But Microsoft was only talking about our connected lives moving from PC’s to mobile, gaming platforms or “connected TV-boxes”. They where not looking into the emerging opportunities from smart objects, SPIMEs or coffee sleeves.
The Europe Logs on report were looking at machines. But the days when only machines were connected to the Internet is already in the past.
Devices are machines where the structure of the object itself affords no utility, but there is a screen and a circuit board in there offering us a range of opportunities. And object is different, it already has an immediate utility, but technology ads a new layer of meaning.
“Devices fool us because they look like objects and do all this stuff, and we are kind of hypnotized by their ability to do all this stuff. Where as when you see an ornament in the shop you know exactly what it is and what it is for. And you don’t except more of it. I think some of the delights that some of these can contain is when it looks like a simple object but contains meaning that you weren’t excepting.” – Russel Davies.
4. Machines are hubs. Take the mobile phone as an example; it should be (and hopefully will be) connecting people to their objects, not filled with an application for each one (object).
Appvertising and applications belong to machines, and are just scratching the surface of connected technology, it is by and far only the answer to the following question: “What do people want access to all the time?”
Integration as a term is not about access, it’s about turning everyday objects into identities, which enables them to organize, create structure and through feedback add a new layer to spaces in our everyday life.
Bill Moggridge mentions in his book Designing Interactions, that there are not only three (spatial) dimensions to an interface, but also a fourth one; time. We are now building a fifth dimension; the digital identity of the physical object.
“This cat is completely unaware of the most important thing about this particular stuffed animal. Which is that it has a whole other life online. This is a Webkinz stuffed animal. And this cat has no idea. It thinks it’s actually engaging with the thing, and in fact it has a whole parallell life thats going on, that this cat can’t touch. And I want to make it clear, that this is where we are heading, towards a world in which entities have this physical presence as well as this digital presence.”
Conclusion:
The important shift with integration is not that we put technology into things (devices), but that everyday objects with an existing physicality and purpose, get a new dimension and additional meaning: A digital identity.
With these identities comes data, responsiveness, organization and connection.
The next generation is all about connecting our stuff, offering new layers of meaning to our objects, our situations and the world at large.
If creativity and design is the process of exploring and articulating the product, then what is the product?
This is the second installment from a rather lengthy article on design published on popsop.com. It discusses what our product is as the first article argues that creativity is a ubiquitous human trait, and design is a craft and a process (first article here).
The marketing relationship is different, it is characterized by two hurdles in the relationship mindset; first of all, where the product relationship generates a hundred thousand individual stories, the marketing relationship can only tell one. Secondly, it assumes their doesn’t exist a product relationship, and wants to create a new one, by associating the “empty” object to a set of values already existing in peoples minds for something else, this is called “storytelling”.
The identity of a product should not be defined by its loud advertising, but it should shape its advertising, a task often left to branding and marketing. This creates products out of touch with its experience, sometimes missing the point and often generalizing its ambition so that it mixes with more fundamental traits and needs of human nature. (The product is important, but inside situations, not as general as contributors to peoples lives on par with friends or sleep).
In research just made public by one of the major banks in Norway, businesses where asked why they were investing in an online presence. The answers presented a bit of a revelation.
The top three answers were all connected with consumer demand, which are all OK points to make, but when compared to the three least popular responses, all linked to business incentives, it seems the focus has been turned a bit up-side-down. It seems businesses are more focused on doing what their customers say, at a cost, rather than doing it for themselves – doing stuff where the company has identified a direct business advantage from having a presence online and want to take advantage of the opportunity.
- This cost-driven strategy might also explain the dreary state of Internet offers today. Where most companies find being just as good as every other brand in their category is good enough – there is no money in it!
THIS IS IMPORTANT, because we are overly focused on talking about people and staring into this black box of consumer habits and behaviors. With extensive demands being added by social media, demand that only a few companies find interesting enough to take on. (It’s more “Lets avoid a mistake”-thinking than “This is an opporuntiny”-thinking as Jon Steel would have said)
But this is hopefully all about to change…
The next generation of online activities will be inherently linked to business advantage, rather than consumer demand. And by that we should also see the real money being poured in, not just marketing pocket lint.
The way we are making and selling design is becoming generic and confusing. One of the challenges is that design, as creativity, is described as a product, an end goal. When the fact is that neither design nor creativity is a result, it’s a description of how we get there not what we will end up with.
I suggest using the term “design” correctly, for its unique abilities, purpose and meaning. The goal would be to offer a product with clear direction and intention, where staring into the unknown is still tangible, where the initial idea/spark has grown into a shared dream and where the need to articulate the process hasn’t created any premature answers.
This is the introduction to a rather lengthy article being broken up into three installments and published on popsop.com. This first installment discusses our vernacular; both the term “creativity” (which I published here previously), and the term “design”.
Two takeouts:
…A simple question to answer is: ‘Is there bad design?” And I would say no. Bad design is not design, if it does not fulfill its intended goal, if it doesn’t solve the components of a brief but veers of on its own, its decoration. Of course, one could argue that the language and instrument used is different from the personal preference, but there is a big difference between liking something based on gut feeling or personal taste, and evaluating a work of design. There is a difference between liking the posture and personality of a spoon and evaluating the craft of the spoon and its ability to work as a kitchen utensil. Of course, personal taste is an important aspect of the visual language, but do not confuse taste with craft…
…The best way of assuring that everybody comes up with the same ideas is to give them the same tools, the same models and the same mindset to work with. This is the way the linear development model works. The design process knows that if you are to discover something new, then even the design process itself needs to be original, and it does this by acting organic and responsive to the temperature, explorations, discoveries and insights found during each iteration…
Digital’s introduction to retail, be it a slow one, will accelerate as the understanding of the width of web and mobile broadens from being all about destinations, to integration into every aspect of business:
I’ve included the part of the script describing the three areas of retail I’ve concentrated on; product, in-store and business opportunities:
Product opportunities The product is not just a “brand” living on a shelf or being consumed by a member of the public. It is a character, which within the framework of a strong identity changes its characteristics to fit different roles through the stages of its own lifecycle; from the initial idea, the spark, to its realization (design), its distribution, shelf life, shared product experience and recycling (sustainability). Digital amplifies the characteristics, and helps the identity adapt at each stage.
In-store opportunities
The retail outlet is the most important arena for public choice. It is intense in its range of decisions, and numbing in its range of (similar) products. Inside this arena there are limited opportunities within frameworks. Frameworks put in place by the non-digital, non-organic world of cardboard and floor space. Digital transcends the limitations of the shop infrastructure, serving communication through personal devices controlled by a digital brain in “the cloud”.
In the advertising mindset the retail communication belongs to the “call-to-action” category. But this limits itself both in its expense on resources (financial and labor), scarcity of real estate and limited time span. In the design mindset the goal is rather strength through identity, creating a long lasting top-of-mind preference through establishing an interesting story, sharing values, creating memberships and avoiding the retail rock concerts of advertising.
Business opportunities
There are new business opportunities to be explored and discovered through the extension of digital and organic platforms. From engaging the crowds to taking the store to the world – not limiting access to it by physical destination. In categories where products follow patterns and become remarkably similar, it is digital and organic platforms that not only invite customers to explore and discover new, unique experiences. But also develop more layered identities, establishing thicker product relationships, and unwrap new business opportunities.
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A special thanks to PSFK which as with a stroke of coincidence launched their brilliant PSFK Future of Retail Report just last week, adding a whole section to my presentation – I’ve been extensively referencing the source.
Creativity implies creating new stuff by combining two or more existing ideas. But, ‘creativity’ is a generic term. It is abstract and has no reference to quality in regards to a specific situation or task. Creativity is not a goal in itself, it’s the character of an activity; it implies nothing more than an exploration with the intention of connecting something known, but previously unconnected.
Creativity is not focused on finding the best solution, but an original one. Telling someone that we are going to have a creative process implies nothing more than: ‘We are going to spend some time coming up with something new”. When it should be: ‘We are going to come up with some shit that really works’.
Everyone is creative, every industry is creative; be they accountants, conceptual artists, storytellers or craftsmen. We pursue a creative process in order to find original answers.
Selling a creative product gives no implication of craft or process, no suggestion of specialization or expertise. Creativity is a given, in every line of work in the knowledge industry, it’s not a specialty.
My issue is with how we articulate our product and what we are loosing from using the wrong labels. My question is: “why are we selling this commodity as a specialized product?”
