designswarm thoughts

So for the first time in years, I went to have a proper look at design graduate work (CSM & RCA) as this is the perfect opportunity to take a snapshot of design education before the scary rise in fees when most UK students might apply outside of the UK and schools start to panic.

What I saw was alright mostly, with some flashes of brilliant and brave work. My favorites were the ones that clearly owned their experience and turned it into opportunities for themselves. Students who took the attitude of “the best time to look for a job is when you have one” and created businesses or support opportunities within the framework of education.

Alexander Groves (Design Products) made some fantastic Hair Glasses but also and mostly created a project called Sea Chair where he proposes to turn a retired fishing trawler into a plastic chair factory, fishing the plastic from the polluted seas around the South West coast of the UK.

Mohammed Daud (Design Products) developed a solution to help urban farming less painful physically with a redesigned hoe design. He is also looking for funding to implement the idea at scale in Pakistan where he went to do user-research. This is ideal for Kickstarter.

I also looked at work which clearly made a huge step in making new techniques feel familiar with the language of design. Studio Koya‘s beautiful and delicate fashion and textile work doesn’t even seem futuristic because of our now common acceptance of Lady Gaga-generated dada fashion.

It’s hard in design at the moment, but these kids will make it.

I got this last month from Michel, a lovely student from Eindhoven:

“I am currently looking for an internship in HCI/ID, but I am suffering from a “typecasting”-effect. Many companies ask for “interaction designers” when they really mean “graphics designers” or “css monkeys”. The fact that I have a background in computer science just makes things worse by adding “programmer” to the list of stigmas. My interests lie in the more physical kinds of interaction, but it’s really hard to find the right positions for that. Do you have any advice as to how I might better find the right places? Any help would be greatly appreciated!”

This felt deeply familiar of course as when I graduated in 2006 and it was a problem even then (I ended up working as a visual designer / information architect for a year even if my portfolio of work was much more product-based).

I try to explain to people what an interaction designer is in the way that I understand it, and in the context of the business I built, it makes sense. But in isolation, it no longer means anything on the market. Physical computing is too embedded in academia and is starting to feel old. Bill Verplank had suggested Physical Interaction Design, but it sounds a little clunky. So should we be concerned by this? As per Michel’s email, i think so. Graduates become senior designers, strategists, creative directors, etc. rarely interaction designers.

Lack of terminology ultimately leads to lack of identity and the dilution of a field into the market, unnoticed. Something to think about for the start of the week :)

Last month, Carole invited me to come in, lecture and help her graduating MA Textile Futures students understand the value of building an online presence of their own. I ended up putting together a few presentations to explain the value of what the internet was about, how it could help them in their career, etc. I learnt a lot and observed a lot along the way. Some of it shocked me, some of it are service ideas that are just screaming to happen and I thought I’d share. Feel free to reap the benefits :)

It’s 2010. The golden age of technology right? Well, managing an online presence, understanding what it’s all for when you’re not a web designer or involved in web design or “social media”, turns out to be more obscure than in 2005. Let me explain.

In 2003, I took a Flash class in my product design course. Horrible, obscure stuff where the end result was a Flash website. Need I say more? In 2005, half way through my master’s in IDII, I learnt how to code my own website (thanks to the many hours I spent with Didier who had the patience to teach me HTML & CSS). The year after that Yaniv made it compulsory to use WordPress to communicate our progress in our thesis work. I still find PHP a horrible thing to understand, but the hours spent paid off eventually. I moved on to being Karola’s sysadmin and web designer (I get jewellery in return you see) which keeps me coding once in a while. So all in all, that’s 5 years worth of investment that unless you’re in a “media” course of some sort, you’ll never encounter. This is a problem.

1. The internet’s ultimate designer package.
Most students will access the internet to have access to particular social communities (FB, Twitter, etc), do google searches for images and check email. They have no real understanding about the value of having their own URL (nevermind that they don’t know what URL means) until you ask them to Google themselves. Then they get it. If there’s a business idea here, its a packaged “registration, hosting and wordpress/tumblr/whatever installation” package. Having that will compete and just eat up horrible sites like indexhibit.org (i don’t even want to link to them) to stop taking advantage of creative people who just want a “box” to put images and captions in. Designers want to worry about the right things, want some degree of personalisation and want to get on with the business of designing quickly.

2. Ignorance is not bliss.
Reliance on “IT support” is strong in the creative industries. This means the IT sector takes the piss and doesn’t educate designers. There is no knowledge exchange, there are only service providers who make designers totally dependant. Explaining to a designer what FTP is, getting them to write their first index.html page and upload it and see it there, means they can then understand what happens behind the curtain and can have a creative discussion about it. Again, not talking about anyone involved in the “new media” sector but everyone else, photographers, textile designers, product designers, etc. Some of the women I spoke to about this (was an all-women course) were amazed and happy to build a vocabulary that made that world of acronyms make more sense.

3. Portfolio communities are horrible.
One of the missconceptions of design graduates, is that shoving their work into online communities for other designers will help them build a voice online. Looking at my own experience, when I graduated from product design school, core77 and if you were a bit cool, Computer Love or if you were really cool K10K were the places to go. What changed soon after that, was that your best friend online became Google and the blogs that linked to the work ( think WMMNA, Cool Hunting, Swissmiss or Mocoloco). In 2010, well it’s partially about Twitter love, but still very much about Google, not about walled gardens but about rich networks of relationships.

4. Flickr’s golden opportunity.
I just spent the day with Karola rethinking her website, and in the end, we found that it was easier to ask her to update Flickr and for her website to just link to slideshows of work. She understands HTML because I bullied her into it ;) , but she’s obviously now much more active and at ease thinking about Flickr, managing an image around her work, and thinking about the power of imagery. So we redesigned her website to basically end up being a “wrapper” around Flickr sets. It’s not Flickr, so she feels its her own space. If you Google her, you’ll get her website first, which is what she wants, but all the assets end up living elsewhere, in a space she’s happy to manage and where customer support is easy to handle through commenting. If Flickr was interested in monetizing at all, this I think would be a nice way to do it.

5. Education
In the end, I was happy to come and talk to the students about this, because noone had really bothered to give me such an introduction when I was a student. I’m not sure to what extent this shouldn’t become a compulsory module for design course “Online identity management” as so much of our work as professionals relies on promoting our work as much as possible, and this isn’t only through publications in magazines anymore. With the recent cuts in education, I doubt this idea will have any traction, but hey, that’s my 10 cents.

Wrote this as an exercise for JC back in Ivrea. Re-read it today and didn’t dissagree with it as much as I thought I would. Strange how we set a path for ourselves and naturally try to follow it. I was young enough I suppose to be able to see beyond myself. In the day to day these days, it’s hard to take that step back.

“A person who creates ideas worthy of note is a person who has learned much from others.”-Konosuke Matsushita

With this statement in a way I seal my faith and set a path. Choose among my many interests and direct my attention. It’s a very hard exercise and I get the feeling I might be inclined to rewrite this every couple of years but I feel I musn’t.

I should have the strength to make this decision. To put forth all my thoughts on myself, my work, my professions, my faith and write it out loud. I still fear as I digest this task, that I do not know, nor do I possess the tools to make such a bold move, but looking back, I’ve been braver. This statement should reflect what I feel of the former suit I wore that is that of industrial designer as well as the new one that doesn’t quite fit right now of interaction designer.

I should be able to tell you of my hope of a society where the industrial designer no longer has the right to produce unconsciously anything that is asked of him. Where responsible design is compulsory and services guide manufacturing and not the other way around.

I should be able to tell you of my fears that this will not happen in my lifetime, that people and societies are stupid, greedy and forgetful, that what has been, will be again and that I feel small in front of that fact but my heart tells me I must be part of the solution and not the problem.

I should be able to recall all the times I was inspired, loved and hated things around me, objects, technology, experiences, people and use that to my advantage.

I should be able to talk to you of my wonder in front of so many things that I still need to learn, all along this road of my life, so many books to read, people to meet and conversations to be had.

I should be able to tell you I only work emotionally, when a project plays with my emotions, that I see beauty I wish to communicate to others or horror which I want to point out.

I should be able to tell you of my love of poetry in a temporary installation, the beauty of something that transcends its physical nature, when an object is more than its shell, that the idea shines through.

I should be able to let you see the possibilities to express that poetry which I seek in technology around me and scarcely find. I wish I could see myself working to better some things, not all, that I know I cannot achieve sadly.

I would tell you of my absolute love of the expression “delicious experience” and my loath of the word “user”. I am not a user, I do not use, I enjoy or detest, I am emotions and intellect, not use.

I should be able to hope that interaction design is not just a screen, hiding the truth, faking experiences for people who have forgotten to appreciate hard work or a sunset. Enhancing is beautiful, faking is a crime.

I should be able to concentrate on this light at the end of the tunnel that are these 2 years in a small Italian village away from reality.

I should be able to see the beauty in befriending and working with 20 other unique, funny, sarcastic, egostistic, ambitious, depressed and talented people who one after the other have made me change a little more everyday as a designer, a student and a person.

I should be able to tell you that I think anything worthy of mention is a combination of different points of view and has a natural richness because of this.

I should be able to say and do these things but I fear, and maybe I should just be silent, take a deep breath and listen for the sound of a future I can’t quite fathom.

I’ve been invited to lead a sort of online discussion for the near-graduation 4th year students of the BA in Industrial design in Montreal. I was in their position in 2004 which seems like so ages ago and I remember the feeling. I felt like I was sortof on the brink of an abyss, the maternal warm womb of school finally letting go of me on the cold asphalt of reality, bills, student loans, rent to pay and generally not much hope for an industry that barely exists in Québec.

When I graduated in 2004, our class was 72 students. Most of them never got a job in design, only 2-3 of us went on to graduate school.
This year, the same course will have 12 graduates. I wonder who has adapted?

So I figured I’d post up some topics of discussions here since I’ve been asked to talk about “design and business”.

- We were told in 2004 that only 10% of us will go into design as a career. What do you think your chances are now?
- If you want to start a business, what will it be? What will be your USP?
- How important do you think the internet is to your future career?
- What do you think makes a good business person? Guts or reason?
- How many jobs do you think you’ll have in your career?
- Being your own boss? What do you think are the advantages/disadvantages?
- Working abroad: do you think its essential? what do you think about Québec as a market for your skills?

I look forward to the conversations very much, maybe I’ll get to see a mirror image of myself when I was young and innocent as Massimo says. :)

So I thought I’d map out the interesting academic environments where one might find a course that relates in some way shape or form to interaction design in the broadest sense possible (notice there aren’t any web courses here). I’m interested in how these schools form the professionals of tomorrow and how the field will find it’s way on the overall market. I’ll evenutally try to do the same with the interaction design businesses.

Note that this map is publicly editable so if I’m missing something, do add to it!

View Larger Map

Not interactive designer, all designers are interactive!

Lovely interview of Kars here, I think that conversation embodies the misunderstandings and challenges around the concept of “just enough prototyping” (mantra that Gillian Crampton Smith pushed at Ivrea) and the need to be dependent on technology when designing or be technology agnostic.

So I find myself in the unlikely position of having bitched about an event I got invited to this year.

Since that post, I can say that the state of interaction design conferences and education has dramatically improved with This happened in London and IxDA in the US. Hopefully this is a “future trend” :) as the schools on the subject are also starting to mushroom:

- The Institute for Information Technology at Thames Valley University is opening a MSc in Computing Interaction Design in the UK in January 2009.

- Former Ivreans are starting Copenhagen Insitute for Interaction design as well as Interaction design program in Venice

- Even Carnegie Mellon is getting on board keeping up the good work with a Masters in Tangible Interaction design.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

Spotted on the world’s favorite waste of time: FB.

I’ve finally found some time to have a proper read through Baudrillard’s System of objects to find it really is shaping my thinking around material culture and technology. Some quick thoughts based on quotes from the book:

“No sooner does an object lose its concrete practical aspects than it is transferred to the realm of mental practices”.

This made me think today about my first mentor if I can call him so. Hywel Jeffcott was my DTC teacher when I was 14-16 and the first one to truly encourage me to go into design. He gave me, on graduating from Year 11, a fabulous book I ended up endlessly flipping through called The Way things work by David Macauley. I think in a way the work I am doing with Tinker tries to somehow get back to the idea that innovation and technology are also palpable things that can be understood down to simple components. Simple components, simple actions that exist within the real of direct application are part of an art and a craft that in design is left to “fabricators”.
“Man has to be reassured by some sense of participation, albeit a merely formal one”

I think there’s much to be said about the fear that technology will take over. Baudrillard highlights an inconsistency in our thinking where we want technology to be as human as possible but if a sense of agency is too present (such as in articifial intelligence) then a line has been crossed which fills us with apocalyptic fears. We want so much for this technology to know about us and our needs, but not _that_ much. Where this line lies depends almost entirely on context of application, which means it isn’t policed and all sorts of privacy issues and concerns arise. It’s what he calls the “new anthropomorphism”.
“No man’s land between workplace and family home” is a metaphor that Baudrillard applies to the automobile. I think it can almost potentially extend to the cell phone. A personal object that is used so publicly and bridges space and time.

In any case, I truly recommend it as compulsory reading for designers. It is full of insights and questions about the great illusion we are creating and the mechanisms  and motivations that work just under the surface of  our everyday life.

I went to see the impossibly crowded opening of the Work-in-progress show at the RCA yesterday and although I really should try to go back, the feeling I got coming out of it was one of being puzzled by what it all meant.

Fact is, I’m not sure of RCA’s overall design rhetoric anymore. Durrel Bishop who once headed taught Design Interactions is now teaching at Design Products and the product design projects start to look like the works for Design Interactions a few years ago (especially the radio project, a late cousin of the IDII’s Strangely Familiar project when I was there in 2005). The Design Interactions projects are conceptually mostly based on either statistics, exploitation of the edges of society and in general not very self-explanatory. Maybe that’s what that course aims to do, to make us aware of problems to come and simply attempt to illustrate solutions or consequences. But then is that even design anymore or simply creative naysaying?

Few projects were really self-explanatory, and well isn’t that what art is about? You read the description to give you a contextual framework in which to understand what you’re seeing. Devoid of those explanations, I would challenge anyone to understand what was happening. Again, not a good or a bad thing, just a trend it seems.

Bless their hearts the IDE course presented loads of great work, themed on the next generation of mobiles (with the network 3) and global warming solutions for the household.

In strange way, the whole show could have been presented along an axis of time, answering the question: For who is it you are designing?
IDE would have answered: “someone from 2009″,
Design Products: “someone from 2011″ and
Design Interactions: “someone from 2025″.

Perhaps then for me would the show have made sense and so would the activity of designing and future-casting associated with it.

“The more I read interviews with these rock star designers, the more I realize how out of touch with real design problems these people are. Approaching design solely as style and brand simply perpetuates the notion of Design as transparent and shallow, and if these people continue to serve as the mouthpieces for our industry, our industry will continue to simultaneously lose the business-centered respect and credibility it so urgently needs, and to ignore the social and cultural problems it so direly needs to solve.”

Via nice article in Core77.

I went to the Work-in-progress show at Central St Martins tonight to see the MA in Industrial Design and Textile Futures course. I’d been invited last December to attend a crit of half of those student’s works and was curious to see what they’d achieved. One of the many reasons I enjoy keeping in touch with students and people still in school, is that more often than not, they point to possible industry futures and this was definitely a surprising experience.

Firstly it seemed that more than ever industrial design drove into the same dead end as its colleagues in the fine arts, design noir and critical design and sometimes interaction design. A lot of ideas, a lot of statements and one-liners but not many projects that addressed modern issues.
One exception was the work of Sara Bellini (terrible picture of her project above) who is trying to cater to bed-ridden children in hospitals. Health is a subject that in my experience, design academics shy away from, partly because the unknown are numerous, it’s hard to relate to the needs of the target audience and also because it’s hard to be poetic in that environment. I think her work might change their minds. Do go check it out in the final exhibition in June.

Industrial design is losing it’s place as the more “technical” but still easthetic cousin of engineering to become the art-wannabe. The future of industrial design it seems, could be found on the 10th floor where the second year of Textiles Futures were exhibiting their own work.

There was really a broad range of applications, of a extremely high standard and with applications that went far beyond your usual motif explorations or weaving techniques: from wallpapers that would visualise your energy use, to furniture made from post-it-like layers of materials, shower curtains that visualise and conserve the water being used, fabrics that trap light, cartoon-like companions for everyday life, and interactive corridors in airports that reflect people’s cultural backgrounds, architectural structures that bring variable amounts of shade to public spaces.

Eager to explore areas they had never touched in their lives, and to learn about the technologies that would help them, I had met some of these women (no men to be found here) for the first time at an Arduino workshop I organised with Tinker.it. Not 1 but about 8 of them had showed up.

I was impressed (and you all know that rarely happens) and I look forward to seeing if this is “la nouvelle vague” of design.

I like to think that design schools don’t just teach good creative thinking but also good habits that shape you as a professional later on and skills that can influence the profession in general.

I’ve been co-teaching one day a week at the University for the Creative Arts and in a way it’s been quite an education (couldn’t help it ;) ).

These 19-20 year olds spend 6 weeks trying out a different program every week and the practice of design is actually called “3DD” or 3D design. 3DD competes with illustration, animation, fine arts, photography and other such courses for student’s attention and at the end of the 6 weeks they will choose a “pathway” for the next 3-4 years.

All the different professions and opportunities in design such as architecture, product design, interior design, urban design, etc are all dumped into this one unappealing label.
Not only that, but the issue of sustainability doesn’t get mentioned anywhere, making this choice of a course completely removed from the realities of society and the professional environment.

This becomes quite obvious in the totally wasteful ways in which students treat the materials they are provided with. Card, paper, foam, toxic glues and the likes are thrown around. Shapes are cut right in the middle of a piece of paper or card and huge leftovers are simply discarded. Being sensitive to the environmental doesn’t grow on you, it’s taught or even imposed as just another set of constraints that come with being a designer.

If we are to make any kind of change in designer’s expectations of the world, their work and their clients, that’s where it starts: among the doubts and questions of students still working out where they stand in a world they don’t quite know how to master.

I just received an email at my Topoware email address starting with “dear sir/madam” expecting it to be spam and horrified at discovering it was a recent graduate who was sending me his cv and portfolio.

Horror! Shock!

So I couldn’t let it be, I HAD to reply and I did, trying desperately not to be too rude. But commmoooooooonnnnnn, isn’t business development part of any design course in the world yet? Oh, and it’s called “the internet”, put your portfolio online for god’s sake! And do me a favor and click on the “who we are” or “contact” or “about” and figure out the name of who you’re trying to reach to at least start your letter with “dear Alexandra”

The only type of communication for which that particular form is still valid, is if I’m filling in my tax return or writing to the gaz company and desperately can’t find the name of the head of the department.