designswarm thoughts

I’ve been working a lot and I admit, more than is probably required by your average human. I barely keep on top of email, check the odd flickr photo, haven’t opened my RSS reader in weeks, haven’t done my Xmas shopping and barely managed to squeeze in a haircut after 2 months without one.

I think I need a new generation of portable technology that let’s me keep up with the world when I’m on the go (what do you mean cell phones already do that?).

Give me till saturday and I’ll be back on track I promise!

I’m slightly baffled at what’s going on in design at the moment. Never more has the term “designer” meant something completely superficial, not so useful, egocentric and unsustainable. And at the same time, in business circles, the term “design” is being hailed as the great solution to a changing economy and market. Has the concept of design diluted itself so much we can’t tell one from the other?

When I was taught industrial design , it was always about problem solving. If the problem wasn’t valid, didn’t affect enough people or the research was poorly done, then the professors would shoot you down. I still feel that’s a great academic approach.

When did design start being about “making a statement”? Is it because it’s easier to think of a general public of “all” as opposed to a public of “some”. Is it because it’s easier to produce just the one piece than to care about bigger production and it’s impact. Is it because designers envy the glamour of art? Is “designer” a new way to say “applied artist”?

I don’t have an answer to these yet… but we should collectively come up with some and quickly if we want to still know what design is supposed to stand for.

A few links that brought this up:
+ Design is the problem by Nathan Shedroff.
++ But is it art? at Intersections07
+++Philippe Starck @ TED.

(Another set of random ideas about the Internet of things)

Matt likes to show off to me his latest games and Portal got my attention.

If you don’t know the game, pictured above is the “Weighted Companion Cube” that you have to save and move as the game progresses and “take care of”.

It’s really interesting to me that a relationship is encouraged with this virtual object that is in essence, not classically attractive. Building this online relationship of course meant that now there are rumors that the cube will be available in plush for this Xmas.

It’s now becoming apparent that relationships of desire towards “objects” can be first established online, through experience of a game, to then lead to an offline sale and expansion of that relationship in the real world through a very different experience.

This is all getting a bit surreal.

Sustainability, product-based values, product design, desire, China, US, values, and a partridge in a pear tree…

It makes me chuckle to eavesdrop on people who have pre-conceived ideas of what it’s like to freelance.

“Oh I don’t want a 9-5 job” they say. Yes that’s true, if you freelance you will be working ALL THE TIME if you’re not careful. Most of your time will be spent looking for those “next steps” and your evenings and weekends will be taken over by client work that needs to be done.

Yes you’ll be better paid, but less often and usually not on time.

Regardless of these factors, as I write this post at the end of a shattering day, knowing that the rest of the week will probably kill me as well, I still like being a freelancer. But it’s definitely not for everyone.

Before attending thishappened last night I was invited by Garrick Jones to attend an informal discussion on web2.0 hosted at the Hospital, a very chichi private club in Soho.

Nothing could have been more further away from how I thought businessmen perceive the value of the now 3 year old term. I should have known better, of course and quickly recalled a client who asked me last year to produce a document on the business value of growing a community online. le sigh.

Here are some answers to parts of that conversation that stood out for me, since the conversation was pretty much taken over by 4 quite aggressive, serious types in a room of 20 sheepish looking observers (i’d kill to know who on earth these people were!).

1. The future of the web is NOT in paying people for their time.

That’s called work. People interact online because it’s fun, they learn stuff, they laugh, they read and educate themselves about the world, and they can meet new people in ways noone would have thought possible. Oh, and Second Life is not a good example of monetisation on the web (WoW is much better at it).
Paying contributors for their time and effort has proven to be an unsuccessful model (check out some thought about this on theWealth of Networks Chapter 4, an article in the O’Reilly radar, and the founder of wikitravel). A vivid example is why, Yahoo answers won against Google answers.

2. Facebook, mySpace, Second Life and Boingboing aren’t the only things online.

These 4 were the most used examples during the entire conversation ( a gentleman from Nokia mentioned Get Satisfaction which was the only new example) and I do not think they represent the spectrum of web2.0 interactions.

3. Stop thinking the Internet is just a dump.

Not unlike a huge library where people don’t put the books back where they left them, the web is full of information which isn’t relevant to EVERYONE but to SOME. Live with that and leave it alone. Not everything is meant to be organised and controlled. Again think word “fun”.

4. Web2.0 can be stronger than corporations, even the online corporations and if you don’t take control of your company’s voice online, you can be sure someone else will.

I have 2 words for you as worthy examples:HD-DVD and Crapwest. If you don’t want something like this to happen to your company every time you piss people off, take part in the conversation online, the worst thing that can happen is that people will challenge you to offer better services.

So in short web2.0 is immensely useful to businesses if they’re wiling to dig a little deeper than the Facebook “you have a new message” emails. (yes someone did refer to that as an example of web2.0 interactions!)

I won’t even try to address some of the silli comparisons to traditional warlord models that were brought up and I wish I had stayed longer talk through some of these points with people, but I had to dash off to a much lovelier crowd in Shoreditch.

“Sustainable design is not only about environmentalism, even if it is an important part of it. Sustainable design is also very much about timelessness, new materials that push the envelope, storytelling, sensorial experiences and cultural awareness.”

Found here.

At some point we’re going to have to accept that sustainability actually involved limitations, cutbacks and sacrifices. Just like we had to “deal” when the first and second WW came around, we will have to be

- smarter
- do less of a number of things
- stop doing a lot of things
- apply new thinking and not see these things as bad, but just simply better

Definitions like the ones above only serve to make everyone think that we can just go about our daily business, that pumping out new products and services and “new materials”, will somehow make things better. And tying the whole thing up with creatively-soothing-methodology-driven words like “storytelling, sensorial experiences and cultural awareness” is just not good enough anymore.

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.

“Interaction design is not about form or even structure, but is more ephemeral–about why and when rather than about what and how.”

This really isn’t helping anyone come up with that one liner at a bar in response to the dreaded:”So what do you do?”

boxes and arrows.

This article prompted some thoughts about this society’s obsession with documenting everything. The article starts rather nicely with

“When I was a boy—I can remember how my Mother would spend a good part of her Sundays. She would take out her phonebook—a tattered collection of names and numbers written in handwriting you could barely read, and re-connect with her personal network—an intimate collection a family and friends. She didn’t create media other than the pictures she took or the video my father shot on his 8mm video camera. ”

Somehow this sounds way more soothing and relaxing than what we’re living now. With these “lifestreams” we’re creating, these social networks, having friends see every corner of our conscious and subconscious existence, pictures, statuses, pokes, twitters, games, applications, we’re also creating an unprecedented set of expectations. “I should post more often on Flickr before I drop off the map” was something I heard recently. These things are starting to sound like work.

Being dedicated at doing something used to be for workaholics. In the meantime we’ve all turned into sociaholics. Progress in society meant we would one day have more time to ourselves:the illiusion of the Homo ludens. But as the NYTimes was quick to point out, we are enjoying less and less free time. So we’ve turned fun into work and are desperate to have fun at work.

There used to be a trend in interaction design of thinking aboutslow technology and creating relaxing experiences for people to have, like slow food, slow travel. But technology by definition has never been slow. Interacting with technology isn’t a slow activity. It’s about being efficient, getting things done, so that you can… hmm… post pictures up on Flickr.

So I have to wonder,will we collectively keep going or will the height of this bubble be a collective “stop”, a global yearning for a technology-lighter existence. Will this be the push towards AI where we literally have nothing to do, no button to push, tranquil in the knowledge that everything is already being captured, edited, published, without us having to lift a finger. Will we actually ever live a moment without having to absolutely, irrevocably, reach down in our pocket for our phone camera and push that button?

Or maybe we were never meant to be totally ludens in the first place.

Talking over coffee about the number of “web2.0 consultants” around these days Matt said:

“During a gold rush the people making money are the ones selling shovels”

I’m spending a first weekend of downtime in a while walking around London, cooking with Matt and letting just random realisations bubble out. A few:

. Why does everyone in design and technology have architecture envy? Everyone talks about urban spaces, psychogeography, gps, architecture… most of these subjects it seems have been covered by scores of people before. There’s loads to read about the subject. Is it because it’s such an established field, with loads of thinkers and theories around it, or is since we got GPS and Google Earth appeared. And why only architecture? Why not product design? Is it because it’s seen as less accessible therefore more enviable.

. I’ve been reading a lot of Kundera in the past few months simply because it gives me a great opportunity to read more French (my mother tongue) and reading L’immortalité has been surprising. It’s simply the best example of a form of writing that hints of how the internet way of understanding information turned out to be. It is a meta book. A book about a book and writing a book, a story about another story with a story to compare it to.

. This has also made me think that I need to go back to the classics and start hacking away at that long list I always said I’d read one day. A brief history of time will be my first one. If it’s true that we are a forgetful species and that everything has already been thought and done maybe some answers to problems lurking in the future lie in what was written in the past.

There’s a habit in the world of product design to only concentrate on the object, its design, the supposed environment in which it would be used (think ikea catalogues where the occasional good looking Swedish person will show up to pick up a spoon from a drawer) and not really on it’s use… For example the Cima ladder, featured in my Core 77 feeds today…

Ok it’s a ladder that looks pretty… and it basically forces you to climb… but holy shit i would be scared senseless to try to change a light-bulb with this, forget trying to paint a wall, i can’t steady my feet on the same level. Perception of stability when doing vertically challenging activities is more important than esthetics… so this ladder reduces any possibility of doing anything that’s independent of a wall… which is why I would need a ladder in the first place no? … as for coming “out of the closet and stand proudly in the salon of the house.”, i don’t have that much space to spare.

So when we’re talking about sustainable product design, and using smart materials, etc… can we also perhaps expect designers to come up with designs that are smart and have the potential to be used in more ways than one? In this case provide the same function as the original product and not less. A “No one-liner” policy would be a great start, otherwise we will keep cultivating the egos of aesthetic and material-based designs with poorer functions and uses…

Highlarious…

There are days when I find the internet boring. This is one of those days. Part dictionary, part soapbox, part best-way-to-not-get-work-done, part adress book, I’m simply not finding it inspiring right now.
I think I might have to leave it alone for a few days (oh how convenient, I’ll be going to Milan!) and come back to it later.