Category: Conferences

My first conference of 2014 was the majestic Design Of Understanding, otherwise known as the Max Gadney show. A personal selection of what he thinks is interesting and he clearly has good taste.

Will Hudson of ‘It’s nice that‘ started the day with a talk about something born out of a university idea to gather and publish things that make people feel good about themselves. He spoke of how the name frames their approach to content and editorial (you can’t be snarky when your reason for being is showing something nice). He also spoke of the challenges of growth, now he has a staff in double figures he worries about his attitude to risk and does everything he can to not kill the youthful exuberance of ideas. He referenced the young entrepreneurs of today the Zuckerberg’s, Karp’s, etc. but also said age and freedom of thinking is not just a product of age…which is a a relief.

Inadvertent Yorkshire

Tony Quinlan constructed a narrative about how companies keep trying to construct narratives….and failing. ‘The moment a company writes down their values they have failed’. The obsession with companies to craft a story, the management version of story, normally where the product or the service or culture was the hero. Most companies avoid stories of failure when most resonance and learning came from those very stories. The micro stories from the water cooler would carry more weight for the brand especially with staff but they are never considered for such corporate messaging. Terry gave a brilliant example of taking the light from stories and applying them in a different context. The sanitation issues of Bangladesh. Villages happy to have a field set aside for defecation needed to be taught about the latrine. The more experts said you should have them the less they wanted to hear it. The key was social status. The message that worked was ‘Marriages where the home had a latrine were more successful’ The use of social status and shaming had a bigger impact than instruction ever could.

David Sheldon-Hicks had the coolest job by far. He designed fake computer interfaces for films and games. His company, Territory Studio, produced the interfaces in the film Prometheus and his insight into how the creation of those interfaces made for a fascinating tale even though he was not the greatest of presenters. The balance of fake/post shoot effects vs real working computer scream on set, Prometheus was more of the latter and the ship had over 100 working screens  meaning a lot of cabling and a lot of computers. The amount of craft and skill that went into something that could be on screen for seconds, cropped in the shot or even blurred, was astounding. When asked how they used data to feed the fake UI’s he said

‘As long as you give NASA credit at the end of the film they are happy to give you pretty much whatever data you want’

 

Andy Kirk gave an excellent statement union of data visualisation. I have attended one of Andy’s data design courses and his knowledge of the subject is exceptional. He spoke of the big data viz events and trends of the year. The New York Times look at how the US speaks, Gun Deaths and lost years, the age of cites and the mesmerising Earth by Cameron Beccario which beautifully visualises wind patterns on out planet. Andy has published his slides so you can see all the work he referenced.

He also explained the state of the ecosystem and it was clear he had a very negative view of the infauxgraphics (mega long scroll nonsense), visual.ly marketplace (a space for the crap to gravitate toward). He was however more positive on the state of tooling and how the wealth of tools were starting to talk to each other more, holding Tableau and R up as a good example. More work to be done on the explanation of the space from a recruitment and understanding point of view but clearly a real growth area.

Jo Roach the cofounder of Makies, the 3D printed dolls talked of the struggles of being one of use first 3D printing manufacturers and the value of great PR and the luck of timing in the rise of 3D printing and media interest. From 3D printer David Cameron and Prince Harry to the tactic of sharing wildly what they had tried, built and envisioned helped them find a solution to the most random of problems eg the wear and tear on the doll joints being solved by silicone injection. The challenges facing a toy retailer of getting across the ethics and value of design for a £70 item vs a £10 Barbie was their big challenge for the future. I wish them luck and hope they succeed.

I felt that a strange sort of hushed reverence befell St brides for the talk of Durrell Bishop of Berg. Whether that was because people knew of his past or just realised they were in the presence of a great mind it was an interesting phenomenon and one that was cruelly hampered by AV issues. He spoke of the need to face the design challenges of today, rather than the creation of beautiful static things of yesteryear, the vase, the chair, today the need was for the explanation of the technical and the graphical. His way of looking at the humble VCR thought the use of simple kitchen implements (the sieve a screen, a tap for the tuner, a bottle as the recording mechanism etc.) helped see the workings in anew light. A new language for the interaction and behaviour of the machine. We cannot understand that which we cannot see. He called for a need for new designers. We are faced with the new mega systems in the world primarily designed by software engineers. Graphic designers have not been able to step up…who will?

One of my favourite talks of the day was from Matt Sheret of the Government Digital Service talking about a subject I have no real interest in, comics. It is just a medium that has kind of passed me by but Matt’s interest, enthusiasm and knowledge for the subject just pulled you in. He explained how to read comics…a seemingly needless exercise but his explanation the gaps between the panels acting a context, making the reader work to fill in the story for the next scene. He spoke of the challenges of new methods of consumption effecting how comics were read, touch screens lending themselves to the flicking between panels and giving the capability of zooming into the scenes. The challenges of the form across new mediums, that morphed and jumped across new channels such a twitter, tumblr, YouTube and ending up at lost and broken urls on MySpace or trapped behind the broken iOS updates of apps. He gave a brilliant quote about the failing of the old world to adapt to the new

Middle aged future

‘DC comics is a good example of how moribund an industry can become when you just have 40 year old white guys writing stories for 40 year old white guys.’

This resonates with me on may levels but as a soon to be 38 year old am I trapped in the same old narratives..it also seems I am worried about my age. I digress. It was a great talk. Matt has posted some notes/videos and links to further reading from his talk.

The last ‘talk’ of the day was actually Max interviewing Russell Davies while using a set of slides Max had created as some thinly veiled reference to his questions. Very thinly. It was of course brilliant. What follows is a lot of notes/quotes and rambling explanation from me.

Russell has lots of experience working with big organisations (Nike, Microsoft, W&K and now the Government) and he seems to effortlessly produce solid gold nuggets of insight every other sentence. I like to think these are a mix of the cuff thoughts beautifully worded mixed with some well honed bon mots crafted over many a plate of eggs, bacon, chips and beans. So here are the best quotes I managed to (hopefully correctly) capture;

On Nike Run London. A campaign for W&K to get non runners to do a 10k run. ‘no inspirational Nike shit, this will be hard, the first month will be hell but it will be worth it’. It was about helping people start, not becoming the very best athlete.

‘We advertised all over the underground to catch people at their bleakest moment’

He gave some great insights on why Nike were better than the other sporting goods manufacturers. They hired people who could get things done by any means. This meant they could deliver just an extra 10% more than the competitors.

‘The only hard problem in big organisations is getting something done’.

When Russell questioned why they did not try and fix the internal problems he received this amazing piece of wisdom about large organisations

‘No matter what you fix in big companies the crap always arrives’.

Nike also had some good habits that helped them immensely. Regional managers would be set the normal sales target but also if you could not show that you had done something new each quarter then you would be done for. Another example of doing differently was the brief for the World Cup. A series of pictures of Ronaldinho that just said things like ‘Fast’. No laborious guidelines and rules, pictures and a word. ‘Post literate’ A kernel of an idea and latitude.

BoJo, MaGa & RuDa

On brands ‘The only people who believe in the power of brands are those that sell belief in brands and those that are really against brands.’

‘Brand is a poisonous word. Brand is just a side effect of an interesting project’

On the advertising industry and his time at Wieden’s.

‘A lot of my success has been making the type being big enough and not mumbling. Clarity is key.’

He spoke of how Wieden’s had a way of framing the work that made them stand out

‘Try and make it better than anything you could look at, at the time’.

On pitching he was a big believer in just saying what you really mean. An example he gave was an architectural firm that presented to some board and just stood up and said ‘look at this building it is beautiful’. A person with charisma and a clear message not laden in concept will more often than not win out.

‘Advertising is a brilliant industry to leave. It is like a foundation course for the creative industries’

Russell has also been lucky enough to present to Jobs and Gates….

‘Billionaires are the best people to present to as they have no concept of constraints. To successfully present to company CEOs you have to realise their weakness, the gaps in their power’

Calling back to Will’s talk at the start of the day it was clear he was not a great fan of the Silicon Valley obsessed tech world and the fascination with young white startup stars.

‘Being young is not a sustainable business model…The privilege of being able to work 18 hour days with no commitments’

If you keep giving privileged young white men lots of money then some of them will make impressive things but clearly that is a limited strategy in many ways.

Although on he subject of age he wished he had started his Really Interesting Group collective when he was a younger man to benefit from that youthful lack of commitments especially the need to earn so much cash (I must admit I would like to see them reform as some sort of super group in their 60s and see what they would produce). Get a very smart bunch of people with differing but complementary skills and interests and get out of their way

‘The Magnificent Seven as a business model. Give them a mission and set them on their way’.

Either Russell did not talk too much about GDS or I was too busy listening and took lousy notes. What he did stress was the work that had gone into the writing. ‘We have writers, not interested in prose but in communication’ he mentioned that the Government used to write clearly but somewhere lost there way and brand experts got involved and messages got lost in concepts. What the world need was a return to the likes of Tom Eckersley

‘The government used to say things like tidy away your hammers’

And on that note I shall end these very long notes. I could maybe do with a few years at Wieden’s & Kennedy to learn about brevity and clarity. Thanks again to Max for putting on a good show. A great day of increasing my understanding of a great many things.

My first conference attendance of 2013 was a belter. I attended the Design of Understanding last year and it was so good I had to attend again. I wrote the bulk of this post on a train to the north and I struggled to comprehend my spider leg in ink, handwritten notes so apologies if this is very disjointed / full of misquotes/misrepresentations of the speakers at the event. I guess this was/is my understanding of the design of understanding based on my memories and notes a week and a bit later.

The first three talks of the morning sessions were all fantastic. Matt Cottam of Tellart spoke about the creation of the Google Chrome Web Lab exhibit at the National Science Museum. A wonderful tale of a lot of hard work to create a truly interactive exhibit for both physical visitors and for people interacting via the web. A theme for the day (I am assuming due to the direction of organizer Max Gadney) was showing your ‘working out’ i.e. how was it made. Matt told of the challenges from the original brief where they focused on the physics of theses displays mixing physical objects such as moving balls with digital displays. They realised this was the wrong path and that attempting to explain how the Internet actually worked was a much richer seam than some forced interaction between physical and digital objects (although the metal ball that rolled behind a screen and kicked off an animation was nice).

Matt also mentioned a great Joi Ito quote about innovation (this was not to be the last time his name was mentioned).

‘The cost of assessing risk now is greater than the cost of failing’

What they built was very impressive. It attempted to explain a number of web concepts that we take for granted such as streaming of video or the concept of the web being this physical thing i.e. billions of wires that traverse the globe under sea and over mountains. The exhibition can be visited in real life until July.

Second talk was by Joe Parry of Cambridge Intelligence, a company that specialises in mapping networks of email flow for the Enron scandal, internal vs external members of an organisation to show sales networks, networks of terrorists across Europe, networks of data centre devices and services. The software they use allows the networks to be filtered and morphed to help bring to the fore previously invisible insights such as the key email sending behaviour in Enron and who the key players were, where the terrorists connect and congregate across continents and highlight key countries involved.

He showed a brilliant image of George W. Bush staring at a giant print out of a terrorist network following the twin towers attack and he glibly said ‘I wrote the software that generated that picture’ (or something close to that, my notes are sketchy). It showed the power of paper and scale in the viewing of these networks. He mentioned the cliché of the lone investigator in films staring at the wall of information looking for the links. Still very valuable even with enhanced digital tools.

The starting hat trick was completed by Phil Gyford talking about his work on bringing Samuel Pepys diary to the web. For those unaware Phil had moved to London and decided to read Pepys famous diaries. As well as reading them he had the idea of publishing the diary entries to the web on a day by day basis linked to the day Pepys wrote his original entry. Pepys diaries spanned a period of ten years. Phil ‘finished’ this project in summer last year. He had posted a diary entry every day for ten years. As he posted he had annotated and expanded on the text by crafting a huge volume of additional commentary on the characters involved in the story, summaries of the story so far and also pulling in extra information on characters from other sources e.g. Wikipedia.

Phil played a lovely animation going back in time to 2002 when he started this project to show how little of the web we know today existed. In a time of the instant gratification web it is awe inspiring to see someone so dedicated to a thing that they would take all that time and effort to see it through. What was even more amazing was that Phil has started again. He rebuilt the site using new technologies and is now repeating the process albeit with a lot of the hard work done it is still going to be herculean task, not least crafting new Tweets. Amazing.

Lloyd Shepherd spoke about the beauty and complexity of note taking. An author by trade he had to do masses of research for his historically set novels and he was unhappy with the tools of today. They are incapable of capturing the neural connections made by the person taking the notes or the links between each note and source. He showed some great notes from Matt Jones of Berg that showed how the layout and design of those notes told so much of the story and almost showed the thought processes of the person capturing the notes. How do you represent that digitally? He has published his talk online which is very helpful for people who did not take good enough notes.

Stef Posavec is a designer who uses data in an amazing way. I have seen Stef speak three times now and I am amazed by her work and how it is made. She spoke extensively about a new project called 94 elements where she was building graphical representations of the 94 naturally occurring elements. Stef broke down how she took the various attributes of the elements and how she looked for patterns in the data that could be transformed into unique simple representations of each. She settled on the atomic numbers of the elements and ended up with gem like representations which could be enhanced with colour and texture.

The talk that caught me by surprise was by Justin McGuirk. He spoke about activist architecture in South America. In twenty minutes he taught me a lot about how ‘modern architecture had gone to South America to die’ and with it how the dreams of building homes for the poor had also failed massively. This gave way to the rise of the slums that spread prolifically and had swamped many of those architectural dreams.

Failed attempts to build sustainable housing, designs that allowed people to improve and extend were admirable but ultimately too expensive. The approach now seems to have changed. The focus has switched to building beautiful and functional buildings and spaces in the middle of the slums to basically lift the area. Examples of multi use community centres or brilliant pieces of infrastructure such as cable cars that meant journeys to the centre of cities no longer took two hours but took nine minutes made it easier for people to work but also reconnected people to wider society.

Some lovely visual notes by Eva-Lamm Lotta

The talk that probably resonated most with me was by Beeker Northam. Beeker was due to speak at last year’s event but had to cancel due the fact she was heavily pregnant with twins, who she mentioned as she was worried they would become the girls from the Shining while her partner wanted them to grow up to be like the Winklevosses. As Beeker’s maternity leave was coming to an end she was starting to think about innovation and how it should work in digital agencies but her thinking was so true that is applies far wider than the agency world. Beeker admitted it was a work in progress but I thought it was pretty close to being done.

My notes only contain three sentences as I was listening so intently. They are as follows.

‘Nearness, Collaboration, Craft > Intersection’ (this was me describing a Venn Diagram that were the key themes of the talk.

‘Anyone who says they have a ten step plan for innovation is wrong’ YES.

‘This 3D printed thing looks like take me to your dealer at Camden Market’. My garbled capture of a great joke on how 3D printing is churning out complex patterns and object that look a bit hippyish but you can clearly see it is going to change the world sooner rather than later.

Beeker also made the second great mention of Joi Ito. Talking about his approach around lots of small, measurable experiments being the closest we will get to a process for innovation. I am unable to do justice to the talk as it was a brilliant collection of thinking that I am incapable of explaining.

As my colleague Betony said after it had finished ‘I thought you were going to take off your shirt and start roaring COME ON!’ thankfully for all attendees I did not. Fantastic.

Last talk of note was Ben Terrett, Head of Design at the Government Digital Service. He had to follow a lady from the BBC who talked about their Olympics offering i.e a load of stirring clips and some stats about how impressive their online service was, which was very impressive but felt like cheating.

Now obviously I am a GDS fanboy. The way they are doing IT right in a big bureaucratic organisation is obviously impressive.  Again it was good to see how they were going about that from the aspiration to build something in the digital space as important as the road sign designs of Margaret Calvert (who they were actually working with and was a fierce critic and continued inspiration.)

The space to put so much effort into design is something I am in awe of. 250 staff at GDS. 16 designers. Strong ratio.

Combined working. New approaches were being tried at the GDS. Instead of designers crafting and pushing pixels in Photoshop they designed in the browser. This meant a designer and a front end coder would pair up and build together. So obvious yet so brilliant.

Mission patches. The thing that inspires me about GDS is the purpose. It drips out of everything they do. I am sure it is not all sweetness and light but from the outside it looks pretty bloody good. Ben shared a great example of mission patches, borrowed from NASA. For each major piece of development and release they handed out mission patches to all involved. These stickers are badges of honour on the laptops of those involved. A seemingly simple thing but a great display of team work.

Paring back to an absolute minimum. Ben gave a great example of some feedback from Margaret Calvert where she had challenged them to really go back to basics with information design. What did the page design look like with a single font at a single weight? Was it still clear and understandable? This minimum viable approach helped shape their thinking and while they did not stick with one font and one weight they only use three weights and the single font they chose was actually the digital version of Transport, the font used on the road signs and designed by you know who.

Like so many of the talks it was a shame this was not recorded in any way. I guess my last words on it will be this…

‘What is the user need, not what is the government need’ Replace the word government with your industry and there is the focus so often disregarded. If you forget that then you are only going to be ever designing from a point of misunderstanding.

Let’s give this blogging thing another go after a couple of months post free. Last Friday I went to a place in London and listened to some clever people talk about some interesting things at an event called Design of Understanding. Here are some words that don’t do the event justice.

It was an eclectic mixture of speakers brought together by a seemingly nice chap called Max Gadney. He kicked off the day with some words of wisdom, the ones which caught my ear the most was ‘all forms of communication should impart understanding’ be the the way we perceive and use physical device or interpret a barely coherent post. This phrase seemed like a nice framing of the day. Here are some notes on my 3 favourite talks of the day.

Timo Arnall of Berg shared his love of film and how he believed it to be the most powerful means of communication. Berg are interested in how new technologies fit into the world. Film gives them the ability to show time, behaviours and to allow them to unpack (this may have been the most used word of the day) technologies. He showed a beautiful example made by Polaroid in 1972. An 11 minute film by Ray & Charles Eames that explained how the SX-70 folding SLR camera worked. No marketing guff of today but a clear and concise explanation of the science behind the device.

The myths that evolve around technology were another source of interest. RFID technology that is still perceived as a new technology even though there are around 4 billion RFID tags and chips in the world. This technology invokes irrational fears and leads to people creating things like copper wired jeans to block the devices being tracked. Is this in part due to the fact that so few people know how these things actually work? How they interact with the world around them? Berg produced a video visualising the fields around the device by using LEDs and sensors, mixed with long exposure photography.  The resulting video is a thing of beauty.

The use of film in this was by Berg has lead them to create something they are calling new grammar. The video almost becomes the product of their design work. The power of this communication form has been proved many times by Berg. Matt Jones wrote a fascinating piece about new grammar and its origins.

Timo ended with the Heathquote. Wise words from Chris Heathcote of Dentsu.

 “the world is going to get strange and magical, and people will be confused and fearful. Designers will have to do what they do best, helping people navigate these environments”

RFID (and its bigger brother NFC) will become increasingly used to the point of ubiquity over the next 5-10 years. How these technologies are designed to work in the world will be key. I think Berg will certainly help figure that out.

It was a bloody good start to the day.

Just before lunch it was the turn of  James Bridle. Not really sure how to explain who James is or what he does. In Max Gadney’s speaker notes he said this about James, which I think sums hims up very well.

“I am always impressed at how his interest in something means he needs to make it, not just to create an objet d’art but more that in order to investigate and understand he makes the thing”

I agree. He is also whip crack smart and a very funny fella.

One of the similarities between James and Timo’s talk was time. James is interested in the effect time has on things in this digital age. He created a series of books that documented the Iraq War based on every edit to the Wikipedia page about that event. A historiography of argument about a series of facts. James jokingly said that because of his background in publishing he always made books. He has also created a book based on his whereabouts over a whole year based on the tracking data from his iPhone, entitled Where the fuck was I. He has also published 50 versions of the Charles Dickens novel, Hard Times, with each version being slightly different. One edition is translated into Russian and back again into English.

Another element of time mentioned was the penchant for taking photos today with smart phone cameras and applying retro effects. As we strive to get our photos looking like the Polaroids of the 70s what does this do to the perception of time. If we see a street scene with a sepia tint we would assume it was from a bygone age. But what does the future look like? What are the digital effects or the contents of the photo to make it look more futuristic. This lead into one of James’ key themes of interest/research which he has called the New Aesthetic.

“For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder. Consider this a mood-board for unknown products.”

You can see this collection at the new aesthetic Tumblr. He said he was now receiving links from people asking ‘Is this the New Aesthetic?’ I can confess I am guilty of this.

I highly recommend you watch this talk by James from last year as he explains the topic in a far more eloquent way than I ever could. You should also check out his portfolio and some of the other things he has made such as Rorschmap (a kaleidoscope view of the world from above), A ship adrift (a bot set adrift based on weather conditions…currentlky somewhere over eastern Europe) and the recently launched Bus Tops, which he called ‘the worlds largest animated GIF sharing infrastructure’ i.e. connected screens on the top of bus shelters to display art. Lunch.

Last talk of the day came from Dan Hill. Dan is a Strategic Design Lead at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. They look into many things but mainly how design can be used to enable change at a city wide level ‘A single building cannot change a city’.

He spoke of the need to change the dark matter that binds the huge organisations/organisms that are cities.  The dark matter being the name Dan gave to the rules and regulations that the city must abide buy even though some of these rules are seemingly unwritten. Sitra looking into new building materials. They wanted to used compressed laminate beams for building structures as they are more environmentally sound than concrete but they are classed as wood, even though they do not burn. The regulations from the 1900s do not allow this. We see so many problems of the 21st century trying to be fixed by 18th century organisations and the rules they created. I can see no parallels with banking here what so ever.

Another example given was around food trucks in Helsinki. They have 10 food trucks for the whole of Helsinki. They all sell the same thing…which did not look pleasant. All restaurants close at 10pm. Drunk revellers seek food much later. They have no choice. The licenses required to open a food truck become available every 10 years. The dark matter of the city prevented innovation around the very important subject of food…or did it? Illegal food sales have began to spring up in parks. People sell food from their windows getting round the restrictions. One brave soul decided to build a crepe truck, Caminoette, and defy the rules. The city regulators were not happy but an 11,000 fan Facebook page and subsequent campaign lead the city, in election year, to reconsider its strict stance. What Sitra are interested in is how more flexibility can be added to the rules to allow for more spikes of innovation. Unpacking the dark matter to make it matter.

These three speakers were the primary reason I wanted to attend this conference. They did not disappoint. I would love to set them loose in a certain industry beginning with B. To see what Timo’s films would unpack, what James would make of the data and what Dan thought about the whole bloody thing. Wonder if I can make that happen? Why on earth would they want to?

There were more speakers and they were all good. Gill Ereaut spoke about the language of corporations and how the way people talk, or name departments lets the culture seep out. Luis Rey talked about the importance of illustration mixed with research, a desire to challenge and a sense of drama to alter the way historians thought about dinosaurs. Tom Armitage spoke of rules and mechanics in games and how the fun of play and ultimately understanding comes from the friction between those collections of rules and mechanics. ‘What toy do you give a 9 year old to show them what the future looks like? Video Games’

A fine first conference of 2012 for me. Thanks to the organisers and the speakers for a brain filling day. I will be the first to admit though that I am not smart enough to have understood all of it. Only so much design you can do.