Should clients have 100% veto power over designers and creative’s art direction and design?

Firstly they are paying for it, and secondly their product and brand is at the mercy of it. But the result is all to often that expert craftsmanship and brilliant work is being destroyed and turned into mediocre craft and ineffective communication at the hands of unskilled clients. Affecting all parties negatively.

Is only one party to blame here? Or is the problem more nuanced? With both creatives and companies having to be more aware of their weaknesses and strengths?

In my presentation Designing Identities I mention that:

“We need to include our clients in the articulation of design, if not products will become unsophisticated and conservative (research proves that the will of unarticulated people creates products that people themselves find uninteresting and boring).”

Aaron Winters requested the references to this, and I thought the feedback would be interesting for several readers:

1. The first reference is from the book Emotional Design by Donald Norman, where he mentions an art project where two artists ask people their preferences in regards to visualization and art. Collecting a range of answers these are then used as instructions for a series of paintings, which garnered terrible feedback. Directly externalizing people’s preferences turned ideas of beauty into something expected and boring.

You can find a larger reference to this statement on slide 17 in the slideshow below, or here.

2. The second and third reference are both from Malcolm Gladwell’s, talk at PopTech!

First Gladwell talks about a research project where a group of students were asked to choose their favorite of two posters; one impressionistic and one of a cat. The first group could just take their favorite poster and leave. But the second group had to explain what they liked about the image and then take it. The group that could just take the poster (without explanation) tended to take the impressionistic one, the group that had to explain their preference tended to take the one of the cat. Even more interesting was the fact that when the researchers called these people back after a while to ask them if they still had/liked the posters, the group who chose the impressionistic one tended to still like their posters while the people who picked the cat did not.

3. Secondly Gladwell mentions that some TV stations in the US turned down what would later prove to be some of America’s most popular TV shows after asking everyday people their opinion on the pilots. The interesting thing about this though is that what the focus groups would criticize and dislike was the things that eventually would make these shows a great success – the quirkiness, the odd things out, the exaggerated personality, the unexpected.

Gladwell points to several things:

- Having to explain our preferences changes them, because we start favoring the stuff we can explain.
- Having to explain ourselves changes our preferences to the least sophisticated, traditional and expected.
- Having to explain ourselves changes our preference from something we really would like, to something we don’t.

At the same time as these three references favor the work and craft of the designer or art director there are arguments favoring the clients perspective:

While clients are not skilled in the creative crafts most designers and art directors are not skilled business experts. And almost no one has as good an understanding of the clients business as the business themselves – shooting out brilliant ideas is one thing, solving business challenges and generating value inside a foreign context a completely different one.

Donald Norman in his article “Design thinking: A useful Myth” suggests that designers, in the context of design thinking, do not possess “some mystical, creative thought process that places them above all others in their skills at creative, groundbreaking thought”, but they do offer an outside perspective.

And I would ad; have a greater propensity to push one self out of the excepted and into the unexpected.

People skilled in the creative crafts are indispensible in the role of solving big communication challenges for companies who need disruptive and innovative solutions. But it is not because they, as Norman says, possess some unnatural ability to have all the solutions in the universe – it is because they help clients remove blinders, and push them to explore opportunities in what will initially be perceived as uncomfortable spaces.

And this is the problem; it is not that the creative work is to good or to bad. The root of the challenge is that creative professionals need to understand that their work is as much related to removing blinders and luring clients into the uncomfortable. If they are not able to do that from a business perspective and on a layman’s level in regards to the design craft, then the product or solution they provide will seem natural to them but be without explanation and relevant context to the client.

The way brands and agencies have combined new technology with their sales, marketing and design strategies, give the impression that technology is outgrowing the creative and communications industry almost ten to one.

A descriptive example is the OMO/Unilever campaign being run in Brazil at the moment (read it here: popsop.com / brandchannel.com). Where they are putting a large GPS tracking device into 50 boxes of a new OMO detergent. And then having teams follow customers as they take it out of the store. At home the people are given a small video recorder and asked to video tape personal moments of family happiness.

To me this presents several missed opportunities. First of all having teams following 50 boxes in a large country as Brazil seems like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Secondly the prize seems to small, thirdly asking people to share their private and personal family moments with the world might be difficult (at least when you are only inviting 50 random people to participate). And lastly; this is detergent, people don’t care, and the context surrounding detergent is probably more connected to housework or clean stuff than the universal value of family happiness (I rant, and am not familiar with the target group, but there it is).

What the campaign does unveil though, and is a brilliant example of, is how bad we are in the communications and creative business at using technological innovation to do our own innovation. We seem to spend large amounts of time and resources on picking out a technology, fitting it into a marketing campaign (and avoiding the hurdles it introduces), rather than using it to innovate our own concepts.

What I am saying is that new technology hasn’t brought with it new ideas, we are just using these new opportunities as vehicles for old communication strategies.

Donald Norman suggest that technology always comes first, and then it creates a need. I interpret this as technology in the beginning will always be rudimentary and difficult to use – innovation in application and design follows in the footsteps of the technology (and I might be a bit impatient).

But we need to keep our eyes on the goal, we need to be aware that we are still talking to people in the same old way – even if the format available has changed completely. In a former post I mentioned the mobile industry having been the only industry to see that what they have been doing has been completely wrong – it is time for the other industries to follow suit.

With the energy, innovation and ideas we are seeing from engineers, start-ups and even companies established production and logistical chains, the creative business is presenting itself as conservative and slow to react.

The creative business might be the most boring business.

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.

As always the individual slides can be found on flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

Find the presentation on slideshare.net/helgetenno/designing-identities or below.

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.

3. Microsoft put it carefully in its Europe Logs on Report in April 2009:

“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.

There is an important distinction to make in order to arrive at the conclusion that we are moving into a new Internet era, and that is the one between the machine and the object. What Russel Davies, in his talk “Printing the Internet out and squirting it into things” at the Lift Conference calls the device and the object.

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.

The digital life of physical objects is what Kevin Slavin discusses in his talk This Platform Called Everyday Life at the PSFK Conference in New York. This quote where he references a video of a cat molesting a Webkinz:

“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).

Read the full article on http://popsop.com/35879.

A few outtakes:

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).

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…

… Jump over to http://popsop.com/35690 and read the whole article.

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:

Find the presentation below or at slideshare.net/helgetenno.

As always find the individual slides under CC-license here: flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

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.

—

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.

PSFK Future of Retail Report

I would also ad these brilliant people and publications as they all helped in filtering the cases and surfacing the best ones:

springwise.com
popsop.com
mashable.com
rubbishcorp.com
adverblog.com
Ingmar de Lange
mobilemarketer.com
digitalbuzzblog.com
Zeus Jones
storefrontbacktalk.com
cpbgroup.com
techcrunch.com
Seth Godin
Richard Murray (for giving us the best insight on retail)
and for his brilliant and extensive posts, *Supercollider at geoffnorthcott.com.

In the communications hierarchy, there are four main field’s positioned in relation to each other. Could visualization introduce a way of understanding their role and ability in relation to each other?

During a short talk with Ji Lee at Gulltaggen 2010, he presented a hierarchy where advertising is at the top, then marketing, brand and at the bottom design. I’d never thought of placing these four fields into such a structure, but loved the concept, and it made sense to position them in relation to each other in this way.

Trying to design this idea, I ended up drawing a pyramid and started adding context to each stage…

Advertising
At the top of the pyramid, advertising can be at least three things:

1. Positioning (Al Ries, Jack Trout),
2. Creating an anticipation of the experience outside the experience itself.
3. Direct sales

Advertising is a great tool for selling anything from low interest products to aiding in creating or changing the perception of a brand. Advertising is tangible, but swift and constantly changing. Its stories and messages are focused on getting people to perform an action. Advertising is designed from briefs defined by guidelines, strategies and goals further down the pyramid; it’s top level communication.

Marketing
Marketing is the process of promoting and selling goods and services. It’s executed through individual actions, but fundamentally it’s the overall strategic program, defining, coordinating and executing on all levels of the organization. Marketing is the sum of day to day activities putting products to market and activating people through promotion and sales. Marketing is designed to achieve company goals and is constrained/directed by brand and design.

Brand
There are as many definitions of what a brand is as there are brand experts, from Neumeier’s “gut feeling”, to Yakob’s “The collective perception”. One thing is for certain; brand value exists in the mind of people engaging with it – not the company itself. But still, there needs to be guidance and direction to this value. The brand strategy defines how the company should achieve the right set of values. Branding aims at creating an advantage in a market place filled with identical products, as Helen Fischer quotes George Bernard Shaw: “Love is overestimating the difference between one woman and another”. The brand direction defines a framework and guides the rest of the company’s promotional and sales activities, but it is not fundamental, it is not the core company idea.

Design
The fundamental idea behind the company comes from its design. From identifying how to offer value in a specific situation, to designing the product (or service), how it creates value, its unique, identifiable identity, its story, form, interaction etc. From the initial value proposition to its tangible product the design defines how it creates value, how it performs, and how it remarks itself in the marketplace.

Design in this context is not just the visualization of an engineered product; it’s the comprehensive identity of the company or product – from the ground up.

–

By looking at the pyramid we can identify the role of each field of communication and how it relates to the other fields. (Advertising is created on the basis of the marketing strategy, which is the consequence of the brand and design platform. The brand is an enforcer of, or supplement to, the design – or lack of design).

It’s also important to note that job title does not define which part of the pyramid you are working on. Great ideas come from great groups of people, not labels. The point is: Understanding the role of the job at hand, and how this job is positioned in the greater complexity of the communications strategy.

I used to hate these things; thinking that it turned the Internet into a generic reading platform (as opposed to a marketing platform), but now I think it’s the other way around.

Publishers aren’t good at designing business models online, most cloak inside a big publishing category, and there are few interesting and identifiable identities. If one could adopt more of the principles behind these kinds of presentation designs, it would be a starting point to create stronger identities, better experiences and hopefully more viable business models.

The service I’m talking about is Arc 90’s Readability, aimed at simplifying the presentation of content so as to make it more readable. But what happens is more than that…

Readability – Installation Video for Firefox, Safari & Chrome from Arc90 on Vimeo.

The removal of all the strongly colored, moving shapes of inefficient advertising (business model wise), all the disarranged forms of hyperlinks and navigation scattered around the page (to get more page views) adds up to quite an efficient interface giving the reader more time to enjoy the content, mull over it, get more value from it – compared to when it is presented in a rushed, hectic navigation environment.

Now I’m not saying that it is the lack of graphical elements that are making this environment better, I’m not. It’s the lack of intense navigational and commercial noise aimed at supplementing a business model designed to generate clicks and views. Which is an infrastructure business model for advertising, a business model that has been proven not to work:

1. Digital, often representing half or more than half of a publication’s readers generate only 5% of a publisher’s income. (link)

2. There is an increase in earnings from subscription models, while the advertising revenue is declining. (Add to this recent news that a large Norwegian publishers is earning four times as much money from its niche subscription products compared to all its display advertising – the infrastructure business model’s future looks bleak.)

Publishers need to enhance the experience of their environments by designing them through their identities; their value proposition, mantra, promise to the customer etc. (Through the application of design and form in order to enhance the value of the content AND the environment).

Today the generic standard publishing interface is overly linking up every piece of content in every direction in what ends up to be a navigational piece of content rather than a valuable piece of content.

Secondly, most publishers today present their content in generic CMS-publishing windows where there is little brand, no identity, just more of the same publishing “cate-orgy”. :) (There are exceptions of course)

As the Future Media presentation suggests, the value for publishers is not from their advertising, but from offering readers, subscribers and even members, a unique, valuable experience over time (content is created in collaboration with companies). This is achieved both through more interesting, scarce content, and better environments for extracting value from it.

The Popular Science iPad application, although tailored for that specific platform, is a long way ahead. And is in stark contrast to the experience Popular Science invites people to in their “browsered” environment.

I suggest that it is – in the interface between / by understanding the principles of – the Popular Science iPad application and the Readability application publishers must explore, in order to design more interesting, unique and valuable identities for their browser based content, enabling them to discover new business models.

If an identity is to create value through identifiable and differentiating qualities, it can’t be designed through employment in the latter stages of a standardized process. It needs to lead the entire creative and strategic process from its initial spark to its finale.

In his talk on FMCG, brands and product design, Richard Murray suggests that we are better at creating categories than individual brands.

Is the sameness of unoriginal ideas to be blamed on our processes being too similar? If the analysis to the insight, to the design and form follows the same pattern across consultancies, agencies and brands, then everybody follows a similar pattern in order to discover the great insight that leads to the unique idea. The problem is, there is a lack of unique ideas. We are in a hammer and nail situation: “If we think our only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail”.

Organic platforms isn’t only evidence of this, it might as well be the biggest category driven collection of surfaces we have.

A great deal of organic productions are built on an offspring of a model created back in 2000. A brilliant tool with an unfortunate side effect: everybody follows an identical pattern for development, one that engineers the structure in a one-dimensional approach, before adding identity at the end; as some kind of tag.

There are originally two legs to identity: The first one is the understanding that the visual identity and story of the product helps it differentiate itself in the market and create a place in peoples harts. The second one is the experience created around the product which helps the product become unique, by enhancing its identity through experience.

On organic platforms there is a third leg as well: Identity design is not only used to design experiences, it also identifies existing experiences.

What does this mean: Designing identities, on organic platforms, has expanded it’s traditional form, which to a large extent has been focused on visual identities and story. Designing identities now also demands that we identifying existing experiences and redesign / augment / ad value to them.

The result of the existing generic standardization, is that it has created an overwhelming range of sameness. Different brands offering the same services, content and applications online – following a pattern that not only creates a surge to make sure we are offering whatever everybody else is offering (the artificial standard / benchmark), but worse – having everything created, copyable by the competition.

Adding a different color scheme or logic at the end of a process does not create a unique experience, it merely ads a label to a generic offering. This is the result of a mindset where identity takes a back seat and is added at the end.

A generic brand identity is not an identity, its a category.

Unique and identifiable brands on organic platforms comes from doing the opposite to the standard process: It starts with the identity, and employs it to every strategic and creative decision from the first spark to the finale. Resulting in a unique and identifiable experience, which the competition is unable to copy and standardize in the marketplace.