The way we are making and selling design is becoming generic and confusing. One of the challenges is that design, as creativity, is described as a product, an end goal. When the fact is that neither design nor creativity is a result; it’s a description of how we get there, not what we will end up with.
The presentation discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of design today, as I see them. The content has previously been posted as three articles on popsop.com and linked to from this blog. The presentation tries to put it all together, make it more internet consumption friendly (read: packed with sound bites), and offer it as a pleasant and enjoyable printable document.
The third and final part of an article on creativity, design and identity was published last week on popsop.com. This last installment discusses the amount of sameness and identical thinking behind our processes for discovering new ideas. And proposes one alternative solution…
“[The] linear model argues that the process of insight ends before the first idea has been conceptualized, that all the questions have been answered before any real ones have been asked. The problem of similar identities does not start with the sketching of ideas; it starts with the structure of exploring knowledge and discovering insight.”
“If you fill people with rectangular knowledge they are going to create a rectangle, if you give them the idea that we are building a geometric shape, the whole organism of the team will work together to explore opportunities in the width of geometric shapes.”
“We need to include our clients in the articulation of design, if not products will become unsophisticated and conservative (research proves that people not articulate in an expert field will prefer products that they themselves eventually find uninteresting and boring).”
I’m not a big fan of the term Social Media. It might be that it translates poorly into Norwegian, the fact that it sounds like its the technology that is social – not how it enables interaction between people or identities, or that I find the term itself invites us to a limited set of ideas in regards to what it can facilitate.
Either way, the following question was sent to me, and several others, from a student, Trude Stokstad, this week:
What will social media be in two years?
Having a blog makes one fortunate enough to answer a lot of questions from readers, students, enthusiasts or people just being plain curious. This gives you an opportunity to search for answers outside your original train of thought and is surely one of the most important benefits of having a blog.
With the assumption that we will still use the term social media in two years, as media and platforms become more nuanced, difficult to categorize and are having their functionality integrated with each other. I still found three things I think will make a difference:
Three things:
1. There will be no social media but social operating systems. There will be an integration of participation and dialogue into everything – or, where it benefits core business models or goals (no more being on Facebook for Facebook’s sake).
In the short time span of two years there will still be destinations and sites like Facebook, youtube, linkedin. But one or more of these databases will own your information and it will be fed out and made accessible on a range of other destinations and services.
This is interesting both in what we are already seeing from services like Facebook Connect, connecting 60 million people to Facebook outside Facebook.com, or the fact that half of all Twitter activity is already taking place off-site.
2. In the future our objects will become our friends. We don’t necessarily need to communicate exclusively to people, we communicate with identities that might as well be objects(people follow the Tower Bridge twitter feed or get SMS’s from their plants that their running out of water).
In the future the stuff around us would want to communicate with us and we would in some way interact with that communication.
One could already ask the question if it is people or objects that help us communicate and organize on Nike+ (the sensor in the shoe and the iPod are the ones collecting and creating the data that connects us)?
3. The language will expand. Today we focus on conscious, tangible communication like the written word or uploaded videos or music. This will change and future communication will be in richer forms. Social Media is not about exchanging words and opinions, it’s about sharing ideas, expressed through any language or data.
Digital is expanding yet again, from the first editorial version, to a second social version and now the third installment; integration.
Some arguments:
1. Integration is not merely about offering services where people are, it’s about implementing connected technology within our everyday objects, or designing new objects based on the new opportunities and additional meaning introduced by technology.
Which gives that this could introduce a completely new generation of needs and behaviors: In the words of Donald Norman;
“Need is created by technology, not the other way around.” Link.
2. With integration we are not only moving from destination sites to aggregate sites, from horizontals to verticals. We are moving from screens to objects, from input devices to sensors and from keyboarded instruments to everyday life.
Jesko Stoetzer’s RFID Sleeve prototype for the Betacup project is a good example. Showing how digital technology, using no screens, no keyboards, just an electronic augmentation and a redesign of an existing object, the cup sleeve. Can improve the coffee experience for enthusiasts, create new business opportunities and increase product sustainability.
“The use of Internet on PC’s will decrease from 95% today to only 50% the next five years.” – pdf
But Microsoft was only talking about our connected lives moving from PC’s to mobile, gaming platforms or “connected TV-boxes”. They where not looking into the emerging opportunities from smart objects, SPIMEs or coffee sleeves.
The Europe Logs on report were looking at machines. But the days when only machines were connected to the Internet is already in the past.
Devices are machines where the structure of the object itself affords no utility, but there is a screen and a circuit board in there offering us a range of opportunities. And object is different, it already has an immediate utility, but technology ads a new layer of meaning.
“Devices fool us because they look like objects and do all this stuff, and we are kind of hypnotized by their ability to do all this stuff. Where as when you see an ornament in the shop you know exactly what it is and what it is for. And you don’t except more of it. I think some of the delights that some of these can contain is when it looks like a simple object but contains meaning that you weren’t excepting.” – Russel Davies.
4. Machines are hubs. Take the mobile phone as an example; it should be (and hopefully will be) connecting people to their objects, not filled with an application for each one (object).
Appvertising and applications belong to machines, and are just scratching the surface of connected technology, it is by and far only the answer to the following question: “What do people want access to all the time?”
Integration as a term is not about access, it’s about turning everyday objects into identities, which enables them to organize, create structure and through feedback add a new layer to spaces in our everyday life.
Bill Moggridge mentions in his book Designing Interactions, that there are not only three (spatial) dimensions to an interface, but also a fourth one; time. We are now building a fifth dimension; the digital identity of the physical object.
“This cat is completely unaware of the most important thing about this particular stuffed animal. Which is that it has a whole other life online. This is a Webkinz stuffed animal. And this cat has no idea. It thinks it’s actually engaging with the thing, and in fact it has a whole parallell life thats going on, that this cat can’t touch. And I want to make it clear, that this is where we are heading, towards a world in which entities have this physical presence as well as this digital presence.”
Conclusion:
The important shift with integration is not that we put technology into things (devices), but that everyday objects with an existing physicality and purpose, get a new dimension and additional meaning: A digital identity.
With these identities comes data, responsiveness, organization and connection.
The next generation is all about connecting our stuff, offering new layers of meaning to our objects, our situations and the world at large.
If creativity and design is the process of exploring and articulating the product, then what is the product?
This is the second installment from a rather lengthy article on design published on popsop.com. It discusses what our product is as the first article argues that creativity is a ubiquitous human trait, and design is a craft and a process (first article here).
The marketing relationship is different, it is characterized by two hurdles in the relationship mindset; first of all, where the product relationship generates a hundred thousand individual stories, the marketing relationship can only tell one. Secondly, it assumes their doesn’t exist a product relationship, and wants to create a new one, by associating the “empty” object to a set of values already existing in peoples minds for something else, this is called “storytelling”.
The identity of a product should not be defined by its loud advertising, but it should shape its advertising, a task often left to branding and marketing. This creates products out of touch with its experience, sometimes missing the point and often generalizing its ambition so that it mixes with more fundamental traits and needs of human nature. (The product is important, but inside situations, not as general as contributors to peoples lives on par with friends or sleep).
In research just made public by one of the major banks in Norway, businesses where asked why they were investing in an online presence. The answers presented a bit of a revelation.
The top three answers were all connected with consumer demand, which are all OK points to make, but when compared to the three least popular responses, all linked to business incentives, it seems the focus has been turned a bit up-side-down. It seems businesses are more focused on doing what their customers say, at a cost, rather than doing it for themselves – doing stuff where the company has identified a direct business advantage from having a presence online and want to take advantage of the opportunity.
- This cost-driven strategy might also explain the dreary state of Internet offers today. Where most companies find being just as good as every other brand in their category is good enough – there is no money in it!
THIS IS IMPORTANT, because we are overly focused on talking about people and staring into this black box of consumer habits and behaviors. With extensive demands being added by social media, demand that only a few companies find interesting enough to take on. (It’s more “Lets avoid a mistake”-thinking than “This is an opporuntiny”-thinking as Jon Steel would have said)
But this is hopefully all about to change…
The next generation of online activities will be inherently linked to business advantage, rather than consumer demand. And by that we should also see the real money being poured in, not just marketing pocket lint.
Creativity implies creating new stuff by combining two or more existing ideas. But, ‘creativity’ is a generic term. It is abstract and has no reference to quality in regards to a specific situation or task. Creativity is not a goal in itself, it’s the character of an activity; it implies nothing more than an exploration with the intention of connecting something known, but previously unconnected.
Creativity is not focused on finding the best solution, but an original one. Telling someone that we are going to have a creative process implies nothing more than: ‘We are going to spend some time coming up with something new”. When it should be: ‘We are going to come up with some shit that really works’.
Everyone is creative, every industry is creative; be they accountants, conceptual artists, storytellers or craftsmen. We pursue a creative process in order to find original answers.
Selling a creative product gives no implication of craft or process, no suggestion of specialization or expertise. Creativity is a given, in every line of work in the knowledge industry, it’s not a specialty.
My issue is with how we articulate our product and what we are loosing from using the wrong labels. My question is: “why are we selling this commodity as a specialized product?”
The third installment of the thought leader compilation Age of Conversation is here. This year 171 authors have contributed their ideas on topics wherein “social” is ubiquitous: “At the Coalface; Identities, Friends and Trusted Strangers; Conversational Branding; Measurement; Corporate Conversations; In the Boardroom; Innovation and Execution; Influence; Getting to Work; and Pitching Social Media.”
I had the pleasure of enjoying the two first publications, and the honor of contributing on this third one, on the topic of Identities with the title “Our future friends are our objects“, (a snippet included below):
“A conversation is more than just the exchange of vocabulary language between two or more people. Rather a conversation is a rich exchange of ideas through several languages expressed synchronously and consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously between identities.
What we define as the social web today is not the future of the conversation. The future of the conversation is everywhere, as digital is everywhere and marketing is everywhere. And our future friends are identities, which might as well be people as objects. “
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.
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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…
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.
