The Process of Interaction Design

“What is it that you do?” A question asked commonly at parties, and usually really just meant as a polite conversation starter. Most jobs have an easy answer, immediately recognizable by the person asking. “I'm a lawyer”. “I'm a doctor”. “I'm a photographer”. “I'm a painter”. “I'm a teacher”. “I'm a gardener”. “I'm an interaction designer”.

“Huh?”

“Euhm... it's also called information architect by some.”

“An architect? So you design buildings?”

“Well… No actually. I don't design buildings, I design websites. An interaction designer pretty much goes through the same process designing a website or application, as an architect does designing a house.”

At this point the person asking usually frowns and arches their eyebrows.

"... Before a house gets build, an architect goes in and assesses the space the house is going to be built on, right? They take a look at what neighborhood the new house is going to be in, and what some of the other houses on the block look like. This will give them a sense of what kind of house will be expected. Then the architect tries to figure out how they can improve on the current model by learning from houses that are in completely different neighborhoods and in completely different climates. Maybe they won’t even look at houses, but at tents, or igloos, or bicycles. Whatever will help gain new insights.

... After the space and environment of the house has been assessed, the architect starts to think about who will actually be living in the house. What are some of the other types of houses the future occupants have lived in? What are they expecting? Do they get up early in the morning? Do they prefer taking baths or showers? If they prefer taking baths, the architect makes sure there is a tub in the bathroom. If the new occupants only ever take showers, he makes sure there is an easy to clean walk-in shower so the future inhabitants wont have to step into the bathtub every morning.

Designing the house around the person who will be occupying it allows the architect to determine exactly what’s needed. How many floors, doors, walls, windows, bathrooms, staircases, and so on and so forth. It allows the architect to predict how the house's inhabitant will walk through the house, which enables the architect to make the experience as comfortable as possible.

Once the space and environment of the house has been determined, and the habits and needs of the future occupant have been addressed, the architect starts to think about what kinds of materials would make sense. What’s right for this climate? What types of materials are usually used for these types of houses?

Then finally, when the architect is done with a project, he delivers the blueprint of the house to the interior designer and the contractor, who are then in charge of decoration and building."

"Hmm... interesting. So you are delivering blue-prints for a euhm-ah, website then?"

"Well yes... When I’m done with a project, I deliver the blueprint for the website or application to the visual designer and the programmer, who are then in charge of visualization and implementation."

"I see."

"... So even though the tools, projects, materials and results are different, the process is almost identical, hence the word "architect" in information architect."

"That makes sense."

Then at this point it's usually time for another beer and I go into the kitchen, and a person I've never met smiles and asks "How are you? What is it that you do?"

Outgrowing Howard Roark

Spent the last month re-reading Ayn Rand's "the Fountainhead" anywhere I could. In the park, on the train, in bed, in the hammock on my deck, I just couldn't put it down. And this is a book I had already read before. My fascination with the book this time around wasn't so much with the actual story, but more with my own changed perception of it. It's the type of book that you can read when you are a teenager and get completely captivated by. But when you read it again as an adult, you realize how naive your view of the world was at the time.

The book is centered around the architect Howard Roark, who sees modernism (his view) as superior to old traditions enforced by other architects (their view). Rather than lose his integrity and artistic vision by conforming to what everyone else is doing, or by doing what clients demand of him, he spends a lifetime struggling in obscurity against old ideas and traditionalists.

While I was reading the book for the second time, it dawned on me. I realized why it captivated me again. It captivated me again, because my opinion on Howard Roark had completely changed from the first time I read it. Re-reading the book made me see the contrast between how I used to view the role of a designer, to how I view it now. Like night and day. I realized I had outgrown Howard Roark.

The first time I read The Fountainhead, was the month before I entered college. I wasn't yet a designer. I was on the cusp. I had just bought my first portfolio bag with art supplies and was looking forward to life-drawing classes, sculpture classes, critical thinking classes... I really believed that you could fight anyone who crosses your path as long as you create what feels right to you. Your opinion, is the only opinion that matters. I thought everything in life was that black and white. Right or wrong. Simple. Just like it is in the Fountainhead.

Design school was a bit like being on another planet where everybody thinks the same, everybody dresses the same, everybody listens to the same music, and everybody aspires to be in Print Magazine. Non-designers from other planets were met with suspicion and general hostility. We were convinced we would change the world. None of us would ever end up working in an office, and none of us would ever work for a big corporation. We weren't interested in making money, or doing what someone told us to do. We created for the sake of creating.

My first step out of that bubble was like taking a cold shower in the middle of winter. All of a sudden I had to deal with tie-wearing non-designers, constantly. The enemy! I felt personally attacked and offended when any of them criticized some of my work or asked for changes I thought were unnecessary. "Who are they to have an opinion!" I thought often. I was behaving like Howard Roark.

After a couple of years outside of the homogenous cult-like world of design school, my mentality completely changed, and I fortunately outgrew all this adolescent behavior. I had some amazing results collaborating with people who wore ties, and began to understand the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach to projects. As a designer you can get so wrapped up in your own work, you can lose yourself in all the details which makes you lose sight of the bigger picture, the actual project. Design is only one part of it. Sharing the project with people who have different strengths and disciplines, allows you to regain your objectivity.

After I finished reading the book, and put it down, I realized how happy I was that the Fountainhead's shining hero; Howard Roark, wasn't on my project.

A Multi-Sensory Experience

Interaction Design used to only account for having the user interact with a site or interface in a linear way. Start at point A, end at point B sort of thing.

Now we engage users in a much more non-linear way. Previously static stories (news articles etc.) are being offered in a multitude of ways, through streaming videos, real-time feedback, comments, sound, etc.

You prefer reading your information? This is possible. Are you more of a visual thinker? Check out the video. Care to listen to the content while working? Stream the audio. Wonder what other people are thinking? Read the comments.

Let's take it a step further...

Hello user! Here's all the information we offer, we'll guess what you're interested in based on your browsing behavior. We'll bubble-up things that you'll find interesting, and we'll allow you to customize our content to fit your needs. Hell, we'll even allow you to not see some of the content you're not interested in. Whatever you want.

Interaction Design is moving into a realm where we have to think of all the possible senses, all the possible preferences, all the differences of all the different users, and it’s slowly becoming the most tailor-made experience you can have with a product, brand or service.

With the broad acceptance of blogs as a legitimate source for information, Web 2.0 tools, social network sites, and the prevalence of broadband, “interaction design” is changing. Everything we do now focuses on designing highly personalized or customized experiences.

It's truly interaction design's time to shine. Today’s interaction designers are looking at the whole thing more holistically. The whole focus has become much more user-centered.

When you enable your users to choose their own path through your content, and allow them to have a highly customizable and personalized experience you can make them feel less like a faceless user and more like a human being, which sometimes we forget that the users accessing our sites, are well… euhm, actual people.

Does Identity Change?

What is it that makes you identify with something? You identify with what you know, with who you think you are, or who you think you'd like to be, or who you think you should be. Taught behavior, society's pressures, family, culture and so on.

If you look at someone's life, is that person the same throughout their whole lives or does the change of personality/character change someone's identity? Who we are as teenagers differs greatly from who we are as adults, but we still say "That is the same person". If that is true, then at what point can you say "I have changed", or "I am a different person now"?

When I was 16, I identified myself as someone who is against any kind of authority, as a high-school student who sucks at math, as a semi-decent snowboarder who wishes to live closer to the mountains, as a lover of foreign films, and a fan of unusual music which would never be played on the radio.

Today most of the criteria that made me identify myself at that time, have changed. It's normal, you experience new things, mature, mellow-out, find new obsessions, move in different social circles, get different habits. I am sure, that the things I identify myself with today, will be different 10 years from now as well. Identity is really an ever-changing state of being, almost like an organism of sorts.

In the 1980's Audi was in the same "league" as say Volkswagen, and was definitely not perceived as a luxury car. Audi, which was not happy with their place in the market, went through an intense re-branding campaign and by the use of great marketing managed to elevate themselves to the same level as Mercedez and BMW. Years have passed and now when we see Audi, we definitely don't think of it as "economy-class" but rather as "high-class". So can we really speak of Audi having the same "identity"? I don't think so.

There is an inherent fear in the corporate world that once they have made a "face" for themselves (primarily by the use of a logo), they are now "jailed" to keep that face for ever and ever. People trying to innovate in a working model are seen as heretics. Don't rock the boat type of thing. I wonder why so many companies are adverse to change. Isn't change human? Of course there are countless tales of re-branding failures, Coke comes to mind, but for every Coca-Cola story, there's an Audi story. Besides, isn't it kind of creepy, to always remain the same, and never change?

If a company would be a person, they would be Emmanuel Lewis, doomed to always look the same, and never being allowed to mature.

Hello Business, Meet Design!

I've been noticing an interesting trend in the past couple of years, business people talking about the importance of design. Just pick up BusinessWeek, or the Economist, and it's all about how we should "design" experiences, apply "visual" strategies and so on.

It's trendy right now for businesses to be on the frontier of design, and business people think they aren't just understanding designers better -they think they are actually becoming designers. While old school graphic designers are slaving away with Flash and Photoshop, trying to compete with cheaper and more recent graduates from design schools in China and India, businesses are hiring MBA graduates to "design". Not design in the traditional design school sort of way, but design in the larger sense, designing experiences.

As long as I have worked in the creative field, I have known that you typically have 2 types of designers, the types who like to do, and the types who like to think. It seems that the business/management people are taking cues from the types who like to think.

Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman Schools of Management, said that real value creation now comes from the designer's most competitive weapon, his imagination, to peer into a mystery -a problem we recognize but don't understand-and device a rough solution that explains it. "For any company that chooses to innovate, the foremost challenge is this". "Are you willing to step back and ask 'What is the problem we're trying to solve?' Well, that's what designers do: They take on a mystery, some abstract challenge, and they try to create a solution."

According to Martin, most linear business people don't think like designers -and so they are ill-prepared for an economy where the winners are determined by design. Conventional companies won't bring a product to market until it's "just right", where designers aren't afraid to move forward when it's unfinished but "good enough". Designers learn by doing: They identify weaknesses and make mid-flight corrections along the way.

Martin asserts that traditional companies reward two types of logic: inductive (proving that something actually operates) and deductive (proving that something must be). Designers combine inductive and deductive reasoning to create a fresh approach -abductive thinking--which Martin defines as "suggesting that something may be and reaching out to explore it." Instead of acting on what's certain, designers bet on what's probable. Companies like Apple say, "If everything must be proven, we would never have made the iPod".

It's an interesting development, and it's great that MBA-ers are now learning to take cues from a designer's perspective to solving a problem. But is it working the other way around? Are designers benefiting from this sudden interest in design, or are designers in danger of having their unique problem solving skills dissected and taken away from them just as their manual and computer design skills have?

If designers decide to embrace this sudden interest in their skills, and some of this new thinking makes its way into design schools, it could create a mutual co-operation and appreciation for some unlikely bedfellows.

Or as IDEO's David Kelly says: "We need to produce T-Shaped thinkers. That means combining analytical thinking -the vertical leg of the T-with horizontal thinking: intuitive, experimental and empathetic."

Logo-Mania

I recently read a very interesting book called "No Logo". Though the book focuses more on the anti-globalization movement and the misdeeds of big corporations such as Nike, the Gap, McDonalds and Shell, than it does on actually getting rid of logo's (which the title of the book might imply) there were some valid points made about corporate responsibility. The logo is the outward symbolization of a company. It's the identifier, the face, the promise, therefore you can't have one thing without the other. Or can you?

So can we talk about an anti-logo movement without talking about capitalism? I think we can. If we try to not think about corporations per sé but think more about what the logo promises, or even what a logo means, we might be able to untangle some of the webs corporations have created with their corporate identities.

We are now in an age that I like to call "Logo-Mania". Every company, no matter how small or big seems to think they can only exist if they have a visual representation of their company. As if having a logo is the only way to legitimize a company. Somehow, without the logo, they feel incomplete. Everyone has a logo! We need one too!

Companies are willing to pay people like me a lot of money to create for them a brand, an identity, a promise of a lifestyle, a way for people to glance through a magazine, see their logo and say, I want that! But is that really what they're getting?

Sure there are a lot of companies we can't even imagine without the logo. Coca-Cola (which in fact is not really a logo as it is a logotype), Playboy, Ralph Lauren's Polo, Nike, Apple. But what about up and coming companies? Did they miss the boat already? How many logos can we have in our heads? 500? 1000? 100.000?

It used to be that a logo meant that you could identify yourself in a way that was different from the competition, and easy to remember, or at least easier to remember. If everyone has a logo doesn't it cease to be different?

Sometimes I walk passed cars and I try to remember which logo belongs to what company and I get confused. It's all so shiny and nifty, but if I can't even remember the name of your company because you have replaced that with a cool looking logo how am I supposed to know what the name of your company is? In the future, when walking into car dealerships do we have to now illustrate the logo of the company we are looking for? Please give me a pen and paper, this is the car I want!

Has our society turned into real life Pictionary?

In this time of logo-mania we are almost forced back to the time of hieroglyphics, remembering symbols rather than names and words. And here I thought we had evolved from that already. There were, however only a hand-full of hieroglyphics needed together to form an idea.

If everyone and their grandmother decides to have a logo, well, there's just not enough space for that in our heads. Or at least not in my head.

Design Thinking for Designers

Oh, "Design Thinking" ... The new hot term in business. I am still not convinced that "Design Thinking" isn't just a new term for "innovation". I am really not a fan of these coined account-guy terms, and the fact that it has the word design in it seems a little bizarre. An actual designer would never come up with something like this.

Let's step back for a second, get away from the "Design Thinking" term, and think about what innovation really is. Innovation is basic problem solving.

When working within a team, in the initial brainstorming phase, most companies or schools will encourage you to go as crazy as possible and think outside of the box. In reality this is a very undisciplined way of going about it. Brainstorming depends on the dynamics of certain personalities within the team, interest in the topic, hierarchy (the longer you've been there, the more your voice will count), the gift of gab, and pure luck. It's really a great place for "geniuses" and "gurus" to shine. It's perceived as a magical process, and impossible to recreate in a methodological manner.

If however, you think of innovation as a science, the first thing that would need to happen is to create an environment, or methodology, where the experience can be recreated. Starting off more focused with things like diagnostics, collection of data, customer needs, the competitors patterns, the company's abilities and ethnography is a more balanced and objective way to deal with the initial start phase of a project.

If you turn brainstorming (or innovation) into a discipline, it can not only be taught and repeated, but also done by anyone rather than only by "geniuses" and "gurus". It's a way to explain the creative process and demystifying it rather than looking at it as a magical freak occurrence.

Myopic Design Views

A lot of people think "Design" means a company's logo, packaging, corporate identity, and advertising. While that is true, Design also means how you interact with the company's message and information, especially in the interactive realm.

I recently dealt with a small start-up communications firm who had a very limited budget for design. Clear decisions had to be made as to what would be the most important visual representation for their company.

They of course wanted a logo, and sleek looking business cards. I however had to convince them that since they did not have a store-front, what they really needed was a well designed, well functioning website, with very easy and clear usability.

I told them that having a logo really doesn't matter at this stage, since with the millions of logos out there no one is going to notice it anyways, unless you spend lots and lots of money on advertising - which of course they couldn't. Business cards you can make on Microsoft Word and print out at Kinko's, even though unless you're a lawyer or agent or Chinese take-out place or something you really don't need one either.

They agreed and we settled on focusing on the design of the website. They were going to spend a lot of time thinking about what they wanted to say, and I was going to puzzle their information together in a logical manner and focus on the overall design experience.

The reason the usability has to be perfect is because consumers now get angry when the interaction of a product, service or website is substandard. People used to think it was they who were stupid, but after having dealt with so many websites, they expect a certain level of usability and now think your company is what's stupid and not them.

I'm definitely not a copywriter, but I do know that clear and concise language definitely helps. If you are selling printing services to graphic designers you can assume they know a certain jargon. But if you are selling printing services for Kinko's customers, you might have to use a more rudimentary language.

Start with the basics. Understand what it is people are looking for. Use clear language. Have well-organized information. Make things as easy to use as possible. These are all things to design, before you even start thinking about a logo or business card.

Why Experience Branding Matters

Experience is everything. From the way a company answers its phone, to its customer service, to the forms it makes you fill out, to they way it deals with problems, to the actual product or service, to trouble-shooting, to the way its store looks, to the way it smells, how its lit, to how you're being approached, to its advertising, to its website, its letters, special offers and promotions...

I could go on and on, but the point is, "experience" is every single touch-point in which the consumer interacts with a company. A company might give you a good experience in one touch-point, but unless all touch-points are aligned, the overall experience will not be remembered as positive.

I hate huge department stores. The music's often too loud, the lines for the waiting room are too long, the lines for the registers are too long, the lights give me a killer headache, and I get a sort of casino-vertigo feeling from not being able to see the exits. The maximum amount of time I can spend in those stores is maybe 25 minutes before I literally get physically ill and have to go outside. Not a very positive experience to say the least. So what happens? I avoid them like the plague.

Another example: Bank deposits. I get paid every 2 weeks, which means I have to "deal" with the bank's nonsense a little too often for my taste. The forms are completely illogical, and it makes you repeat the information three times, once on the actual form, then again on the envelope, and then again on the ATM screen. Most of the time the pens don't work, and I never know what date it is. Here the problem is that it's something I can't avoid, and it pisses me off that they make me go through the same nonsense over and over again when the process could so easily be steamlined.

Sometimes I feel like I am the only one getting annoyed, and I see people just "taking" it, though I am sure that if the experience improves, everyone will suddenly realize how horrible it was before.

A very welcome change and positive experience, is what a lot of airlines have done recently. You can now print out your boarding pass from home, or for international flights you can scan your information into a kiosk on the terminal. I don't know if you've noticed lately, but the lines have gotten exponentially smaller. They realized what the problem was and pro-actively tried to find a solution for it. They weren't forced to make these changes, but they actually researched what the experience of going to an airport really is. They made the changes from the bottom up -from the customer's viewpoint-rather than from the top down, the corporate viewpoint.

Whoever initiated it, thanks! I was annoyed, and I did notice the improvement.

Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain

When I was growing up in Amsterdam there was a very definite definition of who you were based on your thinking abilities. They would push you to study what they thought would suit you best. If you were a Beta person (Left-Brainer) you were supposed to enjoy math and science and become a doctor or engineer, and if you were an Alpha person (Right-Brainer), you were supposed to enjoy arts and literature and become an artist or linguist or something.

Then there was a third group, that sort of hung in between the Alpha and Beta people, (without a proper Greek letter) who went off to do MBA’s or studied accounting and economics.

Because I was able to draw (and just terrible at math) their advice to me was to just go into the arts. According to them there was no need for any type of Left-Brain thinking in arts...

Well, they were wrong.

Once I got into Design, I realized that I quite enjoyed some more Left-Brain thinking. I got interested in the literalness and precision of xhtml and css, and the logic of Information Architecture and Interaction Design, and I realized that the merger of all these skills are not at all impossible, and actually extremely useful if not necessary.

The most successful designers I know today are empathetic artists interested in beauty and form, as well as techno geeks on top of the latest gadgets and technology, who are obsessed with order and detail. So Left-Brain and Right-Brain are actually well connected in Design today.

Now that third left-over group, the group that went off to get their MBA's, are off on another planet. I don't know of any designer who's taken any business courses (some marketing doesn't count) and I don't know any business person who's interested in design. Doesn't mean they're not out there, I just don't know any.

If you believe Daniel Pink, Left-Brain attributes are losing their importance, and in today's "empathy-economy" Right-Brain attributes are needed more than ever. He says that now that India and China can do Left-Brain work cheaper, we have to do Right-Brain work better.

But why neglect one part of the brain? Isn't it best to train yourself to lean more towards the underdeveloped side of your brain? Aren't most people a mixture of both anyway? I know I resented being categorized.

It's time for a new term. No-brain? Middle-brain? Super-brain?

Made in China

Outsourcing and off-shoring is something that is a very real and tangible threat to a lot of design jobs... or is it? Sure, a lot of manufacturing, engineering, software coding, and even accounting has moved overseas, but that just means that what is being valued in the market place right now is changing.

The truth is, America cannot compete with places like China and India when it comes to manufacturing, so it shouldn't. Production is much cheaper, and people are getting paid a fraction of their US counterparts.

The manufacturing of almost all products is now made overseas, but the graphics, packaging, ads -the products' personality- are still designed in the US. Rather than focusing on the "thing", American designers are now focusing on the "experience".

They've shifted their core competencies from drawing to thinking, from styling to innovation. Or to use a nice buzz-word, we are moving from the "Information Age", which was ruled by logic and precision, into the "Conceptual Age" which is ruled by artistry, empathy and emotion. Product designers don't call themselves that anymore, they now call themselves "product innovators".

Sounds like semantics? Sure, and the design world is still fighting over what to call this new development exactly. I've heard everything from "The Empathy Economy", to "Design Business or Management", to "The Creative Economy" to "Design Thinking".

Whatever you want to call it, the truth is that the strength of American design might have changed, but it has certainly not become obsolete.

New skills are needed for this new development. The economy used to be dominated by technology and corporations, but now we are moving into an experience economy controlled by consumers. Companies are creating "Chief Design Officer" slots, and designers are helping corporations build their own innovation centers. Design is beginning to become an integral part of business, because the advantage goes to those who can out-imagine and out-create their competitors.

GE CEO Joseph M. Hogan wrote in The Journal of Business & Design: "Today, when we think about designing, say, a new MRI system, we don't just think about designing the product, we think about designing the whole radiology suite. Design in the next 10 years will move beyond the product. It will move beyond the workflow. Hospitals in the future... will have different ways of interacting with the patient. We have to think about setting the course for how design can affect the whole healthcare experience."

Now that's true innovation, try to find some cheap labor overseas to manage that.

The Difference between Experience Design and Usability

Some people seem to get the terms "Usability" and "Experience Design" confused. I've worked in an environment where the usability for customers was good, but ultimately negated by a bad user experience. What do I mean by that? I'll sketch an example for how this company had good "Usability" but bad "Experience Design".

The company in question sold discounted merchandise on the Internet, and relied heavily on discounted wholesale stock, which was not always immediately available when the customer ordered it. The customer would however not know this until the item they ordered wouldn't arrive when they expected it to.

1st Touch-point - The company's website:
All transactions were done through their website, which was always a positive experience, since it was a well-designed, easy to understand, and quick process. The forms, shipping information, return information, and images of the products were clear. Checkout was quick and easy, and they immediately received an order confirmation number once the process was completed.

All went well until the customer realized 3 weeks later that the requested item still had not arrived. She had selected "UPS Ground", which in her mind meant that it would arrive at her house between 5-7 business days. At this point she gets frustrated and calls the company's customer service.

2nd Touch-point - The company's customer service:
Here an underpaid, often disinterested and overworked customer service representative with 4 other callers on hold has to explain to her that the item is currently out of stock, and he cannot give her an actual date for when the stock will get replenished. He can give her a list of items that are similar and are in stock but unless she is willing to commit to it right now he cannot guarantee her that it will be there tomorrow.

The customer hangs up the phone, left with a sense of frustration. She was going on vacation and needed the item for her trip. She now has 1 day to find the item in a store, so her transaction with this site was a complete waste of time.

Usability answers the question: "Can the user accomplish their goal?" In the case of the on-line shopper, from the site design point of view, she did accomplish her goal and was very satisfied with the result.

Experience Design answers the question: "Did the user have as good an experience as possible?" The customer service portion of the experience canceled out the on-line portion. A good experience is had when all the interactions with a company, all the touch-points are positive.

In the company's case, the usability of the site only involved the people responsible for the design of the site, but to create a total positive experience we now have to involve everyone in the company, including customer service. So Experience Design is more multi-disciplinary than Usability. Obviously Experience Design takes far more effort and resources to do well, but ultimately the results have a bigger impact.

From the company's point of view, their justification for having this process is that they are heavily discounted, and hopefully have enough in stock for the majority of the customers. They think that they can afford to loose a handful of customers to their competitors who can deliver on time.

They've probably never even considered designing the experience of their customers, not many companies have at this point. Therefore the edge is given to the companies that have. Trust and comfort are far more important traits than price-competition for a company to consider, and ultimately a more effective way to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

A happy and satisfied customer returns. A frustrated one most likely not.

American Apparel & Un-Branding

Paying a company to be their walking billboard seems so ridiculous and yet it's something we not only all do, but we actually seem happy to do it. It's even better than free advertising. It's paid advertising, and they're the ones who are getting paid. So how come companies like American Apparel and Muji are determined to not have a logo? Simple, rather than getting lost in the sea of logos, they realized that we are now in a time where to not have a logo is what makes you stand out, not the other way around.

There's a big group of unaccounted consumers who are sick of walking around as a corporate billboard, and are instead looking for the simplicity and anonymity of a logo free brand. That way people cannot automatically categorize you based on the brands you wear on your chest. It's minimalism in corporate identity.

The Japanese company Muji, which has reached a sort of cult status while remaining logo-less seems to think that the only "value" of a logo is to satisfy the customer's ego. Their zen-like mindset is more focused on the quality of the product than on a false ego confirmation.

So you mean they are not distracting the consumer with shiny promises and are actually talking about the product? Yes... And guess what, it's catching on!

Muji is short for "mujirushi ryohin", which translates roughly to "no label, quality goods," and its mission is to provide well-designed and useful products at affordable prices. There's a simple purity in Muji's offerings, which range from stationery and house-wares to toiletries. They're functional and so deliberately unfussy and anonymous that even though they're intended to go unnoticed, they end up drawing attention after all.

American Apparel has a similar philosophy. Their simplicity not only lies in the fact that they don't have a logo on their clothing, its colorful attire is also completely free of any imprints. Their simplicity is instantly recognizable, mainly because they don't follow seasonal trends, but also because their most popular t-shirt line hasn't changed design since the company's beginnings.

Though they are not in any way associated with Naomi Klein's "No Logo" movement (which in fact focuses more on the wrong doings of large corporations), they are in fact sweatshop free, and made in downtown Los Angeles.

So here are 2 companies that have tried to identify themselves outside of the shackles of corporate identity, and have in term, not only generated a positive response from the public, but also created an identity for themselves after all, that is based on the actual product, and not on some false ego affirming promise.

Personally Impersonal

Just received a travel-update-email from a friend who's traveling through Asia. It was addressed to about 50+ people (with all the emails visible, which always annoys me) and told a 4 page travel account of his whereabouts. In the email was a link to his flickr account with all the pictures he had taken so far. I doubt that all the people addressed in his email would care about his travels, but it's just much easier to address these things to "all" rather than handpick the emails in your address book. I've been guilty of it myself.

We're getting personal spam from people we sometimes barely know, and the way I see it is, unless you are having an art-exhibit, concert, party, or you're looking for an apartment, nobody really cares. Besides what's next, the mass-wedding invite?

It got me thinking about why we're putting ourselves out there in cyberspace in the first place. This "Update of my Life Email" is definitely something of my generation and I've received a lot of these over the past couple of years. The funny thing is that with Facebook and blogs etc. we seem to be very open about our personal life. We don't seem to care who reads it and are in return also shamelessly reading about other people's lives. I read David Byrne's blog whenever he updates it, and in a weird voyeuristic way I know what he's been doing even though I never met him.

You would think that we have gotten a lot more "personal" or "connected" to other people in general through blogs, but I think this technology is making quite the opposite happen. A Dutch version of Facebook (Hyves.net) received very angry emails over the fact that from one day to the other, without warning, they made your visits to people's blogs visible to the writer of the blog. So apparently a sort of voyeurism is happening where we want to look, but don't want people to know we're looking. Quite strange (btw: I think this is really only applicable to personal blogs, not professional blogs).

A little while ago my father apparently read my "Retired 2.0" entry and was asking me about the vacation I mentioned. You would think that wouldn't surprise me, but it did. I was also a little embarrassed that my dad had to find out about this trip through reading this journal. Whatever happened to just picking up the phone? But then again, this way I could just write about it once, and not have to tell everyone individually. I don't use this journal for personal things, but all of a sudden it seemed like an easy thing to do. But where does it end?

My generation apparently has a desire to be "connected" without the actual personal approach that a connection would normally require. We prefer text-messages over phone-calls, emails over letters, all things that have made interaction more impersonal, but now more than ever we have the desire for everyone to know what we're doing, at all times, from the interesting to the mundane.

Do we care if people read our thoughts, blogs and journals? Why DO we do it anyway? I guess everybody has their own reasons. But thanks for reading this anyway...

My Fictitious Friend Nancy (or, Personas)

"I can’t believe it’s not butter!” Really? Hmmm… As Anthony Bourdain would say: I can.

This is the problem with so much advertising today, making statements that insult our intelligence and that make absolutely no sense. Of course margarine doesn’t taste anything like real butter, and to suggest to us that it does, well, it’s just a bit condescending isn’t it?

Oh, so you say it tastes just like butter, well then it must!

Let’s review even further, the “I” in “I can’t believe it’s not butter”, is just who exactly? Are they trying to say it’s the consumer, or does it refer to some strange copy-writer who apparently never tasted real butter before? Maybe they had a focus-group of 20 people complete a survey that asked:

Margarine is most like:
a) coffee
b) power-tools
c) deep-sea diving
d) butter

Perhaps they justified it by saying that people on diets like to think they are eating real butter, and they don’t want the product to be called by its actual name, as they want to keep the illusion of eating actual delicious fatty butter alive. Or, it could be that the small splinter-cell of dieters really are in such denial about their food, that like vegans they start calling tofu, not tofu but chicken or pork or something.

That’s not what this is about though.

For decades advertisers have relied on conveying their message to us, with a complete disregard of what the consumer’s actual needs were, or who their consumers even really are. Making up personas, compiling fictitious data, guestimating wishes. Hey it’s not an exact science is it? So why not skew the results a little bit in our favor.

In my first job in e-commerce I had to “write” fictitious personas, which were not based on any real demographic or ethnographic research, and these invented people were supposed to be the most common users for our website.

An example of that would be: “Nancy, is between 28-35, drives an economy car, has a dial-up connection she mostly uses for email, makes between $30k-$50k a year, has a small expendable income and wants to shop for cheaper airfare to meet her mother in Florida”.

This tells us absolutely nothing about the actual consumers, and even back then, when I was writing this nonsense I wasn’t quite sure what the benefit of all of this could possibly be.

So what should we do? Well, I’m a firm believer of direct observation, case studies and ethnography, IDEO style. Go into a store, subway, Starbucks, school or whatever, and really see how people interact with products or services, find out what the problems are, asses where there could be improvements and then try to make the overall experience better. Open up the dialogue with the consumers and don’t be afraid of criticism.

I really want the days of inventing people and statements to be over. I want everyone to be interested in finding out what the consumer really wants, not what we like to think they want.

Charles Eames

In an interview filmed for his 1969 Paris exhibition "Que'est-ce que le Design?" (What is Design?) Charles Eames was asked: "What are the boundaries of design?"

His response was: "What are the boundaries of problems?"

Spam vs. Love

The way the Internet is now able to send out targeted advertising is through some very basic things they know about the user. Cookies can be used to track browsing behavior, which can in term replace the ads you see in pop-ups. For example, if you have visited a certain website, let's say eBAy, that information is stored in your browser, and eBAy is now able to send out targeted advertising to your computer because they now think, that you are interested in their services, based on a past visit.

The reality is, that they really don't know that much about you at all, and it's not very effective. Some companies try to attain your PII (Personal Identifiable Information), but even that only gives them some basic demographics, like age, state of residence etc. So it's no wonder that junk-mail has gotten so extremely out of control. Their strategy is to just shoot a machine-gun of emails in as many directions as possible so that maybe, of the million emails they send out, they might hit one correct target, which of course, is not very effective.

The way I see it, is that I don't mind receiving advertising (even through email) at all, as long as it is something that I might potentially want. I happen to be very interested in things like back-pack traveling, art-shows, certain concerts, snowboarding etc. so if I receive any type of advertising that is related to this, I will take notice.

It is hard however for companies to send out targeted advertising, because they know absolutely nothing about you. People are suspicious of the Internet, and are extremely reluctant to give away any personal information on the web. Or are they? Web sites like match.com and eHarmony.com (which are web-sites geared to finding love on-line) actually get people to give away every little nuance of their personality with the promise that they will help them find love.

So, I went on eHarmony.com and took their very extensive 20 page personality test, I wanted to see just exactly what they would ask me, and how accurate their final analysis of my personality would be.

Which started to make me wonder: can we match people with products and brands the same way they claim to be able to match personalities?

The interesting part is that as they are able to assess your personality (which in my case turned out to be pretty true), you are in fact not giving away any crucial information about yourself such as credit-card numbers, age or even names, just an email address. This would be extremely useful information that could effectively be used for marketing, provided that you ask the right questions, and assume that people will answer honestly.

The one problem though, is that answering a 20 page questionnaire is something not many people enjoy doing, and I actually felt like doing something else after about 10 pages of it. But people go through that effort all the time in order to find love.

But is the promise of getting rid of unwanted spam nearly as enticing?

Design it to Last

What kind of car do you drive? How long have you had it? 2 years, 5 years, 10 years? When you bought it did you need it, did you want it, did you love it?

How about now, do you still love it? Or are you contemplating buying a newer model, with more bells and whistles, the new streamlined design, and that nifty looking updated dash with the neat iPod hook-up?

And how many tape-decks, cd players, iPods, computers, and cell-phones have you owned in your lifetime? 10, 15, 100? Have you bought a new gadget this past year? I have, so you will have too probably.

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault. Products are specifically designed to be replaceable. Even if we wanted to update our electronics, we’re not allowed. We’re meant to throw it away and fall in love with the latest version. It’s what keeps our current economy going. It’s also what’s polluting our environment, but we don’t care. We ship our waste to China anyway. Let them deal with it. Out of sight, out of mind.

Yes we all run after the latest fad and we all want new things. So let’s just accept it, and not rock the boat. It’s human nature after all.

Or is it? Well, not everyone seems to be running after the latest fad. Porsche owners certainly aren't, they are so in love with their cars they couldn’t even imagine getting rid of it.

60% of all Porsches ever made are still on the road…

Sixty Percent!!!!

That probably makes Porsche the most sustainable car in the world. However, when most people think of sustainable design, the last thing that comes to mind are gadgets, cars and electronics. Sustainable design tends to conger up images of granola, woolen socks and whiny neo-hippies. But that’s not what sustainability is about at all. It’s really about designing something to last, or to be updatable, or to be re-used. To use a catchy-term, it’s about “cradle-to-cradle” design (great book btw).

I used to work in a place where they had transformed their colorful iMac to a very cool-looking aquarium, and a friend of mine has come up with awesome packaging that can be re-used in everyday life.

Anything really that is well designed, loved, timeless, and classic will not be discarded that quickly. It’s as simple as that.

And that might be the reason why 60% of all Porsches ever made are still on the road, and also why people have no problems throwing out their old ugly grey printers.

Politics 2.0 and the Thirst for Content

In an earlier entry in this journal I compared Barack Obama's site to Hillary Clinton's. When I wrote that article, Obama had not yet secured the nomination.

Now that he has, I am wondering if his landslide victory had anything to do with his campaign's approach to new (untraditional) media. The campaign seems to have a firm understanding of Web 2.0 practices, and social networking tools.

BarackObama.com is just one aspect of a very well-oiled media machine, another perhaps equally important aspect, is the campaign's Youtube channel. There you can view anything from the candidate's appearances on talk shows, to fully unedited speeches, to the campaign's video team's behind the scenes look on the campaign trail. They have posted over 1000 videos, and they are getting tens of thousands of hits a day.

My generation spends more time on Youtube than on traditional media outlets, and it seems like this 24-hour soundbite news that television networks have been shoving down our throats for years, just doesn't interest us.

We grew up in the age of the soundbite, the age of the slogan, the age of 24-hour news coverage, and it's as if we are tired of it. We don't want soundbites, we want content. Clear, unedited, real content. Obama's campaign doesn't only understand that desire, they are supplying us with the kind of content we crave.

Last night I went to a very interesting talk with Arun Chaudhary, director of video field production for Barack Obama. The evening was hosted by frog design, and moderated by Ellen McGirt (who had just written an incredible article for Fast Company called "The Brand Called Obama"). The room was filled with about 80 people, mostly non-traditional media folks.

Chaudhary talked a bit about how the campaign's media team works, the type of people involved, and how easy it is for them to get content out really quickly, since Obama trusts their judgement and expertise.

How incredible...

In most "creative" work places where you have to deal with clients, there is so much management, legal, and red tape in place, getting something approved can take weeks, sometimes even months. So Barack Obama sounds like the ideal client if you ask me, and it shows in the quality of content that's coming out of that campaign.

Chaudhary came from a solid, academic film background. Before he became Obama's director of field production he was adjunct professor of film at NYU. I think a filmmaker's approach to news coverage is inherently different than anyone working in the traditional media news outlets, and it's quite interesting that Obama's campaign chose a filmmaker to take on that role.

As his role was beginning to take shape, and he was traveling back and forth from Chicago to Iowa covering the Iowa caucus, they were pumping out hundreds of videos in a matter of weeks. At first they were posting little clips from Obama's speeches or town hall meetings on Youtube, but pretty soon people were demanding more content. The Obama campaign was surprised at the amount of people that kept asking for the full video.

So they took their cue from social-networking and Web 2.0, and gave the people what they wanted.

Frog posted some fragments from the night here.

Truth in Infographics

At work we keep a private posting area/blog for us to post interesting design work we've found somewhere else as inspiration, or just for a laugh. I have been wanting it to be public, but I guess the power's that be are nervous about some of our clients seeing the content or something. Nothing earth shattering has ever been posted, but I did want to share this funny chain of events between 2 of our Art Directors.

First, Brian posted an infographic he found about Obama's inventive campaign money raising:

No Small Change
June 27th, 2008 · Posted by BrianB · 2 Comments

How Obama Reinvented Campaign Finance

Here’s a little fun info graphic by Xplane illustrating how Barack Obama found a more effective way to raise campaign cash by using the power social networks.

Then Daniel responded with a graphic he created showing how he felt that the infographic was incorrectly displaying size relationships:

Truth in Infographics
DanielK // Jul 4, 2008 at 6:10 pm

I have a visual response that I’d like to title “Truth in Infographics”

Then finally after that Brian posted a hilarious response to end it for once and for all:

In Addition
BrianB // Jul 7, 2008 at 10:13 pm

Bruce Sterling Interview on DesignBoom

When I was working on the "a day in the life of a designer's smart things, 2030" project, I had the pleasure of getting some insight and advice from Bruce Sterling. When we got a little stuck halfway through the writing process he offered his thoughts on how the storyline could evolve.

The story in the diagram takes place in the year 2030, so who better to ask about the future than the man who's been writing design fiction for decades? As I'm sure he's a very busy man, I was amazed that he took an interest to our project at all. And that makes Bruce Sterling pretty cool in my book.

If you've seen our 2030 diagram, and you're not sure who Bruce Sterling is, take a moment to read his interview at DesignBoom, you'll immediately understand why his work served as an inspiration for the piece.

A Very Disillusioned Philippe Starck

The german magazine Die Zeit recently published a very interesting interview with famous french designer Philippe Starck on the heels of his much quoted speech at the TED conference last year. In it he proclaims that his sort of design – is dead. Not only does he say it's dead, he actually feels ashamed for being a producer of materiality, and is pondering retirement for a life with more meaning.

For all young start-up designers out there, being Philippe Starck, or becoming the Philippe Starck of the 21st century sounds like a beautiful dream. He's famous, he's wealthy, his tastes are trusted and sought out, he's designed some of the most beautiful, interesting and simple objects. He's designed for Microsoft, Aprilia and Target. He's published, he's quoted, his speaking fees are astronomical... He's done it all.

But... Is that enough nowadays? We are now in the midst of a backlash against excessive and unnecessary design, and the interesting thing is that it is mostly coming from the design world itself. Designers are starting to realize that their jobs are, well, unnecessary. We are tired of ourselves. Tired of creating useless things that will pollute our planet, tired of selling lies so some giant company can become even richer. We're tired of intentionally confusing consumers, and purposefully distracting them with shiny colors, eye-candy and slogans.

Designers seem to be looking for meaning. They are trying to make the word design less synonymous with websites and products, and more synonymous with innovation and ideas. Ideas that will help society, organize poorly designed experiences, inform consumers properly, and give the people the tools they need to create their own experiences.

If even Philippe Starck can't find meaning in his job anymore, it's time to re-think what design really means, and how we can use it for good.

When Big Corporations Have a Sense of Humor

HEMA, Hollands biggest department store, sells everything your house-hold can desire. From cups to umbrellas, to electronics –it's Hollands equivalent to a Wal-Mart, or K-Mart. The only difference is that HEMA has a sense of humor, and Wal-Mart and K-Mart obviously don't.

Wal-Mart has this incredibly predictable site, with the boring flash marquees with more of the same unimaginative copy and stock photography of "happy people" and the rip-off Apple mirror effect for their product photography. It's a fad Apple started, and sites like this were quick to copy (I'm sure Photoshop will come out with a quick mirror effect soon). To be honest Wal-Mart's site is really not even worth a rant, since the site is so unmemorable and ordinary.

That's not what this entry is about though. This entry is about HEMA's site, and what can happen when a company doesn't take itself too seriously, doesn't follow other site's fads, and ends up making the experience of going to their site a little more memorable.

Take a look for yourself!

Get Some!

On Valentine's Day there were people all around NYC handing out free condoms. They've been doing this for a couple of years now, and I didn't think much of it until I looked a little closer at the packaging and saw that it said "Get Some"...

Thanks to Yves Behar and his team for making me laugh on my morning commute... When copy just makes sense, AND makes you laugh, it makes the world a better place ;-)

Obama for Design!! (...or President)

Tuesday Obama surpassed Hillary in the amounts of delegates he's accrued, and everyone's now interested in the fact that he might actually stand a chance to take the democratic nomination.

I'm not a citizen, so I can't vote. I think they're both fine, and I'm fine with either of them winning, but from my perspective Obama has already won. Not because he is the better candidate, or because he will make a better president, or because his change campaign is sending positive and hopeful messages, he has already won because his campaign truly mastered the web with the cunning use of great design, great copy-writing, a deep understanding of social-networking tools, and an active participation on social-networking sites.

Hillary's website is terrible. The color scheme, is very, I don't know, blaah, washed-out, old, 1980's looking. Her homepage has a cheezy and boring cut-out photograph of her, and her icons feel outdated, like AOL designed them in 1999. There are hundreds of different font sizes, colors and typefaces, which makes the whole thing feel incredibly cluttered. I don't know where I am supposed to look first, since the grid is poorly designed, and the hierarchy in the site is way off.

One of the Art Directors at work walked over to my computer and we had a little chuckle over Hillary's site, and according to her it's pretty much Kerry's site from four years ago. I haven't been able to find Kerry's old site anywhere, not even a screenshot or anything, but if it is pretty much the same, well, then that's pretty cheap! With all that money they raised you would imagine they could've spent some of it on design.

Obama's site on the other hand literally feels like a breath of fresh air. A simple, elegant and consistent color palette. A nice quiet grid with consistent open padding, with all the tools and options off to the right (obviously a cue taken from blogs). It's soothing, it's clean, it's modern, it's pretty much everything he's trying to make you feel through his campaign.

You can tell his site was made by designers. Not just any designers, but good designers. His site has been extremely successful at branding his internet presence as young, modern, hip, and with-the-times.

Hillary's only presence on social-networking sites is MySpace, Facebook (there's also a anti-Hillary Facebook page which has more members than her actual Facebook page), YouTube, Flickr, and Eons. They way it's displayed on her site is incredibly unimaginative, and I dare you to count the amount of fonts below.

Obama on the other hand is pretty much on every social-networking site and tool you can think of (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Twitter, Eventful, LinkedIn, BlackPlanet, Faithbase, Eons, Glee, MiGente, MyBatanga, AsianAve and DNC Partybuilder), and why not? Some people might say it's overkill, but these platforms can reach millions of voters faster than his own website ever could, and they are also easy to maintain and even easier to set-up.

2007 was THE year of Social-networking/Web 2.0 sites and tools, and his campaign managed to really take advantage of the trend. Just a great job, really.

My vote for worst site of a Presidential Hopeful? The site of Lanakila Washington, with Kucinich's royal mess as second worst, and Hillary's as third worst.

The Thousand Tomorrows Interview

Tom Klinkowstein and I were recently interviewed by Pantopicon about our "A day in the life of a networked designer’s smart things or a day in a designer’s networked smart things, 2030" project, where we tried to envision the role of a designer in the year 2030.

They asked some very interesting questions, which lead to a lively discussion about the future, technology, sustainability, smart things and design.

Here's one of the questions:

Nik at Pantopicon: When you mention ‘her desires are realized with the help of smart things’, I cannot help but remember the many discussions I used to have about the notion ’smart’. ‘Smart’ from an engineering stance (’I made a cool thing that can do a lot of cool, useful things’) is not necessarily ’smart’ from a socio-cultural, economic, ecological etc. point of view. e.g. taking away desires or fulfilling them instantly, making battery-driven toys, … All media, especially of the information and communication-related kind, they all have effects beyond their immediate context of ‘utility/usefulness’, patterns of life are changed, economies, politics, etc. There are positive but also negative impacts. For example, many people wonder about the robustness of our world, its resilience (one driver for more nature-inspired systems) as we become ever more dependent of technologies, others worry about societal change, social cohesion etc. How do you look at this? Did it influence your work? After all, as extensions of man, new technologies also mean new responsibilities.

Irene Pereyra: Depending on technologies is fine with me, providing it’s the right kind of technology, and it supports a sustainable lifestyle/cycle. It’s just a matter of re-thinking what technology means. A lot of designers today are moving in the right direction, asking the right questions. Green design for example is incredibly popular right now, and it feels like designers finally understand the responsibilities they have to society.

For me one of the most interesting ideas/developments is the idea that something can be made to be up-gradable, rather than discarded. If I look at my lifetime for example, the amount of gadgets (cell-phones, walk-man’s, disc-mans etc.) I have discarded is astronomical. Unfortunately, today’s economy relies heavily on this “buy-buy-buy, new-new-new” attitude, so the more interesting question to me is, if we actually do manage to move into a cradle-to-cradle society, where things are re-used, or upgraded, how will it be supported politically, and economically? We have the technology available, the idea is there, designers are working around the clock, but the powers that be haven’t figured out how to shape society’s needs and desires around a sustainable economy. Technology is miles ahead of politics right now, but then again, it usually is.

Tom Klinkowstein: I agree with Irene: technology, commerce and social constructs have all evolved at a breathtaking pace. Politics is still waiting for its Vinton Cerf.

Design and engineering inventions like smart things will not bring heaven on earth but we work in a profession of endless iteration and eventually will get rather close.

Read the full interview at Pantopicon's blog, A Thousand Tomorrows.

The Pratt Preview of "A Day in the Life of a Networked Designer's Smart Things or A Day in a Designer's Networked Smart Things, 2030"

Tom Klinkowstein and I have been working on this project for about 6 months now, and last Friday was the preview mini-opening of the project at Pratt. Which means, well... it's finished! The project was made for the Singapore International Design Festival and is about an imagined designer's day in the year 2030.

The diagram goes through her day and explains how she gets things done with the help of all her smart things.

We began with 4 presentations, Tom Klinkowstein spoke about "Experience Design", Leo Bonanni from the M.I.T Media Lab spoke about "Living Objects", Anthony Townsend from the Institute for the Future spoke about "Living Environments" and I spoke about "Blogs".

It was really a fascinating night about what the possibilities could be in the future of design.

It's Alive! (Experience Design)

For months now, Tom Klinkowstein and I have been working on our "A Day In The Life of a Networked Designer's Smart Things" project, which will be shown at the Singapore International Design Festival in December. Before that, we're going to have an opening at Pratt... So if you're going to be in New York on the 16th, feel free to stop by for the opening of our project, at Pratt's Graduate Campus on 14th street (it's from 6pm-8pm). The event is free and so is the wine ;-)

The project is about "smart things" or "blogjects" or "spimes" and how a designer will interact with these in the year 2030.

Besides displaying the large print, Tom will have a short presentation on "Experience Design", I'll talk about "Blogs" and we have someone from the MIT Media Lab talk about "Living Objects" and someone from the Institute of the Future talk about "Living Environments".

Should be interesting!

Vanity and Wikipedia

Holland is one of a handful of nations in Europe that still has a monarchy. Much like in the UK their private-lives, love-lives and antics are always front page news in the Dutch tabloids. Some people spend much of their day gossiping about their outfits, hairdos, the Queen's latest outrageous hats or the princes' wives/girlfriends... Pretty mundane and uninteresting things, and I've never been quite up to date on all the latest of it.

Until recently that is...

About 2 months ago the news broke that one of the prince's wife's Wikipedia article had been altered regarding the entry about her alleged affair with a famous dutch drug-lord before she married the prince. This had been in the Dutch media for a couple of years now, and she had always stated that though she knew this drug-lord, she never had an affair with him. A little while ago however the drug-lord's old body-guard came forward to say that she had in fact been the guy's girlfriend for a while in the late 80's.

Ok well who cares...

Well, not a lot of people did, that is, until it was discovered that her Wikipedia entry was actually altered from the Queen's own computer at the Royal Palace. The entry was changed from "she had given incomplete and false information about the duration and extent of her contacts with drug kingpin Klaas Bruinsma" to "she had given incomplete information about the duration and extent of her contacts with drug kingpin Klaas Bruinsma".

Leaving out the word "false".

The change was noticed when the WikiScanner was looking to verify the latest additions and alterations to its articles and actually managed to trace the IP address back to the Queen's computer at the Royal Palace.

So these two Royal idiots were attempting to change history on the computer of his mother , who happens to be the Queen of Holland, and actually got caught. How embarrassing, and stupid. The Dutch media and comedians had a field day with this of course.

I would imagine it's very tempting though, to alter your own Wikipedia entry for one reason or another, and in fact it has proven to be. Since the WikiScanner went online a couple of months ago, it has been used to uncover thousands of vanity revisions.

So... What would you like to scrub clean from your past?

Designing with Passion (for Jesus?)

As I was thumbing through css vault, (a depository for great looking sites that have xhtml/css compliant code) I noticed how a lot of the newly added sites were religious in nature, or even the sites of actual churches.

It's a new development I've noticed recently and at first glance I was a bit confused by it. I'm personally not religious at all, so css vault was really my first encounter with these sites.

After looking at the latest additions a little closer I came to the conclusion that there could only be 2 possible explanations for the recent rise in well-designed religiously-themed sites:

1) CSS vault is going religious.
2) Religious/Church sites are well designed.

If I assume css vault's only God is compliant code and good design, then the second reason must be true.

But why is this?

Do these sites have a lot of money? Probably. Do they need to attract/convert people? Of course. Are they looking for more "cult-like" followers? Sure. But isn't that true for most big "brands"?

I think so... and yet most big brands don't nearly have such neat looking sites.

So something else is happening here. Maybe it's that the designers who create these sites believe in the message a lot more than some web-agency in New York believes in let's say, Coca-Cola. I know from my personal experience that when I'm excited about a project, or message, I tend to put a lot more work and effort into it. Everybody knows that having a room full of designers who truly believe in the brand's message is a recipe for a winning design.

I did a little research on the web and found these guys, who are a religious bunch of designers, with pretty impressive resumes. Designers are people too after all, and some people happen to be religious... And I imagine that in any large church there must be at least one, maybe even more talented designers, who'd be happy to do some pro-bono work for something they believe in.

Anyways, see for yourself:
Revolution / Soul Purpose / Bethlehem Church / Generation Church / The City Church / Church Media

Pretty nice looking sites eh? I especially like the "Pastors Corner Blog"... They're so ahead of the curve, they've even gone web 2.0 now! Incredible...

Death of a Logo

Have been working on a site re-design for at&t, and I was once again reminded of the fact that they changed their awesome, strong, iconic Saul Bass logo (popularly known as the deathstar) to this poorly designed 3D-looking (and not even in the right perspective!) photoshoppy version of the old logo, made by some genius or guru or brand specialist or whatever at Interbrand for a whole lot of money.

Saul Bass is turning in his grave.

Normally I'm not that annoyed with these things (hey, at least it's not the Verizon logo, now THAT'S a monstrosity! Why can't someone redesign that?), but now that I actually have to work with the new logo, and have turned from passive observer to active user, I realize what an enormous pain in the neck it is to work with. The thing just looks awkward next to anything, on any background, in any size.

The Saul Bass version actually had multiple versions of the globe. The size, color and placement determined the version used, which gave every application of it the strongest possible graphic impact.

When this switch happened about 2 years ago during the AT&T/Cingular/SBC merger, I was agast that they would even consider changing a logo which had a 98% recognition rate, (most companies would die for such a high recognition rate) and I was honestly expecting at&t to fail miserably because of it.

And so I waited.

But nothing happened... There was no public uproar, no riots, no protests, no retrieval demands, and so yet another classic logo went away quietly, just like Paul Rand's classic UPS logo had a couple of years earlier.

And AT&T? (...ahum, excuse me at&t, it's lowercase now...) Well, they're doing fine, dandy, never better actually, thanks for asking!

Does this mean that these days the logo really doesn't matter that much after all? If Saul Bass' perfectly designed logo is replaceable and can't make a lasting impact on society, what makes you think yours can?

The 'Ole Way vs. Web 2.0

How have some things changed in our profession since 2000? Since the dot-com era, since the bubble burst, in this new age of web 2.0?

How we use the web and its services is completely different now. We have blogs, communities, and completely new and dynamic ways to create websites, but not everybody is caught up yet.

Are you up to speed or still living in the year 2000?

Of all the things listed to the right, the one thing I don't interact with is Facebook. Yes I am a bit of a hater. I just don’t really see the point. I had a MySpace profile years ago but committed MySpace-Suicide a couple of months later after being highly frustrated of all the “How are You?” nonsense messages my friends were leaving all the time.

Don’t really care what your favorite color is, or what annoying song you might have instantaneously play when I get to your page. I also don’t care about your band or the fact that having 8,000 friends somehow makes you feel more popular.

You want to write to me? If you know me just send me an email, the whole world doesn’t need to know about our correspondence. But I seem to be the last of the Mohicans. Almost everyone I know now has a Facebook profile.

So here’s what really annoys me about Facebook, without being a member you can’t even look at someone’s profile. When people email me to tell me they just posted some interesting information or graphic on their Facebook page, I can’t even get to it, unless I well… euhm… sign up with Facebook.

No Facebook! I don’t want to be a member, I don’t care how “highly” exclusive your little club is, I just want to be able to see someone’s profile who actually is a member.

So forget it Facebook! Stop trying! You’re not cornering me into signing up! You’re not! Aaaahh!

Smarter Design Choices for the Environment

Okay so sustainability is totally hip right now. Everyone cares about the environment. Green is the new black. Al Gore's film was the most watched documentary ever. Yes, yes, yes and yes, but what can designers do to help the environment?

Not many designers know how to properly design with the environment in mind, and us designers are some of the world's greatest polluters. Packaging, printing, recycling, paper-making, inks, foil stamping, binding... All this and more is what we are putting out there in terms of energy (ab)use. According to the Environment Protection Agency, as much as a third of the developing world's non-industrial solid waste streams consists of packaging.

There are some myths out there that the energy needed to recycle minimizes any savings in the use of recycled papers versus virgin paper (paper directly from trees), but by using recycled papers there is less energy consumption, fewer greenhouse gases, less waste paper and less solid waste.

So Print Designers. What can you do? Turns out you can do a lot. Here are some ideas.

Plan ahead

• Consider 100% PCW uncoated paper, or elemental chlorine free or totally chlorine free paper.
• For long shelf life, choose a paper that meets the American National Standards Institute standards for product longevity.
• Plan ahead to avoid air shipping, and use targeted, updated mailing lists.
• If designing packaging, design it to last, can it be used for something else?
• Design packaging closest to the product's size, and at a most efficient size for shipping. As much as 50% of packaging waste is from the outer packaging that the consumer will never see.
  

Production

• Use the fewest materials necessary to be effective.
• Consider standard paper sizes to maximize positioning and bleeds (4up? 6up?).
• Design with multipurpose use in mind (can an invitation also be self-mailer?).
• If the printed piece isn't reusable, ensure that it is recyclable.
• Use digital photography when possible.
• Use PDF digital proofs instead of paper printouts.

Inks & Finishing

• Consider vegetable-based inks.
• Use fewer ink colors, consider 2 color jobs over 4 color jobs (less inks are also cheaper for the client, and can have amazing graphic impact).
• Consider less ink coverage.
• Avoid metallic and fluorescent inks when possible.
• Consider using aqueous varnishes and coatings instead of UV coatings and laminates.
• Consider alternatives to foil stamping.
• Consider water-based glues.

Printing

• Choose an FSC-certified printer.
• Consider filmless and plateless digital printing for small runs over off-set printing.
• Send artwork to printer electronically.

Then lastly there is that old myth that recycled papers always look, well, recycled, and that 2 color jobs miss out on the graphic impact. I couldn't disagree more. Here's a self-mailer I designed that was printed on recycled paper and made by only using 2 inks (purple and black).

Can you tell it was designed with the environment in mind?

(for more ideas on eco-friendly print download monadnock paper mills' pdf)

The Wonderful Marriage of XHTML and CSS

Let me start off by saying that I am not a web developer. I don't deal with code at work at all, however, in my freelance work I am sometimes handcoding small websites.

When I was in college, I was lucky enough to have a very inspiring professor, who was very evangelical about the use of xhtml and css. Back then, this was a fairly new development, and his reasoning for using it has always made a great impression on me. So when I was asked twice by clients why they should adopt Web Standards for their new sites. Well, here’s what I told them…

Web Standards deals with making your site accessible for everyone, including people with disabilities. It also makes it easier for search engines to find your site and to degrade gracefully to a PDA. But most importantly, it separates your formatting (CSS) from your structure (XHTML).

Why use XHTML? Because it’s the mark-up language that married HTML and XML, and is the latest mark-up language that is set as standard by the W3C, who are a bit like the web-police trying to create standards for the web. The reason XHTML degrades better to a PDA, is because it allows you to organize your structure in the way of what the "actual" information hierarchy is (what text comes first, second, what are the headlines, etc.) that way even when all the style-sheets and images fall away you can still read the information as it was meant to be read on the current PDA's.

Why use CSS? Because it’s ALL the styling information for your website (colors, typography, layout, imagery etc.). The advantage of keeping your style-sheet separate from you structure is, if you change one instance in the CSS (let's say you want all body type throughout the entire site to be red now), you can do so by changing it in the CSS document alone, where in the past, you would have to change that in every single page.

Bottom line? Less time spent making updates = Less money you have to spend.

Personally, I am not a big fan of many Flash sites, very often it’s overused and the motion gets to be annoying after a while quite frankly. Doesn’t mean there’s no place for Flash, if you have a highly interactive site like Color in Motion, it can be absolutely amazing. In most other cases, it just takes too long to load, has bad looking typography, is hard to update, is hard to find by search engines, and not to mention impossible to degrade to a PDA (besides the iPhone).

Here are some other arguments for using web standards (via my old professor Aarron Walter):

• By keeping your formatting (CSS) separated from structure (XHTML), you will use less code, which makes your site download faster. Your external CSS files will also cache in the browser’s temporary memory so the code doesn’t have to download each time a page is viewed.


• Maintenance times are less by building sites without nested tables, which can be a nightmare to try to modify. Changes can be made site-wide in a design by modifying one external style sheet, saving time and money.


• Following Web Standards improves proper cross-browser display, and helps ensure that a site is forward compatible with future browsers


• Any contract work with the US government, needs to be Section 508

Sounds simple? It is, but you'd be surprised how many small sites still get this wrong.

The Future of Experience Design

Tom Klinkowstein and I have been working on a very interesting project about a day in the life of a designer in the year 2030. We have been writing the content and we're basically trying to imagine what the role of a designer will be after the Experience Design/Web 2.0/Second Life Revolution has happened. Some of it is very far-fetched and sci-fi-ish, and some of it is very plausible.

I'll be writing about some of the content once it's developed, but for now, enjoy this video I found. It's amazing how some of our thoughts on the future correspond with this...

Design = The Bottom Line

Three weeks ago I went to the IDEO discussion panel at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where they discussed the importance of design to business. The panel was lead by Bruce Nussbaum (who is the assistant managing editor of BusinessWeek, and included Tim Brown (chief executive officer of IDEO), Claudia Kotchka, (VP, design innovation and strategy at P&G), and Gael Towey, (chief creative officer of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia).

It was right up my alley and very interesting, exactly what I have been talking about on my blog. It was also extremely exciting to see some of the world’s most innovative leaders talk about design and its importance to business.

Nussbaum spoke about how some CEO’s still have a problem with the word “Design”, because they think it has something to do with wallpaper and maybe the suits they wear. They are much more comfortable calling it “Innovation”… Innovation sounds strong and masculine. It implies leadership. Nussbaum doesn’t care what it’s called and thinks it should all be called banana.

Claudia Kotcka, (who was appointed by Lafley in 2001 to inject some design thinking to P&G) spoke of a wonderful interval at P&G where she managed to show a bunch of P&G accountants the value of design by comparing a standard measuring cup to the oxo measuring-cup. The accountant’s initial response was “isn’t design usually the first thing to get cut from the budget?” but after her simple demo, (the oxo measuring-cup allows you to read the measurements on the inside of the cup, so you don’t have to raise it to your eyelevel) they approved her new budget for more design.

I posed a question to the panel as to why they think so few designers today are interested in this “Design Thinking”, “Empathy Economy”, “Right Brain meets Left Brain” revolution, and Tim Brown’s response was, that while the business world is slowly starting to accept design as a necessity, as a means for innovation, not many designers and design institutions understand the importance of design and design thinking to businesses just yet. Designers are not used to allowing people from other disciplines to be creative and a lot of them still think they are the ones who “own” design and creativity.

According to him what the word “design” means is changing, and unless designers catch-up to this new trend in business, the term “design” is in danger of getting fully hijacked by non-designers.

The most innovative companies today are all non-design firms, (with the exception of IDEO maybe) and there are already MBA programs out there experimenting with adding design to their curriculum, but very few (almost none) design schools are yet experimenting with adding business-like sensibilities to their skill-sets.

Pitfalls of Multiple Touch-Points

In an older entry in this journal, I wrote about how usability is different from experience design because usability is only one touch-point and experience design is the sum of all the possible touch-points in which the consumer interacts with a company (product, web, interface, customer service, retail store, peripheral devices etc.)

From the company’s point of view, if they design all aspects of the product or service, they are in control of your overall experience. From the consumer’s point of view however, in order to actually have a good experience, you would need all the touch-points to align, and be positive, because when one fails, the whole thing falls apart.

With a device like the iPod, in order to use it, you also need to have iTunes. Apple was able to not only control the design of the actual product, but also invent a way to better organize music on an mp3 player. Apple made the experience of organizing music better, and they also made 2 customers out of where there was only 1 before.

Recently I read a great article by Adam Greenfield, and he gives some great examples of how some good ideas (acela, nike+, trainaway) fail because the integration of all these touch-points has either not been designed properly, relies to heavily on branding, or is completely neglected.

I’m interested in the branding part.

With cross-brands like nike+ (nike and apple), the experience is constrained mostly by branding. It only works with certain nike shoes, and only with the iPod nano (which kind of makes sense since you don’t want to go running with an iPod with movable parts). It would have been great however, if the technology could have been made available for any shoes or mp3 players, but obviously the heavily branded experience of nike+ only works with, well… euhm, Nike.

The argument would be then, to either have an independent company create a similar device that is highly customizable, or better yet have Nike and Apple open up the platform so it works for all shoes and mp3 players. This is obviously not what they were hoping for, since they want their company, and their company alone, to be in control of your experience, and basically sell as much as they possibly can to 1 consumer.

So… The multi-touchpoint experience now actually becomes a hindrance to the consumer, and it feels a bit like being locked into a brand monopoly (we now have to buy the shoes they tell us to, the right mp3 player, iTunes etc.), so even though they are selling it to us as if we are getting more control, in reality they are taking away any choices we could possibly make for ourselves.

The solution would be then, I think, to allow the consumers to make as many choices as they want themselves, and design the product in a sort of modular fashion where you allow the consumer to have a highly customizable experience. Then if you still want people to buy your sneakers, well… go back to the drawing board and make them better so people will want to buy your sneakers because they are good, not because you force them to.

How Ethnography Can Help Design

Most designers tend to be quite detached from the end-user when creating visual solutions. We’re not always too concerned with what the actual meaning or practicalities of our designs are, and our strengths lie more in our visual thinking than in our holistic or empathetic abilities.

At school we’re trained to design, which just means we have to visually engage the viewer, and so according to most designers our responsibilities end there. When we start work we create solutions within a certain framework that’s been set by others who’ve supposedly done the research for us, though in reality very few places actually do research, or collect any kind of feedback after the fact.

No wonder there are so many horrible products and services out there no one wants, nobody bothered to find out if anybody actually really wanted them.

Most designers also don’t think of people as people. We prefer to call them “consumers”, “customers” or “users”. It’s not our fault, we never get to see or hear any of them. Within the confines of our studios we like to think we are in control, and think we have some sort of authority in knowing what it is people want, even though very few of us actually get to hear any customer feedback after we have sent off our work to the next wheel of the production cycle.

The truth is, in order to have a really successful design, product, or service, designers need to have compassion and empathy for their audiences, and make an effort to truly understand what it is they need, and where it is they are coming from.

Ethnography does exactly that. Ethnography is all about answering questions that are generally out of a designer’s reach. It’s about observing people in their natural environments, and finding ways to improve their experiences from the bottom-up. It’s not about selling products or services at this point, it’s about finding out what it is people need or want before any design even starts. Doesn’t that sound like a logical first step?

Rather than guestimating what it is people supposedly crave, they go out and methodologically study people’s behaviors and experiences in everyday life, and try to make sense out of all the complex problems and questions new products and services might raise. This approach generates more actual solutions than any thinking or brainstorming inside the studio between designers ever could.

So how come every design studio still doesn’t have ethnographers on staff?

Or better yet, how come so few designers are interested in holistic solutions?

RSS in Plain English (for Mom)

Some people still have a hard time understanding just what exactly RSS is, what the benefits could possibly be, or how to use it.

The beauty of RSS is, that where before, without RSS, you had to go looking for updates from your favorite blogs or websites, and sometimes they were updated, sometimes they weren't. Now you know immediately when there is new information, because your feedreader will display it immediately.

So... it basically keeps you more informed on your favorite sites, which makes it a great tool for people who use the web... well... all the time... For me, it's pretty much the way of life now... Let the information come to me!

Anyways, if you are like my mom, and are one of those people who still doesn't quite "get" RSS, you should really click on the above image and watch the video...

How RFID's Can Replace Branding

For a conference I'm participating in about the Future of Design (Design in the year 2030), I've been doing a lot of reading about RFID's, Smart Things, Spimes and Blogjects. The terminology sounds a little intimidating, but all these things are basically autonomous entities that could track, sense, respond, blog, record and archive things based on human associative thinking.

For this conference we are encourage to really think “futuristic”, not necessarily “realistic”, but there are some definite realistic possibilities within this realm that could change the entire consumer culture, and put the consumer more in control, which is something I’m highly interested in.

RFID’s for example are already being used for kind of uninteresting tracking purposes on clothes and other articles, but they could potentially be used for a plethora of other things such as inventory, and the storing of any type of information about the product itself -which is where things have the potential of getting really interesting, not to mention change the entire production cycle, and in term design and marketing.

There's an interesting Dutch project called "Milk" that tracked the "history" of a batch of milk. It shows the "road" the milk has traveled to get to its final destination –the consumer’s plate. The milk was produced by Latvian farmers, made into cheese by a local factory with the help of an Italian expert, then transported to the Netherlands and stored in a Dutch cheese warehouse to ripen, after which it was sold at the Utrecht market and finally eaten by Dutch citizens.

Ideally you could store all sorts of information about a product, (not just where it has traveled) for the consumers to access at any time. Not sure how that would work exactly, you would need a scanner of some sort, or maybe a type of tracking number you could type into an application or website or something.

Some things we could then potentially know about an object or product:

• When and where it was made.
• The road it has traveled to get to its final destination.
• The functional principles.
• The help-desk efficiency.
• How it obeys to standards.
• How much energy it uses
• What the materials are/how it’s constructed.
• Who made it (illegal immigrants, child labor)
• It could tell you exactly how much energy was used to design, promote, manufacture, transport and sell it.
• It could show us what it looks like not just in the end state, but at every stage of development.
• It could inform you to make decisions based on legal, social, ethical, and environmental criteria.

Once these blogjects, spimes, or however you want to call them are in place, they have the potential to replace branding, because they would inform more completely than some nonsensical slogan could. Sales pitches would also go away because a product would come with any information you could possibly want to know about it.

This type of brutal honesty would obviously only work for companies who want to highlight these points about their product or service, like companies whose products are sustainable or not made by child labor (think American Apparel). Companies who are still in the myth-making business, however, would obviously not benefit from this and would still need a great advertising agency. I'm not suggesting advertising will disappear entirely, I'm merely suggesting that other worlds are possible as well.

Maybe this is my idea of nerdy-utopia, but I would definitely like to know these things about a product, and it would be a much more comprehensive way to chose between competitors than a consumer report ever could. I also imagine that if these things become common practice, companies would be forced to think more about things like sustainability, and labor practices.

The New (Experience) Delta

Yesterday I saw Delta's much-anticipated new ad on Fox during the show House (prime-time) and it's following the experience revolution cues pretty exact (though probably subtle enough for the average viewer not to notice).

Delta is coming out of Chapter 11 (bankruptcy) and with their ad titled "Anthem" they are showing us how they have changed. The new ad starts with a bleak opening sequence with empty airports and baggage-claims but then it changes to a fast-paced up-beat "Delta Workshop" type of environment where they show us they are redoing everything from the seats to the food to the flight-attendants outfits.

Nothing too out of the ordinary here, but by using catchy phrases such as "Change Means Rethinking Every Moment of Your Travel Experience" you can probably understand why I took notice. I've been talking and writing about this experience revolution for a while now so for an ad to make this promise, well, they better deliver.

I did a little research and found out that "SS&K" (Shepardson Stern & Kaminsky) of New York won the Delta account, and that apparently they are known for doing a lot of work for political candidates. They were also recently hired by Barack Obama and are set to use some nontraditional media for persuasive purposes targeted at young voters.

So Delta is tackling their new campaign as if they are on a political campaign trail. They want to make the experience of flying better, and make changes based around the ever-changing needs of their consumers.

The new campaign promises a whole lot, and the question is whether or not Delta can actually deliver. They have completely changed their tone, that's for sure. They are now speaking of a "Delta Community", and about "Sharing" your ideas... They want to make the travel experience better "Together". All very lofty ideas, but for it to be a true "Experience" centered change, they need to not only promise it, they need to make the changes actually happen. This only the future can tell.

Tim Mapes (vice president for marketing at Delta) said of the new campaign that they do not want to set up expectations that are false. I wonder how much of this new campaign has been a true multi-disciplinary collaborative effort, or if it's just a smart marketing move from the guys at SS&K.

Does Delta really know what changing the experience of flying means, or do they just want us to think they do?

Buying Buzz

Just received a ranting email from a friend of mine (who will remain nameless) who is involved in creating a fake blog for an insurance company which is set to hit the internet this summer. He's embarrassed, angry and pretty much ready to quit his job. The creative director seems to think that creating a fake blog is an excellent idea because (to quote him) "blogs are totally in right now!"

Euhm... yeah real blogs are maybe, but there's nothing sadder than a fake blog, especially when they get found out (Coca-Cola's Zero Movement, or Wall-Mart did earlier this year), and trust me, sooner or later they will get found out.

Who's doing the research at that place? When is creating false consumer experiences ever a good idea? Besides, is anyone actually going to believe that some person in love with their insurance company is going to blog about it? I mean stranger things have happened I suppose but this just has bad idea written all over it. You can't buy buzz. You just can't.

It seems like a lot of companies have been running after this blog-fad. They don't seem to understand that actual blogging is not easy, and that to have a successful blog is nearly impossible.

Without trying to understand what it really means, what it is that motivates people to blog, companies are just putting the elements that they think make a blog happen together and expect people to be interested.

Hire a copy-writer, write a little story about why company X is so great, add some supporting comments and you're done right?

No, not exactly. Not at all actually.

Blogging takes a lot. You need to be passionate about something, and take time out of your already busy day to write down some thoughts, all while trying to keep the conversation somewhat consistent and interesting. It's about being honest about whatever it is that you're writing about it.

If we're writing about a brand, (which let's face it, not too many blogs are in the first place) it's basically the only way we have to create a dialogue between us and a company, or at least have our voices be heard.

I think that knowing, I mean really knowing, what people think about your brand can only be helpful, even if it's less than positive. If companies are now inventing an experience, inventing conversations, they are missing out on the exact thing that they can gain from blogs, which is free insight into their consumers' thoughts.

Retired 2.0

Spent last week in Southern Florida, which besides sun+sea and a much needed vacation, provided some insight in what the current retired community thinks about this whole Web 2.0 thing.

At a dinner party with a bunch of retired folks I brought up the topic of Experience Design, and how the Design community is finally putting the consumer first. This brought up an interesting discussion about branding and the internet.

The people at the dinner party were in their late 60's, all products of the consumer boom of the 1950's, actively involved in the business world of the past 40 years, and lived through the mega-brand explosion of the 1980's. They still believed in buying a "respectable" and "trustworthy" brand. We spoke about fridges, cars and camera's and I realized that when it came to the more expensive items they were still very brand focused.

Nothing too out of the ordinary there.

Now here's for the interesting part, somebody said that the AARP magazine wrote a piece about how to buy the right brand of fridge, car or whatever. According to AARP, the best way to know what brand to buy is not to shop for prices, not to check out consumer reports, or consult your friends, but rather to call the customer service line of the brands you are considering, and pretend you have a defected item, and see how their customer service deals with the problem. AARP seems to think that's where the true value of a brand lies.

Interesting. I wonder if AOL would pass the test.

I asked them if any of them used the AARP website or if they read the magazine. They all said they read the magazine because the website is too confusing. So when I got home I toured the AARP website, and I have to agree with them, it is a bit confusing, even for an internet savvy person. Nobody at the dinner party knew what RSS was (one person had heard of it, but didn't really know how it worked) even though on the AARP website you can get an RSS feed. Seems like AARP's website is missing the mark a bit on the needs of their users.

The reason I think it's interesting to know how older generations use the web is because within 5 years all the baby-boomers will retire. They are much more internet savvy than their predecessors (the people I had dinner with), but maybe not as much as their kids. With the baby-boomers making up a large part of the community, they will probably be the first retired people who will make real use of the internet.

My parents are a good example of the generation that is about to retire. My father is very internet savvy, uses Firefox and tabbed browsing, subscribes to RSS feeds, and even has a daily newsletter (blog) he writes himself about Latin American politics. My mother is less internet savvy but still has a laptop, and mostly uses the web to write emails and shop for cheap airfare.

So now that everyone can be a writer, critic, or director on the internet, retired people with extra time on their hands have all the tools they need to stay informed, and share their knowledge.

Web 2.0 is not just for the young generation. If we say that everyone should be able to play, that means everyone. Don’t be surprised if a type of Facebook or Flickr more geared towards the baby-boom generation will start popping up soon.

Design for $5/hour

If I had a small firm, I would definitely not pay some American designer $40-$60/hour to design or code my website. I would go to a site like oDesk.com and get some Bulgarian, Polish, Indonesian, Pakistani or Indian designer to get me almost the exact result for as little as $5/hour. For an extra dollar at $6/hour you can get someone with 5 years of experience.

oDesk.com is super convenient, easy to use, and it would cost me less than if I would post an ad on craigslist.org Anything I could possibly outsource I would. No doubt about it.

Why not? Are American and European designers really capable of delivering such better work?

Most design work (websites, identities etc.) can be learned by routine and repetition, done on free pirated software at home, and with a little bit of a creative eye you're ready to go. Besides I've seen some horrible crap designed by US designers who charged $50/hour and went to some fancy design school for 4 years. So I see nothing wrong with out-sourcing design work.

The tools of the trade are out there for everyone to use, and the truth is, it's just not that special anymore. You can design? So what. Everybody can now.

It's making the design industry extremely uncomfortable though, especially Design Schools that focus more on teaching software than they do on teaching "Creative Thinking". I guess it's hard to get away with charging 60k for an education that puts the graduate in competition with someone who gets paid $5 an hour.

Ouch... Might as well work at Starbucks then, at least they have benefits…

The beauty however, of all this outsourcing is that it just puts all of us designers on our toes. It forces us to think more about our place in the production cycle, and it forces us to become more like thinkers and strategists instead of simple-minded Adobe Computer Monkeys...

Maybe besides weeding out the not so great designers, it will manage to create some alternate views on what Design really means, or where it might be going… American Design's not dead yet. It's just morphing into something else. Something that's way more interesting anyway.

New Design Democracy

Nussbaum’s latest article in BusinessWeek (Are Designers the Enemy of Design?) was quite controversial, and if you read some of the comments posted after the article was published, it apparently infuriated quite some designers.

Not me though ☺

I actually found myself laughing out loud, recognizing some typical designer traits he describes (arrogance, self-inflated egos, disinterest in sustainability, etc.), and also found myself agreeing with almost everything he says about the current state of “designers”.

It’s true. A lot of designers around me do not like this new wave of design democracy. Now that anyone can design their own website, social networks, blogs, and shoes, they seem to think that it erodes design, and devaluates the importance of design. They think that only designers are allowed to design.

I actually see it as a positive thing. Apparently people (non-designers) like designing things. I don’t know why it’s such a big shock to us, since designing your own blog or clothes is really not that much different from decorating your living room. And I think if people had the option to “design” their house, they would like to do that as well (…sorry architects).

The main reason for this design revolution is that design has gotten to a place where you don’t need to be an expert to participate. Where before the tools of the trade were only reserved for a select view, nowadays people are designing entire websites (think blogger) without any knowledge of html or css.

Sure, “great” design will most likely be done by trained (or learned) designers, but that doesn’t mean the right to blog for example should only be reserved for savvy internet coders.

So the big challenge is to properly facilitate this apparent desire to design. A lot of sites have already been quite successful at that. I hate to sound like a broken record, but the YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, Blogger revolution has tapped into that exact desire. The beauty of these platforms is that you are able to change any aspect of the design any time you like (without having to go through the pain and expense of an “internet-design” company), which is not something that most companies (who actually have paid these “internet-design” companies) can say.

By giving the user the control, they in term will feel more connected to the platform that provides them with that control.

There’s really quite a creative revolution going on with “non-desingers”, and though we mainly have technology to thank for that, I do think we have tapped into some subconscious need to design (or be in control of) any aspect of our lives.

I’m one of many (sorry Bruce) designers who welcome this revolution. Design should be about participation, about giving everyone the tools they need, and figuring out how to get people involved. It should definitely not be some archaic elitist belief that design is only for designers, which unfortunately, is what’s still being taught at the nation’s top design schools, so it’s really not a big surprise most designers are still opposed to the idea…

Brand Experience is Hijacking Experience Design

I've been reading a lot about Experience Design lately and it struck me how a lot of companies and even designers are still trying to group it with Branding. They make it seem as if we're now in an age where we are "Experiencing Brands", or trying to make the "Brand Experience" more about the consumer. Apparently we interact with Brands on a personal level now. Here I always thought we interacted with the companies on a personal level and not with Brands, but maybe I'm crazy.

Companies are still trying to shove their brands down our throats. Power-point presentations where their logo is on every single slide still screams "It's about us! - Not about you!" Which is fine with me if that's the road you are taking with your company, but don't try to disguise that as Experience Design. I guess the problem is that the term hasn't been defined enough, or that companies and designers are jumping on a bandwagon they don't fully understand or trust.

It's great that companies like Delta now have check-in kiosks in airport terminals, they've obviously considered designing a better experience for their customers. But the fact that their logo screams out at you on every single page still tells us it's all about them. Well... Experience Design is all about us, about the consumer, not about your company, and guess what, we don't really care about your logo, sorry...

The reason I think we really need to differentiate the word "brand" from "experience", and crowbar them as far away from each other as possible, is because "brand" will always be, no matter how nicely you wrap it up, about the company, and not about the consumer. It's an impression they want to make to us, and is therefore always from the "inside-out", from the company to the consumer.

Brands always start with the company.

Experience Design on the other hand, is about the consumer, about their needs, their desires and expectations. It's about making what they are trying to achieve as good as possible, the best it can possibly be. Experience Design is about designing things from the consumer's viewpoint, from the "outside-in".

Experience Design always starts with the consumer.

I'm not trying to say that there is absolutely no place for Branding, I understand that a company needs to have a visual representation of their company and I see nothing wrong with that. What does bother me though, is the hijacking of the term "Experience Design".

If people start referring to Experience Design in such a way, the term will loose its meaning and its impact on society, which would be a loss for both businesses and designers because it has a lot to offer us.

For "Experience Design" to truly succeed as a discipline and earn full legitimacy, it will need to distinguish itself from brand strategy and design, and demonstrate its distinct value as a contributor to business.

It's therefore very important for businesses and designers to agree on the term and not muddle it even further. Let's create some standards people!

The Promise of the Logo

I bought a fake Prada bag in Chinatown. On my way to have dim-sum I saw this really cool looking neon green-bag, and bought it for $10. The guy wanted $25 based on the fact that according to him it had a real fake Prada logo (which he thought was worth more than $10), and my argument was that the materials and production definitely cost less than $25. He finally agreed with me and I bought the purse for $10.

The "real" bag must have cost, I don't know $900 perhaps? But the real bag is probably also made out of real leather, and not some plastic made to look like leather. I also assume that with the real bag the lock doesn't fall out after 2 months and the stitching doesn't let loose after 3. But I might be wrong.

So if the leather and the fact that it is practically hand-made is the real quality, the real reason why it's expensive, why are we obsessing over the Prada logo? Why does the logo become the status symbol and not the craftsmanship?

Does the name Prada really make us feel as if we are a wealthy Italian movie actor in some Fellini film? Even if we own a real Prada bag, would we ever go up to someone and say: "You know, it's a Prrrradaaaa!!"

Who are we buying it for and why?

I must say, I have my weird fetishes and I love well-made things. Whether they're designer chairs, leather agendas, well fitting clothes or handmade shoes, I want it. But I don't necessarily associate "high-designer" brands with "quality".

I have a pair of real Gucci sunglasses, which have an awesome design, but are complete and utter crap quality. The plastic bends way too much, and the screws have fallen out many times already. I don't think I'll ever buy another pair.

I obviously don't mean to say that all designer brands are crap quality, but a lot of them are selling you the idea of quality and exclusivity while delivering bad quality products. Jaguars are one of the most expensive cars you can buy, but everyone knows that they are an electrical disaster on wheels. Couldn't tell by their million dollar commercials though.

There are however, a couple of brands that seem to bring out a certain fanaticism in their buyers. The brands with the most fanatic followers are not called "Brands", but rather "Love Marks".

Apple comes to mind. Never ever get into a discussion about Microsoft vs. Apple with an Apple user. They will defend it to their deathbed, or at least until you have converted.

Even I'm proud to say this article was written on an Apple, and that having an Apple makes me feel special, makes me feel like I'm part of the non-PC family, makes me feel cooler, hipper, more with it, younger and more computer savvy than your average PC user. A silly and emotional reaction to effective marketing and advertising?

Sure...

But I could also argue the fact that I prefer Apple's interface, usability, product design, retail stores and peripheral devices (such as the iPod). All these things that have absolutely nothing to do with their advertising image or promise, but rather with the overall design and usability of their products.

It's not a surprise Apple is doing so well. It not only promises quality, but it delivers it as well. Who ever thought laptops could be sexy anyways?

Designers did, that's who.

Designers are Con-Artists

After being in the field since I was 15 years old, one of the things I have learned about working as a designer is that we con people into wanting to buy your products. By shifting the focus from the actual product, to the shiny promise, (we all want to be cool and we all want to belong) graphic designers, advertising gurus and marketing people are taking control of what you buy.

There is no space or time to assume what people want, or even listen to what people want. Instead the current philosophy is to tell people what they want. By telling people what it is that they want, we are in control and not the consumer. Who wants to spend the time giving information about the actual product when we can sell them the shiny promise of belonging?

We are not trained to design products we are trained to design the promise of the identity of the product. Give you that sense of exclusivity. But since this visual promise has absolutely nothing to do with the actual product, and very often designers are completely uninformed about the product they're designing identities for, it very often just doesn't work.

We have created this beast of uninformed consumers who are making irrational choices because we have manipulated them into buying into the shiny colors and catchy slogans.

Just Do IT!

Branding makes us feel like we are part of a family or group, or sub-group or anti-group or whatever, but are we going to far when we talk about paper-cups in the same way? Do we really care what brand of paper-cups we buy? Do we buy into the paper-cup promise that if we buy these cups we are somehow part of that family? Do we care? Why not, if we care that way about jeans, shoes and coffee why don't we care that way about paper-cups? Where is the line, at what point can we say, we don't care?

We have generated even more chaos in already fickle consumers, and they're starting to distrust us and turn on us. So why can't we talk about the product? Are we so afraid of the truth of the product that we think people will not buy it? "Just divert them with shiny colors and slogans!" seems to be the norm these days. Is it really that boring to just talk about the product?

If I am buying a car, I am far more interested in the performance, design, usability, comfort and durability of the car than some shiny montage of clips where the car speeds through sun-drenched meadows with a professional driver on a closed course.

People used to love watching commercials in the 1950's, it was exciting to see what new products where on the market, but now, more than 50 years later, people are sick of it and fast-forwarding through 1 million dollar commercials.

Ouch...

The world is changing and traditional designers are going to miss the boat if they don't watch out. The time of selling hot air to unassuming consumers is over, and the time that we were in control is also over. Nowadays it's all about the consumer, customer, user or whatever you want to call it. They're the ones calling the shots, not us. Get used to it.