Aiden.Kenny.Blog

On Creating and Preserving Irish Digital Design

2018-10-17T15:53:00.001+01:00

I gave this presentation on behalf of Frontend.com at the 100 Archive’s ‘Save As’ event the National Library of Ireland in August 2018. The event addressed issues of how Irish design shall preserve digital content – websites, apps, software and systems – when our means of making, using and saving them evolve so rapidly.

The intention of my presentation was to explore the topic through the lens of a professional practitioner, and to identify questions that I thought were worthy of further investigation. So this presentation does not provide many answers. This is a slightly revised version of the script I wrote and which I did not deviate too far from in whatever extemporising I did on the night.

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Good evening.

Tonight I want to investigate whether we are taking the best approach in how we think about preserving Digital Design for future audiences. Do we tend to focus on the pixel, not the paradigm?

To set the scene, I need to talk about the kinds of work that we do in Frontend.com and how we go about doing it. The first thing most people think of when they hear Digital Design still tends to be websites. But, in reality, the scope of what we design is considerably broader than that. We design Digital Systems. That is combinations of front-end and back-end software which can be accessed and used in many ways. Whether that is over the Internet, in dedicated PC applications or smartphone apps, or even embedded within specific bespoke hardware devices.

We could be designing these products for use by general consumers, like this application. Or else be tailoring them specifically for particular cohorts of users such as financial analysts, medical healthcare professionals, and so on. Predominantly, these are tools that help people to achieve their goals in their working life.

I realise that not everyone in the audience this evening works in the Irish design sector. So, firstly, here are some useful definitions. In Digital Design we work in teams. These teams become get large and complicated, but at a high-level, the three core roles are User Experience Designers, Interaction Designers, and User Interface Designers.

To make a real-world analogy; let us use this library. (Note that this presentation was being given in the National Library of Ireland.) Working from the specific to the general. You can consider items such as this marketing leaflet as an aspect of the library’s User Interface.

The ways that the library’s contents are organised and how the physical spaces are configured, such as how many people the reading room can accommodate for example. Those can all be thought of as equivalent to its Interaction Design.

Then, at the highest level, User Experience takes responsibility for the overall experience people have here in the National Library. It requires considering every possible touchpoint, potential interaction, or conversation that people can have. Everything from the quality of your seat in the Reading Room, to the standard of coffee you get in the restaurant, to the kind of advice you get from the receptionist.

Now while this is an imperfect analogy, it strives to makes the point that a lot of the design thinking we have to do in Digital Design is concerned with Designing Experiences rather than Creating Artefacts. Obviously, this presents challenges when we want to consider how to preserve the outcomes of such design activities in the future.

If we think about the nature of the kinds of work activities being carried out.

User Experience is primarily delivered as a service: in workshops, design sprints, meetings, and conversations. While these processes produce a lot of ephemera, (the cliche of the wall of Post-it notes being the most obvious) there may not be much that can be archived in a meaningful way.

Interaction Design is the majority of the work. This produces copious documentation. So archiving those documents can be useful as they are rich in information. Although realistically we may have to consider archiving as periodic snapshots. I will go into more detail on that point later.

User Interface delivers tangible digital artefacts and its outputs are the closest equivalent to final end-products. Currently, these artefacts are the easiest to archive, and therefore are the most likely to be retained in the long-term by design studios. But the key issue to explore tonight is that the tendency to focus on this aspect of the process fails to capture the totality of Digital Product Design.

Digital Design Practices

In thinking about this topic it is important that we consider the behaviours and practices in use within Digital Design teams. How do we work today? How are the ways that we work evolving? How are the commercial realities that we operate within changing?

The most fundamental change that we have seen over twenty years in Frontend.com is that previously our projects were discrete units of work; with a tangible deliverable at their completion. The project scope was often such that we would be able to complete all tasks in-house, deliver something to our client, and later on showcase the work as something we had made ourselves.

It is not so simple anymore.

Digital Design now operates within an international context. For example, on a typical project today we could be working with Corporate Ownership in the USA, Product Management in Switzerland, and Software Development in Poland, with us providing the User Experience Design from Dublin.

The Digital Design deliverables which we create are typically an intermediate element within such large complex projects. Our outputs are taken by either the client’s own in-house development team or by their software partners who realise the final end-product from our specifications.

As a result of operating within these sorts of contexts, Digital Design processes have evolved in parallel with software development methodologies and practices. Clients have moved away from the so-called ‘Big Plan Up-Front’ approach of putting a huge effort into defined and numbered product releases, v1.0 and v2.0 and so on. Instead most now choose to work in a sequence of ongoing iterations.

Interestingly this means that our design output is never truly fixed and is always in a state of flux. When designers are operating within a cycle of daily releases, their everyday reality is like the old expression: ‘You can never step into the same stream twice.’

So operating in this context and thinking about digital archiving the first question becomes: where does one draw the line? At what point do you step off the wheel and take a snapshot to archive?

Digital Designer Behaviours

The next facet of this topic we need to explore is the mindset of today’s Digital Designers. Would they ever make significant use of any significant national Digital Design Archive, or would such a resource prove more valuable to an academic audience?

Based on my own observations, Digital Designers more inclined to look sideways rather than look back to precedent. That is, they seem more inclined to draw from international best practices, heuristics, and design patterns in their areas of expertise, rather than from a deeper history of design.

I suspect that this is the case because Digital Designer’s mental bandwidth is occupied with keeping afloat in the ever-present waves of technological innovation that just keep coming at them. The various disciplines of Digital Design are not yet settled. They are characterised by ongoing iterations and reinventions, both at the minute level of craft-based details and all the way up to fundamental paradigm shifts at the macro levels of activity.

Of course, we can hope and expect that these Designers do have the wherewithal to look to precedent for some overarching general principles of User Experience Design. But we are not talking about a long period of time here.

If you consider that the Nokia phones top left were the cutting edge of mobile UI when Frontend.com was founded in 1999. The first ever web page was only published eight years before that. Then seven years previously the core user interface patterns we all rely on today were being defined with the first Apple Macintosh. In that same year, Jet Set Willy was the level of user interface that introduced me to digital design on my 16k ZX Spectrum. Look much further back and at a certain point, you run out of reference materials once you get to punchcards in the 1960s..

So we can say that the realistic event-horizon of historical reference points for a Digital Design project does tend to be limited by whenever the underlying software or technology platform was created.

What Do We Preserve?

Every studio I have worked in has a dusty drawer full of unreadable ZIP disks, JAZ disks, CD-ROMs, and so on. Eventually, these legacy storage media do all end up in a skip and ultimately landfill.

In our studio, we do have a server with a working digital repository of projects going back to when we were founded. However, it is quite likely we may no longer have the means to access, edit, or even view a certain amount of those archived files.

It turns out that this is not actually much of a business problem. As there are few, if any, client requests to go back into our digital archive and engage with our older design resources and files.

Examples of our work where we can no longer feasible or easily view our end-products include:

Flex applications or Flash-based websites.
Applications that need specific Operating System versions to run.
Embedded Applications in depreciated hardware, particularly medical devices.
iOS and Android apps that only run on earlier releases of either operating system.
Applications that depend on depreciated cloud services to provide live data and content to present. When that data is no longer available or does not even exist, how can one represent those digital User Experiences in the future?

No Paper Trail

The paperless office is another factor we have to address if we are thinking about what design legacy may survive into the future. I am sure archivists would love to get their hands on lots of Digital Designer’s black leather notebooks crammed full of carefully hand-rendered UI concept sketches. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of less of those these days as well.

Today that process tends more towards collaboration. As, for example, in our studio the vital initial ‘thinking by drawing’ work all happens on the walls, the tables, and the desks. We have adapted nearly every flat surface in our studio for writing and drawing on.

While that facilitates an efficient process of Design, Redesign, Redraw, Erase, and Repeat. It ultimately means no physical paper trail and no permanent record.

What Should We Be Preserving?

We need to ask ourselves what is it that best captures the true essence of a Digital Product?

Does a dance step diagram capture the dynamic experience of the tango?
Does an architectural drawing capture the experience of walking through a historic building?
Does a UI specifications document capture the experience of using a complex digital product?
Obviously, the answer to these questions is no. Each is a facet of the designed experience, but none of them provides the complete picture.

If we visualise the Digital Product at sitting the centre of the context diagram below. Working outwards, to the left, there is the context of the user-facing hardware and interaction elements that house the digital construct. Do you need to archive those to capture the holistic experience of using the Digital Product?

Then working backwards, to the right, there is the vast ecosystem of all the potential inputs into the digital construct: content, databases, networks, location data, images, sensor data etc. Without those, the Digital Product is only an empty framework. So, do you also need to archive that to capture the holistic experience?

Novel UX Interactions

Now to add one further complication. We need to address the kinds of novel Digital Designs that may prove even more challenging to archive in future. As our smart devices are now location-aware, we observe more products which are deeply context-dependent. Think of the furniture app that shows you an augmented reality 3D view of how that armchair would look in your living room. The experience of these products is completely dependent on and tied to, the unique physical space that the app is being used within. You simply cannot replicate that experience in any another physical space. From an archival perspective, I would see these digital products as being akin to site-specific, location-based artworks.

Today our UX design practice extends to designing conversations. Experiences like chatbot interactions can be either text-based with an on-screen visual expression, or can be purely vocal. How might one archive user interactions for purely voice-driven technology platforms?

So while there has been a tendency to consider Digital Design in association with printed materials. There are interesting conversations to be had about exploring ways to preserve Digital Design which may have more in common with how physical objects are preserved in a museum or artworks in a gallery.

Possible Solutions

What we find interesting would be to consider approaches to how one would go about archiving Digital Design outputs which are:

Complex
Multi-faceted
Multi-platform
Multi-channel
Continuously Iterated
Use Live Data

The Pixel or the Paradigm?

At Frontend.com we find it most helpful to think of design as a narrative. It is more important to somehow capture as complete a representation of that narrative. For, if we only capture the pixels then we risk losing sight of the larger picture.

So, to that end, we have experimented with using narrative videos to capture the overall experience of our Digital Products by telling the story of those products. These videos include the products being used, along with conversations with their users discussing how the product's functionality and utility benefited them. Here is a short excerpt from one such video about the MyMilkman system we developed for Glanbia.

Perhaps narratives like this can point towards one of the necessary solutions to preserving the multi-faceted experience of using Digital Design products. I am looking forward to discussing this further with you all after we hear from our next two speakers.

Thank you.

Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

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‘Save As: Creating and Preserving Irish Digital Design’ was presented as part of Heritage Week and the European Year of Cultural Heritage. Other speakers included design historian Sorcha O’Brien and Joanna Finegan of the National Library’s Digital Collections Department. The 100 Archive is a community-centred initiative to capture and record the diverse history and practices of Irish graphic design.

Messaging Apps as the Operating Systems of the Future

2015-09-23T10:43:00.000+01:00

Photo: Aiden Kenny

I attended an interesting presentation by Paul Adams and Emmet Connolly at the ‘Intercom On Product’ event in the Mansion House on 9 September 2015. Their topic was messaging apps as the operating systems of the future. They outlined three noteworthy factors deserving our attention which are now setting the stage for what they posited as an oncoming ‘post-app era’.

The dominance of messenger apps, which are become better attuned to how we operate as social animals.
The improvements in contextual predictive systems, such as Android Now and Siri, which are bootstrapping themselves to ever-more sophisticated levels. The availability of ever-larger datasets is accelerating the pace and capability of global-scale machine learning projects.
The rise of push-button service ecosystems, such as Uber. In which the app is merely one surface aspect of the greater ecosystem — which is the true product.

As these three inter-related strands converge they will negate the need to install and use many of the kinds of apps that we all regularly use today. These three shifts in technology and culture have fare ranging implications for us designers. So, to help clarify my own understanding, I have summarised Adams’ main points from his presentation and his earlier writings on the Intercom blog. Some of the key ideas discussed were the role of bots and affordance of card-based interactions.

Photo: Aiden Kenny

Adams’ advises that it is critical for designers today to think in terms of overarching systems, rather than of individual destinations such as apps. For the reason that we should not expect our primary computing paradigm today – that of a screen of apps on a sheet of glass – to persist over the long term. Products and services are already morphing into ‘digital fluids’ that flow into different forms conforming to the affordances of their destinations. That process is only going to accelerate.

Change is one of the defining attributes of the Internet. Today this implies that UX and UI designers have much to learn from the skills and mindsets of adjacent disciplines: such as animators because now they need to design for time, and architects because now they need to design for space. There are many hidden traps in continuing to use tools originally conceived for static design to now create experiences that have change, movement, transition, and flow as innate properties. We need to choose our tools carefully, or indeed build all-new tools fit for purpose.

Designers need to understand that we are in the midst of a transition from an ‘Internet Made of Documents’ into an ‘Internet Made of People’. We humans are social animals. So it should be unsurprising that the most successful Internet companies, services, and products are those that leverage our innate social nature. Adams sees the successful systems of the future as those that can best leverage our information to provide ever-more tailored feeds of personalised content. (Just don’t be creepy.)

Intercom innovate at the level of Product Strategy and Product Concept, and not at the level of User Interface. Adams works on the basis that we are still only in the earliest days of the Internet Era. So, as we collectively shuffle forwards out of the dark, we are going to need to rely less on existing design paradigms. More often we are going to have to rethink from first principles. That means there are now amazing opportunities to investigate, explore, define, and craft novel interactions and design patterns.

One design challenge is that to move large numbers of users along any technology innovation curve, it is often necessary to only introduce iterative changes, so that you do not break user’s existing mental models and habitual workflows. Designers and developers are often early-adopter personality types — eager to move fast and break things. We need to remember that most people are not. Even on a (relatively slow) one-year cycle time, changes to Apple’s iOS are still treated as suspect by many types of users.

Adams explores the idea of replacing a screen of apps with a design pattern based on cards. Cards are one of the atomic units of the web, as explained by Brad Frost. Cards can be considers as containers for content from any app. You can observe this today in the interactive notifications in iOS and Android. So that more often we do not need to open an app now to act. The notification itself can be the complete experience for many activities.

Interface of Facebook’s ‘M’ product.

Increasingly the content of cards and notifications will be brief conversations and interactions initiated by bots. Bots can communicate to users via messaging interfaces (think of Slackbot and Facebook’s prototype personal assistant ‘M’). Bots can already take on many basic interaction tasks, and so leave humans free to address more nuanced interactions. In future a considerable amount of our time spent interacting with companies will be communicating with such AI-enabled systems. Just as we all once had to acclimatise to ATMs instead of bank tellers, so people will adapt to this mode of interaction as well.

Facebook’s new ‘M’ product is one facet of their current initiative to overcome their lack of a native operating system. ‘M’ places a novel AI assistant inside their Messenger app. Users interact with the service using natural language texts. Currently this is only a beta service limited within a strict geographic area. At present the nascent AI still has to be supported by teams of humans to ensure it parses user requests correctly.

However, I wonder whether one master-stream of notifications could ever make sense to users? Even today, my full Twitter-stream is such an overwhelming juxtaposition of friends, bloggers, news organisations, apps, parody accounts, and much more, that it is essentially unusable. So I depend upon my Twitter Lists to mentally shift contexts and to filter Twitter into a usable and beneficial service. I work with a different mindset, and range of potential actions, when I am reading my ‘Friends’ list than when I am reading my ‘Innovation & Ideas’ list. Classification tools such as Twitter Lists and Google+ Circles still seem to be more of a power-user preference. That said, lists are also a problematic design pattern in their own right. They make us define arbitrary categorisations. Unfortunately they need ongoing curation and regular maintenance to stay useful. Despite years of innovation and iteration no-one has truly cracked categorisation of social feeds yet.

Content within our apps is cumulative. Even the most diligent data-editors amongst us are always adding more contacts into our address books every year, following more people on social media, and accreting more connections on LinkedIn. These, and all the other data silos on our phones, represent ever-more opportunities for unwanted notifications. Any successful card-based interaction model is going to succeed or fail depending on careful tuning of the signal-to-noise ratio. Will that be better served by the user spending precious time curating and adjusting? Or will an algorithmic solution prove good enough? While we know that spending hours triaging email is neither an enjoyable activity nor a productive workflow, many people also spend blocks of time ‘going through Facebook’ or ‘getting caught up on Twitter’. These are the kinds of siloed activities that the proposed new interaction models seek to minimise.

How can design thinking help us to find the balance between people either achieving optimum flow and living in the moment with all timely and relevant information immediately at their fingertips, or descending into the near-adjacent possibility of existing in a state of permanent distraction?

One issue arising from the card-based systems discussed is – as they become optimised to present an ongoing stream of micro-events needing response or action – when will we get the time to sit, to think, and to process the inputs requiring more than immediate reactions? In one sense this is of course a personal question, relating to our own productivity habits and how mindfully we manage our time and our attention. That said it is also an issue that the technology industries need to address. If an ever-increasing number of notifications are not to overwhelm us, then automated filtering and prioritisation become critical problems to solve. Then we also need to consider whose algorithms do the filtering, and what do those entities gain from providing that service?

Adams poses these three questions:

The first is will this new model operate at the level of the app, or notification or OS?
Secondly, will these experiences occur in one consolidated stream, or in multiple streams?
Thirdly, will that stream be owned at a company level, or as an open interoperable standard?

His point is that apps are changing; they are not siloed destinations anymore. Increasingly we engage with them across multiple surfaces: notifications, cards, and whatever comes next, etc. Designers ought to think of apps as publishing systems and not as a destinations.

Disrupt Yourself

2015-09-11T15:50:00.001+01:00

In this week’s episode of The Critical Path, Horace Dediu interviewed Whitney Johnson, the author of the forthcoming book ‘Disrupt Yourself’. She has taken the tenets of disruption innovation theory and attempted to map them to career progression strategies. Which is an interesting exercise.

Her thesis is that in today’s world of work we can no longer rest on our laurels and presume that our current skills and competencies will carry us to the end of our careers. We are all going to have to disrupt ourselves many times throughout the arc of our careers. She outlined seven strategies you can implement to disrupt successfully.

1. Take the right kind of risks

She identifies two categories of risk. The first is Market Risk, where you innovate within your sector. “Play where no one else is playing.” The second is Competitive Risk, where you innovate against your peers. She observes that while our brains are wired to see Competitive Risk as being less risky than Market Risk, the reverse is actually true.

2. Play to your distinctive strengths

Transpose your skills into a new environment and propel yourself up the curve.

3. Embrace constraints

Understand that you are going to be constrained along some axis: be it experience, or buy-in, or time, or money. Those people who are most successful moving up the curve often impose constraints on themselves.

4. Battle entitlement

Do not fall into the trap of intellectual entitlement. If you are set in your ways of thinking about the world, then that makes it far easier for others to disrupt you. It is better to engage with people who disagree with you. Sharpen your arguments and learn more. “Stress yourself with an open mind to make yourself smarter.”

5. Step back

To practice self-disruption, you often need to step back in your career to catapult yourself further up the curve. Having support is critical at this step, so bring those closest to you along on your journey. Consider how you can give those people the confidence they need.

6. Put failure in its place

You can choose whether you view an experience as a failure or a success. Learn to see the process of failure as a process of learning. Humility humble in the face of that is key.

7. Be driven by discovery

Many successful businesses end up in a very different place than where they started from. “We like to think we can see the top of the curve from the bottom of the curve.” You need to be open to discovering our path by course-correcting along the way.

Worth a listen.
The Critical Path 158, ‘Disrupt Yourself with Whitney Johnson’

Digital Innovation Drives Breakthrough Customer Journeys

2015-08-25T10:31:00.000+01:00

David Edelman of McKinsey Digital spoke at LinkedIn’s FinanceConnect event in May 2015. His discussed using digital innovation to support breakthrough Customer Journeys, and how joined-up digital design thinking drives those initiatives.

His four linked imperatives, driving the ‘in-the-moment’ Customer Journeys that organisations shall have to deliver, are enlightening:

Real-time automation.
Interfaces allowing ‘in-the-moment’ interactions.
Proactive intelligence allowing just-in-time personalisation and optimisation.
Engagement that drives further innovation.

The idea of the Customer Journey as the pre-eminent expression of organisation’s brands has gained increasing currency. (Obviously Service Designers have been making that argument for years. It is interesting to hear leading marketers take up the case.) Digital innovations are obviously driving much of the innovation and the affordances for new services within those customer journeys. Any squeamishness about the benefits-to-creepiness ratio of such novel services are surely an actuarial issue.

Edelman warns large organisations that they need to uncover their own internal battlegrounds (what I would refer to as Strategy Taxes) which cause all of the compromises along their customer’s journeys. Legacy organisations need to resolve those internal battlegrounds, because those are precisely the key opportunity spaces for digital-first competitors to route around them and disrupt their way to success.

Another implication of his thesis is that marketers have a responsibility to really understand their company’s IT architecture. Creating truly novel service delivery invariably means innovating within the technological backend. Marketers need to understand what falls within the realm of the possible.

Finally, Edelman calls on large companies to shift their thinking and consider how they can possibly reorganise their internal structures around customer journeys.

On Design Language Systems 01: IBM

2015-06-16T13:00:00.000+01:00

One of my key professional activities is writing and designing brand guidance systems for companies and organisations. It has been a pillar of my practise for over twenty years. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to help people understand their organisation’s visual identity systems, use them effectively, improve them logically, and extend them thoughtfully.

Spread from Manuals One. ©Unit Editions.

As a corporate design aficionado, I have enjoyed spending many evenings pouring over esoteric design details in my copies of Unit Editions’ handsome publications Manuals One and Manuals Two. These two books, reproducing a rich selection of corporate design and identity guidelines from 1963 through to 2008, are an unrivalled design reference resource.

Cover of Manuals Two. ©Unit Editions.

However, examining the requirements of corporate design from the sixties and seventies inevitably got me thinking about the differences in how organisations use design today. At the simplest level, the underlying principles of corporate design still stand; while many of the various technologies of production, manufacture, and distribution have altered significantly, evolved, or have been replaced completely. At the more profound level, it is the ways that companies operate, organise themselves, deliver their services, and communicate with their customers, that have all changed most fundamentally in the last fifty years.

So it is worth asking whether the existing forms of design and brand guidance have kept pace with the ever-changing nature of the commercial entities which are their subject matter.

That line of thinking eventually leads one to enquire: what should designers strive to give as the most useful design guidance for the ever-increasing scope of digital expressions which are central to all experiences delivered by today’s organisations? While organisations will always require some form of brand guidance, I no longer think that itself is sufficient any more. I believe that the most interesting organisations today are having to evolve a more valuable approach of also defining their overall design experience frameworks. These frameworks are more all-encompassing than traditional brand guidance systems.

Four Design Language Examples

I think it is worth investigating some examples of the novel kind of design experience frameworks that I have in mind. These four organisations have each addressed different aspects of the overall corporate challenges to be expressed by design. They form a useful basis for study as they have made much of their design experience framework systems available online. These four sites are all rich in information and each is well worth delving into.

— IBM Design Language
To establish a unified digital experience across many digital products delivered by one global organisation.

— Google Material Design Framework
Towards a consistent digital user experience across many digital products delivered by multiple organisations, (but stewarded by one).

— BBC Global Experience Language
To establish a shared framework for a widely diverse range of content delivered by one global organisation.

— UK GDS Government Service Design Manual
To establish a shared framework for the digital delivery of a whole country’s public services.

(I like the elegance of IBM’s term ‘Design Language’, and will use that for the rest of this article.)

For the multinationals who are now the prime exemplars of these new corporate Design Languages today there are also larger strategic imperatives driving their investment in building these sorts of design systems. As such, their Design Language initiatives are just one strand within those organisation’s broader coordinated strategies: addressing their pressing need to engage with, and leverage, design far more seriously than before. (And also their equally important need to be seen as doing so.)

About Design Languages

The parameters of each Design Language depend on the characteristics of the each organisation’s products or services. For some organisations their Design Language would have more of a visual design emphasis. For others it would primarily address experience design, and for another group it would focus on digital design.

It is important to observe that all of those novel Design Language systems are discrete, and each is separate from their organisation’s brand guidelines. That point may seem somewhat nuanced, but awareness of that distinction is key to understanding the value that is unlocked by such Design Language systems.

Design Languages are primarily about designing the experiences of using an organisation’s products or services. They do not concern themselves with how an organisation communicates, promotes, explains, and sells what it does. Brand Guidelines are about designing those messages and communications around the products and services. The Jobs-To-Be-Done of these two complementary systems are different, so their incentives for excellence diverge.

So comparing them would be of little value. However, I think there is something to be achieved in exploring some contrasts between these two classes of organisational systems. My own professional experience primary concerns brand guidance systems, and my dissatisfaction with their inherent limitations has lead me to investigate Design Language frameworks.

Not every organisation has the need for a Design Language system. In contrasting Design Languages with brand guidance systems, I think that a critical, almost philosophical, difference is that a Design Language must start from the basis that everyone agrees that *design is what the organisation does*. If an organisation’s culture excludes that shared belief, then agreeing upon any shared Design Language is not relevant. Therefore, one significant issue to be aware of is that building any Design Language inevitably requires decisions about how broad or narrow an organisation’s definition of ‘design’ truly is.

Some thoughts on IBM’s Design Language

Starting with the first of the four organisations on my list, I have familiarised myself with the IBM Design Language system. Introduced in 2014, this is a significant organisational effort to collect a corpus of the essential principles of design that apply to IBM’s customer’s experiences of using all IBM products.

IBM delivers hundreds of products with a global organisation of around 380,000 people. Given that IBM is now building a substantial internal design function and is hiring ambitiously to populate that division, it needs a cohesive design system to operate at a global scale, and at the pace of the Internet economy. Explaining the reasons why design has become such a priority now, at this particular point in the lifespan of a one-hundred-year-old organisation, is beyond the scope of this article. For an insightful overview of their design vision and priorities watch this presentation by Phil Gilbert, IBM Design’s General Manager, at this year’s IBEC ‘Better Business By Design’ Conference here in Dublin.

IBM’s new Design Language system aims to bring a renewed focus on human-centred, empathic thinking to what has been an engineering-driven culture. This is now a critical corporate imperative in today’s world, where it is the experience of using digital products and services that is delivering true competitive advantage, more-so than brand reputation or authority. This has not traditionally been the case in the Business-To-Business sectors IBM operates within, but has now become one of the critical metrics for success.

A feature graphic from the IBM Design Language website. ©IBM 2015.

IBM’s Design Language is evolving. It cannot remain static. Their online Design Language resource records the current state of what has to be an ongoing dialogue within IBM. As IBM’s brand guidelines are tools for certain internal audiences, such as marketing managers, and external design and advertising agencies; so their Design Language is a shared framework for IBM’s designers and developers to build the organisation’s products. As such, IBM have structured their Design Language into four sections on Experience Design, Visual Design, Interaction Design, and Front-End Design.

A feature graphic from the IBM Design Language website. ©IBM 2015.

IBM’s Design Language does not instruct their designers how to achieve any particular desired design outcomes, rather it provides a shared conceptual framework. The system is primarily concerned with outlining their high-level design principles and is not intended to be an exhaustive explanation of every aspect of design. (IBM has an ever-growing cohort of trained designers on staff, who will be carrying such design fundamentals around in their heads.) So it is not a suite of integrated design elements providing libraries of digital assets and resources, like Google’s Material Design. Nor is it an out-of-the-box design toolkit, such as Twitter’s Bootstrap. Yet, in publishing most of their framework online, they have also expressed greater ambitions for its wider adoption outside of IBM.

My reaction as I read through the IBM Design Language site was that, although it is already a large corpus of information, I initially thought it was perhaps too high-level and lacking in specifics. In many paragraphs, the authors could have extracted every single sentence to serve as the title for a sub-section detailing how to deliver on that specific statement or goal. However, when I had read and absorbed everything, I understood how their intent was not to specify the answers to all design problems with a toolkit of detailed design patterns. Rather their goal seems to be build an extensible framework which they can improve and refine over time with further inputs as IBM’s designers apply it to ever more real-world products and services.

A feature graphic from the IBM Design Language website. ©IBM 2015.

The significant focus of the IBM Design Language is on design-for-use. They aim to build products which serve as tools that make their customers more effective and efficient. One relevant quote from their framework is that: “a design is not done until a person interacts with it.”

An important outcome of keeping their Design Language at a high-level is that aspects of the IBM Design Language can also inform design thinking. So the organisation can apply their core design methodology to many types of business use cases.

“To emphasise how Design Thinking is not solely about visual design, IBM have used this approach with internal teams creating APIs. In the case of an API there is no UI at all.”

‘IBM Design: Think before you speak’ – Creative Intellect UK

Additional benefits of developing a Design Language

The key benefit derived from the effort expended in defining a Design Language lies in the organisation’s enhanced design output. That said, they also seem to deliver ancillary benefits as well.

One benefit of a Design Language is as a tool which sets a baseline for all design conversations and feedback within an organisation. Some of its utility must arise from the act of taking certain aspects of design discussions off the table. It must allow the organisation’s design leadership some additional leverage when having the kind of conversations that start like this. “Today we all need to focus on this specific aspect of this design challenge – as our high-level design principles are already in place and so are not for interrogation as part of this project.” Brand guidelines also play the same internal management role for communications design projects.

I can see Design Languages also providing better organisational focus through educating internal clients; by better explaining aspects of what designers do. So that, when evaluating design work, internal clients can hopefully display a greater understanding of the various strata of thinking underlying the design decisions being reviewed. Considering Design Language frameworks through that lens, then they do not need to be exhaustively comprehensive. (Any expanded encyclopedic version, if it was ever to exist, could be a dedicated resource for the organisation’s designers alone.)

Language-In-Progress

The defining characteristic of all Design Languages is that they are never finished. They are an artifact of an ongoing conversation that each organisation is always having with itself. As such, rather than being outsourced to external design agencies or brand consultancies, the onus is on organisations to develop, manage, and steward their own Design Languages. The organisation needs to own design.

The macro-trend of the resurgence, increasing relevance, and importance of in-house design departments is a significant topic I have addressed in previous posts and will return to again. John Maeda recently published an insightful contribution to that ongoing discussion: Why Design Matters More than Moore’s Law.

The potential of Design Languages

The theoretical ideal of an organisation’s brand guidance system is as a platform for establishing a complete, coordinated, and coherent suite of messages, communications, and brand experiences. It must strike a fine balance between the quotidian, tactical, operational requirements and the long-term vision and goals of the organisation.

Unfortunately, in practise, many brand guidelines become used politically. Rather than opening up the complete range of possible expressions within any brand framework, they can become more focused on limiting options. Effectively, they become used as one mechanism to corral the divergent incentives and strategy taxes which exist within the organisation’s power structures. Robert Jones, the Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins, has written about this limitation of brand management in companies lacking a shared unity of purpose.

It most likely may be naive to imagine that corporate Design Languages can deliver on some of the ideals which brand guidance systems still struggle to achieve. Particularly given that such design initiatives are inevitably subject to the same organisational political forces that influence brand management activities. Yet perhaps the fact that Design Languages have user-centred mindsets embedded within their foundations may make them less prone to being undermined by organisational priorities.

To me the most interesting aspect of the potential of Design Languages lies in applying design thinking, methods and insight to the core of what organisations do as opposed to what they tell people about what they do. Writing as someone who enjoys problems requiring systems-thinking solutions, I am fascinated by the intellectual endeavour involved in developing a complete Design Language. It is a significant challenge; one I would relish contributing to.

Notes and Thoughts From The ‘Hidden Rooms’ Conference

2014-12-08T13:00:00.000+00:00

I took part in Dublin City Council’s ‘Hidden Rooms’ conference in November. DCC convened more than 350 participants over two days to brainstorm 16 policy issues in a variety of interesting locations across the city. Each room was asked to formulate a pilot project that could be be actioned by DCC in 2015. I was asked to join room seven ‘The Rewarded City’, discussing ideas for incentivising and supporting creative entrepreneurs in Dublin‘s emerging cultural cluster.

On the topic of the Rewarded City
The one quote that most resonated with me on the day was from Anne Miltenburg, the international contributor to the Rewarded City room. She outlined a massive challenge as: “how to make our cities hard-wired to accept new ideas more easily”.

That challenge is one of the major underlying themes of the Hidden Rooms event (and arguably of last year’s DCC/Pivot ‘Designing Growth’ event as well). It also segues with my own understanding of some broader DCC agendas. Although it is also worth noting Anne’s experience of the difficulties she outlined in trying to get some crowd-sourced innovation projects started in Amsterdam. Their Government believes that people doing things for themselves does not necessarily save any money. As the Government argues that they then have to ‘spend time monitoring what those people are doing’. So that becomes a disincentive for Governments to encourage such innovative, bottom-up activities.

Other interesting ideas that I took away from the conversations about the topic of rewarding creative entrepreneurs were that, as public bodies do not have much money, therefore they are reluctant to put any money that they do have into anything risky. So the State ought to focus to provide enabling mechanisms for creative entrepreneurs, rather than reward mechanisms. Creative entrepreneurs will create rewards, not accept them. Volunteerism is not the solution to anything (in the long-term). The strategic alignment of self-interest is what actually works. True creative entrepreneurs will say: ‘I am going to do this anyway whether you help me or not’. And paradoxically those are the people who get support.

Photo: DCC/Pivot Dublin

On the process and methodology
I have recorded some insights and lessons from the workshopping day of the event. Primarily I made these notes and observations as guidance for myself for whenever I am facilitating any similarly-structured brainstorming sessions in the future.

The central idea behind Hidden Rooms was to gather an interested cohort of people together to brainstorm ideas around key policy areas. With the intention of creating novel ideas unconstrained by the limitations of the perceived conventional thinking.

One insight shared with me about this kind of process and methodology was that ‘people can be enthusiastic and keen to take part; but not have the mental tools to take part effectively’. One participant observed that in Ireland we do not have a history of working together in large groups. We tend to operate best in smaller groups, or in one-on-one scenarios. That is a general cultural limitation which we all need to overcome. One which initiatives like Hidden Rooms are intended to challenge.

One primary risk of this group brainstorming approach can be that he ideas which the group produce are either too naive or too top-level. That they are just variants of ideas the client has seen before, or tried already. Or that they are merely what the client might expect from a group which has only been thinking about complex multi-faceted issues for four or five hours. (In contrast with the deep domain expertise of the client.) I do not think that possibility was actualised in the outcomes from Hidden Rooms. That can only be known in the longer-term, when the number of initiatives and ideas that were fully implemented can be measured.

Another insight from the workshop day is that, to make ad-hoc interdisciplinary teams work most effectively within concentrated time spans, all of the participants would be best served with a comprehensive background briefing on the project; so that they have a clarified context to operate within. Otherwise, a substantial amount of time is needed simply coordinating the group around the specifics of the topic they are to address. That leads to the issue of what is the optimal amount of briefing time on the day? Working within a fixed timeframe, the ideal should be to maximise the amount of brainstorming time. A related question then is; how much pre-event briefing is too much? If you send people a comprehensive brief, of say ten-pages, will they all read it in detail beforehand? There is definitely a trade-off here.

It turns out that the expertise of the facilitator is hugely critical to the group successfully generating insightful Design Thinking outcomes. This may actually prove to be the greatest influencer on the outcomes within compressed timelines. The facilitator can cloud the issue easily if they do not actively listen to the group and follow the dynamic of the conversations. Yes, the day needs to be managed and the activities must progress within the allocated timeframe, but staying wedded to a predetermined agenda can prove counterproductive to this type of engagement, when conversations are still in flux.

You also need a domain expert in the room (in this case the DCC client). They need to provide the necessary context to anchor the new ideas being generated. But the intrinsic problem is that the expert also has a strong understanding of what is unlikely to work and what has being tried already — which can prove to be a limiting factor on idea generation. It is critical that the facilitator and domain expert work well together. They need to be in general alignment. They need to liaise and coordinate prior to the workshop to ensure that their goals and aims align.

How could the activities of the working groups in each room be improved for subsequent events? Would it be limiting to predefine the necessary sub-groupings in advance? That could ensure that each sub-group includes at least one person capable of taking on the ‘snowplough’ role (possibly an architect in the specific case of the Hidden Rooms remit) and one other person who is an experienced Design Thinking practitioner. Either of whom could run the cooperative idea generation process on their own, if necessary. That approach could either optimise efficiency or reduce spontaneity, so would depend on the personality and dynamics of individual rooms.

Update
DCC have now published the initial outcomes from Hidden Rooms on the Pivot Dublin site. The specific outcomes from the Rewarded City room are at this page.

A Future For Designers — Expanded and Annotated

2014-11-14T08:00:00.000+00:00

We all know that we need to innovate. But which of the different classes of innovation should we expend our best efforts on? That choice effects the kind of futures we shall build. What novel roles could designers play within those futures? If it is not going to be what we expect or desire, what can we designers do to future-proof our careers?

That was the description of my presentation to yesterday’s Defuse Dublin event. I had to condense my message dramatically to fit into the five-minute Petcha-Kucha format. I hope that posting this comprehensive version here along with source material links will prove useful to all those interested in this topic.

I am interested in what it will mean to practice as a graphic designer in future. Not in the far-flung future; but within the span of our own career horizons. It is too easy to think about what is happening in graphic design this month, or what is coming up in the next quarter. Sometimes it is worth taking a longer-term view. Thinking about what changes lie ahead for the design sector; for the overall role of graphic designers; and in the professional activities of individual designers in five, ten or twenty years time. While acknowledging that such futurology contains elements of guesswork, we can extrapolate from existing trends. The workplace of the future will look different to that of today, and most likely entirely different to that of just a decade ago.

So, what trends are potentially coming down the line that are work thinking about? Automation is not a topic we discuss much within the design sector. In a real sense many aspects of knowledge work and creative work can eventually be automated. This is the prospect facing all white collar careers in all economies. Watch the fascinating documentary ‘Humans Need Not Apply’. Its key messages are:

That automation does not need to be perfect — it just needs to be better than most of us, most of the time.
That automation is not bad — it is simply inevitable.

I will accept that film is somewhat apocalyptic. But, if we can get past immediately dismissing it as being of little relevance to the creative economy, it does offer us much to think about. It is not only taxi drivers who need to be concerned in the face of automation. We graphic designers are not protected in some unique creative sector bubble.

Over the last thirty years technology has disrupted and depreciated the roles artworkers and typesetters in the design sector. Throughout the nineties many of those people’s careers migrated to being aspects of graphic designer’s job descriptions. Now it looks possible that many of those design tasks will migrate further on to various forms of automated algorithmic technology.

A lot of my day-to-day activities involve writing and designing corporate identity systems. Essentially that is creating design languages and visual grammars for organisations. This establishes a coherent framework for other graphic designers to create within.

Corporate identity manuals are transitioning from nouns to verbs. They began as hefty physical publications and evolved through PDFs to become online resources. Soon they will become APIs.

One can think about corporate identities as high-level pattern languages with many iteration potentials. Unfortunately for some, quite a lot of everyday graphic design work is based on understanding, manipulating and re-purposing of such pattern languages.

Africa books montage by Simon Stevens.

What would be involved in designing another cover for a new book about Africa? Or perhaps creating the icon for a new To-Do app? If we believe that these – and many similar graphic design tasks – cannot ultimately be automated to a greater or lesser degree, then it is likely that we are fooling ourselves.

Such graphic design automation will begin with the design of relatively structured and formulaic materials. It will not begin by automating high level ‘creativity’ per-se. That said, rather than being science-fiction, or the white-paper aspirations of professional futurists, this is already possible.

At a simple level, consider the fascinating service: ‘Paper-Later’. This merges a read-it-later-style bookmarking app with the automatic layout of personal, customised, physical newspapers, printed and posted to you. Do these newspapers have a rudimentary and limited design layout? Yes, of course they do. But remember this is how disruption starts: at the simplest, almost trivial, level. Which is easily dismissed by the incumbents.

It is likely that the relationship of post-human algorithmic design to the accepted Canon Of Significant Graphic Design will be as the musical output of Pop-Idol is to, say, The Beatles. But, in many situations, it will provide the minimal viable solution. Design elitists may wail and gnash their teeth and rend their garments, but the pattern of disruption has been well mapped-out for all industries at this stage. It seems improbable that graphic design would prove to be the exception.

It is notable that IBM’s Watson has already proven its prowess at answering natural language questions. It won the US game show ‘Jeopardy’ and already supports medical professionals in making treatment options for their patients. So automation can already win game shows, compose music and write news articles. But are many of the human skills supporting advanced Design-Thinking too complex for any artificial intelligence software to handle?

We designers pride ourselves upon being creative thinkers who imagine novel solutions for a living. So it should not be a stretch for us to imagine creative algorithms which could design as well as the average designer today. Now, I am no AI research scientist. But for tonight, I have sketched out this quick wire-frame of a rudimentary ‘Design-O-Matic’ algorithm in my notebook.

I am an early-adopter and an anti-Luddite. So I am not discussing automation as a negative phenomenon, more as an inevitability. The correct response to the ‘Lump Of Labour’ fallacy has always been that new innovations open up new roles and free people from less skilled tasks to pursue higher callings. Yet, many experts are concerned that things may not pan out that way, this time around.

Read more: Lump of Labor: Certainly a Red Herring, Albert Wenger, 2014.

So, bearing all of that in mind, we need to ask ourselves: how many graphic designers will actually be needed in the future? And what kind of careers will they have?

The premise underpinning the related future theory of the ‘Gig-Economy’ is that all knowledge workers or members of the creative classes who do succeed in retaining a career shall have no choice but to operate as On-Demand, Super-Specialised, Free Agents serving the tiniest niches within a frictionless, Internet-enabled, global economy.

The most unnerving aspect of that future scenario is that only a small percent of the global population will be smart enough for the level of careers remaining. Ergo, only an equally small percent of the designer population will be smart enough for the remaining creative jobs. Will there be one-percent who provide the novel design solutions which provide the stimulus material for the other ninety-nine percent?

In such a scenario, the critical question then is whether the design-related jobs which are displaced by technology can be replaced at the same rate by those Gig Economy careers? (And how long before someone brainstorms a working business model for the Uber for Graphic Designers? Or even one for brand consultants!)

Learn more: Exponent podcast, Ben Thompson and James Allworth, weekly .
Read more: Airbnb CEO Spells Out The End Game For The Sharing Economy, Venture Beat, 2014.

In our personal response to all such speculative futures we can choose to be fatalistic, or to be excited and inspired. For many graphic designers our future is going to have to be less focussed on design-craft skills. If automation will not displace those jobs in the near-term, then it could be off-shoring, or the ongoing democratisation of design via smarter tools. All those forces are already acting on the graphic design sector.

But it is not all bad news.

Paradoxically, at a time when some designer’s careers will face their greatest challenge, there is also a potential upside for others. There is a parallel narrative of new opportunities for those designers who are prepared to reinvent and reorientate themselves with new mindsets, and in new roles. It remains an open question what proportion of graphic designers will have the appropriate levels and forms of creativity required to succeed within these new economic landscapes.

Read more: It is OK to Worry about Work, Albert Wenger, August 2014.

Illustration by

One of the traditional career trajectories for designers has been to devote less time to their graphic design craft skills and more to developing their soft skills in consultancy and client advisory roles. Those trust-based roles should prove less amenable to automation in the medium-term. The disciplines of Service Design, Experience Design and Design-Thinking are examples of horizontal activities that broaden the scope of designer’s activities and roles.

Within the graphic design sector the practice of entrepreneurship has traditionally been limited to setting-up design studios. Most those have been lifestyle businesses and SMEs, and rarely economically significant enterprises of scale. Of course, starting such service agencies is entrepreneurial. But what about the designer’s role being neither that of a service-agent nor an advisor? What about designers taking on more of a true leadership role as drivers of innovation?

Wired magazine claimed that fifty percent of startup founders have engineering backgrounds with only six percent have design backgrounds. Most graphic designers have a maker’s focus on building their expertise in their craft. Or at least that is where they tend to start from in their careers. The personality-type of an entrepreneur is characterised as not being expert at any single discipline — except leadership. They have to be ‘good enough’ at many different disciplines and know when to delegate. Yet, both entrepreneurs and designers have skills in iterating and problem solving.

It is striking that 60% of Fortune-500 CEOs cite ‘creativity’ as the most important quality of leadership today. To me that suggests that we graphic designers need to broaden our conception of success. About one-third of today’s Fortune-500 CEOs have engineering backgrounds, rather than pure business backgrounds. What if, in future, one-third of such CEOs had design backgrounds?

Read more: The Economist Special Report: Technology Is Not Working, October 2014

We can observe that — as the value in many products and services migrates upwards to the experience level — design-thinking skills are now deemed critical, valued, and sought-after. In recent years the international business and technology media have started reporting more frequently on the value that designers now bring in setting the agenda and leading organisations.

This narrative is that designers are amongst those best placed to capitalise in the future economy by focussing more on creative thinking and problem solving.

“Over the next few decades demand in the top layer of the labour market may well centre on individuals with high abstract reasoning, creative, and interpersonal skills that are beyond most workers, including graduates.”

Read more: Silicon Valley's New Secret Weapon: Designers Who Found Startups, Fast Company, 2012.
Read more: The Interface Layer: Where Design Commoditizes Tech, Scott Belsky, 2014.
Read more: Why VC Firms Are Snapping Up Designers, Fast Company, 2014.

The role of the ‘Designer-Founder’ is a notable new career path. This is someone who uses her design-thinking mindset and problem-solving methods to build businesses that are far more ambitious than service agencies. The challenges within the problem-spaces that many startups are starting to explore now benefit dramatically from experienced design-thinking. The time is right. The opportunity is now and the need is there. No-one is arguing that designer-founders are better than founders with technical or business backgrounds. Rather they complement each other.

Read more: Advice for Designers Who Want to Be Founders, Eoghan McCabe, 2013.

A relevant question to ask is what proportion of graphic designers do have these kinds of leadership aspirations? The answer is now more than has ever been the case before.

That said, it now seems probable that an ambitious cohort within the graphic design sector will decide it is economically most advantageous to abandon the artisan career path or the professional-service career path and step up to the founder career path. Indeed, there are already historical precedents for this type of industry-wide phase-change, most notably in Engineering.

So it is informative to note that incubators only for design-founders are appearing in the US, along with some dedicated venture capital funds such as ‘DesignerFund’. Initiatives like the experimental designer school ‘30-Weeks’ are pioneering the approach of equipping designers with the skills needed to start enterprises, after years of trying to teach startups about design.

We should ask ourselves what potential there is for similar initiatives here in Ireland?

Read more: 30 Weeks: An Experimental New Design School, Backed By Google, Fast Company, June 2014.
Read more: Google Funds a Design School That Works Like a Tech Incubator, Wired, June 2014.

Airbnb’s Brian Chesky & Joe Gebbia, Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann & Evan Sharpe, Path’s Dave Morin, and Tumblr’s David Karp.

Looking internationally, there are already examples of high-profile, market-disrupting companies whose founders have design backgrounds. I am sure you are all familiar with Air-BnB, Pinterest, Path, and Tumblr.

No-one argues that Designer-Founders are better than founders with technical or business backgrounds. Rather, that they complement each other.

Some VCs even claim that the core of start-ups has evolved from an ‘Engineer plus Hustler’ partnership. The new ideal is a trio of Engineer plus Designer plus Hustler.

I think it will be interesting to observe how different the priorities of organisations led with a design mindset will be in comparison with those led by a Technical mindset. Perhaps Designer-Founders will envisage and build a different kind of future to complement the visions of technology founders?

Intercom’s Eoghan McCabe & Des Traynor, SeeSearch’s Hilary Kenna, Thoughtbox’s Cristina Luminea, and Drop’s Zachary Davison, Ben Harris, Jonny McCauley & Jack Phelan.

While that trio startup model is now unexceptional on the US West Coast, Designer-Founders are still only a niche here in Ireland. But we are seeing some home-grown Irish startups with designers taking on key roles in their founding teams. While many of these are just out of incubator stage, there are certainly a few we can learn from.

Read more: Find Your Niche And Put Focus On Design, The Irish Times, November 2014.

How is the Irish third-level graphic design education sector grappling with these ideas and economic imperatives? The colleges will have a key role to play in encouraging and transmitting the entrepreneurial aspects of design thinking to the graphic designers of tomorrow. Have they started planning for these futures? Their critical challenge will be that colleges need to foster such entrepreneurial mindsets while they have been configured to graduate graphic designers with an agent mindset.

Ten years ago I attended a talk by Professor Christopher Frayling. He praised what he thought was the under-rated calling of being an “everyday graphic design tradesman”. He argued that educators need to realise and accept that not every student is going to be an iconoclast, a paradigm-changer or a design visionary. He argued educators should be content to train some people to be competent journeymen designers. I do not believe that is a viable strategy any more if we face a combination of automation and a Gig-Economy marketplace.

Obviously third-level design departments cannot just flick a switch and turn on some entrepreneurial acumen within their students. But there is little value in preparing their students for careers that may not exist when they graduate. I spoke with some of the design departments about this. While I found them aware of aspects of these challenges. The slow pace of institutional reaction times and the challenges in evolving their approaches frustrated some of those educators.

So, the future of graphic design work may be far more different than we expect. This third kind of career path will not suit all graphic designers. But, ultimately I think many of us are going to have to realign our mindsets from serving as agents or trusted advisors and step-up to acting as instigators.

The issue then becomes: how do we best prepare ourselves to operate in that capacity?

Read more: What It Takes To Be A Lead Designer At A Top Startup, Designerfund, 2014.
Read more: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, by Seth Godin.

Quote from Merlin Mann, episode one of Roderick On The Line.

All this tells me that if you are a graphic designer, you need to work actively on keeping yourself relevant. Ask yourself:

What aspects of your work might simply just *go away* in the next five years?
Then identify what new areas of expertise you need to start building today.
Focus intensely on how you add unique value that cannot be readily replicated.

You need to design the arc of your own career.

Read more: The End of Design As We Know It, Dan Saffer, September 2014. (That post has a lot of crossover with my presentation. I had drafted most of this essay in August and September, before that post was published, but you can imagine how I felt when I read it!)

So, who will be the potential founders, leaders and innovators within our design community in Ireland? Perhaps it is you? Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow. But at some possible point in your future career. So do not close the door to that possibility.

No one is going to choose you. Choose yourself.

Postscript
I think it is important to note that this essay is not intended as an incitement to jumping aboard some happy-clappy ‘Wantrepreneur’ bandwagon. This is not a call to all graphic designers to abandon their craft skills and just release their inner Jobs/Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg. Obviously, the third career path discussed will not suit all graphic designers. My point is about recognising that there just are not going to be the same amount of artisan or service-agent design roles required in future. So staying active and relevant within the graphic design field may need a broader mindset and a willingness to apply the core abilities of the Design-Thinker to a new set of opportunities.

Presentation Video
IxDA have now posted videos of all of yesterday’s presentations on YouTube. So here is the live version of my talk.

Acknowledgements
Writing an article like this does not happen in a vacuum. I road-tested some of my ideas, and investigated the background with some knowledgeable people. So my thanks to Valerie Haslam, John O’Connor, Barry Sheehan, Hilary Kenna, Jill Barry, Amy Neale, Conor Clarke, David Smyth, and Shirley Casey for their contributions.

Defensive Inertia

2014-11-04T11:58:00.000+00:00

As I was distilling and percolating the themes for my forthcoming Defuse presentation, I ended up also considering the different ways we can unintentionally stall our own progress. Think about these three examples.

What’s the problem?
In general I am the person least likely to watch sports-related films. Although 2011’s Moneyball tells a story of American baseball, its theme is really disruption – a topic much closer to my own interests. The film charts the rise of statistical quant methodologies in team construction and player selection.

There is one critical scene where the protagonist Billy Beane confronts the Ancien Régime of grizzled talent scouts responsible for recruiting new players. He explains the true challenges being faced and they summarily dismiss him and his methodologies.

That scene has stuck with me because, whatever business we are in, it is always too easy (in many situations) to gradually fall into the role of that dismissive old guard. As we gain experience, we all develop skills giving us the fast insights, accurate rules of thumb and so-called gut instincts that made those talent scout characters successful in their careers. The danger lies in believing that whatever heuristics have worked for us before will continue to work in future.

However, the true skill is in knowing when the underlying topology is changing and the accepted ground rules are no longer operating. Do not find yourself defending the wrong territory.

Trapped in amber
Last year I attended the screening of the documentary Linotype at the National Print Museum. Many in the the audience seemed in tune with the nostalgic aspects of that film, which was in part a paean to simpler times. When the Linotype machine was introduced it was an innovative and disruptive technology. It allowed newspapers to expand their page counts and frequency of publication. During the era of Peak Linotype, thousands of people were employed worldwide operating those machines. Anyone still capable of operating a Linotype machine today is a novelty: either a nostalgic anachronism encased within an academic/museum setting, or else a decidedly retro design-hipster.

Reflecting afterwards, I think I gleaned a different message from the film than most of the audience. What struck me most was that when Linotype was later overtaken by superior technologies many who had once made successful careers as Linotype typesetters abjectly failed to adapt and make further progress in new or adjacent activities. What would your Second Act be, if the parameters of your industry were to change as dramatically?

Arrested Development
The third idea that I have been mulling over is how the concept of arrested development (loosely interpreted) can apply to our careers. The flip side of attaining high degrees of competency in anything, is that you can blind yourself to your own further potential in greater areas of operation. You can all too-easily define yourself as the person who only does X, precisely because you are one of the best there is at doing X. Yet, you could be even better at Y…

Obviously this poses an ongoing conundrum to all of us throughout our careers. This crosses over with the notion that ‘knowing what you need to know’ is a complex, recursive challenge facing all knowledge workers and members of the creative classes. Merlin Mann has been addressing this recently, both in his Back To Work podcast and in his recent talk Advanced Tricycling at this year’s 34e developer conference.

So a loose assembly of those three ideas was in the back of my mind as I composed my talk ‘A Future For Designers’. I think that the take-away here is that we always need to beware of getting ourselves stuck by defending our own personal status-quo. (Even though we most often do so with the best of intentions).

Speaking at Defuse Dublin 2014

2014-10-24T13:00:00.000+01:00

Detail from what might just be my favourite slide.

I am delighted to have been invited to speak at this year’s Defuse Dublin event in November. The line up of speakers looks interesting and this should be an enjoyable and educational evening.

The topic of my presentation is ‘A Future For Designers’. (Well why not aim high?) I reasoned that it would be somewhat ambitious to try and figure out *The* Future For Designers — never mind then trying to present that within five minutes. But thinking about one possible future seems a worthwhile intellectual exercise.

I submitted this original outline for my talk back in August:

“We all know that we need to innovate. But which of the different classes of innovation should we expend our best efforts on? That choice effects the kind of futures we shall build. What novel roles could designers play within those futures? If it is not going to be what we expect or desire, what can we designers do to future-proof our careers?”

The final version of my talk is not as expansive as all that, given the realities of tailoring my message to fit twenty slides delivered in five minutes.

This talk can be considered as a third instalment of an ongoing exploration I began in Applying Design Thinking to Big Data, Uber-fication, The End of Average and The Capitalist’s Dilemma and continued in The Future Of Work And The Internet Rainforest.

(And if I had more than five minutes, my talk could have included more slides on Christensen’s Disruption Theory as well as some Pixar Easter Eggs, cartoon hipsters from the Simpsons, Morpheus’ Red Pill/Blue Pill from The Matrix, and hard-take-off AIs. Who knows, maybe next time?)

Hopefully see you at The Sugar Club on the thirteenth.

The Future Of Work And The Internet Rainforest

2014-10-01T13:30:00.000+01:00

This year Exponent has become my primary must-listen-to podcast. (I am still hugely appreciative of The Critical Path podcast, but it has gradually drifted away from a weekly schedule.) What makes the Exponent format unique, amongst the podcasts I listen to regularly, is that the hosts Ben Thompson and James Allworth usually tackle a topic by taking two different analysis and having a robust debate to dig into the topic and uncover new insights. There is a lot to learn from their full and frank exchanges. I find their probing dialogues to be successful because, in general, they are dissecting the ideas – not the person proposing the ideas. I always strive to live up to the maxim of ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’. So I think it is always educational to see how someone well-invested in one thoughtful analysis can revise their position in a debate that brings new insights to the surface.

Recently I have been doing some investigations around the topic of ‘The Future Of Work’. The twelfth episode of Exponent ‘The Internet Rainforest’ delved into aspects of that topic. To appropriate one of Allworth’s preferred superlatives this particular topic is ‘super-interesting’. There are many significant changes already underway in the way that labour markets are going to operate. With no guarantees of positive developments for the majority.

The aspects they discuss reflects Thompson’s career where he has established a viable niche as an analyst/blogger/pundit/podcaster by cultivating an audience of paying subscribers. They discuss whether the majority of viable careers will have to take similar forms in the future, and how many people shall be capable of operating at the required levels. They develop an intriguing metaphor of an ‘Internet Rainforest’ to represent the extremes within future labour markets: with colossal omni-national corporations above in the canopy and nimble techno-artisans below on the forest floor.

As I have already transcribed selected excerpts from episode twelve for my own notes, I hope that, by sharing them here, others may find them useful as well. I have attributed each quote to BT (Ben Thompson) or JA (James Allworth) and given an approximate time stamp. One disclaimer: I have lightly-edited portions of these transcriptions for clarity, mostly by omitting conversational repetitions.

One of the absolute outcomes of the Internet may be the end of super-large companies. (BT ~19.50)

If you start a company on the Internet your addressable market is in the billions. So even if your niche is only point-one percent of four billion, it is still a very big number. (BT ~20.30)

It is like you can longer have super-large companies now because they cannot be large enough any more. (BT ~22.20)

My thesis is that there is going to be a massive bifurcation between very, very large and very, very small and everyone in the middle will go away. (BT ~23.40)

I am imagining this Rain Forest with these massive trees, but this interesting canopy down underneath that is growing and harbouring all of this interesting life. But there is literally nothing in between the two. That is the economy that the Internet is creating. (BT ~28.00)

I am reaching an infinitesimal sliver of the Internet, but the Internet is so huge that it is a meaningful amount. On the flip side: huge sites get more huge. They are reaping the benefits just as well. Meanwhile everyone in the middle, who has neither the focus nor the huge scale, is going out of business. (BT ~28.30)

What is the future of jobs going to look like? It is going to look messy; just as the Industrial Revolution was messy. However, whenever we do reach that future, it is going to be a more individual, artisanal society. Where people do something super-specific that they are really freaking good at. And they are able to reach a sustainable audience through the Internet. (BT ~30.30)

[The questions are] how technology is changing the ways people work and where the gains will accrue. They will increasingly flow to a few people who will become really big winners. Folks that are concerned about how the Internet is going to change employment and contribute to inequality are not Luddites. They have identified that something has changed fundamentally in the way that the labour market operates. (JA ~39.20)

Technology increases efficiency. Those efficiency gains accrue to the owners of capital and not to labour. The people who actually do the work, not only do they not make more money, but they are not even needed. That is all basic Marxist theory: but what Marx got wrong was that machines in the time of the Industrial Revolution were dumb and did not take that many jobs. Now machines are smart and just because people were wrong to say machines would take over human jobs previously, does not mean that it is not going to happen this time. Also, it is not like it was super-great the last time. The Industrial Revolution took decades and two world wars to work its way through the system. (BT ~40.20)

In the Industrial Revolution, the number of new jobs and their value outweighed the number of old jobs that they replaced. So the question is: will that be true again here? (JA ~43.10)

How fast can we come up with these new types of jobs? And can we come up with them at a rate faster than we are losing jobs to automation? (BT ~44.00)

What is encouraging is that this is a clear call-to-action for how we can meaningfully create the future and overcome those problems. (BT ~44.20)

The longer-term question is: are there potentials for everyone not working inside [a large multinational at top of the Internet Rainforest] to be doing the kind of thing you are doing? (JA ~45.20)

If you start breaking the seven(?) billion people on the planet into these little niches: are there enough niches to support the vast majority of the world’s population doing these kind of jobs? The skills required have evolved from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age onto the Information Age. It sounds like creativity is going to be something that allows people to flourish on the forest floor. Are there enough creative people out there to do that? And if you are not creative what happens to you? (JA ~45.40)

Another way to frame your question is: will the number of niches outpace the gains to the power curve? (BT ~46.30)

In any particular niche there are going to be just a couple of big winners. And so when I talk about the long tail: it is not that there is a long tail within a niche, it is that there are an infinite number of niches. Because, in a particular niche, the whole reason the niche is now possible is that you can reach everyone on the planet. There is going to be the single best person who does X, and if you are the fifth or sixth best person who does X… Well that is where the tension comes in. (BT ~47.00)

My hypothesis would be that there are going to be plenty of fifths and sixths; and the world we moving towards does not behave too kindly towards them. (JA ~47.30)

Even after the Industrial Revolution the vast majority of people do jobs that they don’t like. This is not a utopian future. (BT ~48.00)

We started with 98% working on farms. We ended with 2% working on farms. The problem was that industrial jobs increased more slowly than jobs on the farms disappeared. That meant we went through a wrenching change over decades that manifested in all kinds of ways, through economic upheaval and wars. (BT ~49.30)

When you have a system where things don’t line up temporaly, then you have the chance for all kinds of ruptures and fissures in society. To me that is a clarion call to us in Tech. (BT ~50.40)

Everything is accelerating. We don’t want to overly pattern-match, So why assume? Just because it took a few hundred years before; it does not necessarily have to take a few hundred years this time. (BT ~51.30)

If you find the ideas in those excerpted transcriptions engaging, then I urge you to listen to the complete episode here. The other episodes are worth delving into as well (there have been nineteen to date).

The Design Of Service Design

2014-09-03T12:05:00.001+01:00

Service Design has been one of my ongoing topics of interest. It is something that I have been triangulating towards for many years. I have it up on my mental whiteboard in a group of topics addressing how designers can move further up the value-chain in an environment of commoditisation. I also have identified it as another hedge against that future impact point whenever the phenomenon of ‘Software Eating The World’ finally puts white collar professions and the creative industries on the menu.

With that in mind, I recently participated in the Service Design Masterclass at The National College of Art and Design. The organisers may have mis-calibrated the naming and positioning of their summer school experiment. ‘Service Design Bootcamp’ would be a more accurate name. As this three-day course was no theoretical wander through the conceptual underpinnings of the discipline of Service Design. Rather it was an intensive, headlong dash through the Service Design process. We worked from initial research on the first day, through to taking a suite of prototype services out to market on day three. Ré Dubhthaigh, Lynsey Duncan and Sean Miller hosted the course which itself was a prototype of a new kind of offering for NCAD.

I have captured my initial reactions and learnings in this post. There is more that I still need to unpack long-term, but it is valuable to record first impressions. Just to note that I will examining this through the lens of brand consultancy, as that is my current area of focus. These are not my final thoughts on the subject. The course participants came from a broad variety of disciplines, including architecture, UI/UX, graphic design, planning, academia, innovation, and in-house service delivery, amongst many others. So the learnings from this course have a lot of other useful potential aspects of analysis.

The chosen course methodology was ‘Learning By Doing’. Which seemed prudent given that so much of the fundamental theory is available online and in books. What that method delivered was a tangible sense of the culture and the atmosphere within a Service Design team. While I have read some books on Service Design over the last three years, I never grasped that core cultural essence before. That is not something you can grok from books or websites – there is no comparison to just doing it. I have a working understanding and appreciation of the specific kinds of internal cultures that differentiate Design Studios, Internet Agencies, Advertising Agencies, PR Houses, Branding Consultancies and related enterprises. Now I think I can add a clearer understanding of the three P’s (the mix of People, Processes and Priorities) that might typify a Service Design Agency as well. What is interesting is that it is a culture with quite a different stance and attitude to what I am used to operating within. So that makes developing a Service Design competence more of a challenge than I had envisaged. But it is a positive challenge.

Reviewing first day’s work in progress. (Yes it is designers looking at Post-It notes on white boards.)

One key fact I have taken away (blindingly obvious in hindsight perhaps) is that organisations are building new services and refining their existing services all of the time — consciously or unconsciously and with or without the help of dedicated Service Designers. So there are many opportunities out there for design thinkers to contribute. The challenge we need to set for ourselves is how to add value and become useful participants within those processes. Thinking about many of the organisations that I interact with, (and using a metaphor given on day one) it seems obvious that many are still building their services from ‘back-of-stage’ outwards rather than from ‘front-of-stage’ inwards.

The most profound difference from the professional offerings I am accustomed to is that the design component of Service Design is fundamentally about co-creation. Design Agencies and Brand Consultancies primarily operate from a stance of expertise. Yes, there is an emphasis on working closely with their clients, of course. But in practice that only goes so far, at a certain point the experts go off on their own and return later with their considered response for the benefit and edification of their clients. Service Design is far, far more about discovering the best solutions together.

So being a good facilitator is a key skill for Service Designers. The working assumption seems to be that the Service Design experts alone cannot find the best answers. They must form them with the integral participation of those who deliver the service. While my own practice of delivering brand consultancy does include a significant amount of workshops; those are usually with C-level participants. When workshops have been with service-delivery teams they generally have concerned mining for raw materials or gathering information to filter upwards.

Service Design sits at the intersection between Research and Design. Both aspects are integral to delivery. The designers need to be researchers and the researchers need to be designers. The kind of research used in the Service Design process is all about listening. I found it to be much more exploratory and open in testing assumptions. The research I am more familiar with, is sometimes concerned with finding the necessary evidence to buttress a certain position.

Ré in action.

The clichéd narrative about design is that clients do not understand it, and it is always something that merely gets added on at the end. While that is often indeed the case, it is also worth remembering that some client organisations do perceive ‘design’ as being about true problem-solving at a higher level, whereas they consider ‘branding’ as only about messaging and communication. Some people see branding as a subset of design: others see design as a subset of branding. The fact that both of these terms have become empty signifiers is something we simply have to deal with. Yet, that does not imply we cannot work their imprecision to our own advantages either. So, depending upon the particular emphasis taken by a client or potential client, Service Design can be proffered on its own, or else as an integrated element within a larger project offering.

I think the biggest challenge facing experienced designers is the learn to let go early and then go out and test ideas that are only half-formed, or quarter-formed even. I can just imagine the initial reaction of some of my designer friends to the prototyping mantra of “Early, Ugly & Often”. The fact that much of the Service Design practices outlined on the course do work best when the prototypes are almost un-designed is a mindset that is challenging to engage with. I can see how well this approach works. But overcoming the well-worn grooves of minimal design quality habits is a non-trivial exercise.

A friend of mine has been putting together a great novel framework of organisational personalities. It is based on the metaphor of everyone being either Tinkers, Tailors, Soldiers, or Spies (with suitable apologies to Mr. Le Carré). Within that model, the members of the design community are predominantly ‘Tailors’ by nature; obsessing about the fit-and-finish of every detail of every single thing they do. Service Design asks us to step outside our traditional mindset and become ‘Tinkers’; adept at putting things together using whatever is to hand to discover what works.

On-street interview to reality-check our prototype service.

The kind of rapid iterative prototyping we did on this course is far messier and rougher than anything that we would consider in my current practice. But, critically, that does not mean that it is uncontrolled and chaotic — it is just that the control has shifted to a different axis. Ré recalled a pertinent quotation that “a prototype is worth a thousand meetings’. While I do know that from my own experience, what I would have considered a prototype before is so much further realised and polished than anything we produced on this course. I suppose that for those of us with a design background, our innate response it that a consistent high degree of finish is a key aspect of the value we deliver. That is now something I need to recalibrate.

Productive chaos

Early in the course Ré and Sean deftly side-stepped the issue of precise academic definitions. I got the sense that parsing the nuances between Service Design, User-Centred Design, Human-Centred Design and similar terms was a potential conversational black-hole which could have swallowed a lot of time. From where I am operating, the relevant matching term would be ‘Brand Experience’. We would include much of the activities and deliverables of Service Design would within the remit of that phrase. Yet, it is always worth bearing in mind that intra-sectoral naming debates do fall prey to the Narcissism of Small Differences (if that reference is too Psych-101, just think the ‘People’s Front of Judea’ and the ‘Judean People’s Front’).

I approached this class in a spirit of enquiry and curiosity, and with a willingness be challenged and to learn. The worst outcomes from investing time into this kind of enterprise is to come away thinking either “I knew most of this already” or “this does not apply to me”. Where I have ended up is that Service Design as a methodology and mindset would be a challenge worth taking further.

One opportunity arising from this initiative is perhaps to start forming a nascent community of practice around Service Design here within Dublin. I have been assembling a Twitter list of the course attendees which anyone can subscribe to. There is also an excellent masterclass Tumblr which has a comprehensive photographic record of the activities conducted.

Finally, on the lighter side, over the three intensive days we somehow also managed to address a significant amount of tangential, yet critical, issues and topics of the day. To throw out a few examples: we discussed how challenging it is for dolphins to use the Internet effectively. We explored the pros and cons that we might associate with the founding of an international ‘Festival of Questionable Digestion’ taking place in Dublin’s Liberties district. We also made a tentative diagnosis of ‘Post-It Sole’ as a common pernicious malady that afflicts Service Designers in particular. We also did some inadvertent primary research into Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as it pertains to the inverse relationship between the tea and caffeine intake of professionals and their learning acumen.

Spot the Service Designer’s room!

Update

Two other class participants have blogged their responses to the course.

Johnny Ryan wrote: Designing services for smarter business

Cat Drew wrote: Policy Lab goes back to school

This Week In Disruption Theory

2014-07-03T23:00:00.000+01:00

There has been much useful online debate and commentary this week, incited by the New Yorker’s cover story: ‘What the Theory of Disruptive Innovation Gets Wrong’. Jill Lepore’s article is both an overview of Clay Christensen’s theory of disruption and a critique of what she sees as its key failings. Despite a lot of flawed analysis, the article is worth reading, even though in my opinion it seriously loses its way towards the end.

Lepore asserts that there is a lack of rigorous analysis and critiques of disruption theory.

“Disruptive innovation as the explanation for how change happens has been subject to little serious criticism, partly because it’s headlong, while critical inquiry is unhurried; partly because disrupters ridicule doubters by charging them with fogyism, as if to criticize a theory of change were identical to decrying change; and partly because, in its modern usage, innovation is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box.”

I am a strong believer in always questioning assumptions and in always probing the accepted wisdom within different fields of activity. So any increase in thorough analysis, informed debate, and productive critiques of disruption. I am also unfamiliar with the relevant formal academic literature on the topic. So I can not comment on the amount and rigour of serious criticism. To be transparent, my own readings on disruption theory have all come from (some decidedly non-academic) online technology and business publications and blogs. There is a lot of informative and educational material out there. Although I do need to make the time to read Christensen’s original thinking in his books.

Lepore argues that some supporters of disruption interpret the idea too broadly.

“But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt… When an established company succeeds, that’s only because it hasn’t yet failed.”

She also critiques disruption theory for its failure to provide accurate predictions.

“This is less because people have used his model to make accurate predictions about things that haven’t happened yet than because disruption has been sold as advice, and because much that happened between 1997 and 2011 looks, in retrospect, disruptive. Disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact.”

Joshua Gans correctly analyses this flaw as being a result of Christensen’s own dilemma.

“He saw his theory as predictive even though its own internal logic says prediction is impossible… The Innovator’s Dilemma is like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. You can’t get around it and Christensen’s failing is that he has sold it as something you can get around”

In his role as an academic Christensen needs to be able to position himself as a mentor for future business leaders. So this forces him to need to present some light at the end of the tunnel.

Ben Thompson makes the critical distinction that Christensen has identified two different types of disruption, and that Lepore has conflated the two. The first type is ‘New Market Disruption’, where new technologies with asymmetric business models gradually take the market away from incumbents. The second type is ‘Low End Disruption’ which asserts that, in the long-term, modular products succeed against integrated products. This theory applies to B2B businesses but its criteria and assumptions do not necessarily translate to B2C businesses. As Gans describes:

“You can’t actually ‘disrupt’ an industry with a technology that most consumers don’t like. There are many of those. To distinguish a disruptive technology from a mere bad idea or dead-end, you need a second criteria — the technology has a fast path of improvement on precisely those metrics the industry currently values.”

The most insightful clarifications that I have learned from this recent round of debate are, firstly, that disruption is most useful in retrospect, to explain why a business or an industry has failed. By definition, the theory can not predict which one from a cohort of potential challengers is going to successfully disrupt any industry. Steve Denning observes:

“But the theory sheds insufficient light on the question of how do you tell a dangerous disruption from an illusory one. There is no clear metric of disruption. All disruptions are not equal.”

Secondly that the alternative innovator’s solution – of acquiring the ascendant challenger at the appropriate time – seems more successful than the original 2003 solution of businesses attempting to disrupt themselves by establishing isolated skunk-works within their organisations. Think about Facebook spending US$19 billion to acquire WhatsApp earlier this year, in contrast to their gestures towards self-disruption with their exploratory Paper app. Denning observes that:

“The ‘innovator’s solution’ isn’t a solution to the innovator’s dilemma. It doesn’t neutralise the forces hostile to innovation; it merely postpones the task of finding a solution to a later date.”

One final takeaway from this article is that the idea of disruption has now reached the point where its awareness amongst a broader audience means that many people are using the term indiscriminately and inaccurately. (Obviously disruption is not a new topic: The Innovator’s Dilemma was published in 1997.) The word disruption is becoming neutered, and is on its way to becoming an empty signifier. So we can no doubt expect a lot more ill-informed commentary and criticism which is not referring to the core idea at all. In fact I would be surprised at this stage if no-one has begun writing the Freakonomics-style mass-market paperback summarising the essence of disruption theory. Although, as an aside, anyone needing a useful primer to share with someone unfamiliar with the topic should start with Dedieu’s excellent and concise ‘Disruption FAQ’.

I have become interested in disruption theory because I am interested in change, and in the effects of change on individuals, on organisations, and on society. While we are in the midst of any process of change it is difficult to be objective about the scale of its impact. That only becomes measurable in retrospect. I concede that when we are undergoing change we can tend to over-estimate the long-term impact. Yet, even with that awareness, I do believe that we are now in a period of fundamental change happening at many different levels. I find that grappling with the ideas at the heart of disruption theory provides perspective on macro-forces of change operating today.

Disruption is one of those ideas which step out from the pages of academic publications and business books into an awareness amongst the broader culture. I think that is because we can all see its effects in the world around us. Some of us see it as a narrative of potential: a mechanism to affect change in the world. Many others still see it as something to be afraid of. Yet the ongoing outcomes of multiple disruptions are going to effect us all today and in the years to come. So for that reason alone it is worth making the effort to understand the theory.

Linked Articles
‘The Disruption Machine: What The Gospel Of Innovation Gets Wrong’ – Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 2014.
‘Clayton Christensen: Are Investors Bad For Business?’ – Steve Denning, Forbes, 2014.
‘The Easy Target That Is The Theory Of Disruptive Innovation’ – Joshua Gans, Digitopoly.org, 2014.
‘The New Yorker: Battle Of The Strategy Titans’ – Steve Denning, Forbes, 2014.
‘What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong’ – Ben Thompson, Stratechery.com, 2013.
‘The Disruption FAQ’ – Horace Dedieu, Asymco.com, 2014.

Is Brand Strength Any Defence Against Big Bang Disruption?

2014-06-10T13:25:00.000+01:00

One open question arising from my previous post about disruption and design thinking is whether brand strength (1) provides any potential defence or hedge against disruption?

At this stage we are all familiar with the narrative of true business model disruption. Entire industries, such as travel agents and book shops, have been made made redundant as low-end disruptors reinvented the rules of those businesses within a few short years. For accuracy I will also include Thompson’s complimentary concept of ‘Obsoletive’ technologies which posits high-end innovations that make older technologies obsolete.

For businesses to survive disruption, they need to abandon and completely rethink their long term strategic plans. The old rules no longer apply. As Steve Denning observes:

“Big-Bang Disruption is just one of the more dramatic symptoms of this broader and deeper economic phase change: the emergence of the creative economy, where continuous transformational innovation is the game being played.”

It is trivial to come up with examples where disruptive or obsoletive innovators have destroyed the value of incumbent’s brands (as a by-product of destroying their business).

Think of the many mobile phone manufacturers who had built global brands (most spectacularly Nokia) only to have them wiped out in less than five years by the disruptive market entrants iPhone and Android.
The Walkman brand for mobile music was so dominant in its time that it became the default name for a whole product category. All of that brand’s value was destroyed when Sony's internal politics allowed MP3 players to disrupt their business.
Yahoo had established the pre-eminent brand in the area of Internet search before Google arrived with PageRank, an innovative alternative approach to search, and completely disrupted Yahoo’s business. Now Yahoo licenses search technology from Microsoft.
Garmin lost 85% of its market capitalisation in the eighteen months following the introduction of Google Maps.

Counter examples are more difficult to find. What are the relevant examples of businesses under sustained Big Bang Disruption who succeeded in using their brand strength to delay (or avert) their decline?

The disruptors begin by attracting the low-value customers and then capturing more of the high-value customers. So during disruption, the classes of business assets that brand consultants leverage: brand equity, corporate reputation, even customer service experience, all become progressively irrelevant as customers migrate to the disruptor’s better, cheaper products.

My opinion is that Big-Bang Disruptive business model innovation routes around brand strength and makes it redundant. Therefore it is probable that brand strength only operates within markets based on standard competition of similar business models.

So while the methodologies of branding, as currently configured, may not be fit-for-purpose in defending against disruptive business models, it remains an open question as to how one would re-invent or re-orient branding so that it could provide more of an effective hedge against disruptive competitors.

A related question is how then should branding consultants effectively engage with companies undergoing Big-Bang Disruption?

1 — Note on ‘Brand Strength’
Up to now I have been using the phrase ‘Brand Equity’ too loosely in my writing. I became irked by the confusion around that phrase caused by both a vagueness of terminology and a variety of definitions. Kapferer (New Strategic Brand Management, 2008) proposed that brand equity is composed of three aspects: brand assets, brand strength, and brand value. With brand value being “the profit potential of the brand assets, mediated by brand strength”. So, in the context of this article the relevant aspect is the strength of a brand.

Applying Design Thinking to Big Data, Uber-fication, The End of Average and The Capitalist’s Dilemma

2014-05-02T15:08:00.000+01:00

An overview of some of the compelling ideas and business innovation themes that are influencing my thinking at the moment.

Over the past year I have been investigating the topic of Design Thinking. I have been documenting some aspects of my explorations on this blog. However, I realised that I had only been considering Design Thinking as a theoretical methodology. Organisations can use its methods to address issues at all scales: from small design problems all the way up to large-scale economic and policy issues. I had not considered any potential challenges worth tackling with Design Thinking.

In my readings of the first part of this year, I have noticed some relevant emerging themes.

The Potential of Big Data
The Impacts of Uber-fication
The End of Average
The Capitalist’s Dilemma

I have selected these four themes for this post, as I think they interconnect, build upon, and influence each other. And also because they align with some of my own areas of interest. There are many other related and relevant themes and trends which I have omitted due to constraints of time.

I am interested in whether and how organisations could use Design Thinking and Service Design methodologies to address aspects of these themes. These are all macro trends and their initial connection to Design Thinking can appear tenuous at first. Yet one other key theme from my readings is that many people now believe that the insights and novel combinations delivered by the application of Design Thinking methods – and indeed by bringing the skills and mindset of professional designers to bear on a much broader range of challenges – should, in some part, contribute to the sort of idea generation, realisation, and implementation that can help organisations address today’s big challenges.

1 — The Potential of Big Data

From my perspective, it appear that we are experiencing a time of accelerating exploration and development of novel business models due to many overlapping actors and factors. Big Data is a global macro-trend that is acting as a scene-setting backdrop and enabler to many novel activities and potential innovations. Consider these sample data points.

• Beyond PC
There are already 7 billion mobile connections held by 3.45 billion unique mobile subscribers worldwide. One billion more people will soon own smartphones in the near future. Each of those devices will create extra data and contribute to the global network.
Read: ‘Postmodern Computing’ on Asymco.com.

• The Golden Triangle of Disruption
Social, Mobile, and Real-Time technologies are all aligning to cause far bigger changes than organisations had ever anticipated. These new consumer habits and expectations are outpacing current organisational structures and fractures. So organisations are having to scramble to catch up, or even just to keep up.
Read: Digital Transformation Report 2014 by the Altimeter Group.

• The Internet of Things
Everything is becoming connected. More and more devices are providing inputs into the network. Google recently spent $3.2 billion acquiring Nest which produces data-enabled devices for the home: such as smart thermostats and smoke detectors. Over 11 billion sensors are attached to the global network today, by 2020 predictions are for over 50 billion sensors. What can we do with the new kinds of knowledge arising from the patterns in all this information?
Read: ‘In Praise of Boring Objects’ by Tom Coates.

What is also intriguing is that, up to now, smartphones have only had rudimentary awareness of their surroundings. The ways that low-cost, low-energy iBeacon technologies are starting to provide an API for the offline world and close the physical attribution loop for online services means that business innovation in that area is only in its infancy.
Read: ‘On The New Edge Network and The Future of Local Commerce’ on Stevecheney.com.

• Smarter Cities
Everything is becoming connected. IBM are focussing on this aspect of Big Data and public services are very invested. Optimising all aspects of city infrastructure both to bring efficiencies in city management and improvements to citizen's quality of life will only become more important as populations continue to grow.

• The Quantified Self
Big Data can also be personal. It can concern our individual health. We can now generate and analyse data that encourages our own behavioural changes. "Big Data is made from Small Data." The Quantified Self is enabled by technologies such as the (just-retired) Nike Fuelband and the iPhone 5S which already has a dedicated motion-tracking co-processor. Indeed Apple are poised to bring take niche activity into the mainstream with talk of dedicated “HealthBook” features coming to all iPhones this year in iOS8 (and with their rumoured wearable product as well).

Big Data is going to spawn many new innovations in business and services. Opportunities that we are only now beginning to imagine. I believe that the Design Thinking mindset will have much to contribute in exploring potential use-cases and implementations, and can provide significant inputs at this inflection point.

But problems and negative reactions also lie ahead when the consequences of hyper-efficiency start to play out in local economies.

2 — The Impacts of Uber-fication

One significant transformative impact on businesses arising from Big Data-related innovations – which we have already entered the early stages of – is the potential for the so-called ‘Uber-fication’ of local-scale economic activities. The new category of On-Demand Mobile Services – apps, such as Uber and AirBnB, that aggregate consumer demand via mobile devices, but then fulfil that demand through offline services – could deliver multi-billion market opportunities.

While this is a technology-driven phenomenon, it would be a grave mistake to view it solely as a technology disruption. This one is going to play out at a societal level. There are two notable effects of this disruption.

On the buy-side, the levels of customisation and optimisation of services for the users is compelling and has delivered competitive advantage. This has already started to re-set customer expectations for many other services. People are becoming accustomed to buying services in ways that the end-supplier may have difficulty transitioning to. Push-back against this disruption ranges from the street level: protestors attacking Uber taxis in France and picketing Google buses in San Francisco, up to formal regulatory and governmental responses.

On the sell-side, certain services are becoming markets. Hailo’s CEO spoke at last year’s Dublin Web Summit alluding to the broader scope of the Hailo/Uber resource allocation business model. In effect, this model is accelerating the migration of many new categories of service providers to more of freelance-based, gig economy. So these models are disrupting the fundamental nature of many occupations. It may be taxi drivers and B&B owners today, but it may well be white-collar professional careers next.

Ring-fencing existing business models, and wishing things would stay the same is never a successful long-term solution. The fact that these dramatic changes to the ways that services and markets relate, and to the ways that people think about services and interact with services, are all happening right now provide many challenges and opportunities for leveraging Design Thinking.

Moving on from the disruption of service markets, let us consider the future of white collar professions and knowledge workers.

3 — The End of Average (or the Death Of The Middle)

One thing the Internet does particularly well is disseminate knowledge. In all markets the addition of knowledge allows for more discernment: we know who is the best and who merely claims to be the best. So the Internet begets Power Law differentiations. Sure, there is a long tail, but influence accrues at the head of the curve. We are only beginning to experience the fallout from the collision of society’s normal Bell curve with the Internet’s Power Law curve.

The global newspaper industry is a topical example. What is happening there is a clarification between ‘news’ and ‘newspapers’, which are not the same thing. (Although for the majority of their existence up to now they had seemed to be.) The previous economic constraints of time and place that always supported mid-tier newspaper titles have fallen away now that everyone more-or-less has access to the best of journalism. Those businesses are failing one after another. We need new business models for new entities – not revised business models for out-dated entities.

So what careers lie ahead for the tens of thousands of journalists who used to occupy the middle of that bell curve? This has huge implications for economies and societies in the long-term.

“Then think about the millions of others in all the other industries touched by the Internet who are perfectly average and thus, in an age where the best is only a click away, are simply not needed?” “The challenge of our time is figuring out what to do with a population distribution that is fundamentally misaligned with Internet economics.”

Read: ‘Fivethirtyeight And The End Of Average’ on Stratechery.com.

Design Thinking is associated with dealing so-called ‘wicked problems.’ I think these themes fall within that category. Addressing issues of those magnitudes needs new thinking. They will requires cross-disciplinary thinking and no single actor will resolve them. So the next question is: has anyone started to chart to path forward?

4 — The Capitalist’s Dilemma

I think that businesses and policy makers could investigate and engage with Clayton Christensen’s thesis of ‘The Capitalist’s Dilemma.’ He identifies three types of innovations and observes that we are focusing on creating the wrong sort of innovation.

• The first type are ‘Empowering’ innovations. These transform complicated, expensive products that had been available only to a few people before, into simpler, cheaper products available to many. The Ford Model T was an empowering innovation, as was the PC. What is important is that these innovations create many direct and indirect new jobs for the people who will build, distribute, sell and service these products.

• The second type are ‘Sustaining’ innovations. These replace old products with new. They are necessary to remain competitive against competitors.They keep economies vibrant, but they have a neutral effect on jobs.

• The third type are ‘Efficiency’ innovations. Efficiency innovations almost always reduce the total number of jobs within an industry, by allowing fewer people to complete the same amount of work (or even more work). The problem is that we have become so good creating at such optimising efficiencies without balancing them with new empowering innovations.

(Guess which type of innovations we focus on most within this country?)

Organisations have relied on measures of efficiency that focused on the short term, which leads them to invest in sustaining and efficiency innovations instead of funding the big ticket empowering innovations that pay off over long time frames.

Over the long-term this pattern is problematic for many reasons. Christensen posits that, to avoid the twin perils of trapping capital in silos and decreasing employment we need to get far better at creating empowering innovations. Easier said than done.

Read: ‘Christensen: We are living The Capitalist’s Dilemma’ on CNN.com.

Aside: while we may not be kickstarting the next Manhattan Project or moon-shot anytime soon, we do need to explore some longer term projects. (What about colonising Saturn anyone?)

The way forward involves innovating our way to growth. Innovation has become a somewhat redundant term through overuse. Horace Dediu has provided us with a useful critical lens through which to parse real innovation from mere novelty.
Read: ‘Innoveracy: Misunderstanding Innovation’ on Asymco.com.

In conclusion

Global, societal, economic and cultural challenges are complex and multi-faceted. They have no single source of solutions. Design Thinking is another toolkit people can draw upon to tackle such looming, large-scale, intractable problems. Its methodologies have application to many relevant and pressing areas of investigation. Organisations, in both the commercial and the public sectors, could benefit by using Design Thinking methodologies and practices to generate and explore new empowering innovations.

On Sticker-Speak

2014-04-28T16:37:00.000+01:00

Some of the stickers available within Facebook’s Messenger app.

In a March 2007 post subtitled ‘How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Just Get With The Blip-Post Programme’ I wrote that

“the ultimate logical step will be for someone to create a social networking site that just posts individual tag words on their own…”

While I was positing that notion with tongue firmly in cheek, it is interesting to observe that we now do have the ability to communicate using absolutely simple, single-concept message units. The emojii-based stickers of today’s messaging apps are the example I have been thinking about recently. At first glance the idea behind these stickers appears trivial, indeed faintly silly. Scroll through the sticker selection panels in any messaging app and you will see rows of cute cartoon characters over-acting and gurning some exaggerated emotion.

But I think that if we look a little bit deeper there is something interesting going on here. So, while the audience for this blog is unlikely to embrace the use of pictographic stickers in their everyday messaging, it is always worthwhile for anyone working in branding, design and app development to observe the trends and be aware of what different kinds of communications are bubbling up.
People are choosing to use these stickers to communicate in some manner. So they definitely have a job-to-be-done. What that job may be, and indeed what might be the minimum that we need for viable digital communication seems worth exploring here.

Minimum Viable Communications
Firstly, I do not think that it is a given fact that the idea of simplified, single-concept message units would necessarily be seen as useful and become broadly accepted. That core idea needs to be provided as a service in a manner that people find appealing to use. In the mid-nineties, when I was doing a lot of design work for Telecom Eireann, mobile phones were still expensive products aimed at businesses. Telecom Eireann tried to kick-start a youth market for pagers as a more price-appropriate product. They launched a range of pagers in Ireland with a heavily promoted and expensive Eurotrash-themed advertising campaign which struggled and failed to make pagers seem hip. Although hobbled by ill-advised advertising creative, the real downfall of the product was that, given the available technology of the time, the low-budget devices could only send three-digit numeric codes. People could not message each other in plaintext. So to use a pager you needed to carry a booklet with an unwieldy list of arbitrary meanings ascribed to those numerical pager codes. Something like ‘234 = I am running late’ and ‘678 = Drinks later?’ The pager market never took off. The limitations imposed on communication outweighed the promise of being able to communicate on the move. The target audience just ignored pagers and waited for mobile phones to become affordable. So this was not a failure of the idea of simplified minimal communications per se, but rather of their service execution in a form that was difficult to use, and which did not convey meaning.

Jump forward to today and most smartphone operating systems have incorporated Japanese i-Mode emoji icons. These simple, single-concept icons are inter-operable with the Western character set within text messages. Most often I see people appending emoji as suffixes to text messages. Using just one character the senders can add information about whether they are being ironic or playful in their message. Emoji solve the problem where, writing so concisely, we often must sacrifice tonality. So, at least in the usage which I observe, they act as modifiers to the main text. These eight words may not necessarily clearly signify whether the sender is optimistic, sarcastic or infuriated. That is the additional role given to the little yellow character at the end.

Where I do see emoji used on their own are generally as replies to written texts. A text asking ‘How did the meeting go?’ might get a thumbs-up emoji response. No words being necessary, as a conversation will provide the relevant detail later.

Although it is not a usage I see amongst my peers, emoji can even be strung together as a rudimentary pictographic language. If only for humorous intent more than anything. Yet, I think that if that was the only way of using them, they would necessarily fail in the same way as the pager codes did. Perhaps these kinds of single-concept pictographic linguistic tools are really only useful as an adjunct to the written word?

Messenging App Stickers
Stickers – although related to the original emoji – offer a new set of affordance and a different communicative role. Stickers can only be used one at a time and can not be mixed with text. This makes them ill-suited as modifiers and so they serve a different purpose. So while these pictures are not worth a thousand words, they are intended to be worth one text message.

Stickers take the basic idea of image-based emoji to a new level. They take advantage of the larger screens and higher resolutions of today’s mobile devices. So they appear larger on-screen and can be more illustrative and expressive in style and not limited to the more iconic style needed for emoji. They are often based on cartoon characters and portray a wider range of emotions and behaviours then emoji. (The emoji character set was originally developed for the technological limitations of i-Mode phones in at the end of the nineties.) As they are not trying to be part of one standardised international character set the range of sticker designs varies from app to app. Developers can strike licensing deals with IP owners to ensure that particular characters are available exclusively in their app to attract more customers.

Facebook’s Messenger app expands the expressive range of their ‘Like’ icon.

Selling sets of digital stickers is one of the revenue-generating features of messaging apps. Remember that this is a category of apps whose key benefit is communication at no cost to their users. So I assume stickers must be popular — and with more than just Japanese teenagers. Stickers are serving some purpose for a broader set of users. As I see it stickers answer the desire for a one-touch, single-concept message.

It is not that people are becoming too lazy to compose simple sentences. It is worth remembering – before any doom-sayers begin to predict the end of literacy and language again – that new forms of communication like this never replace what already exists, they sit alongside them. Rather it is the case that – just as something as barely noticeable as a raised eyebrow or a wink can signify a lot in our real-world conversations – so too perhaps can the emotions of an illustrated character in our online conversations. The semantic meaning encoded in the smallest gestures depends on the context and the relationship between the two people communicating.

An examples of some of the character-based stickers available within the Viber app.

I would not underestimate how many text messages are rote and formulaic. People keeping in touch simply by saying ‘good morning’ or ‘good-night’. The real meaning here is in reaffirming the connection rather than in the specific semantic content. So adding some visual flair, through colour, image and typography the way that many stickers do can enhance such simple regular messages. Even if simply through novelty and variety.

An examples of some of the text-based stickers available within the Viber app.

The visual language of emoticons and stickers sits alongside spoken languages and people all over the world can use them to communicate. Even so, it would be foolish to consider them serving as a proxy for a common global visual language. While the majority of human emotional expressions do share their meaning amongst all peoples, there are still many distinct cultural signals and messages that are learned. (That is why trying to decipher some of the obscure-to-me Japanese cultural references symbolised in the original i-Mode emoticon set seems beyond my West-of-Ireland background.)

Red = ‘I am angry’
As a final thought, I suppose it is again worth considering what comes next? What is the truly Minimal Viable Communication? Should we expect an app that allows us to communicate using just solid colours perhaps? Yellow meaning ‘I am happy’, blue saying ‘I am sad’ and red growling ‘I am angry’... Who knows?

Update 1: June 2014
Given my line of thinking on Minimal Viable Communication here, I guess that I really should have foreseen the ‘Yo’ app. Very minimal indeed.

Update 2: July 2014
Further to my point about stringing emoji together as a pictographic language for humorous intent. Turns out that you can sign-up today to ‘Emojli’ – the emoji-only social network. That may not even be a parody, and is launching soon apparently.

(I guess the Garfield licensing deal fell through.)

The Next Challenges for ChangeLabs, IdeaLabs and DesignLabs

2014-03-28T14:18:00.000+00:00

John Thackara gave a considered talk on ‘What Makes A Change-Lab Successful’ at Science Gallery on Friday 14 March.

His theme was that “to effect system-level change in health, energy, food, or mobility, a first step is often to reframe the question. Grassroots innovation is emerging wherever people seek new ways to meet their daily life needs. So the question becomes: what are the best ways to support, connect and amplify these experiments?”

John Thackara. Photo by Uros Abram

He began with an overview of what he has learned from his years working in this area. In recent years there has been a proliferation of ‘Labs’ across the world. They use many names: Change-Labs, Design-Labs, Ideas-Labs. As traditional models of economic development have come to an impasse, these labs are exploring new models. People are investigating how to build social capital.

What the work of these Change-Labs has demonstrated is that people have no problem generating lots of good ideas. The greater challenges follow on from the initial ideation process. The first challenge is how to choose the best ideas from those generated. The second challenge is how to take the next actions arising from those best ideas. For many interconnected reasons putting useful ideas into practice is a lot more difficult than anticipated. The third challenge is how to make all the ideas work together in a long-term ecosystem.

There was a definite sense of optimism meets realpolitik to his introduction. But that kind of reality-check seems unsurprising to me.

He looked at the contemporary research area of ‘Smarter Cities’. All cities are already rich in (often vernacular) service ecologies. Many of the solutions Change-Labs brainstorming today already exist. He advised Change-Labs that they need to get better at looking back in time and across to other countries and cultures for applicable solutions. True success lies in minimising the amount of times that people reinvent the wheel.

He asked how can a city be vital in ways other than spending money? Most cities do not acknowledge their hinterlands. They depend on them for the food, materials, and energy they need to survive. So it is worth investigating how to reconnect cities with the land.

Change-Labs try to foster trust to activate their projects. This takes time and effort. He advised that they ought to get better at connecting with the ‘trust that already exists in many local place-based organisations’.

Addressing the role of ‘Design Thinking’, his view is that designers add true value in moving the process from discussing things on to making things. What I call delivering tangibility

Thackara posed a set of questions challenging a common business orthodoxy that only activities operating at a vast scale generate the greatest value.

What value can accrue from that which cannot scale?
What value can accrue from within the local living economy.
So-called ‘wicked’ problems are more meaningful when they are “unique to here”.
What methods of collaboration will succeed within your specific context?
What coalitions and platforms are possible within your specific context?

One particularly interesting statement was his observation that there are lots of one-person Change-Labs out there. “There are innovators everywhere.” How can we create informal social structures that will support those change agents? Otherwise he is concerned that they will burn-out without achieving their true potential. “Change is not a trick we find in a Lab; it needs social supports.”

At a macro level, he suggested that Change-Labs could contemplate how they operate as an integrated combination of: Space, Place, People and Time.

His key insight concerned the issue of project timeframes. Most Change-Labs think and act in short-term and medium-term timeframes, due to the political and cultural contexts they operate in. To effect more significant change they need to begin to act in medium-term and long-term timeframes. In practice this means that the people who finish a project are not those who instigate it. So Change-Labs need to build self-sustaining projects with longevity baked-in.

He identifies the greatest issue facing Change-Labs as that gap between creating the initial big idea and realising the intended long-term impact. Change-Labs have a two-to-five year interstitial period in which to build “coalitions of constellations” that they can work with to tackle their chosen problems.

Thackara’s thesis is that Change-Labs need to transition from their current output-based processes to interconnected ecosystem-based processes. He posited that to be more successful they need to learn how to build “mindful systems-based and time-aware processes” which come after their Design Thinking activities.

Given the research I have been conducting into this topic, Thackara’s experienced-based observations and high-level analysis does raise many valid questions for anyone considering applying Design Thinking to tackle complex problems.

Offset Conference Themes 2014

2014-03-24T13:40:00.001+00:00

This year’s Offset creative conference was a refreshing recharge for my creative batteries. I saw a lot of interesting and inspirational work over three enjoyable days. I experienced a lot of new creative work that I was unfamiliar with. Measured on that basis this conference delivers.

The most common style of presentation is where people showcase their work throughout their career while also imparting some wisdom they have learned along the way. This is a challenge on many levels. With an audience of over two thousand creatives from many different industry sectors, the inclination is to speak in broad principles rather than in specifics. With more than twenty other presenters imparting similar insights, there is a lot of scope for crossover.

Rather than write up my notes on each presentation this year, I made this list of aphorisms from presenter’s key slides instead. All are from the formal presentations on the main stage, rather than the discussions and debates on the secondary stages. The presenters expressed a lot of shared sentiments. I have anonymised, reordered, and mixed this selection of their messages. This representative list may reveal an emergent theme for the whole conference.

Be uncompromising in your approach.
Be true to your own heart.
Great work comes from passion.
Dig deep.
Always be curious.
Always ask questions.
Find your own authentic voice and speak with it very loudly.
Explore your identity through your work.
Pay attention to what you do when no-one is paying you.
Talk less about making things: just go and make things.
Everything is a design problem.
Coming up with ideas is the easy part.
Embrace ambiguity.
Be comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Build a process that delivers the unexpected.
Be fearless.
Almost all fear is bullshit.
Dive in head first.
Don’t be afraid to lose control.
Make trouble.
Explore, fail, and fail again.
Set yourself constraints. Play by your own rules (and break them).
Focus on your work/play balance; not your work/life balance.
Play is your most important activity.
Get away from your computer.
Think outside the box.*
Don’t learn creativity: unlearn restrictions.
Keep simplifying until you can’t simplify anymore.
The parts that no-one sees can be the most important.
Try to interrupt the dominant narrative.
Always over-deliver.
Respect your client.
Invest in progress.
One good thing leads to another.
Fight for what you believe in.
Never say die.
Don’t be an asshole.

One concern I am grappling with is that the speakers are just delivering broad generalities. Perhaps I am expecting too much. I may be better off just appreciating the exceptional creative work on its own merits and being less concerned about any advice on how to find success and happiness in a design-centric career.

*Yes, someone actually stood in front of two thousand creatives and advised them to think outside the box.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Brand

2014-03-05T13:56:00.000+00:00

One of the challenges of working in brand consultancy are the many overlapping meanings of the word ‘brand’ itself.

Each client brings along slightly different interpretations of ‘brand’ when they engage with branding services. Some are better informed and have a more fully-rounded understanding of the scope of branding. Often different people within the same organisation use the word to refer to different ideas. To complicate matters further, different brand consultancies then offer their own interpretations of ‘brand’ depending on their particular mix of competencies and services.

To get a sense of the variety of meaning you can start with a dictionary definition of brand and the Wikipedia entry. Neither provides much clarity. Brand is an expansive category term (like ‘design’ and ‘technology’) which includes many sub-meanings within itself.

It irks me when commentators, journalists, academics, and particularly brand consultants (who should know better) decide to use the single word ‘brand’ in reference to many of these alternate interpretations within one article, or even within one paragraph. While this often suits their own rhetorical ends, it confuses their readers.

This variation of interpretation is an important factor to bear in mind when discussing brand with clients. Obviously it is essential that both parties in a conversation about brand are referring to the same idea. Particularly in a group discussion when contributors may bring many interpretations.

Rather than retreat into the academic literature to scope out the complete gamut of meanings, what I want to do in this post is record the actual usage I encounter. These are the common interpretations which I find that I have to engage with in my day-to-day conversations with Irish organisations. This is not yet an exhaustive list. I may add to it later.

The Minimalist Interpretation
Brand is limited to meaning only a logo or a symbol.
“We are commissioning the design of a new brand for application onto our website, literature, vehicles and stationery.”
(Also notably used in the evergreen scandalous rebranding news story: “Outrage At €20k Spent On New Logo for NameCo!”)

The Maximalist Interpretation
Brand is intrinsic and encompasses almost all of an organisation’s activities.
“If marketing is the talk, then branding is the walk.”

The Corporate-Identity Interpretation
Brand as a set of assets which includes a brand mark, colour palettes, typefaces, imagery style, and graphic patterns, etc. It defines a structure upon which to build a coherent visual expression for an organisation.
“Refer to our Brand Usage Standards for guidance on how to use our brand.”

The Purpose-Based Interpretation
Brand is an emergent property arising from an organisation’s Mission, Vision and Values.
“The Board of Directors held an all-day workshop to define the new brand strategy.”

The Reputation-Based Interpretation
Brand as a synonym for the organisation’s reputation.
“The expenses scandal has dramatically weakened the NameCo brand.”

The Relationship-Based Interpretation
Brand exists in the mind of customers and informs their relationship with the organisation.
“Our brand is our promise to you.”

The Internal-Cultural Interpretation
An organisation’s brand resides in its people: in their culture, processes and practises.
“Our HR team is our greatest asset in building our brand. Everyone one of us must live the brand.”

The Experiential Interpretation
Brand is every experience that every customer has with every touchpoint of an organisation.
“Our app always brings you that authentic NameCo experience wherever you are.”

The Narrative Interpretation
Brand is the story that an organisation tells to its customers, to its own people, and to all other interested parties.
“Example.”

The Exclusive Interpretation
Brand used as a noun referring to luxury goods, or to the premium product sector in general.
“Consumer spending on brands has decreased in the last twelve months.”

The Personal Interpretation
Every one of us has our own personal brand, which we must steward to maximise our personal success and happiness.
“You are the full-time CEO of BrandYou.”

The conundrum is that the concept of ‘brand’ can indeed include all those interpretations, each being facets of the whole. Indeed that complexity is part of the fascination of devoting precious time and attention to the topic.

Some of these interpretations are more inclusive and others more restrictive. Given that interpretation is subjective, then none is necessarily more correct than any other. More importantly they are not mutually exclusive either.

Different client organisations will focus on particular facets when parsing their specific challenges. Different brand advisors specialise in addressing sub-sets of the gamut of branding activities. The ideal is in best matching the client’s requirements with the appropriate brand consultant’s area of expertise. But as a profession we do not always make that as easy as is should be.

Thought Experiment: Infinite Spotify Playlists Via Procedurally-Generated Tracks

2014-02-24T13:26:00.002+00:00

I use Spotify to listen to a lot of instrumental music when working; as it is less distracting than music with vocals. The Spotify Radio feature generates an effectively nigh-infinite playlist of tracks based on the characteristics of a chosen source genre, artist or track.

What appeals to me about this technology is that is encourages a very different mindset from that fostered by the old economic models. I actually like the idea of hearing lots of novel music without knowing who the artists are and quite likely never hearing that one particular piece of music ever again. It can be a river of sound: never the same experience twice.

However, how comprehensive are those playlists today? At what point would the artists or songs start to repeat themselves too much?

It strikes me that one factor which makes Spotify Radio so compelling is that it allows you to hone in on your own favourite sub-niches of sub-niches of sub-niches within musical genres. But at a certain point surely any personalised niche becomes a finite set. Perhaps it is defined by a set period of geography or of time: no-one makes music of that sort any more. Or perhaps it is defined by a small set of artists, or other such variables.

Could we reach a point in the future where Spotify, or similar services, were able to enhance such playlists with their own procedurally-generated music? Thus giving each user their own ultimately personalised music stream.

What I wonder about is the state-of-the-art regarding computer-generated music. Has the technology advanced to the point such that an algorithm could take a detailed blueprint of the DNA of a particular musical sub-genre (such as Pandora’s Music Genome) and then create novel variations on, and iterations from, those conventions? And, most critically, whether the best results would then rise above the levels of musak? I imagine that this would be more readily achievable for instrumental genres, as including lyrics and vocals would add another layer of complexity.

Before all of the Muso-Purists create a flame war in the comments section about musical integrity and whats real, lets consider the following. What if for many users the job-to-be-done for Spotify turns out not to be the high-end ideal of “find me great artists whom I can follow and develop an ongoing appreciation for the complete depth of their back catalogue”. Rather what if the job-to-be-done was the more prosaic “find me a large amount of novel music that sounds like the kind of music I prefer”. There is a subtle distinction between those two use-cases. Spotify's marketing emphasises the former (perhaps to keep today's iteration of the music industry on-side) but they could be equally successful serving the second need.

Now perhaps the world’s musical output will always be enough to back-fill people’s infinite playlists. (Given that there already at least one dedicated service for playing only the millions of never-played tracks already on Spotify.) But it is also not beyond the realms of imagination to see such user-customised tracks slipping into playlists at some point in our not-to-distant-future.

This may not be a business which Spotify themselves would wish to enter. If so, then perhaps there is a gap in the market for businesses to start creating such content.

(I am thinking of blogging a few short thought experiments of novel features or blue-sky ideas for products and services that I use regularly.)

Descriptagram

2013-12-10T13:41:00.001+00:00

(Being a palette cleanser after my last heavy-duty blog post.)

Descriptagram is an idea for a small creative writing side-project. It is an exercise in brevity and clarity. It begins with the question: if a picture is worth a thousand words, what happens when you summarise that picture in 140 characters?

I scanned through my Instagram feed and attempted to capture the essence of select images using the minimum of words. Interestingly, the juxtaposition of content in this written list is far more dissonant compared with viewing the source images within the app.

“Disembodied head of a vintage shop mannequin: seventies-chic, cracked lipstick, disappointing hair.”
“Desiccated orange starfish atop a variety of grey pebbles.”
“Four bright green fractal broccoli arranged square-wise on the rich brown hues of a wooden table.”
“Mandarin Chinese characters finger-written in the mist of a window’s condensation sheen.”
“Close-up of distressed street lettering – disintegrated white paint on a black tar road.”
“Random metal letterpress type characters arranged within a steel tray, mostly serifed capitals.”
“Landscape: four-fifths dark night sky to one-fifth tiny lights delineating the vastness of a city grid.”
“A pair of hipster spectacles completely disassembled on a wooden table.”
“Midnight. Red. Green. Blue. A neon sign’s lettering reflected onto water surface.”
“Rusty, weathered, fifties-era Vegas motel sign contrasted against a bright blue sky.”
“Close-up of overly ornate letterforms from a Victorian advert (bonus naive pro-smoking message).”
“Long shot of dark tree trunks covered in snow. Colour image appears faux-monochrome.”
“Sunrise viewed through silhouettes of leafless trees. Elongated shadows creating emphasised perspective.”
“Wrinkly young puppy asleep on a cushion; indoors, no flash, amber hues.”
“Predictable birds-eye view of a cappuccino; starkness of white cup contrasts details in wood grain of table.”
“Poorly-kerned vernacular typography. With the obligatory scathingly superior comment appended.”

I may continue this exercise in a dedicated Twitter account. Its longevity would depend on how quickly the novelty of sentence construction devolves into similarity and pattern repetition. I guess I should go and research some Haiku...

Notes and Thoughts From The ‘Designing Growth’ Event

2013-11-27T09:06:00.001+00:00

As part of Design Week 2013, Dublin City Council’s Pivot Dublin organised ‘Designing Growth’ – a panel discussion on how design could be harnessed to drive growth in Ireland. The event was promoted as “a discussion on ways to develop new and better public services, communication platforms, education and business models through design”. These are my notes from the evening’s discussion, along with some further thoughts on my ongoing investigations of Design Thinking.

Four of the five panellists were international speakers:
Marco Steinberg, Founder of Snowcone & Haystack
Robin Edman, CEO of the Swedish Industrial Design Foundation
Maureen Thurston, Design Principal at Deloitte Australia
Enrique Avogadro, Head of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Design District

The fifth panellist was John Moran, the Secretary General of the Department of Finance. Representing the beneficiaries, rather than the providers, of ‘Design Thinking’, John was asking the skeptical questions about what precisely that methodology could add to the public sector and to broader state policy.

Panel of speakers lined up & ready to go at #designgrowth pic.twitter.com/8JZFxmNW9k
— Martina Quinn (@MartinaPQuinn) November 6, 2013

Ali Grehan, Dublin City Architect and Pivot Dublin representative, set the scene by positioning the evening’s event as the starting point for a conversation about a national vision for design. She expressed her belief that Ireland needs to develop a National Design Strategy which addresses our specific context and our particular needs. She stressed that in forming such a strategy we should learn as much as we can from international best practice: hence the panel of international speakers.

Some initial definitions of ‘Design’ and ‘Design Thinking’

Steinberg — Design brings coherence to things. In terms of public policy, ‘Design Thinking’ is another tool to better ensure that the policies you build are robust and fit for purpose. Design Thinking is useful for creating simpler solutions (that is, better solutions). In many regards designers can contribute like economists and engineers, by adding their expertise into a collective process. For example, one of their useful roles on a team is to be the ‘proposition-based’ thinkers; in counterpoint to the ‘analysis-based’ thinkers.

Edman — The key differentiator of ‘Design Thinking’ is that you do not just step through your process and once you have ticked-off all of the actions on your checklist then you are done. With Design Thinking you are stepping into the unknown: you need to be brave. You must iterate and learn as you go along, without knowing precisely where the process is eventually going to lead you.

Thurston — The value of ‘Design Thinking’ can be as an alternative to traditional problem-solving methodologies. More people need to understand and appreciate the values and utility of Design Thinking within the earlier ‘Problem-Finding’ and ‘Problem-Defining’ stages; before using it in to the more expected ‘Problem-Solving’ stage. A key benefit of teaching people to use Design Thinking is they then learn to approach problems with an open mind, rather than relying upon bringing along their pre-considered solutions (even when such solutions have proved effective for similar problems in the past).

On Promoting Design

Edman’s argument was to stop attempting to promote the Irish design industry and Irish designers. Do not elevate them onto a pedestal and then promote them using the lingua franca of the design sector. Rather you need to promote ‘Design’ by focusing on the buyers of, and the users of, design. (At the same time, he added that the Irish design sector does need to raise its game and learn to position its design services at a higher level, so that it can then become a welcomed contributor to government policy-forming.)

We are talking about #design and very quickly also about start-ups, beta projects and making policy #designgrowth @PivotDublin
— Flora Fleischer (@Daydreamer2105) November 6, 2013

Steinberg on Public Sector and Policy

In my view, Marco Steinberg was the most engaging of the four ‘Design Thinking’ panelists on the night. His particular areas of focus seemed most concerned with public services.

“Redesigning public service can no longer just be about making your existing processes and services increasingly efficient any more. Given the scale of cuts over recent years you now need to totally rethink many public services from the ground up. One critical question then becomes: what is the skill-set needed to re-imagine, re-invent and transform your public services at the required scale?

Too much of existing policy-making uses a general vernacular design process (“This is how we do it” and “It is just common sense”). There is a discipline of ‘Design For Policy’ which is about formally leveraging Design Thinking as part of your policy-making process. You can use those methods to investigate and address these three questions to solve policy issues in an integrated manner:

What is your culture?
What are your tools?
What are your procedures?

Policy-makers need to become far more comfortable playing with ideas and with failing. Learning to fail is critical to the Design Thinking methodology. Then, failing faster is a key way of learning and ultimately becoming wiser.”

Steinberg noted that when he advances that particular line of argument he often gets a lot of push-back from the public sector. In their view they do explore already, and they do iterate to develop new initiatives, and they do pilot them. While that may indeed be the case, he argues that cycle times need to be questioned, as most are far too slow. As an example, he claimed that some global corporations may iterate aspects of their services 15 times in a single day.

Most govts like to plan & launch a solution, then find out too late there's a problem - @marcolsteinberg #DesignGrowth
— Martina Quinn (@MartinaPQuinn) November 6, 2013

There is a need is to innovate government itself and ultimately to change the culture of the public sector. For example, he asked, what if the public sector tried to move from providing services to providing platforms, along the lines of the Kickstarter model? This could be a mechanism that channels activism into something more useful. As most activism tends to burn-out over the longer term unfortunately.

A mission critical question is where would such an innovative design capability exist? If you place it at the centre of your public service then it will be crushed by incumbents and vested interests. If you place it on the outside it will be seen as separate and ultimately irrelevant. The optimal point is at the periphery. If it operates along the edges (near delivery of services?) then it will have more of a chance of being effective and engendering substantive change.

John Moran Responds

“A post-crisis Ireland has to be open to reinvention. So we do need the design-process mindset more than ever before. We have to redesign a lot of what Ireland does. We have to design a new economic model for this country. (We tried just selling houses to each other and that did not work out so well!) What I think ‘Design Thinking’ can contribute to that process is a Culture Of Innovation that can help us to find a way for this country to be the best that it can be.

I believe that the underlying ideas being discussed here are correct, but I remain unconvinced about the ‘Design Thinking’ label. What you all call ‘Design’ and ‘Design Thinking’, we simply call ‘Policy-Making’ within the Department of Finance. And I think that lots of other people in other areas already practice such ‘Design Thinking’ as well. Surely many applications of this methodology do not necessarily require designers. Within this new paradigm we have to ask who is a designer, and who is not a designer?”

Do things better or do things differently? #designgrowth
— John O'Connor (@JohnOConnorDIT) November 6, 2013

My Own Thoughts

The topic of ‘Design Thinking’ (and its related field of Service Design) is something that I have an ongoing interest in. I have been wrestling with how to incorporate it into my own professional practice for some time. Its cross-disciplinary nature is a big part of its appeal to me. The fact that Design Thinking is just as a valid topic of investigation for business schools as it is for design educators is interesting. They are both converging on the same topic from different directions.

It is noteworthy that as senior a figure as the General Secretary of the Department of Finance is interested in engaging with design thinkers to investigate what benefits their methodology can contribute. It is disheartening when the design representatives can not then deliver a unified elevator pitch for the benefits of Design Thinking. In that sense I think that ‘Designing for Growth’ was somewhat of a lost opportunity. In my interpretation, one of the (perhaps unspoken) purposes behind this event was to move design thinkers a step closer to a seat at the Big Table.

After this event, I did find myself asking: if John Mahon had wholeheartedly embraced the idea of leveraging ‘Design Thinking’ methodologies within the policy-creating function of the Department of Finance – who would he then turn to for delivery of that service? Which, if any, Irish design firms actually can offer that service at the appropriate level today? Or is it being offered by any of the business strategy units within the large Irish management consultancies? Or would he have to look to international management consultancies at present?

There is also another interesting discussion to be had exploring the reality that there is going to be an inherent conflict between any efforts at bringing a lean, light, fast-moving, iterative, design-informed process into a public sector where innovation is still constrained by cautious, slow-moving procurement policies built to counteract financial prolificacy and wasteful spending. Where are the spaces for the sorts of experimentation needed to investigate the most ambiguous problems?

The malleability of the meanings of the words ‘Design’ and ‘Designer’ in this evening’s discussion has to be telling. The catch-all term ‘design’ being perhaps too all-inclusive to be truly useful in these kinds of discussions, given that it can signify a mindset, an activity, and a practice, as well as an atypically broad industry sector which includes many different sub-sectors of activity with vastly varying business models. (But, having said that, what other term could be used in its place?) As more activities are included within ever-broader definitions of ‘Design’, then the term becomes more vague and less useful. That breadth of definition may be part of what confuses the issue whenever trying to discuss topics such as ‘Design In Ireland’.

Although I think that it is still only somewhat loosely defined within the various design sectors, it seems clear that the phrase ‘Design Thinking’ does make sense within the industry as a useful differentiator that allows certain designers to position themselves higher up the stack and so to capture greater value. So within the design sectors that phrase can be a useful signifying differentiator which is understood as being contrasted against other forms of design activity. While I do not think that those other activities are considered to be ‘un-thinking’, those forms of design activity are necessarily set in counterpoint as being somewhat less analytical or rational. In every field of human activity we always have to account for the Narcissism Of Small Differences. Therefore it is unsurprising when, within the broad church of design, a rationalist tendency should seek mechanisms to define their activities as distinctly separate from (what we can refer to as) a more instinctual tendency.

The communicative problem then arises when that intra-sector signifier ‘Design Thinking’ has to be parsed and interpreted by the purchasers of design services. It seems probable that, rather than considering Design Thinking against other forms of designing, they are considering it against other forms of thinking. I suspect that was one factor informing John Moran’s comments this evening. So it seems to me that one open challenge for the design sector is to find a better way to explain ‘Design Thinking’ in a less self-referential manner.

Design is a problem solver, however, as designers we have to be able to explain this solution using 'non-design' language #DesignGrowth
— DotDash (@DotDashOne) November 6, 2013

Also, to gain broader acceptance of its various methodologies, it is important that ‘Design Thinking’ is not positioned as some form of panacea. That line of thinking is obviously nonsensical, but it does still tend to be a theme that these conversations can circle around. For that reason I found similarities between this event and the discussions at this Summer’s IxDA ‘Design & Thinking’ event.

To me ‘Design Thinking’ can be usefully understood as another tool in the mental toolkit, offering a different perspective that works best within a broader collective process. It can obviously be approached from many different directions, each dependent on the professional’s own expertise. My current notion (well, for today at least) is that some of the most useful manifestations of ‘Design Thinking’ may lie in collaborations between business strategists who can think creatively on one hand, and strategically-minded designers with a bias for integrated thinking on the other. But I still have a lot more thinking to do on this topic.

Postscript

It took me a few weeks to carve out time to assemble my notes from the event into this post. That delay has had one benefit in that during the interval Clay Shirky posted his article ‘Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality’. Shirky’s dissection of the mis-management of the Obamacare online service delivery is as strong an argument as any I have read for the benefits of an iterative, prototyping and testing-based methodology for public services.

Read Pivot Dublin’s own review of this event here.

Disclaimer

It is important to clarify that all of the attributed statements in this post are paraphrased from my own (fairly concise) notes and none are verbatim quotations. As usual, if I have seriously misquoted anyone please do let me know.

Clarity and Focus in Blog Layouts

2013-11-20T17:33:00.000+00:00

Working my way through the process of typesetting my old blog posts for the print-on-demand edition of Thoughtport had one unforeseen outcome. I began to appreciate the simplicity and clarity of seeing my words typeset on a clear white page without any digital clutter surrounding them.

When I returned to writing on the Blogger platform, I found the online presentation of my content too busy and distracting. Up to then, I had always used some variant of the conventional two-column blog layout. This was a primary column containing the posts with a sidebar column of ancillary information, navigation, and outbound links. I adopted that fundamental layout structure on the first day of this site. Over the years I had updated and adjusted the types of content displayed in both the sidebar, and in what became a deep footer. But I had never taken a top level review of what I should include and what I should remove. Were the sidebar functions in any way helpful, or were they distracting from my primary content?

I read all my blog subscriptions within the Reeder RSS aggregator app. This imposes one standard visual treatment on to all blogs. So I had become unfamiliar with the design layout of the HTML versions of the blogs I read regularly. I did some ad-hoc research to see what was working well.

Gemmell follows his own design principles in the layout of his blog.

Jeffery Zeldman’s layout seems perfectly optimised for reading on a tablet.

Although John Gruber still uses a sidebar.

Having decided to simplify the design of my blog to deliver some of the positive features I observed in the clarity of my book layout, I was fortunate to then read this wonderful post by Matt Gemmell: ‘Designing blogs for readers.’ (I recommend you read his whole article.) He advocates a merciless editing of blog layouts to focus on legibility and content. I found that, whether consciously or otherwise, many of the writers I admire had adopted many of his recommendations in the presentation of their material. Gemmell’s arguments convinced me to go much much farther in redesigning this site than I had considered. These images of my previous blog layouts illustrate how much I have changed this site’s design over time.

How this blog looked way way back in 2006. Jiminiy!

Still very busy in 2010 presenting too many distracting links.

This was the last layout I used before introducing the new clarified treatment.

In the end, I removed everything from both the secondary sidebar and the deep footer this time. I changed the harsh white background to a soft creamy white and replaced all of the san-serif typefaces with a serif faces typeset at a larger size. One significant outcome of this new design is that this site is now far more tablet-friendly.

The new reconsidered layout brings my content to the fore and optimises for attentive reading. By reducing distractions and providing some necessary stillness, I hope that I have improved your engagement with my writing.

Quite meta I know, but here is a screen-shot of this post in the new layout.

Messenger 3.0 Icon Redesign

2013-11-14T13:30:00.000+00:00

Last year I wrote about Facebook making the design of all of their app icons more consistent. Yesterday’s release of their Messenger 3.0 app indicates that they have now reversed last year’s decision. What can we possibly intuit about their branding strategy from this tactical design decision?

In the new icon a bright blue iOS7-flavoured oval speech bubble on a white background replaces the previous round-rec speech bubble reversed out of the darker Facebook blue. The new oval bubble looks a lot more friendly and presents a far less corporate impression. So much so that the inset lightning bolt symbol now looks somewhat too harsh.

Previous Messenger icon in the centre.

So, why might Facebook decide to take such a different direction with the icon design for this release? Firstly, and most obviously, they have visually refreshed the complete app UI to benefit from the new design conventions of iOS7. The new icon needs to signify this.

One of the other jobs-to-be-done by the previous icon was to send a strong, clear signal of this app’s Facebook provenance. It seems that is no longer a requirement for this new design. (Note my related observation that although the Facebook app was also updated yesterday its icon has not been redesigned into a corresponding white lowercase ‘f’ within a blue circle on a white background.)

It turns out that the most immediate precedent for this new icon design may be Facebook’s Poke app launched in late 2012. (Does anyone remember Poke? When grabbing its icon off the App Store I could not help but notice that the app has never once been updated. A telling comparison to the main Facebook app which seems to get a revision every fortnight at least.)

But looking beyond the aesthetics of the new icon, there are more substantive issues being signalled by these design decisions. For the first time, this latest release of Messenger now allows users to message people who are not their Facebook Friends by accessing their phone’s address book. Adding this feature now puts Messenger into direct competition with Apple’s pre-installed Messages app. More tellingly this functionality signals a response to the significant growth in messaging apps such as WeChat, Viber and Whatsapp over the past year. (Services such as the sticker-messaging app Line and the disposable photo-sharing app Snapchat can be included within this category as well.) All of these apps are capturing market share at an accelerated rate. Their single-use model is understood to be attractive to those users who see Facebook’s range of bundled services as overwrought and complex.

There are some prevalent icon conventions within this category.

Facebook’s overall rate of uptake and engagement with the teen demographic has been slowing. Teens are among the most active users of messaging service apps. Any increased fragmentation within the messenger app marketplace is an issue for Facebook over the long term. So this release of Messenger needs to address those factors. Deliberately de-emphasising the Facebookishness of this app is a step towards re-engaging with those demographics who perceive Facebook as being too unwieldy for their needs. Messaging has become an increasingly competitive area of focus for all of the social networks, so I think that we can expect a lot of activity and innovation in the coming months.

Experiments not Features

2013-11-04T14:01:00.000+00:00

One of the more interesting conversations that piqued my interest while watching the live feed from this week’s Web Summit was Jay Bregman, co-founder of Hailo, explaining their evolving methodology of ‘Experiments Not Features’.

During the summit’s ‘Going Global’ session Bregman explained some aspects of Hailo’s business model. (His comment about Hailo eventually becoming a platform for many more service transitions than taxi rides is also something worth a blog post all of its own some time.)

Hailo works effectively as a network because “it is local and it appears local”. What that means for the business is that each of their markets operates slightly differently. The overall global network learns a little from each different market, which then feeds into refinements to the master model for more efficient and effective roll-out in future cities.

Because Hailo needed to be a global company from the offset, they deliberately planned not to have one centralised headquarters. Rather their model is to have “centres of gravity” in Asia, North America and Europe. This makes them more sensitive to the specific localised needs of the cities they are serving.

There are three primary implications arising from that corporate structure: firstly they need superb integrated processes and secondly they need excellent internal communications. The third implication relates to their underlying technology. As they are a global network, they have to look as coherent as possible to all of their consumers. Therefore it is mission-critical that they can identify which proposed technological deviations/innovations are truly beneficial for any local market, and which are merely personal preferences. This is where their experimental methodology kicks in.

Bregman claims Hailo has “had to build one of the best A/B mobile testing platforms”. This is allowing them to run massive large scale tests – with the vision that ultimately they can test everything. So if the Dublin operation wants to modify some aspect of the technology platform in future, rather than request a new feature, they would simply be able to run a live test. Then, if they can prove that it produces better results in their city, they can implement it.

On one hand reading this just sounds like common sense – A/B testing is a not new methodology. But the fact that today’s technology now facilitates companies runnig large scale live experiments in real-time is becoming profoundly disruptive. Behind-closed-doors development of digital services design is counterproductive, iterating in public is becoming the proven methodology for success.

It is worth thinking through how this approach effects product development roadmaps and workflows, increases the pace of innovation, and ultimately delivers greater responsiveness to customer needs.

Here is the video of the Web Summit ‘Going Global’ session which features Jay Bregman co-founder of Hailo, and Niklas Adalberth co-founder of Klarna, moderated by Niklas Zennstrom co-founder of Skype.

PostScript: for a complementary take on this subject, have a read of Dan Frommer’s post from the same date: ‘The Best Part Of Twitter’s New Design Is That It’s Experimenting In Public’.

Excisions And Omissions from ‘Thinking Out Loud’

2013-09-16T13:19:00.002+01:00

There are some differences between the printed edition and this online version of my blog. While it may be possible that not many copies of the volume will be printed, I wanted to note those differences here.

My initial impulse for creating the print-on-demand edition was to produce an archival volume of my complete blog. Therefore, I originally included every blog post in the manuscript. However, typesetting everything resulted in a far greater page count than I had anticipated. So I needed to edit my existing content down to a page count that I was more comfortable with.

One complicating factor in deciding which material to excise is that my own perception of the ‘job to be done’ for my blog has evolved over the years. So I had to make decisions about a variety of different classes and categories of blog posts. I decided that the essence of what I most usefully wanted to record in the volume was my own thinking. So firstly I could dispense with all of my published posts where that was not the core focus.

Many of my early posts from 2004 and 2005 were merely web links with short accompanying descriptions, and that text was often only cut and pasted from the linked source page. This was before Evernote had evolved to its current form. One of my primary uses for my blog during that time was as a searchable online archive. There was no value in including that class of posts when editing the volume. I did decide to retain a very small number of such minor posts from 2004 that convey some sense of what finding my feet in my early days of blogging was like.

In retrospect it seems surprisingly prescient or somewhat telling that my second and third posts were concerned with initial attempts at uploading content into the Blogger CMS using my 2004-era featurephone. Wholly without prior consideration on my part, those first brief posts turned out to be the seeds of one of the stronger emergent themes of the collection. So while it may have taken time to find my voice, some of my themes were there right from the start.

Then in 2008, while I was blogging my way through my Masters, I began to cross-post some pertinent tweets onto this blog in a Thought for the Day series. I have retained those tweets within the printed volume but, rather than typeset them as complete posts, I gathered them together in the first appendix.

Also during 2008 I ran a complementary series of posts called Quote of the Day highlighting some interesting or inspiring quotations that I had come across during my MA research. As none of those posts included my own commentary I omitted all of them.

I posted the majority of my MA original research on Blogging in the Irish Graphic Design Sector onto this blog as well. I omitted the substantial amount of my quantitative research, which is mostly voluminous check-lists of Irish design companies’ social media activities during 2009. All of that research material still remains available online and would have seemed incongruous and redundant within the printed edition.

There were some interesting (and popular) posts which I omitted solely due to their lack of any of my own commentary, such as the evergreen Colin Powell’s Rules of Leadership. For any number of reasons, not least copyright violation, I did not want to republish any directly reblogged content.

Another small number of posts were so dependant on embedded video that they made little sense within the context of a book.

Finally I had to make some judgement calls. I omitted certain posts that concerned friends and family. While there would be no reason to retroactively whitewash those posts out of the online blog (they are still available here) they just did not contribute enough to the overall arc of my blog to warrant their inclusion.

All of those excisions gave me a more focused manuscript without losing sight of my original intent of producing a representative printed archive of my writing on this blog.