I’m deeply ambivalent about the relationship between technology and the education system. I think Steve Jobs summed up my feelings nicely in 1995 when he said:

… I’ve helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world and I absolutely convinced that is by no means the most important thing. The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can. The elements of discovery are all around you. You don’t need a computer.

This is what makes me skeptical of Russ Maschmeyer’s manifesto for a new education system. Russ’ piece is well worth a read, and his argument that the education system is fundamentally broken is spot on, but his proposed solution is to open source the curriculum to create a “coursework of the commons” and to allow teachers to live-stream their lectures to hundreds of students online.

I can see these solutions working at the tertiary/college level, but at the primary and high school level, I firmly believe that schools and teachers should integrate technology into classes as necessary, and only when it is clear that there are net gains to be made. There is a prevalent belief that, because we live in a technologically-mediated society, every facet of our education system must “go digital” or fall out of the loop. If your child’s school provides every student with an iPad, teachers must attempt to integrate the device into their lesson plan, even if it isn’t really clear that using the iPad will lead to clear gains.

I’m speaking as a now-twentysomething who participated in a very early “laptops in schools” program just over a decade ago. Perhaps things have changed since 2001, but my experience was that teachers used the fact that students had their own “learning devices” as a crutch – instead of standing up the front of the class and engaging us in the subject matter, my seventh grade teacher would ask us to load up a maths/English/science application on our iBook laptops, and sit back for the next forty-five minutes as we either muddled our way through the prescribed work on the device, or (more likely) switched to a game or file sharing program or instant messenger client. In English class that year, one term-long assignment was to “analyse” (I use the term very loosely) the computer game of our choosing (for the record, the game I chose was American McGee’s Alice).

During the year in which I participated in the laptop program, I learnt virtually nothing in class. Because it was difficult to find suitable maths applications for thirteen year-olds, my teacher taught us how to create spreadsheets on Microsoft Excel and neglected to teach us algebra. The device, in short, dictated the curriculum. (Unsurprisingly, my parents pulled me out of this school).

Teachers who care about connecting with students are rightfully worried about bringing devices into the classroom. I don’t believe this makes those teachers Luddites. In fact, I despise the fact that we seem to automatically vilify those who are opposed to new technologies as fearful or lazy conservatives.

Kyle Baxter, in responding to a teacher lamenting the fact that bringing computers into the classroom will force her to change her teaching method, says, “The problem she’s facing has nothing to do with technology.” I think, up to a point, he’s right. Good teachers will continue to exist in classrooms with gadgets. And the role of the good teacher will remain the same: to motivate, to keep students engaged, and to tailor the curriculum to meet the specific needs of students.

The problem, from my perspective, is that the place of the gadget within the classroom is extremely poorly defined. Some teachers, at least, view the iPad or laptop as a crutch. They don’t see the device as existing to improve their ability to teach, but as cutting down on their workload. After all, it is easier to get away with being a bad teacher in a classroom in which the device has centre stage. How do you measure engagement in a classroom in which thirty students are uniformly gazing quietly into their own glowing screen?

(I’d like to point out that I’ve dealt with only one really bad client this year. If I’ve worked for you and you’re reading this: you are most vehemently not that client! You’ve been wonderful!)

From my experience, there are broadly two flavours of bad client: incompetent “Dilbert boss” types, and bullies. Incompetent clients tend to beindecisive, because they lack the ability to properly articulate their needs, and so are of the attitude that they’ll “know what they want when they see it”. Considering a hazily-defined problem could have virtually infinite design solutions, this will almost always result in a project stretching on indefinitely. Incompetent clients are often ridiculously nice human beings, but are rarely great to work with.

Bullies, of course, are much worse. A bully might use a bait-and-switch tactic to draw you into a project, then suddenly change the scope when it’s too late for you to back out. A bully might belittle you and your work – not for the purposes of constructive criticism (which would be fine!), but to make you feel small. A bully might decide – after the fact – that your work simply isn’t worth paying for.

It’s worth developing strategies by which to spot a bad client as early as possible. Some of the signs are extremely obvious: does the client misspell your name in emails, or contact you without having seen, or wanting to see, samples of your previous work? If so, there’s a fairly good chance the client views you as expendable. Are you being hired because the client admires your past work, and believes you are the right person to solve a particular design problem… or are you being hired because you’re the only person this person knows who owns a copy of Photoshop? It’s worth only taking on clients who admire (or at least are aware of!) the work you do.

A second test comes in setting the parameters of the project. Can the client clearly explain what he or she is looking for? Of course, the client doesn’t need to know what a CMS is, or the difference between Verdana and Futura, or whether they believe their website’s design should be responsive. The client doesn’t need to “speak designer”. But can the prospective client explain, broadly, what they are looking for? As in: “I’m a photographer, looking for a simple website I can use to maintain a portfolio and a blog. I’d also like a an elegant logo that says ‘girly and high fashion’. Here are a few examples of sites and logos I like…” If, at the stage of setting the parameters of the project, the client offers little scope or direction, it’s probably a sign they don’t really care about the project or lack the ability to communicate their needs.

Another good way to sniff out a bad client comes in their tardiness with payment. Speaking from experience, it’s a very wise idea to split all projects into several stages of payment. At the very least, one payment for completion of mockups, and one final payment on completion. Being paid for mockups before progressing to the project proper allows you to ensure the client is willing to pay in full, and on time. If you aren’t paid for your mockups, cut your losses and move on. If you are paid, but the payment is months late, or there are any other issues, politely inform the client that you don’t think things are going to work out. By front-loading any potential issues with payment to the early stages of the project, the stakes are smaller, and it’s easier to leave a client before things turn really nasty.

Finally, a bulletproof contract is always your friend. I use a fairly heavily-modified version of Andy Clarke’s killer contract. The great thing about Andy’s contract is that it’s straightforward and friendly, instead of placing the client on the back foot. It prevents scope shift, ensures the client is obliged to provide adequate input to push the project forward, and sets deadlines for payment and project delivery. Andy’s contract isn’t designed to screw the client, but to ensure any reasonably foreseeable conflicts can be resolved clearly. A good client can turn into a bad client in the case of a dispute, but a contract works to stand between the client and the designer so nobody gets hurt.

TL;DR? Bad clients are bad. Develop strategies to sniff ‘em out, then avoid like the plague. A good contract can serve to cushion the blow, but who wants to to enter into a business relationship knowing you’ll probably end up having to wield your contract like a wooden shield?

That’s my largest fear with the Google X lab. Google has proven many times over that they can indeed make some really cool stuff. The problem is that they largely fail at creating practical, consumer, applications for their products that they dream up (Google Wave, for example. Google TV as another example.)

Kyle Baxter:

All of these projects that sometimes turn into something and sometimes don’t would be fine if Google had a very well defined idea of what the company is and what it does so they could integrate the good ones. But they don’t, so we end up with Google doing a bunch of things that don’t really fit together into a greater whole.

I sometimes get the sense that what the founders of Google really want is for their company to assume the role of a forward-thinking tech-centric research university. This explains Google’s lack of focus: as at a research university, interesting ideas are pursued as ends-in-themselves.

When it comes to turning those great ideas into actual shipping products, though, it sometimes seems as though nobody at Google really gives a damn: customers are an inconvenience necessary to support the continued existence of the labs. The advertising revenue generated by Google’s search engine is a cash cow that enables the company to avoid, for better or worse, operating like a real business.

‘The Book’ stands for more than the codex as a technology (multiple sheets of paper carrying printed text, stitched together, bound, and covered), but for every aspect of our culture books have touched. Those who don’t read books for leisure sometimes don’t get it, and can find the whole discussion tedious – after all, what does it really matter if the words we devour come in the form of pigments on cellulose pulp or backlit liquid crystals? Who cares if you, in the privacy of your own home, decide to go to bed with a paperback or a tablet computer? Isn’t it the words that are important?

Well, yes. But, as usual, there’s more to it. ‘The Printed Book’, as a kind of platonic entity, has come to stand for more than ink on bound quires of paper. The Book has come to stand for a certain way of engaging with our culture: a slow, deep, focused plod through enduring narratives and timeless knowledge. Rightly or wrongly, the internet has come to stand for the opposite: fast access, divided attention, rapid-fire response, perishable content, and a preference for easy-to-grok cat videos over challenging and stimulating work. The ‘death’ or ‘future’ of The Book is less about the future of the printed codex as a technology, and almost entirely about the future of ‘high culture’ The Book has come to represent: literature, scholarship, wisdom.

Those who want The Book to survive tend to want the internet to lose (even if they won’t readily admit it), but because there’s almost no chance of that happening, the electronic book has emerged, the result of a kind of Faustian Pact in which The Book’s soul has been sold to the internet in exchange for the promise of eternal digital life.

Nine out of ten books I read go through my Kindle, and it’s really not so scary. Those who have never seen a Kindle in the flesh are almost invariably surprised by how closely it resembles a book – the screen looks like cardboard, the e-ink is deliciously viscous (if I’m totally honest, I even like the smell). I don’t feel as though I’m missing anything.

And yet, while the Kindle apes the printed codex ninety percent of the time, there’s something claustrophobic about a world in which the entirety of our culture arrives through telephone lines and wireless networks. In which the library as we now know it is reduced to a series of computer terminals providing free access to the web.

Most days, my eyes move in a restless loop from the screen of my iMac to my iPhone to my iPad, such that when I close them shut, I can see the outline of a bright white rectangle that can take minutes to go away. And yet, what can I do? What can any of us do? The Printed Book offers the promise of a momentary escape from a creeping digital culture. To leave the internet for an extended period and engage with a printed book provides the ability to perceive our culture with a certain perspective unavailable to those constantly jacked in.

Perhaps unfortunately, as soon as you engage with digital culture, it’s extremely difficult to return to the way things were: the old way is too slow, too time-consuming. I’d love to read more books in print, just as I’d love to listen to records, write more letters, and paint with oils. But there’s no time: there are too many emails to send this morning, too many songs and videos to load into iTunes. In two decades, I’ve noticed the pace of my life quicken, and distance and depth diminish. I’m reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs right now, and Jobs remarks at one point that the Western mind isn’t good at moving slowly: as soon as we reach a certain speed of thought, we find the concept of decelerating impossible. It’s testament to the complexity of Jobs’ character that his devices are both responsible for making deep reading difficult while at the same time enabling publishers to sell electronic books en masse.

‘The Printed Book’ stands for a very particular kind of journey: a journey across narrative terrain that takes significant time and effort. Most electronic books preserve that sense of ‘bookishness’, but the electronic medium stands for something different: effortlessness and immediacy. We’ll keep talking about the future of the book until this incongruity is resolved. Maybe this conversation is one we’ll be having for a while.

Client: SA Multicultural Debate

What’s nifty about this project?

Initially, the team putting together the SA Multicultural Debate were considering a conventional multi-page website. After a consultation, I introduced them to the concept of the one page website, in which all content is served on a single homepage. This approach allows users to scan for general information without needing to navigate from one page to another. A navigation bar, meanwhile, allows users who know what they’re looking for quick access to relevant content.

Project type: web design, print design, branding

Client: The Kind Cleaner

What’s nifty about this project?

Paul Goodsell was looking to establish a brand for The Kind Cleaner, his environmentally-friendly cleaning company.

Conventionally, we’re told to distinguish work from life, art from commerce, the serious from the joyful. As far as I can tell, Steve Jobs never paid heed to such distinctions.

Steve wasn’t a businessman in the typical sense. He was a man who conceived of tools to enable us to create and communicate, and to enjoy the creativity of others. Steve’s genius was his recognition that mass-produced slabs of glass and silicon and aluminium could be drawn together to create something beautiful and human.

Still, I couldn’t care less about the gadgets. It would be sad and misguided to reduce Steve Jobs to a product lineup.

Steve’s legacy can, I think, be summarised in a single sentence: it shows when we take care.

My life, and the lives of countless others, has been shaped by that philosophy.

Last week, I spent some time working on a project with an illustrator. In poking around the backend of the illustrator’s website, I noticed that her online portfolio had been constructed around a fairly generic WordPress theme sold online for $20. A quick glance at the stats over at the theme store revealed over three thousand bloggers had purchased this theme for use. This illustrator prides herself on her attention to detail, so it surprised me that she would feel comfortable using such a common, almost entirely unmodified template.

I brought the matter up with the illustrator. She paid a web designer $1300 to create her online portfolio, operating under the implied understanding that he would provide her with an original design upon which she could base her brand. Legally, however, this understanding was not made clear. The web designer used the illustrator’s naivety to onsell the license to a cheap WordPress theme for well over fifty times the license’s cost. Legally, the designer has purchased the right to sell the design to his client. Ethically, however, the client is not expecting to be resold the license to use somebody else’s design. There’s a disconnect between what is legally allowable, and what is ethically right.

A broad equivalent might be a photographer purchasing a series of stock photographs, presenting those photographs to the editor of a magazine as her own work, and pocketing the difference. Or a student purchasing a piece of writing from an online essay mill and turning that work in to his professor.

I wonder how often these kinds of shenanigans takes place. Unfortunately, the legal burden falls on the client to make their needs as explicit as possible.

The ethical burden, however, falls squarely on the creative professional. If you consider yourself a true craftsperson, and if you value doing damn good work, you should be as open and honest as possible with your client. You should be able to explain your work clearly, without reference to meaningless acronyms or technical language, and you should set your prices fairly, instead of setting rates based on how much you think you can squeeze for the very least possible effort.

If you shirk your ethical obligation and attempt to deceive your client in search of a quick buck, you’re an embarrassment to everybody out there for whom the work is more than merely the means to an end. This isn’t about feeling guilty. It’s about taking pride in who you are and what you do.

Over time, though, I’ve learned to see things differently. It’s the gap between my work and the fantastic work I see that excites me. That gap means there’s a wealth of knowledge and experience out there, lying in wait. That gap means I’m never bored.

Curiously, as I get better at what I do, I don’t find that gap narrowing. Instead, the more I learn, the more I recognise there is to learn.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling proud of your work, but if you believe your work is perfect, I pity you. It means you’ve lost the ability to recognise the existence of the treasury of understanding that sits just outside your grasp.

Stay hungry, stay foolish… and keep grasping.

Every year, you run a poster design competition to determine the visual branding of the next year’s festival. I understand why you might think this is a great idea: it’s inclusive, puts “professional designers” on the same level as the amateurs, is a bit of fun, and gets people chatting.

From another standpoint, though, it’s Very Wrong Indeed. In sourcing specifically-produced work from a range of designers (the “entrants”) and only paying one of those designers (the “winner”), the end result is that you’ve dramatically underpaid for all the work you’ve received. Even if you pay the winner handsomely, consider this: if you receive a hundred entries and select pick one, you’re only paying 1% of what you should have. If every organisation or business were to follow your lead, the median salary across the design profession would shoot down. That sucks, no?

“Whoa, now!” I hear you say. “That’s a bit rich! We’ve made the rules clear! People know what they’re getting into!” That’s true, but it’s also true that you’ve set a precedent for other organisations and businesses to follow in sourcing design work. You’re a leader here, and instead of approaching the designer as a fellow professional, you’re promoting a model in which the client has all the power and the designer has none.

Would you consider it acceptable for any other business to seek out a redesign this way? If not, ask yourself what makes your organisation the exception to the rule – and recognise that almost every business believe themselves the exception (that’s the whole problem).

Also keep in mind that, contrary to supporting emerging talent, you’re actually suggesting to the amateur designer that spec work is acceptable practice, and that it’s usual for designers to work on projects for which they receive no compensation. Emerging designers need to understand that spec work is bad practice, or risk undervaluing their work.

So, what’s to be done, then? I’d suggest a better way to go about sourcing a fantastic poster design would be to ask designers – professional or amateur – to shoot through samples from their portfolio. If one of those designers stands out, you work with them to determine the kind of poster design you’d like. For unsuccessful applicants, very little time or energy is lost. For the successful applicant, you provide valuable advice and experience, assisting them in creating the kind of poster that fits the festival. You get a better poster. You don’t piss anybody off. Everybody wins.