ChangeOrder

We Become What We Behold

The words of media prophet Marshall McLuhan: "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."

Well, our newfangled tools are becoming... thoughty. Or perhaps a better word: impressionistic.

Phone Knows Best

Can a phone be your trusted best friend? Your personal trainer? Your confidante? Can it cheer you up when you're stressed? Can it know what you're feeling, and why you're feeling it? Can it go away when you just want to sit in the corner and cry?

If we're serious about pushing the utility of mobile devices to their absolute limit, then we will have to create software so sophisticated that it can discern the difference between the perceived intent of user actions and the actual intent contained in our brains and bodies. Computers will need to make us feel like they're reading our minds—not just our words, where our eyeballs are pointing, and where our body is positioned in physical space. And when we behave in a irrational manner (meaning like human beings) these same computers will need to withhold judgment on what does not compute.

We will call these design challenges "HAL 9000 problems," because this leap in technological evolution brings up some very gnarly dilemmas for designers and developers—though not because an AI in a spaceship is preparing to kill us. (Yet.)

How to Throw a "Part with Your Art Party"

 

My wife and I were staring into our closet at a big bundle of framed photographs we'd accumulated over the past eight years.

"What are we going to do with all of these?" I said. It was unlikely we'd ever show them again or own a place large enough to accommodate them all. Wouldn't they look better in someone's home? At this point, would it make sense to just give them away?

"Let's throw a 'Part with Your Art Party,'" my wife said. Hence, a plan was hatched.

Thinking about Intangible User Interfaces

Apple's announcement on Monday regarding the iPhone 3G S, with voice control, represents more than just a way to manage your iPod state and dial phone calls in a hands-free manner. It's an important step in growing new flavors of user interface that are contingent on the intangible into the mainstream.

I'm not talking solely about Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), or the profession of Voice Interaction Design (VIxD), or the many small fiefdoms and associations currently blossoming around human-computer interaction governed by conversational speech systems. These are useful and important niches, but let's think big in our increasingly fractured and over-specialized profession of design.

Let me propose a somewhat radical alternative: roll Voice User Interfaces into a category that I'd like to dub the Intangible User Interface.

We have Graphical User Interfaces, which we know quite well from decades of struggling with operating systems. Our new friends, the Touch and Natural User Interfaces, rely on our physical bodies for operation beyond things like mice and keyboards. Intangible User Interfaces, however, would be a branch of interface that relies on everything but using your physical body in motion as an input mechanism. There's some wobbly semantics around the word "intangible," as it's often used to describe the attributes of a designed system that can't be visibly measured or quantified when observing users. However, it's that specific quality that I want to focus on: input and output contingent on what cannot be seen.

Thinking Beyond Design Thinking

How have design thinking and design aesthetics become such strange befellows?

These past few weeks, I've been meditating on the following quote by Charles Olson regarding the two critical human inputs into a powerfully charged poem:

the HEAD, by the way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE

In Olson's quote, he's referring to his theory of organic poetics, which is a type of poetry that derives its power from closely mimicking the ebb and flow of thought as opposed to falling into the lockstep cadence and strictures of versification, meter, rhyme, and other European contrivances. As a result of this alignment of the head and the heart beyond intellectual constructs, the art that you experience through the eye and the ear inspires direct transmission of experience.

Why is there not such a unity in how we talk about design? Perhaps because we still have no vocabulary around how to describe the most important result of the design process: the direct transmission of knowledge.

Hacking Your Design Habits

These past few weeks, I've been trying to watch how my interaction with my laptop and desktop computer changes the quality of what I design.

As an example: When I'm writing copy for a web page, I often key it directly into the Photoshop comp and try to design the layout around it. However, if I'm writing copy divorced from layout, it invariably ends up being too long, and I end up struggling with paring it down to half of its length.

At this point, I usually go for a walk or take on another task until I've achieved enough detachment to find new angles for editing the content. But recently I thought of a new tack: reading copy off the screen and transcribing it onto a sticky note. In the process of writing the copy longhand into a tiny square, I don't even have to think about what I need to edit. New words suggest themselves just because I'm writing at the speed of my body, not the speed of my mind.

That was just one example of design hacking. Another design hack I've been experimenting with is practicing Surrealist automatism in meetings, then bringing ideas from the automatic drawing into my work. Automatism is a practice derived from Surrealist poets such as André Breton, which swiftly leapt into the drawing and painting work of André Masson, Miró, Dalî, and many others.

How do you do it? The next time you're in a meeting -- the more procedural, the better -- allow your pencil in your notebook to move freely. Keep your rational mind occupied: focus on what's being said with your rational mind, and participate in the conversation. And be sure to avoid trying to craft or shape what emerges consciously. You aren't trying to draw. You're just drawing.

After the meeting is over and when you're back at your desk, look down at what you've written. What accidents and chance marks on the page are suggestive to you? How could they evolve into ideas that, when the opportunity arises, infiltrate one of your designs?

Short URLs, Say Hello to Marketing

Want some http://co.ke/tonite?

If you're investing in sending out a high volume of tweets for yourself or your company -- and you happen to possess a fairly rabid fan base -- it would be interesting to explore if you'd receive more click-throughs to your tweets as a result of vanity short URLs.

Doing Less with More: The Elegance of Denovation

Are you looking to create the next killer Web site or app? Perhaps you should start by denovating.

Elegant Web experiences mingle utility with a spirit of "denovation" -- a word from Jeremy Alexis, who defines the term as "the attempt to simplify or reduce the number of products without reducing the service performed. Denovation provides a clear path to elegance."

Successful Web sites and applications, well-tended by humans, naturally lend themselves to a denovative approach. You can shed unnecessary or cumbersome features and pages to create a firmer focus on a user's greatest needs. Much like pruning a tree in order to preserve its health, a site whose growth is managed in this way can maintain its systemic and formal elegance over time.

Web sites and apps need to evolve as user behaviors change. In this fashion, the Internet conforms to the same natural rules as humans because these billions of pages are created by humans and fed by humans. So if we view elegant Web sites as being organic in nature, then we can read "denovation" as a form of natural selection. Features whose level of use fall at the very far end of the long tail should be pruned.

Reducing features also has an added benefit: you gain more space in which to evoke positive feeling, not cognitive friction. Can you imagine if they did such a thing with, say, Microsoft Word? I think the overall level of anger in today's society would drop substantially...

Doing the UI Pantomime

In my last 80 Works class, I asked the talented designer Scott Scheff to come as a guest. He brought a great exercise that has a lot of practical application for a group of designers looking to explore the nooks and crannies of an interface. Scott dubbed the exercise the "UI Pantomime," and it is a twist on a few of IDEO's role-playing methods.

The students were tasked with helping create the in-store experience for a "record store of the future" called Unifi. At this store, you could use an iPhone application as an adjunct to the shopping experience. The app would add the following to your retail browsing experience:

1. When looking at a CD, you could sample audio from the CD's tracks
2. When you purchased a CD in the store, you would automatically get MP3s of the CD tracks downloaded to your device
3. The application would also prompt you with related artists and featured artists (this week: Wilco)

After the students were briefed, we set them loose with about 30 minutes to work through the details of the interface through "UI Pantomime".

Here's how the exercise played out:

First 5-10 minutes: The students chose roles. One was the shopper entering the store. She held an eraser, which was a stand in for an iPhone. A second student played the interface of the iPhone app and had to act out what was happening within the interface. The shopper and the app then worked through the use cases we'd provided, while another student was responsible for documenting a rough user flow and UI ideas based on the conversation between the phone and the shopper.

Second 5-10 minutes: All the students stopped role playing/documenting the action and examined the user flow and user interface sketches, making refinements to screens based on the varying perceptions of each student.

Third 5-10 minutes: The students playing the shopper and the iPhone interface attempt to follow the user flow/UI sketches as documented. The third student observed the tension between the real-world interaction and the documented flow and recorded any new screens/areas that emerged.

Fourth 5-10 minutes: The students debrief and revise the flow and screens.

If this was an at-work exercise, this iterative cycle could continue until the final "performance" felt complete.

When watching the students work through this exercise, there were a number of aha! moments for all of us.

Working out user flows and UI designs on paper is never a substitute for living through one. When creating a user flow and UI, it's fairly easy to document and improve upon what already exists. But if you're making a Web app or site from scratch, you should try to find a way to "live through it". Acting the flow out in the physical world affords us a much wider range of observed behaviors, which helps us select the one that is most usable and human.

What may not be apparent as an issue to one designer can be immediately apparent as an issue to a group of designers. Moving from free-form improvisation to literal, documented flows causes powerful tension that immediately calls into question every detail you've documented to date. After only a minute or two of directly following along with the documented user flow and UI design, the students asking to break out of the exercise and revise the UI right on the spot. They immediately knew which details weren't right.

Great Web sites and applications require friendly dialogue. Acting out interfaces forced us to bring a conversational nature to our application design. Alan Cooper said rightly that we treat computers like people, not boxes of logic -- we expect a tiny bit of emotion to how we exchange information. One of the students joked at the start of the exercise that he didn't feel like he was acting like an interface... he was too human-sounding. I shot back that he was acting how a good interface should behave.

Give this exercise a whirl and let me know how it works for you. We'll be trying it again in our next class!

Texting Your Fridge Was Never Easier

We're all abuzz about items that consolidate all of our media-related needs into one hand-held device, such as the iPhone. Or, alternatively, we geek out over those little electronic doodads that just do things more simply. The Flip camcorder comes to mind, capturing 13 percent of the camcorder market within a year.

These two trends are buzzing merrily right along. We drool over devices of both stripes accordingly.

But there was a dearth of coverage this holiday season about a technological doodad that is pointing towards a new trend in our innovation-led technodevice industry. And lord knows you could find it on T-Mobile's Web site -- they don't even feature it online.

My Dream Channel: ARG-TV

Delving deeply into the online world crafted for Alan Ball's new vampire series on HBO, True Blood, I was struck by how the world of Alternative Reality Gaming (ARGs) and the world of TV are so well made for each other. I'm waiting for the day that they crash together American Idol-style into an interactive experience that, after every commerical break, would adjust its storyline based on the preferred audience input home by home. Call it immersive, personalized, interactive entertainment. ARG-TV.

If you haven't participated in an ARG, it's a collaborative rallying of players around the activities of clue-gathering, puzzle-solving, and online and real-world collaboration to help assemble complex strands of plot and character into a meaningful narrative. The intense focus on creating a mythology, the high level of detail crammed into most ARGs, and the cross-linkages between on- and off-line clue gathering make for a novelistic, long-form gaming experience that blurs boundaries between the real world and the world of the game. Many ARGs are crafted to promote corporate entertainments such as movies and TV programs, while others are created by die-hard gamers with a personal interest in creating a meaningful gaming experience or pushing the boundaries of the medium. The screen capture shown above is from the ARG attached to the new TV show Fringe. In true J.J. Abrams style, the corporation referenced as the big bad evil in the series has its own Web site full of puzzling secrets -- much like The Hanso Foundation in one of the Lost ARGs.

Now, I haven't owned a television set for 8 years and counting -- and colleagues in my field in the late 90s and early 2000s ragged on me hard for it, because I've had some responsibility for helping to craft storyboards for commercials, video, motion graphics, Flash demos, etc. "How can you do a good job if you don't see what everyone else is doing? You should be watching MTV every day. Suck it down from the pipe!"

Then MTV became MTV.com. Which helped to spawn YouTube. Which begat Vimeo. Which spread killer work via blogs. Which were aggregated into sites that tracked all the hot work in motion graphics for me, so I didn't even need to go out and seek it anymore. All that great work is beckoning from my Google Reader, the junk drawer of my Internet addiction beckoning away, awaiting another mainline fix.

I'm waiting for the same growth progression to happen with ARGs and how they filter into our mainstream consciousness. There are communities that have sprung up around ARGs such as Unfiction's forums and ARGNet, where the players create the dialogue and archive the game progression as it unfolds, wiki-style.

But I'm waiting for a similar kind of daily content aggregation to happen to ARGs. The lurkers, the mass audience that watches the activity of the ARG players --- almost like the hushed crowd at Wimbledon watching the tennis ball get smacked back and forth between expert players -- hold the real power to push an ARG's mythology and associated thought product into our collective consciousness.

But the important thing is, it won't be just content aggregation or news coverage. ARG-TV would allow the creation of the story, rebroadcast and assembled into a more palatable form for the masses and still malleable enough to be influenced by every reader. A kind of wiki-tainment that flows across text, image, audio, and video. Instead of playing your game on an Xbox 360 or Wii, you'd be playing it in the real world and on your TV... though what we consider a TV would have eventually mashed up with your computer and platform gaming machine into some kind of unholy beast.

I'd also want ARG-TV to have some form of slider that allowed me to dial in exactly how much community interaction I wanted with my gaming experience. Other people's actions could influence my online experience massively, or not at all, depending on how I twist a certain dial in my television settings.

Unlike a regular first-person shooter or other type of reflex-based game, watching ARG-TV would require a real investment of time, intellect, and emotion. Most games only require an investment of time and don't tax the intellect or emotion too heavily. There's a smaller but more focused audience that I feel would invest the energy necessary to play a massive, ongoing ARG, and then be rewarded with a truly collaborative experience that would be watched by others and appreciated.

Think ESPN gone Kurt Vonnegut patronized by MENSA. I'd pay to watch that. Maybe two other people would, too.

Party Browsing

Now that everyone's got a snazzy browser in their iPhone, it seems like the Internet has become our real-world intelligence confirmation unit. I can't recall the last time I was at a party or eating dinner with some friends, and when a point of consideration came up, out came the phone for instant Wikipedia validation. Web browsing is now social, just forced through a straw.

This kind of collaborative browsing, while still fresh and new, seems to be an evolution of co-browsing activities such as Medium and other fairly new sites on the scene. But what I'm really interested in is the following:

How do you make browsing the Internet a real-world, at home party activity? How do you work together in one physical space to assemble and share entertainment and knowledge? Do you have multiple input devices? A giant touch screen with a natural user interface? Do you control it with your mobile device? It's not good enough to each have our own Internet appliance. We need one appliance that we can throw all of our thoughts onto, like a digital whiteboard mixed up with a browser, to mush it all together. Just imagine the overload of great stuff, all there on one big screen.

Of course, then we'd need a drinking game to go with it as well.

We were having a great time party surfing this past weekend. When having friends over for dinner recently, our postprandial activity consisted of calling out links we'd recently enjoyed, then surfing to the appropriate URL and sharing the information out among the group. After a while, practically anything one of us said became a URL to check out.

Big technology and game companies, get right on it. I'm sure there are at least twelve people that will pay $500k for such technology in their palatial homes.

What Should I Do With TypographyPolice.com?

Oh, the curse of a great URL, purchased amid a flurry of irrational anger at a poorly designed, awfully kerned, Comic Sans-ridden sign in a bakery window. TypographyPolice.com, what shall I do with thee? You are about to expire, and I should probably renew you and actually do something with the domain.

Some ideas that came to mind in the heat of the moment:

1. A running blog of terrible type examples from the real world, with pointers as to how to avoid those mistakes.

2. Along with those terrible type samples, highlights of amazing typography alongside a series of 20 or so rules that designers can follow to rock the their type hardcore.

3. A Type Police exam and, upon passing, a membership card that showed that you were a Type Policeperson and were fully authorized to smack down on the terrors that face us in a Microsoft Word-dominated world.

4. Printable tear-off sheets that people could use to paste violations on real-world stuff. (Design-Police.org started this after I bought this URL, which made me quash the idea of TypographyPolice, but really, these are different things, right?)

What else could this domain represent? How can we save the world from ridiculous typography and the terrors that it imprints on the public at large?

Social Media(tion): Polishing the Mirror

I watched the robin hop his way up and down the branches of the tree, efficiently gulping down the berries until he noticed my gaze. In a huff, he flew away.

Mesmerized, I forgot to take a picture of that moment with my camera phone for my Flickr photostream or Tumblr page. Or I could digest it into a brief tweet so my friends can imagine that moment in time, distract themselves as long as it took me to write the above sentence, and turn back to whatever matters are consuming their attention. Instead of being in the moment, I was in the moment of thinking how I could share the moment. Then, the moment ended. I was left with nothing but these words.

*

What frustrates me about social media is a kind of behavior I can only describe as social media(tion). The onslaught of social media options allows near-microscopic access to our lives through a computer or a smart device, and at the same time, it calls attention to how our privacy has always been an illusion in the real world as well. It places a veil over direct experience in a way that makes me feel less human. I find myself conforming my mental environment to fit the medium that broadcasts the message.

Perhaps it is my quasi-Buddhist bent, but the mediation inherent in social networks requires creativity on the part of both actors in a conversation. Those online interactions rarely enhance my real-world experiences unless both parties are straining against the boundaries of the medium. The more experiences we have online, the more time we spend searching for those truly creative moments -- and they are ever fleeting.

Social media has encouraged me to collect what I call me-bits, lists and photos and links and words that are the sum total of the online collective me. It's a simulcrum of experience, reductive, and utterly necessary to place a little tip of each person's iceberg into the pool of humanity. You have to pour something true into that sea and hope it bobs to the surface, giving others a sense of who you are in reality.

As a designer tasked with the unique challenge of being media agnostic and savvy when it comes to social networking, you have a sense of what it takes to craft a truly meaningful experience, bundling up those me-bits into something tangible and human. Is it ever simple to craft a thing of true meaning, both casual and profound?

*

Social media is ubiquitous now. It pours around us, clear as water, and holds within it the seeds that will create the new ways for computers to become more human. Social media, and with it, social computing as a whole, is sandpapering the edges off the computer into some kind of telescope that we can use to zoom in closely and gain access to other person's life, wholesale. The days of Friendster v1 and the introduction of MySpace are starting to look like the Pleioscene Era.

Inevitably, computers will get pretty good at predicting how we'll act, depending how we behave on those networks. Soon enough, we won't have to think at a very granular level. There's a reason all those sci-fi movies show people standing before a clear pane of glass, speaking to an AI and using their touch-screen interface to swiftly dial up any matter of information without having to manage higher-order complexity. The computer does the crunching, and we manage how the digested bits get mushed around.

If that dream of progress is Computing v2.0, a la the scene in WALL-E where all of humanity communicates through holo-screens and robot servants that provide you with your every whim and need, we're still in Society v0.2.

Society v0.1 was when we invented the printing press. The Web today consists of what are effectively flickering pieces of paper with type and images imprinted on them, augmented by video and audio in small measure. We can get creative about what lives on the pieces of paper, what gets filmed out of the real world and edited into a palatable artifact, and listen to the recordings that have been mastered optimally for AAC format, but in the end you can't smell what you're typing unless your computer is on fire. Someone tagging me it and running away on Facebook seems like a delightful diversion, but I'd rather that someone in the real world started a game of hide and seek at my office.

Perhaps anthropologists in the future will view all these me-bits in their Wayback Machine, sifting through the wreckage of our era in sheer delight at the ingenuity we were able to squeeze out of such a limited medium, compared to their 4D brain-sharing technologies.

*

Where I struggle with social media -- and this may be a generational thing, considering I was born in the penultimate year of the much storied Gen X klatch -- has little to do with the actual mechanisms out there on the Interweb. Facebook, Twitter, Del.icio.us, and Second Life are damn useful. My main issue is that social media feels like work.

Having a conversation with a person on the street, getting lost in the act of creating a piece of art, eating really good dark chocolate, luxuriating in the feeling of not having to focus my attention on anything at all, doesn't feel like work. Those are the experiences that seem to stick in my mind, that are a function of being in my body. Playing with Facebook or sending out a tweet, to me, feels like polishing the mirror.

That latter phrase refers to one of the Platform Sutras:

"The body is the tree of wisdom,
the mind a bright mirror in its stand.
At all times take care to keep it polished,
never let the dust and grime collect!"

The counter-verse to this, the fundamental outcry that spits in the face of me-bits:

"Wisdom never had a tree,
the bright mirror lacks a stand.
Fundamentally there is not a single thing--
where could the dust and grime collect?"

Social media is the mirror we place the me-bits on. Polishing the mirror brings more me-bits into focus, and may bring us greater knowledge, entertainment, and maybe even enlightenment. But ultimately, we walk away from the mirror. The mirror doesn't exist, except in our minds -- and, lest I forget, in data centers backed up by the minute, every blog post encased in amber. Such a gargantuan effort to remember shards of our selves, locked into database fields and blog posts stacked to Alpha Centauri and back. It is our mind versus the machine, in a race to craft the most appropriate illusion of self.

In the end, the machine will win. Pleased with its first formulation of digital personality, it will look back into our recent history, confident that human thought had been finally codified into easily twined threads of emotion and logic within a computer chip that could fit on the head of a pin.

*

When will social media cease to feel like work? When social media ceases to exist in its current form. When social media is supplanted by the direct recording of human experience. Another sci-fi movie device: the iPod that contains human memory, that we can digest at our leisure. More powerful than art, a higher-order kind of mind-porn, and the great divider between those that have the imagination necessary to live the experiences that other people want to consume.

Maybe social media needs to be work. Maybe my struggle against social media has everything to do with the limited time we have on this planet, and the time expended waiting for the next browser refresh, the next page in a series of twenty. The me that sits here typing these me-bits will need a place to eat and sleep. Until then, the mirror will continue to collect dust, glinting faintly in the sunset peering over the Cascades. I will shut my laptop, walk out onto the balcony, and watch the faint sliver of orange light curl its way below the snow-capped peaks, comfortable in the knowledge that at least a hairsbreadth of this moment felt was contained, however faintly, in your mind.

Eco Luxury: Not to Scale, Yet

My big advice to Nau 2.0: Charge more for your clothes. And start as small as you can.

A few months ago, I wrote a post on the rise of Indie and Eco Luxury, and one of the hero companies of Eco Luxury that I mentioned was Nau. They were one of the first attempts at creating a luxury brand that forcefully marketed ecological, sustainable, and stylish clothing through online and direct retail stores.

Sadly, due to a lack of venture capital funding Nau was forced to shut their retail stores and sell off all of their stock at a discount. There's been much talk in the blogosphere about what killed Nau v1.0:

Their unusual, I mean novel, retail model. Nau stores generally carried one size of each style and encouraged store visitors to have their purchases shipped to their home instead of buying them in the store. Critics have noted that many luxury fashion purchases are often made on whim, and the inability to easily carry a purchase out could have been a negative for the buying experience. (I personally didn't care when I had made an purchase there, but then again, I'm not really a luxury shopper.)

Their all-Flash Web site. Nau.com, as much as I love it from a branding perspective, was not created in a manner that made it easy to shop and had weak user experience. When the brand launched, some of my designer friends had hammered on the site design as an example of design trumping usability, which is definitely a bad place to be for a design-oriented brand that focuses on function and form.

Their oversized ambition regarding audience demand. Nau's business plan hinged on continued rounds of investor financing to ensure their continued growth into more retail locations. This is what really spiked Nau's ambition, when you boil all of this down. Instead of fostering an audience through their Web site and then growing that online audience into local retail, where demand had been generated, Nau was looking to expand into new locations even as they were discussing shutting their doors. My neighborhood of Fremont in Seattle was the destination for one of those new locations.

I find it fascinating that a company that wanted to live, eat, sleep, and breathe sustainability in clothing production, distribution, and sales practices didn't launch their business by only selling through the Internet, or intentionally limit their market by starting very exclusive before mass-producing their line and attempting to go big retail. Millions of dollars were wasted in proving that without a strong online customer base, a compelling retail experience in a few upscale markets isn't quite enough to keep the doors open.

Had Nau offered a smaller product line that was made to order and was perhaps more exclusive in both price point and retail placement, my gut tells me that they would have organically created a group of loyalists that would have evangelized the brand when they dove into the mainstream retail market as their own storefront.

Small pioneering eco-luxury brands such as Mink Shoes took about as long as Nau's lifespan to get off the ground, and still haven't achieved any major economies of scale. But they're profitable, and resell through many top retailers. A recent article in Fast Company echoes similar sentiment regarding the need to find sustainability through selling small quantities of green products in the luxury market. You won't see Barney's selling 2,000 of the same pair of eco-friendly shoes. Eco Luxury has a long, long way to go if it's going to scale to the mainstream in any meaningful way.

Hindsight is 20/20 here. And luckily, Horny Toad has swooped in and purchased the Nau brand and legacy, along with much of the original staff, to give it another go. Here's hoping that with this new financial backer, Nau 2.0 will be able to create a sustainable business practice through actual clothing sales that matches the deep philosophical roots that underpin their products.

So, back to what I said at the start of all this...

Okay, Nau 2.0: Now that thousands of your loyal customers have jumped up and down and told you how much we want you to stick around, I don't think we'll mind paying a little more for your clothes -- especially if that will allow you to continue donating 5% of each purchase to charity.

If you're going to try and keep the luxury mantle on your products and your philosophy untouched, that's one of the few ways to keep an edge on the dozens of other fashion brands that are now rolling out eco-friendly lines alongside their usual unsustainable practices.

And we'll forgive you for the missteps along the way... just be sure to be a little smarter about what you're doing this time.

Give Your Phone the Finger

Multi-touch, gestural interfaces are the new black. And for the next four to five years, they're the immediate future of our ever-evolving human/computer interactions. But for us designers, I'd like to project a little further into the future and discern an even more likely scenario: true sense integration on mobile and desktop computing devices.

As designers, we usually only get to consider how media looks, sounds, and feels in a mildly tactile sense. In the future, we'll be able to consider these variables at a much greater depth and dimension than that of a static, unchanging substrate. I also wouldn't be surprised if smell and taste gained much greater prominence in the designer's arsenal.

Specifically, there are certain kinds of interactions regarding mobile and desktop devices that don't seem very far off from a technology standpoint. They do, however, require weaning us off the idea of doing our computing through a screen-topped device with a gestural input mechanism. Multi-touch interfaces don't have a ton of utility if you have disabilities, and definitely don't exploit other mechanisms we humans have for conveying and receiving information.

Here's what I'm dreaming of...

An earpiece that doubles as a phone and really understands what I want.

I don't always need to see the Internet to be able to grasp the information from it.

If you're looking to access the visual Internet, the iPhone dominates the field for ease of use and clarity and will likely be the gold standard for some time. But what if I'm going out on the town and don't want that phone in my pocket? Make the earpiece a phone as well, and pair it with trainable natural-language voice recognition software driven through the cell-phone network that learns my voice, my needs, and my quirky slang.

I could imagine the earpiece phone recognizing commands such as "give me turn-by-turn directions to Pacific Place," "pay my cell phone bill with my credit card," or "text my friend Joanie that I'll be twenty minutes late" and it will be smart enough to fulfill your actions without any major hiccups.

This is a true expression of cloud computing separate of the desktop and is where Google is starting to lay the ground with services such as 1-800-GOOG-411, which they claim is a not-for-profit venture, but makes a heck of a lot of sense in their long term strategy for having a universe of cloud-driven Internet tools that have great utility for a broad audience and further help them sell search advertising.

Knowing how excited people get about these kinds of interfaces, I could see them being smart enough to recognize patterns of behavior and quietly prompt you: "Did you mean to pass by the cereal aisle? I know you like Lucky Charms." (Okay, that would be scary...)

A touch interface that communicates through sense of touch, not screen activity.

What's the weather going to be? I go to the weather service on my phone, and when I touch the screen to see what the upcoming weather's going to be like through the weekend, the surface of the touch interface gets hotter or colder depending on the time period my finger hovers over. Sounds frilly, right? Sure, if you aren't blind. Blind people should be able to ask their phone, "What's the temperature going to be tomorrow?" and have the phone adjust its heat output in relation to today's temperature to indicate the relative difference.

Another example. Let's say I'm considering taking SR-520 over I-90 to get to the Eastside. I ask my phone (using my voice interface) how the traffic is on SR-520. The steering wheel gets harder by 30%. Should I take I-90 then? The steering wheel softens dramatically. There are other ways of getting data instead of me barking orders to my phone/car/computer, then having it bark at me a series of choppily-voiced words, which are interrupting my enjoyment of the new MGMT album.

Yes, the multi-touch gestural interface is very cool and gets rid of that mousy thing on the desk. But I want more sense out of my touch interactions.

Forget the idea of the phone altogether. It's part of the devices around me.

I know phone manufacturers want to make money from our phone networks that require devices that earn money for large publicly traded companies through the use of night and weekend minutes... but doesn't that idea sound... quaint?

I'd be perfectly happy if phone calls followed me from device to device around me, instead of me having to carry a device around in my pocket. Sure, there is the love that I'd lavish on a phone as part of my technological pocket arsenal next to the iPod, the (soon to be smart) wallet, my house keys, my sketch notebook, and my pack of mints. But I'm of the "less is more" camp, and less means no phone whenever possible.

Since I'm Gen X, I'm cool with being a little out of touch. I'm already seeing that use of cell phones will stratify, with phones being generated for the youth as part of their uniform, while from Gen X on up, it's seen as a necessity, not as an entertaining activity. Higher-end luxury phones will be wispy, while phones for the youth will be badges.

But really, I'd like to get rid of the word phone altogether. Or at least call this new category of devices something else. The whole beauty of the term "mobile device" is that you don't have to say it's a phone/MP3 player/GPS/Knife/Wii remote. Let's just tack the word "multi-sensory" onto mobile devices and hope that the device manufacturers can pay it off with something that delivers some real utility to us technology junkies.

Plotting the Impact of Creative Ideas

The wall has twenty or thirty sketches pinned to it, and you're in a big group of designers, account managers, project managers, and other creative types trying to determine which ideas make the cut and get executed for the big client meeting. The creative director turns to the group and says, "So, which of these ideas do you like the best?"

Always a loaded question.

Does it boil down to how I feel about it -- the gut level reaction?

To me, a great concept will always inspire some sort of emotion, twanging the heartstrings, so to speak. It also has some kind of poetry or sizzle that takes it to a place that demands some form of attention.

But is that what the client wants? Is that what the creative brief demands? And is that what the audience needs to hear?

All valid questions, which lead to great concepts being spiked before they reach the light of a Web site or a billboard -- and if unasked, allow the wrong kinds of concepts to slip through to the client.

After going through a few hundred of these concept evaluation meetings, I decided to get smart about forging a process to focus my concepts before they're evaluated.

Before I concept, I look at the chart above and determine in my head where my design work should land based on the business case. Different marketing needs call for different kinds of ideas. Before I go off into dreamland, I have an idea of where I need to steer to fulfill the client's objective.

Then, after I've got a few awful sketches and well-refined umbrella concept rationales and headlines, I'll pin them up on the wall and I'll ask myself the following three questions, keeping in mind the baseline strategy I've staked for the project:

1) What kind of emotion is evoked through the communication?

If I'm creating a product brochure with dry descriptions of enterprise-level accounting software, the kinds of emotion I'm seeking to express may be quite different from a global campaign selling soap. Understand where you need to land on the scale between logic and emotion ensures that the audience receives the right effect from the communication. Ideally, you're using the right blend of the two to address an audience's need or "pain point."

We always groan when we see the mother making the Prego spaghetti sauce, but it does evoke the right emotion and I remember the ad enough to write about it here. Plus, it addresses a real pain point: do I really have the time to go spend two hours in the kitchen making slow-cooked tomato sauce?

2) How tangible are the benefits in the messaging?

How many commercials have you seen where you remember the gimmick, but not the product? Usually the gimmick is only tangentially related to the tangible product.

At some agencies I've worked at, the art directors have said, "Be sure to make the product as small as possible in the corner." That umbrella solution sure doesn't work in the long run if you need to show tangibility, which in the long run points to sales, not awareness.

Remember that Infiniti car commercial campaign where they never showed the cars, just natural forms like leaves floating on the wind? The press positively glowed about it. Quite a good idea, but the lack of tangibility proved to be the ads' Achilles heel. The ads were found to be ineffective when it came to selling cars.

3) Is it evocative or just an echo of the mundane?

If you don't create something expressive to market your product or service, you aren't going to keep audience interest -- your work will veer from the poetic to the mundane. It's hard to create poetry with a tangible expression of a product like, say, toilet-bowl cleaners.

This is where real understanding how your audience approaches your product makes such a big impact on the quality of a creative idea. If it's evocative, you've reflected the audience's mindset and tapped into their impressions and emotions. And by evocative, I mean that it ceases to function in the realm of the literal and becomes figurative, metaphorical, or expressive in a way that transcends our notions of our day-to-day lives.

--

I think it's easy to play on the axes between logic/emotion and tangibility/intangibility. Where we really show our stripes as creative thinkers is where our ideas land on the axis between the mundane and the poetic. This is why many designers struggle when they can't create a communication that has a measure of poetry in it.

In my estimation, if you've come up with a really poetic idea and it creates the right emotional reaction in your target audience, and the tangibility of your product's benefits are visible in some way, you've found the "sweet spot" for your concept. From our recent bevy of Super Bowl spots, ones that caught my interest were the Monster ad with the two guys on bikes at the center of the Earth and the Tide commercial with the talking stain. Both of them expressed these three criteria in a measure that worked.

If the client just wants a rational comparison between three types of software, then you know your concepts need to speak to rational decision-makers. It's not going to veer into the poetic.

If you're selling a politician, you may veer into pure emotion and poetry and for a time, forgo all those things like, say, facts.

If your client sells security systems, you'll likely have an ad that implies that someone tried to break into your house, inspiring fear and playing on the literal risk of being hurt by a burglar, then it isn't likely you're going to shoehorn some kind of poetry into it. I can imagine it now... Security Alarms: The Musical.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether this model holds up beyond advertising and also can help designers determine their best work in areas like branding, identity development, and designing compelling environmental graphics. Thanks!

The Benefits of Design Thievery

In my very first days as a fledgling graphic designer, in love with the potent combination of Emigre and Ray Gun that my high school literary magazine editor had foisted upon me, I combed through the local bookstore for anything that could explain to me, in a nutshell, all of the skills I'd need to learn to become a graphic designer.

I found plenty of Graphis Annuals, back issues of Communications Arts, and a number of books that recounted the history of graphic design. What I really dreamt of, in those days, was a book that could teach me everything that I'd need to know to design a logo, create a typeface from scratch, put together an annual report, art direct a photo shoot. You name it, I wanted to know how to do it well.

Much to my surprise, such a book did not exist. Twenty years later, such a book still does not exist. And that book never will.

It took me long into my career to learn the following: The only way to learn your best process for doing graphic design work is to do graphic design work.

Or, more specifically, you need to learn the accumulation of individual skills and talents that make up your favored design discipline, and then hone them until they're almost unconscious in their presence, and then practice them at your peak.

Bookstores nowadays are cluttered with monographs and catalogs of all types of design work. Such books are treasure troves of inspiration for designers, illuminating other designer's processes and their special ways of polishing their ideas into killer executions. They're going to give you new ways of thinking about the work and the raw fuel to push you in new directions to come up with better solutions in the future.

But they aren't really going to teach you how to be a better designer.

Wait -- doesn't reading design books make you a better designer? Doesn't it help you come up with better solutions? All these people that I read about are success stories. I can climb on their shoulders, glean their brilliance, and design the sleekest mousetrap around.

Well, the short answer is: Reading design books can help you succeed. But they sure aren't a substitute for doing the work. You only become a better designer through designing, or having a creative director that art directs the hell out of you until you learn the discipline.

Books, magazines, websites, music, other artistic mediums, etc. are aids in the process of gaining ideas. To borrow poet T.S. Eliot's critical note on the creative process -- shown here not misquoted, as it usually is collapsed into the old adage "Good poets borrow, great poets steal":

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

You could insert any artistic medium in for "poetry" in the above quote and it would hold true. Other designer's work is a launch pad, not a chance for you to rip them off wholesale. You don't copy other people's executions to make your work better. That would be unprofessional. Instead, you weld your theft into a whole of feeling which is unique and your own.

After you've been in the game for a decade or so, it can seem like the same ideas keep marching through. You keep your work unique by putting the right spin on the idea, clothing it something fresh. How many Western-themed invitations do you think have been made in your lifetime? What about a 1950s kitsch theme? These design motifs get recycled over and over again. The ideas behind them are what matter. When I left college, everything in the design world was new to me. Every idea seemed to spring unbidden in its novelty from brainstorming sessions with my creative teams. But after what seems a short 12 years, it became apparent that there are no new ideas under the sun. When embarking on a new project, if you stumble upon something fresh, it's 99.99% likely that someone else has already thought of it and maybe even won an award for it in a design magazine. But it's also likely that it hasn't been done in your market category, which is a certain kind of novelty that the market will easily bear.

For that 0.01% with the fresh, new idea -- we envy you. It's the graphic design equivalent of visiting Antarctica, quiet and mysterious, always cold and yet full of exotic wildlife you can't find anywhere else. And you can't step foot there. Not easily, at least. You need all sorts of permits and special dispensations. So put that aside for the moment. The day you can visit will come.

I've seen that the most potent, original ideas spring out of imagination and empathy and experience much quicker than leafing through a stack of magazines. It always feels like the magazines come out halfway through a project, when we've concepted work to the point that we feel like we're exhausted, and then we whip out books to see if there were any approaches we missed. Those approaches rarely make the cut, as they're usually derivations on a theme. This is the same reason why I discourage young designers from using stock photography websites to look for ideas. Then you're just fitting your ideas to their imagery. Ideas create imagery, not vice versa.

Want to have fresh ideas? The trick here is so simple, it's almost counter-intuitive. Instead of looking outward for inspiration, look inward. You need to see into your own emotional experience to find the right solution. That experience can include what you've seen before in life, encompassing everything from design books to personal experience, forged in radical combination and recombination with other ideas bouncing around in your mind and with your team. Ideas come from emotions and visualizing yourself in the place of your audience. The execution comes out of your own hands and your own unique artistic vision.

So remember... the seed of that great concept may have been inspired by something you've seen in a magazine. Just make sure, in the end, it's yours.

Idea Professionals, Beware of Microconcepting

I was watching Martin Lindstrom's "Brand Flash" this morning on AdAge.com when a thought struck me like a brick. Now I'm going to lob it at you.

The AdAge segment was regarding BootB.com, an online marktetplace a la eBay, where people can post marketing briefs and have people post ideas solving the brief. The best idea receives payment and can be utilized. I have no idea what happens to the other ideas and whether they can also be used by the client without payment.

While Martin Lindstrom believes that this is going to become a trend in the marketing industry -- that sites will spring up to fulfill people's need for concept generation at a price point lower than you'd require from a marketing professional, I kindly disagree.

My wife went to school to get a professional photography degree, and her teachers repeated time and time again the following:

"Yes, there will always be amateur photographers out there in the world that will get a lucky shot that's as good as yours. But you aren't going to be hired to shoot one lucky photograph. Clients will expect you to always shoot good photographs, day in and day out. That's why they pay you the big bucks."

Yes, for the lower-tier corporations and nonprofits, it's likely that these sites will pull away their business from designers and agencies. However, for larger corporations, using this kind of site is like playing roulette. Who's going to shepherd the idea to completion, time and time again? Who's going to be the professional that can spin ideas out over and over again, without fear of luck running out? Sounds easy to bring in the right idea, but still difficult to execute well.

For designers, the danger of having an idea marketplace is that once you've heard a good idea, you'll never forget it. Hear three or four good ideas, and the best attributes of each idea will combine to form an even better idea. This is great for the end clients but terrible for designers. You aren't being paid for that idea being utilized, even in a minor capacity. Ideas have value outside of their execution and need to be acknowledged as such.

I think the smart creative professionals will keep clear of sites like BootB.com. However, much like how iStockPhoto.com has revolutionized the stock photography model and created a new microstock category, BootB.com will definitely create a new category of lower-tier talent servicing lower-tier clients for low numbers of dollars. For now, I will coin it microconcepting.

I'd love to hear your thoughts as to how a designer would position themselves against a site like this. Let's start to sharpen our arguments as to why diversity of thought isn't as good as being a partner with a seasoned creative professional.