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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.

We Are Web Technology

Recently, I had an idea for a classy text interface that I thought would revolutionize how people used the Internet. Within five minutes of online research, I discovered that someone else had come up with the same idea... in 1986.

The lure of Web 2.0, a.k.a user-centered computing mechanics, is finally beginning to outstrip the humble origins of HTML and its basis in a formatting language for articles and other educational ephemera. But we have many decades-worth of ideas within the coffers of both academia and popular business related to interface design just yearning to step onto the stage of the Web. And I'll wager that it will take another two to three decades to reach the point where Internet users are comfortable with these advances. They will revolutionize how we engage with and consume information.

The initial beauty of hypertext was its ability to channel and shape large volumes of information and allow linking to similar types of content. The real revolution to occur in user-centered Web systems has little to do with typesetting content, and everything to do with contextual organization and passing knowledge through conversation.

Let's Create a Little Context

I want a fluid markup language that is easily usable by the layperson that automatically allows us to build intelligent, intuitive relationships between different types of content. I'm not talking about XML, per se. XML is the enabling factor that will encapsulate all Web content. I'm talking about the browsers that parse XML and spit out the Web pages we love so much in fresher, more usable ways.

For example: In the future, and hopefully the near future, I would hope to see Web pages and/or browsers where, if you are reading on a topic of interest, the article could reconfigure based on areas that you linger upon, offering up topics that may be of interest in a separate sidebar.

Or, if you click on a link within the paragraph, instead of being tossed into another browser window or tab, a secondary channel on the page opens to enclose and accommodate that content, allowing you to choose a path of inquiry in-line before punting to another location.

This would require sifting and sorting of content elements that goes beyond what we call content management. It would require a method of relational sorting and artificial intelligence that may not exist yet in the consumer space, though I have a feeling it already exists in some form at Xerox PARC or Apple, but is being withheld from the general market as it is not seen as "usable" yet.

DHTML and AJAX are allowing us to add another layer of context within Web pages, so we can explore deeper levels of information within a single Web page. And yet it's still not enough, and that kind of functionality is usually custom-built at great expense. We're still bookmarking pages (socially or otherwise) and leafing through the online equivalent of a magazine. A well-designed magazine that evolves over time in response to my activity, mind you, but still a magazine. Most related links are hand-coded in, and companies like Amazon and Netflix have invested millions in creating automated systems that create context. Bring their systems to the masses. Organize us relationally.

Either that, or rely more heavily on the content management system that we call The Human Brain.

That's What I'm Talking About

What stands in the way of this contextual method of organizing and navigating Web content? Ourselves. Humans have yet to evolve to the point that they can move beyond the static page en masse. Perhaps the next generation of Web users will be able to grok this method of information navigation without feeling like the ground is about to give way beneath their feet.

It's clear that the Internet has turned into the Mariana Trench of human knowledge. Trawling that almost infinite depth of information has become entirely impersonal. We don't control how we reach the things that we need, and we can't easily control how that information is presented. When couched in these terms, it's easy to understand why it's so hard to create a Web system that users would want to experience.

Novels, essays, articles, blog posts, diaries, text messages -- these are all fixed forms that govern how we apprehend content and structure how we consume them. When we compare the longevity of those forms to a fluid content bucket that can't be passed along or referred to another person without changing in some way, you can only imagine the fear it would strike in an everyday user. Just give me a page with what I want, or a search engine that can find me what I want within two clicks (unless I'm feeling lucky). Seeking knowledge, fulfilling task, receiving information, end stop.

Interestingly, if you think about how people seek knowledge independent of the Internet -- through real-life queries and conversation with peers that have reservoirs of knowledge -- then you'd think we'd be spending more time creating Web systems that mimic that human-to-human mode of information acquisition, that add shape and color around information that we seek. I see this as not Web 3.0, or even 5.0. Until there are heuristics that can resolve these levels of complexity in a piece of content, and spit out a relatively appropriate answer the majority of the time, this technology will be a novelty used by dozens.

Thankfully, we have the time and the depth of material out on the Internet to use as our laboratory, as well as the new explosion of smart devices and micro-computers that will worm their way into the fabric of our everyday activities. By the time this type of contextual navigation reaches the masses, we'll be so plugged in that we'll probably just be querying people instead of computers to receive what we need. Oh, wait -- I just got a text message from a friend asking me if I know a good place to find high-quality dark chocolate...

[UPDATE: Check out powerset.com for a taste of what I'm talking about... currently it works with a subset of information-dense sites like Wikipedia.]

And Now, an Interaction from our Sponsor

You're watching the new episode of Lost on abc.com, and during the break, a little app from Google pops up that says you have two new messages on your Gmail account, there's a hurricane blasting its way through Peru, and your RSS reader has two articles you'd probably want to read before Jack and Kate start to make out.

"Entertainment with utility!" That'll be the rallying cry of the new breed of advertising married to interactive television.

Wait--don't we watch TV, go out to movies, and listen to music to escape from reality?

Definitely not. Anyone who has a young daughter or son, or has spent time observing TV-watching behavior, knows that we are now experiencing an unprecedented level of layering. Using their computer to sift the Internet for that next hot band, watching a so-so sitcom on their flat-screen TV out of the corner of their eye, chatting on their Bluetooth headset with their BFF, and maybe even having a little snack they just whipped up in the microwave. Simultaneously. I see people trying to cram as many interactions into each minute as possible.

So my thought is simple: layer the interactive experience so all those things happen within the computer. Or the TV. Or mash them up into one device. Give the audience the options to select how many layers they want. And integrate the online applications they use most into the advertising, creating utility in a domain usually reserved for talking dogs and men being chased by women due to their body spray. I'm already watching a TV show for entertainment. Make some of my advertising useful.

Sounds easy, and I'm sure Apple is already all over this in their secret R&D labs. But whomever cracks this code and creates the tightest integration will win: for consumers, for advertisers, and for those who create the platforms to deliver this kind of quality experience for their audience.

Ecotagging: Fostering Transparency for Sustainable Business

Consumers now expect sustainability and ecological sensitivity to be factored into the cost of manufacturing and selling consumer goods. Corporations such as Patagonia, through their Footprint Chronicles, and Timberland, with their nutrition label for social responsibility, have started a major trend that pulls back the veil on the apparel industry, making us aware of the major demands that the textile industry put on our world. It's not enough to just offset your purchases. Through our purchasing decisions, we can alter how the industry operates.

The EcoTag for apparel, shown below in a draft format, was designed as a prototype to make sustainability factors more transparent for purchasing decisions across all brands -- not just these brave few who are striving to lead the industry. The ultimate goal of the EcoTag is to incent corporations to make their sustainability measures accountable to their customers. “Sustainability grading” or other methods of ranking products, derived from ecotagging, would create new ways for customers to evaluate the value of a product, while forcing corporations that have since been uninterested in bringing sustainability practices to their businesses to change their behavior.

The front panel of the tag displays the standard SKUs for a product, as well as the costs of offsets and recycling that have been factored into the product price.

The back panel of the EcoTag gives a view into how a piece of apparel was sourced, produced, and shipped, as well as the average carbon cost and whether the clothing is organic, recycled, and/or biodegradeable.

Ideally, the tag would be resized, printed, and affixed to goods in a way that had minimal impact on the product’s carbon footprint.

Without an industry-wide standard for this type of information, it will continue to be difficult for consumers to make educated decisions about what they purchase and how their purchases will influence the world. With proper education of the consumer at point of purchase, the latent waste of the textiles industry may be reduced and ideally replaced with more sustainable options.

Download a one-page PDF summary of this piece at this link: http://www.davidsherwin.com/EcoTagForApparel.pdf.

If you're interested in helping with this endeavor, please feel free to contact me at david at davidsherwin.com.

Sorry, We're Clopen Source

My brilliant colleague Carrie Byrne came up with the title of this post and the term. I'm just the messenger.

Clopen source is the spirit of open-source application creation -- crowdsourcing, product development by a vocal community, free sharing of information to encourage innovation separate of a technology provider -- with very strict boundaries that ensure the profit of the key patent-holders. The key boundary is the device that holds the applications.

Clopen source means more than just having a community of users contribute to the success of a technology or device. It requires mechanisms for profit as part of its motive. And it requires purchase of a specific product or service to play ball. This ain't your father's UNIX, which is really the last frontier for true open source goodness.

Apple Software Development Kit (SDK) for the iPhone? Clopen source. More apps on their phone means more minutes used, more iPhones sold, and more SDKs sold to third parties. Create a community that develops apps for you, then monetize it. This has been the game on all smart device platforms, until Android came along.

Google's Android OS for smart devices. At first, doesn't seem like clopen source. Google is making the device OS 100% open source for developers, but the platform still needs to be monetized. So, who wins here? Phone sellers push more units at similar prices to Windows Mobile phones without paying for licensing, while Google makes more money off mobile search and advertising tied into the apps. This would be clopen source at its heart. You can't just give it away.

Free code, or even full applications, that drive your Web site? Clopen source. Using the code encourages the adoption of a specific server-side technology and the use of a development platform. Just choose your flavor and its overall software cost to you.

Neuros OSD, which lets you archive your DVD and video content? Clopen source. The box runs on Linux and Neuros encourages developers to improve the device's feature set. But it's a closed community, and you have to fork over for the box to play ball.

I don't think there's anything wrong with clopen source. It seems to be the best way to make money off interactive technologies in today's "free economy."

In many ways, clopen source is the great hope of keeping ahead of the curve and advancing the next killer app. By having product audiences have access to personally improving company technologies, and allowing those companies to absorb that learning into their own products, will have massive impacts on the speed of technological growth in immature markets like mobile computing, smart device generation, and other technologies that blur the lines between product categories.

Design and Business Sustainability in 2012

One of my co-workers recently lent me a copy of the book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. The entire book is a stunning thought experiment about what would happen to the world if all the humans suddenly vanished. How long would it take for nature to recover from our influence? What are the real impacts of our daily lifestyle choices on the world at large? What systems do we have currently in place, such as nuclear and petrochemical energy creation, that would have an explosive impact on the Earth if we weren't there to manage them?

As I read the book, I jotted down a few questions that came up that we designers should be considering now, as part of our day-to-day responsibilities. It will take us some time to formulate real ways to answer them.

Should we worry more than we do currently about the environmental impact of an interactive property, and plan our user experience accordingly to lessen its effect?

I could see this movement as having the following slogan: Make Hits Mean More. Code your apps tight. Make them efficient on your processor. Make sure your hosting service uses green IT. Improve overall usability. Save a kilowatt or two.

Last month's Harper's magazine had an interesting short piece about how each Google search burns a certain number of watts. When you tally up the number of searches engaged by search engines on a daily basis, we're burning a helluva lot of power to see where Britney Spears had lunch on Tuesday.

We will have methods to quantify this impact on our power grid, and perhaps even be charged for our electricity consumption amortized across the Internet, the number of searches we engage, and any other wasteful Internet usage. There will be systems to quantify power used across a web site or Internet application. We may even test our code for browser compatibility alongside its overall wattage use per click.

Will people be warned of the environmental impact of their purchases online or in a physical store?

As designers, we will need to develop rationales to guide our clients into greater transparency on whether the world needs their products, and if so, what kind of impact purchasing their products will have on society as a whole. People will need to see, in product marketing, the long-term effects of their choices beyond their own lifespan.

For example: baby clothes and toys, which are swiftly outgrown. You can recycle baby clothes and toys by passing them along to new mothers, but eventually, the polyester and plastic clothes will enter a landfill and degrade into tiny bits that in a few thousand years will perhaps be eaten by microbes that have evolved to consume plastic and its derivatives.

We can't expect our clients to shoulder this kind of burden while we're just pointing the way. It will likely be a shared responsibility, and we'll have to create methods to kindly shame the big companies into shifting their business strategy.

Will the environmental impact of a future product, or even a meme, be accurately measured and rated before it hits the market?

The tools don't exist to make this kind of assessment over time... yet. But they will.

"Great thought, Jim. You'll make millions off it but it'll generate at least 20 million pounds of carbon waste, use as much water as Lake Michigan in processing, and kill dozens of whales and three species of waterfowl. Should we come up with something better, or see if we can improve your idea to have less of an environmental impact?"

People will need to make judgment calls before they even engage on making a product or service. This kind of filter for a business decision hasn't been clearly articulated across Wall Street, because both public and private corporations had been traditionally focused more on making money than on leaving no trace. Sustainability is the next arms race for public corporations, and will be full of claims such as: "We use 5% less waste in our packaging, reducing our overall waste by 50,000 tons." All while the bottle's still made of plastic. And not being recycled.

Are we really being creative enough about finding a better way to assess a product's long-term impact? Companies will need to evolve existing products that sell well to either minimize their impact, or make the decision to cut them entirely (such as spray aerosols) and invent new products that aren't as convenient, but won't, say, destroy the ozone layer accidentally over New Jersey.

Designers will need to be vocal and raise their hand when they see potential problems, both in product design, development, and marketing, to ensure the long-term interests of the Earth aren't being trounced.

Designers can also encourage innovations that, for products with a short lifespan, biodegrade gracefully with low or no environmental impact. A company that makes tricycles, for example, could replace the plastic with a corn derivative or another compostable substance, which would break down over a year or two. This is already happening with plastic silverware. Consumers will need to be sold on the benefits of owning a product that will fall apart quickly and return to the earth in a non-harmful way.

The only danger with this technology is that we'll need to be sure we don't overtax the land necessary to grow the crops we'll use to create the plastic alternatives.

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I have other questions, but in order to save a watt or two, I will beg them off for another post. However, I'd like you to expend some watts by posing some more questions regarding the future of design and sustainability.

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.

The Crasstige Manifesto

A day will come when people will pay more -- by an order of magnitude, I expect -- for things that are not only well made and technologically sophisticated and desirable in the marketplace, but also intentionally crass and funny and ironic and over-engineered and technologically overblown and completely painful to look at.

I'm not talking about vintage revival, chuckle-inducing wagon-wheel coffee tables and 100-dollar torn t-shirts emblazoned with witticisms that elicit stares from fashionistas as they paw through the clothing racks at the upscale boutiques. I'm not talking about fashion shows where people parade down the runway with outfits that look like they're cobbled together with urinals and clothing dredged from dumpsters. I'm definitely not talking about gangsta styling with mass appropriation of high-value items that are then paraded through high-production-value videos on MTV to sell albums full of cringe-inducing props to Dom Perignon and Courvoisier.

For starters, I'm envisioning those who drive cars inspired by the Edsel or the Delorean, because it's crass enough to be cool. I'm envisioning people who spend vast quantities of money for clothes that are just so ugly it's like you're looking at a train wreck. I'm envisioning big hulks of stereo technology that completely dominate your living room, like modern sculpture on crystal meth.

In short, I'm envisioning people standing on the very edge of popular fashion and technological innovation, leaping off of it, landing flat on their face in the mud, rolling around in it, and making sure that everyone knows they paid through the nose for it.

This future trend would come to be known as crasstige. I've Googled the term and it hasn't appeared on the Internet -- until now. And as I'm the one throwing my stake in the ground, let's venture a real definition of the term:

crasstige (n., adj.):

1) a high-cost product that intentionally goes against the grain of popular taste and fashion in its design. Example: Wow, that $2,000 hat he bought is so ugly... It is completely crasstige.

2) a category of products that, when consumers purchase them, immediately broadcast their frustration with traditional notions of luxury. Example: Bob is a real crasstige sort of guy. He bought the Scion xQ with the argyle pattern.

But here's the twist -- the little quirk that makes the idea of crasstige so interesting and of-the-moment:

3) a mashup of attributes between different product categories, creating a new item that seems on the surface to lack functional utility. Example: That's some crasstige handbag you've got there... Yep, it's hip, it has a refrigerator compartment, a clock radio, it checks my stock prices, and I can plug in a little doodad that checks my blood sugar.

The idea of a mashup is so popular in digital culture, it's inevitable that it will bleed into manufactured objects. An item denoted as crasstige would cross boundaries between convenience and utility and product categories for no real reason other than to be crazy. There is no single utility from a truly crasstige item. It's the inverse of the orderly universe of an iPhone.

This is not the kind of trend that will just appear on the street in one year, fully baked. I'm thinking this is the kind of snowball-becomes-an-avalance thinking that will surface when we emerge from recession, as a kind of conspicuous consumption gone haywire, fed by small artisans and then major corporations who smell a trend and dive into it with ferocity.

Like most trend predictions, I hope this one falls by the wayside, never coming to pass. But if it does, let us be ready for the ferocious parade of scary manufactured goods that further contribute to the clutter of the world, and vote with our pocketbooks as designers for items that connote elegant form, utility and function, meaning and sustainability, and some measure of grace.

As designers that seek order and polish, this is a trend that we will passionately hate. So don't shoot the oracle.

The Designer as an Agent of Change

The future of design is not design. The future of design is embracing change.

To take it further: I see design's real opportunity in this coming decade is to step up and acknowledge that design has always been an agent of change. It just took this long for interactive, as a communication medium, to mature enough to make that change visible to the eye.

There. I said it. And while we're at it...

Down with the tyranny of the professional designer! Down with their superiority complex in the face of a world full of 1 billion dreadfully designed web pages! Down with their PMS swatch books, organized by hue on their desks! Down with their eloquent pronounciation of obscure typeface names from minute foundries run by hotshot typographers in their late twenties who insist on spending at least a year on each Bodoni revival to ensure its legibility at 4 points!

I could go on, but I think you get the point. (And the sarcasm. I'm still working on my Bodoni revival as well...)

Design is a professional practice and a business discipline. It requires an enormous breadth of knowledge in aesthetics and an gigantic amount of thought to fulfill well. It requires an awareness of psychology and visual poetry. It thrives off foresight and insight as well as the willpower necessary to weather the stormy seas that come with large, challenging projects. That's all apparent to us, there on the front lines.

We've developed a fairly exclusive lingo and professional language to talk about design. However, the tools that we use are becoming increasingly democratic. We can't rest on our Photoshop and our Illustrator skillz anymore. Our discipline needs to evolve out of our tools and into the effect of our thinking.

In twenty years, I expect that most people will have on their desktop computer the kind of affordable access to the tools necessary to render, print, publish, upload, or animate the necessary materials to do good design work without a professional designer at arm's reach. Eventually, the so-called ivory tower where design theory is housed will be rocked by its inability to function in a business context. And hasn't this always been the struggle?

I've worked at too many agencies where students straight out of school come into meetings with extraordinary ideas and compelling thinking that have no relationship whatsoever to the business problems at hand. I was one of those kids at one point (though I got an English degree with a focus in design and art history, not a design BFA), and I have fond memories of being doe-eyed in the midst of a crew of hunters busy polishing their guns before they set off to find some conceptual game to take down, slaughter, and present -- freshly cooked in layout stew -- to their hungry clients.

Design school today, in my mind's eye, is a tall building manufactured in the Bauhaus period, with perfectly placed windows that conform to a densely spaced grid, creating a pleasing sense of order. Within said building, each room is bursting with all sorts of ideas, pictures, words, images, and theories just yearning to shake the world to its bones. Some of my happiest days I was knee deep in collage clippings, huffing rubber cement, designing typefaces made of fruit I photocopied and hand-colored lovingly on posterboard.

Then reality happens. We intern and apprentice and learn the ropes and that idealism gets smacked out of us by reality. Business meetings happen. Clients ask us what we do. We have to codify what we do, put ourselves in a box, show the power of design in the work but be professional in the interim. We stumble over how to sell ourselves without sounding too visionary:

We solve business problems. We're passionate. We create implementations of ideas. We create influence, belief, understanding, results. We have a proprietary process. We ensures your success. We inspire decisions. We change behavior. Anyone can come up with an idea -- we just come up with better ideas. We create compelling brands. Brand experiences. Brand propositions. Meaningful brands. Increase brand value. We create meaningful experiences. Design can be a powerful force of change.

Does any of this sound familiar? I just went and looked at some agency websites and typed in phrases that I saw on their "About Us" pages. We're specialists in differentiation, right? Then why do our descriptions of what we do say the same thing, over and over and over again?

It seems like we always latch onto the most recent buzzwords and trends (experiential branding! Web 2.0!) instead of looking inward, at what design really excels at in a business context. It's not creating influence or belief or understanding. It's creating change. It always boils down to change. None of this wussy "design can be a powerful force of change" that I saw on a leading design firm's Web site. Design is the force of change. We can own it, today. Interactive has the ability to spread ideas like a gasoline leak that's caught fire. With social media in play, it only takes hours, if not minutes, to get a meme rolling. We can watch the bloom of it, organically -- observe the change happening in real time. The old guard still doesn't quite understand this, but when they do, we're so in business. Whole battles of opinion will play out like watching the Wimbledon tournament compressed into two minutes flat.

I have fond memories of the early to mid-90s, when it became standard business practice for businesses to realize that they absolutely needed a Web site. Your design firm would declare a competency in Web design and people would beat down your door to give you their business. I worked at agencies where we had no portfolio in Web site design and clients would be practically throwing projects at us. On the fly, we'd be creating code and learning Flash and generally falling all over the place, trying to learn what the heck we were doing. We were all tyros. There wasn't much need to differentiate ourselves. We were all in it together.

Accelerate. Five years later, everyone knows the technology. Now the best thinking wins the work. You fall out of the game or you try harder.

Another few years pass, along with a number of influential publications on the 360-degree brand. Experiential branding becomes the rage (agencies love it because it makes it easier to sell more services bundled within one company). Then social media/Web 2.0 strikes the market like a meteor. Oh wait, now we don't just sell ideas... we need to prove that we know how to speak to people online, in the car, on billboards, in the bathroom, in direct mail. The traditional communications disciplines of sales, marketing, public relations, etc. are converging on themselves like a reversal of the big bang.

This trend is not going to stop, as interactive has become the big bad beast that's overwhelmed all other disciplines. It will become the hub of the wheel, and all other disciplines will become the spokes radiating from it.

This puts us in a new space with our clients. In the past, clients came to us understanding what they wanted to change, and we would use design to try to make that happen. As we continue to mature design as a discipline, bolstering it with our learnings in research, anthropology, economics, psychology, sociology, and so on, companies will retain us to promote change separate of projects.

We will manage the brand experience, come up with tactical ideas and strategies to ensure their sales numbers were met, but first and foremost, we will be agents of change. Awareness, understanding, belief, action, reaction, sales, all rolled into one. We will not answer RFPs for tactical campaign work. We will be hired across all disciplines (not just advertising and traditional marketing) to effect change enterprise-wide across organizations. We will speak up regarding business process, customer service, inter-office dynamics -- you name it, it influences the brand, so it falls within our domain. Tactical marketing will always be in our arsenal but we'll be digging way deeper into our toolbox than sending out postcards.

I don't imagine this like the current retainer relationships major agencies have as agency of record. We would be tasked to serve the customer first and the company second -- since, if you think about it, the customer owns the company anyways.

We will differentiate ourselves from the dilettantes and homebodies because we will be bringing value to our client relationships as mavens of change. We will differentiate our agencies by creating our own methods of fostering change. There isn't just one way to do it right. The market will always prove that out.

We will have evolved our discipline enough to be trusted to take initiative when necessary. Ideally, we will function within companies as in-house groups and orbiting consultancies that provide the drive necessary to keep business growth happening (looking good to shareholders) and creating meaningful relationships with customers (fostering the love of customers).

Are designers really equipped to take on this challenge? No way. We will likely have to huddle together and gain the resources to pay it off in the long term. This is consistent with every other growth spurt in the design community -- we seem to hoover up whatever we need from any other discipline when it suits our needs. But the large agencies will get there quickly and stand on the vanguard until we all catch up. Our agency staff won't be designers and production artists and developers and account people. Start seeing a huge diversity of people that you'd never think would pass through the halls of a creative agency.

In ten years, we won't discover we're out of work because of 50DollarLogos.com. We'll be busy as hell. It's just that we won't be creating logos and websites and videos. We'll be creating change. We will be hired to be agents of change. The logos just happen as a result of that.

And I can't wait for that day to arrive.