eri on the interweb

Toby & Pete founders speaking at Apple Store Sydney for Australian Infront

What do you do with your eponymous moniker when your duo turns into a company? That was the predicament that Toby & Pete founders, Toby Pike and Piotr Stopniak found themselves in only 18 months after they started and the focus of their talk for the Apple/Australian Insight series. Toby & Pete are CGI artists who specialise in print media. They produce phantasmagorical images for the likes of Nike, AMP, SBS and Daily Juice.

Current outdoor campaign for Daily Juice Company features artwork by Toby & Pete. At bus stop on William St East Sydney

I love a good critique so I left the October Insight talk featuring Dutch design duo Toko well sated. They reflected on their career; taking risks, both professional and personal (they moved their lives to Australia almost on a whim) and the state of the design industry.

Toko at the Apple Store presenting for the Infront Insight series

Reference is not concept

Theirs was a rally cry against derivative design. They talked about “empty aesthetics”, and the problem of relying on design blogs and the “reference folder”. Uh oh! The reference folder! I still maintain reference collections from my graphic design days, and a visual bookmark collection – and I love them! But I also understand the critique. Who needs a concept when you can just see what’s “now” by scanning design blogs? Who needs a solution when you can just copy a pattern? Interestingly Toko did not encounter the use of the reference folder in their native Holland, but found its use widespread elsewhere, particularly in Australia. Is this a result of the Antipodean condition – being so far and feeling so far behind?

The brief for the night from Australian Infront to Vince Frost was not to present a portfolio but to talk about something broader, deeper. Specifically, how has he stayed in business for such a long time?  How has he stayed creatively relevant? How does he do this with a large team (30-35)?

The result was a presentation on: designing your life, your business and your happiness. How do you achieve a balance between an enriched life, business and achieving your dreams? Frost had 25 mantras, part design wishes part life coach, part business coach. In fact he attributed a few of the points to his naturopath and CEO. So here they are:

1. Every day is an opp to shine.
   Have a positive outlook, choose a career you love. (With an interesting question posed to the audience – do you  separate work and life, is lack of separation a weakness? Do you embrace the fact that your life and work is enmeshed?)

I recently finished a project where I conducted user testing to validate the effectiveness of a navigation menu. The project was a collaboration with the client’s project team who were responsible for the prototype and the recruitment. Everyone was confident going in to the user testing on the IA scheme but were open to changes. This may seem a mute point—why do testing if you are not going to change anything? Strangely I have seen people be highly selective of what they wanted to have proven in testing. Luckily this project featured no such hubris and everyone was respectful of the problems encountered by the users.

Elsewhere in the organisation other stakeholders held competing and contrasting views of what needed to be designed in the schema and what labels needed to be used. User testing the IA was seen as a means to streamline and manage the internal decision making process by bringing everyone together on the same page and letting users themselves determine the outcome.

Matt Hogdson, awsome conference speaker, and writer of things IA and UX, and agile posted a blog about UCD. Intrigued I asked a question in the comments, and got a whole blog post as a response on getting stakeholders and users together in a workshop for co-design magic! Wow!

It’s a good read to boot. If you haven’t been so inclined as to click on any of the other links referenced thus far check it out: http://magia3e.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/ucd-is-getting-users-and-stakeholders-together/

What are social technologies: Penny Hagen @ Design Thinking

Where have I been all this time that Design Thinking has been meeting? I have no context to this event, other than to say that more events were promised, which going by this week’s standard can only be an awesome thing.

Highlights:

• Getting to sticky beak at Digital Eskimo’s oh so cute offices.
• The Eskimos! Despite the mandatory photo on entrance (that was like a border crossing!) the Digital Eskimo guys were the most hospitable folks ever. Wine in hands, snacks in sight, they were ever so lovely and chatty hosts. The photos did come out nice though.
• The suggestion that banks, who have to face the sensitive issue of money that no one likes to talk about, can learn from sexual health, something else people don’t like to talk about.

At work we  are  currently making some fact sheets for a project to be distributed to both staff and customers so I am doing a scan for interesting  info graphics at the moment. Was thinking of an illustrated brochure before I thought … seriously, who reads stuff anyways? The research showed that these customers didn’t read, didn’t read much or only read information they had previously collected at the very point before they had to apply it. Makes sense. So brochure may be out the door, but scannable graphic may be on the table.

Like this one from Washington Post as it clearly shows the relationship between type and users. Very applicable to what I am working on.

Information Control washingtonpost.com.

And next, a snappy behavioural breakdown courtesy of: http://ngonlinenews.com.

Twitter users infographic

This snappy attention grabbing headline certainly gets my attention. As do the numbers. Courtesy of  designer Mike Wirth: What is the deal with Hanukkah, anyway?.