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

After 12 months in operation and 100 projects Toby & Pete found themselves at a turning point. They had their own company but had no control of the work they were producing. Their goal was to work alongside art directors on concept and design and not just be CGI “operators”. Their strategy for branching out was to assemble a cooperative of like minded, self driven creatives with complementary skills sets. They grew from a team of two CGI artists to a team of 8 with skills in illustration, animation, app development, web, typography, print and events. The folio changed overnight as did the opportunities before them.

They attribute their success to two factors. Firstly their mission which is to “excel in and out of the pigeon hole”. Having quickly built their reputation for CGI work, they have been determined that everything the studio produce, regardless of medium be of the same quality. Secondly, the cooperative was founded with a manifesto of sorts. While the designers have non exclusive obligations to the agency, everyone is required to work from the studio space. They noted that the turning point of a creative piece can come from someone’s “two cents worth” of feedback. The value of being in a company together is the contribution and input on one another’s projects, especially those conversations in passing. Theirs is the best manifestation of collaboration I have heard in a long time. Collaboration not as a process but as an environment that provides a constant feedback loop.

What can the UX field learn from Toby & Pete?

The creative strategy of Toby & Pete is also a business one. To seize control of their work and have input earlier in projects they diversified their offering. Is this something that the UX field can learn from? UX has matured into a discipline that consults on business strategy – particularly in the area of service design. We have no hesitation stepping on the toes of product managers, marketers, business analysts and business strategists. Yet we often complain how hard it is to be taken seriously by other fields and be considered earlier in the process. Maybe we should stop lobbying and start working together – not as vendors and clients but as colleagues.

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?

Business

Toko also commented on the obsession with business growth. It’s interesting – they left an established career and client base to come here. So clearly they are not focussed on money. But they find that Australians are. They are asked regularly if they want to grow their business, which is apparently a question never broached in Holland. This leads me to their reflections on their company and workplace.

Experience principles of the design workplace

Their business philosophy is to grow better, not bigger. Their belief is that quality and innovation comes in small packages, for the plain fact that talent is a too scarce a resource to build a large team around. Furthermore their experience is that personality, collaboration, flexibility (in design approach and solution), and passion is only sustainable in a manageable environment. They acknowledged their gratitude for their time at Studio Dumbar. A prolific agency where they learnt that “quality transcends quantity”. There they found an environment that supported individual talent instead of turning people into employees – taking an active interest in their progression and growth. The atmosphere was described as informal, friendly, flat not hierarchical (“you’re a designer, that’s it”) with a shared ambition for quality. Imagine if clients shortlisted studios based on these principles and not company size?

Copy culture demeans the value of design

But back to reference culture. The critique of derivative design was that it was inflexible, making for predictable design and halting progression of skills and practice. At stake is the integrity of the profession, if the value of design is cannibalised by designers themselves and so easily diluted. This has been cruelly felt by Toko whose work was plagiarised by a design student who ended up winning a coveted Red Dot design award. But the message I got was that it’s not only about awards. If there is no originality in concept or execution we allow our service to be too easily commoditised and its value too easily bargained.

The alternative? What we all learnt at art school. Concept is king. Or as one of the Toko duo put it (sorry didn’t note which) “when the ideas are there the aesthetic happens”.

Wabi-sabi

Their talk ended on an aesthetic note – “perfection is not a good look” as demonstrated in the poster for the event itself (does something look amiss to you?). Perhaps this was a nod to design tools doing the work of designers. They introduced the Japanese principle wabi-sabi – about the imperfect, the incomplete, modesty, roughness, simplicity. They talked about finding inspiration in opposites and using those areas of tension.

So stay fresh, be novel, concept then design, don’t pursue perfection, ignore design blogs and trash your reference folder. Hmmm, I still don’t think I am capable of doing that last one. Also, if reference is bad should I or should I not include a link to the Toko site? You know you want it.

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?)
2. Be decisive.
   Design and life is about solving problems and coming to solutions. Say yes and mean it. Say no and mean it.
3. Smile a lot.
   You get what you give. Smile even when you don’t feel like it. Look for inspiration, energies, queues from those around you
4. Never stop being a kid.
   Design is learning how to play again. Be expressive, try things.
5. Question everything.
   Never presume you know everything. Listen critically, carefully, quietly. Delve, be empathetic to your audience – what are they trying to achieve? The clues you hear will make your design stronger.
6. Take a break.
   Recharge, energise, take a step back. As a company celebrate achievement and introspect. Don’t get stuck in a routine – do something diff every day.
7. Play.
   Joke, enjoy, muck around.
8. Play with colour.
   Understand its effects on people. There’s a science behind it. It can stimulate, it can calm.
9. Ho(me).
   Find a home designed for you specific needs, were you can relax and switch off.
10. Create a positive environment.
    Add value, add stuff that is sustainable.
11. Be fulfilled.
    Seek satisfaction. Choose to be doing stuff you want to do, or not. Try different things, counties, studios, test things out.
12. Be challenged.
    Seek diversity in the work environment. Push in different directions, to learn and grow, gain confidence
13. Stretch yourself.
    Avoid routine.
14. Make mistakes and celebrate them.
15. Give generously.
    Help people.
16. Feel.
    Have empathy for your end user.
17. Care lots.
    Care brings determination to maximise opportunity
18. Collaborate.
    With clients too. Work closely with them, banter, aim for transparency between parties.
19. Love your family and your friends.
20. Walk everyday especially once you hit 40.
    Getting up at 5am gives you more hours in the day.
21. Be prolific.
    Do lots of good things.
22. Don’t be mechanical.
    Don’t jump on the computer. Think, brainstorm, throw ideas around. Don’t let tools  design the end result.
23. Don’t go around in circles.
    Focus on direction. Goals in life. Understand your intent and make a plan.
24. Trust your intuition.
25. Don’t focus on projects.
    Focus on giving from the heart in everything you do. How can you inspire the client, engage the opportunity in a positive engaging way?

Peppered with these messages were examples of inspiring work from the team at Frost studio. Work that had depth of meaning, texture, dimension, colour. Frost himself was a delight too. No buzz words, just sincere sharing of life and work experiences and a clear passion for applying design and seeing beauty.

The talk will also be available as a podcast on iTunes courtesy of the Apple Store. BTW Apple peeps, this blog post was produced by my delightful HP in your store ;)

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.

The project was a simple engagement but an important one in an organisation that is seeking to embed UCD and customer centric thinking. The client team invited their colleagues to witness proceedings. Luckily during the testing itself I completely forgot that up to 17 people were watching me! time was scheduled in between the user testing sessions to debrief. I collected the thoughts of the observers; their impressions, implications and design ideas. The debriefing sessions were important. Not only did I benefit from the input of subject matter experts, but members of the organisation got to see the process itself. I was able to field questions about the method, diffuse doubts on the spot and collectively we arrived towards the findings. When it came to the presentation of the recommendations there were few surprises and high engagement.

The testing was not about flogging a dead horse to validate how much something did or didn’t work. Sufficient time was left between sessions for important changes to be made and tested. Stakeholders learnt by observing the process that user testing is not a research exercise. It is a design process. One that is more effective, more pertinent and faster than design by committee.

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.

Now to the talk! Penny Hagen presented on her doctoral paper: Social technologies, participation, design methods. The central question being how to support and frame participation in the design process when using social technologies? The social technologies in question are the usual suspects: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, etc. And you can guess that if people are participating in the design and/or research process using these methods that the design process is in the “wild”, so to speak. The sticky issue is that design practice and research are public but the advantages are a “design that emerges through use, which is hard to simulate in the studio”.

Available examples of “design in the wild” exist: Threadless, the P&G open initiative, Crowdspring, 99 designs and more. But what of the crowd? How can it be harnessed so design by community doesn’t become design by committee? Penny outlined two models to describe this design process:

1. iterative design
2. emergent design

Iterative is what we have seen with the continuous Google beta launches and subsequent product improvements. Emergent is the evolution of the design through use and prototype. Interestingly the latter model was described as not necessarily having to illicit requirements at the start of the process. If I understood it correctly (please correct me if I am mistaken in the comments), the design process can begin by prototyping with an existing and available technology, to address the design problem and see how people use it.

Simultaneous design and use: Penny Hagen @ Design Thinking

Concurrent design, research and use: Penny Hagen @ Design Thinking

Keen to see how they could adopt a more experimental approach the audience discussion centred around how to convince clients to let them get away with an approach that, at the outset, may not have a defined process let alone a predictable outcome. Unfortunately I missed the second discussion and the playtime at the studio afterwards. Thankfully, another event is promised in April at the Arthouse.

Penny has presentations on participatory design practices on Slideshare, is published in industry mags, and chats on Twitter. The nnub.net Moggill community digital noticeboard case study cited in the presentation is available online. A much better write up of the event was captured Sketch note style by Ben Crothers. And lastly, if one of the organisers can respond with how to get on their database for the April event announcement, that would be grand.

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?.

I heard that statistics were one of the most compelling aspects of sports coverage (during a netball game on TV). And so it is with social media, and resource politics too … these graphics are great for the sheer, clear number crunch.

Twitter statistics

If twitter were 100 people, 20 would be dead, 50 would be lazy, only 5 have more than 100 followers and 5 are loud mouths generating 75% of content.

Oil spills and oil consumption

Lastly, I implore you to check out this amazing collection of infographics by designer Megan Jaegerman who published in the New Yorker: Ask E.T.: Megan Jaegerman’s brilliant news graphics.

The design piece we are working on now came about as a result of qualitative longitudinal diary studies.  We created various customer journeys as part of the research deliverable which proved to be very compelling artifacts for the client. I like how these 2 illustrations show a journey over time and a process with meaningful scannable information and compelling but not overblown graphics to support the copy.

Touch Design Principles

Shane Morris outlined some design prinicples when designing for the Surface, but many would apply to designing for smaller touch screen devices.

• Don’t deploy a desktop application to a new device, consider the specific requirements of a touch interface
• You may be designing for more than one simultaneous user. Users may be interacting from different directions so the app should be ‘direction-less’.
• Non functional gestures need to be acknowledged. (Vapour trails have been built into the Surface platform to orient the user and show non consequential hand gestures.)
• Use large targets. Avoid traditional controls.
• Design for the super real i.e. design digital objects using real world objects as inspiration. Think about how the object  behaves in the real world, to design how the virtual object responds to touch.

Below are some amateur video clips of me and others playing around with the Microsoft Surface.

Switching it on

The Surface is not a magic table. Under that huge resistive touch screen is a machine. Weirdly, a convenient button to switch it on, located on the outside, does not seem to have been included in the design brief.

Social

People are happy to clean up the debris left by other users on the Surface, and its all part of the fun and learning.

Hold on! Those 2 demos show it working great but …

One handed, while I was holding the camera, I was having a bit more trouble than the peeps in the Lonely Planet demo. I had objects spinning out of control all over the place but it was still fun.

The point of the Lonely Planet Surface app is to load a passport with information, like photos and videos from the store, that you can look at later online. Each “passport” has a barcode type sticker so the machine can read it. Each Lonely Planet book also has a “barcode”, so as soon as you plonk it on the table it reveals relevant content.

Resistive Screen

Touch devices are either resistive or capacitive. The Surface is obviously resistive, so the pressure you apply affects the interaction as this simple Ribbons app demonstrates.

Design for the Super Real

This wine store didn’t quite work for me. It used pretty conventional controls, and I kept trying to do something with the bottles themselves. The workflow seemed kinda busted too.

But the piano app works great.

Another learning from this blog post is that videos take forever to upload on Youtube. FOREVER!

Richard Prince's cowboy series of photographs were based on the Marlboro Man commercials

This week the Australian government announced that it would be the first country in the world to enforce that cigarettes be sold in plain packaging. The plan is that by 1 July 2012 cigarette packets:

• will feature no logos,
• will feature no brand imagery,
• will be uncoloured,
• will not be allowed any promotional copy.

The brand name will have to:

• be a standard colour,
• in a standard position,
• in a standard font,
• in a standard size.

As well as this the graphic health warnings will be updated. The new packet non-design will be tested for its effectiveness, but it will look something like this:

How the generic pack of cigarettes will look. Image courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald

The tobacco industry will of course mount a legal challenge but I am more curious about how they will respond to the design challenge. How can a brand with no colours, mark, typography or imagery distinguish itself? I expect tobacco shops will start selling more branded cigarette tins and that the tobacco companies will start giving away promotional and durable packets within weeks if they are able.

Much of the space on supermarket shelves is taken up with products that are almost identical. Products might smell a bit different but the distinguishing properties are by and large to be found within the packaging design. With no cigarette branding it will be interesting to see how many cigarette brands survive.

How do you think cigarette brands will respond to this ultimate design challenge?