paulhazel.com

Following on from the previous post, one of the most interesting presentations at the D&AD Xchange 07 was that of Flo Heiss, Creative Partner at “interactive marketing agency” Dare.

The presentation was entitled How To Make Digital Your Bestest Friend and was structured around 7 ‘principles of good design’. Whilst targeted mainly at those marketing online, these principles could quite easily be applied to almost any kind of web design:

1. Be Useful.
2. Be Engaging.
3. Be Entertaining.
4. Make It Unfinished.
5. Be Honest.
6. Give Up Control.
7. Do It For Real.

I’m not going to go through Heiss’s examples of each principle one by one, or attempt to spell them out, because - and this is one for my students - what you need to do is to challenge them. It’s no use accepting these principles at face value and measuring their validity against the specific examples Heiss presented and which I might re-present here. What you need to do is to use them, test them against web resources you are familiar with. How strong are they? Do they break under certain circumstances? How widely applicable are they? Etc.. For myself, I’d prefer to talk here about a couple of these principles in a far more general way:

4. Make It Unfinished. I personally believe this is one of the most important concepts for any designer, writer, film maker, or artist of whatever sort to grasp. There has to be some space for the subject to enter into. You don’t have to say everything, you don’t have to explain everything, you don’t have to show everything. The incompleteness is what draws people in and allows them to resolve it for themselves: the unfinished work involves and engages the audience. The unfinished work respects the audience by not imposing a viewpoint, by allowing dialogue… The unfinished work creates a resonant interval.

This also applies to teaching. One of the worst sins you can commit is to present a subject to a student as though we know everything about it, as though it’s a closed book. It never is, because at the end of the day all meaning is ultimately socially situated: facts mean nothing in isolation, and only make sense within a particular set of inherited cultural norms, values, or beliefs. Therefore there is always a dialogue between the facts ‘out there’ and the sense made of them ‘in here’. Nothing is ever absolute, nothing ever really ‘finished’, and to present them is if they are is, at best, misguided.

7: Do It For Real. This is the example Flo Heiss used, one of Dare’s adverts for Vodaphone:

All good fun! I suppose what Heiss means by this is that there comes a time when working online—or with computers, it’s the same thing these days—is not enough and you just have to go and start pushing physical objects around. Of course it’s true, for no matter how sophisticated our computer technologies are they still fall a long, long way short of our multi-dimensional, tactile, dynamic, sensuous, and unexpected real world. Staring into a screen and clicking occasionally doesn’t really compete.

I’m blathering. So, yes: Flo Heiss! Excellent thought-provoking presentation. Nice.

Earlier this week my colleague John Hill and I attended this year’s D&AD Xchange 07 conference at the London College of Fashion. It was very well organized, very interesting, and we met a lot of nice people. Here’s my notes from the event:

Carlos Segura is a designer with his roots firmly embedded in old-school typography. He has an enviable track record of graphic design, a portfolio of which can be found at Segura Inc. This also includes links to his typography site T.26 and designer blank media site 5″ (amongst others). For me the highlight of his presentation was his work for stock photo company Corbis, especially the Crop series: rather than just present examples from their library in standard thumbnail format, he created large-scale diptychs printed on various high-quality papers where each pair of images tells a little story:

The juxtaposition of images was humorous, provocative, and sometimes outright shocking. I love this sort of thing, where meaning resides somehow in the space between the images, or as McLuhan would say, in the resonant interval. Best quote:

By doing what others do, you become invisible…

I also found Segura’s presentation interesting because of his use of background music. Normally I would advise students not to use music in this way at all, and I did find it intrusive (despite it all being chilled-out electronica). But in places it was successful: he started off the presentation with a couple of amusing anecdotal stories and these worked with the music, quickly establishing a very strong mood. Never say never.

Ulrich Proeschel of TBWA presented a case study of their marketing of Adidas during the 2006 World Cup Finals. He explained how the whole thing was based around a single idea, +10, and how this was extended out in a deliberate attempt to involve everyone in Germany (especially as the team was playing so badly before the tournament). The highlights of their campaign were a massive Oliver Kahn bridge over the autobahn leading away from Cologne airport:

And, rather than a billboard campaign, just a single huge image on the ceiling of a railway terminus based on the Sistine Chapel:

Needless to say, there was much discussion amongst the delegates about the worldview that sees branding and advertising as culture, a point which was driven home by Ulrich’s classic quote:

The World Cup was really a battle between Adidas and Nike, not 32 football teams.

Paul Priestman gave a presentation which showed off Priestman Goode’s fascinating work on large projects such as the interiors of luxury aircraft, cruise liners, and airport terminals.

Wayne Hemingway came across as a likable, intelligent, humorous, and very down-to-earth guy. However, he’s very much a one-off, and it was very difficult to take anything away that would be more generally useful: you had to be there. Best quote:

It’s all about being a human being that thinks!

Of particular interest was his discussion of our physical environment and the effect it has on behaviour, and his observation that most modern housing developments are simply the “slums of the future.” Hemingway’s design studio is here, and it includes links to his various other enterprises including the delightfully-named retro design resource, Land Of Lost Content.

Andy Hobsbawm and Ben Felton from Agency.com gave a presentation on their work for Ikea. As with Ulrich Proesel above it offered a fascinating insight into the advertising industry, but in this case it was all online stuff. Andy Hobsbawm kicked off with a run through Ikea’s ‘8 core ideas’ about their company identity, and he came across very well, talking intelligently and fluently about a range of new media issues. Best quote (which he acknowledged was from someone at Xerox Parc):

Technology is only technology for people who were born before it was invented.

Ben Felton then showed off some of their work, which to be honest I found a little dull, and a colleague found the “Brussels Sprout slider” on one of their Flash micro-sites quite hilarious. They also came in for a fair bit of stick from the delegates during the Q&A session for their unquestioning attitude to new media dogma. True believers.

There we have it. There were some other very good speakers, and I’ll be doing a couple of follow-up pieces on them individually. Ciao!

Back in January I had a good look at the iPhone and Jefferson Han’s work on multi-touch interfaces (here and here). And for those of you looking to gain some kind of contextualization on this fascinating and highly topical area of interface design I’ve recently come across Bill Buxton’s historical overview.

I casually mention these only by way of introduction to Microsoft’s (ahem) “new paradigm in computing”, the Surface computer. Here’s one of Microsoft’s own promotional videos:

For something a little more illuminating, and that briefly includes schematics showing the innards of the Surface:

And for the inner geek, here’s a full 18-minute test-drive of the thing:

Yes, it’s pretty impressive (although the thought of that bog-standard PC running Windows Vista hiding inside is a bit off-putting). Some thoughts:

1. It’s not clear how the security issues will work. I mean, have you ever transferred data from one device to another without generating security prompts? As these will be public devices it seems inconceivable that security will not be a huge issue, and yet not once do we see anyone even inputting a PIN number in any of the videos. As if!
2. Will all manufactured objects become ‘tagged’ in the near future to allow interfacing with surface computers?
3. If so, will there develop a universal tagging language that will be understood by all “surface-compatible” products?
4. Can we predict a new job description: Surface Designer?
5. I do think there is a certain inevitability about this type of product.
6. The ability of the Surface to act as a ‘docking station’ for mobile devices calls to mind one of McLuhan’s Laws of Media: if you push a technology to an extreme it flips over into it’s opposite. In other words, as mobile devices have gotten smaller and yet more powerful, the tendency for miniaturization flips over into single large device that many of them can simultaneously attach to like a Mother Ship.
7. Doesn’t the Microsoft Surface remind you of those black glass-topped gaming tables you used to find in pubs? Space Invaders, anyone?

Of course there are those who quite rightly question Microsoft’s presumptuous and overblown claims for their product: British multi-touch interface designer Andrew Fentem has a reasonable and well-argued critique of both Microsoft and Jefferson Han here. Fentem’s own Spaceman Technologies website is well worth checking out by multi-touch aficionados.

Finally, irresistibly, if only to puncture the corporate pomposity of Microsoft:

A couple of weeks ago, in an idle moment, I picked up The Medium is the Massage again and read it from cover to cover. It took me about an hour. Since then, I’ve read it cover to cover twice more, and am constantly dipping into it. I love it.

The Medium is the Massage wasn’t actually “written” by McLuhan:

The book had in fact been composed by Jerome Agel, who had written a profile of McLuhan in 1965, and Quentin Fiore, a first-class book designer. The two selected or commissioned photographs to accompany excerpts they culled and reshaped from various writings and statements of McLuhan’s. [...] McLuhan contributed the punning title and approved the text and layouts. Agel and Fiore evidently did their work well: McLuhan changed only one word. Their mix of text and visuals was indeed a virtuoso feat. They used arresting photographs and artwork and performed interesting experiments with type, laying it upside down, on the slant, or in mirror image, switching its size from page to page, switching between regular and boldface, and so on.
Agel referred to the result as a “cubist” production. McLuhan recognized that it was an effective sales brochure for his ideas. (Marchand 1989, p.192)

Exactly forty years on, the book stands up well: it’s very digital media. The book is a riot of collages, visual puns, voice prints, excerpts from newspapers and magazines, cartoons, abstract patterns, extreme close-ups, black- and white-negative space, and runs the whole gamut of typographical experimentation. It’s the sort of thing that would be quite easy to do now, but was probably very difficult in 1967.

Set against and around this visual feast are expertly chosen and edited nuggets of McLuhan’s writing. The text bounces off the images, argues and agrees with them, works in concert and opposition. It resonates. It’s metaphoric.

The Medium is the Massage remains McLuhan’s bestselling book, and it’s easy to see why: the brevity, the condensation, the humour, the life offered by the interplay between text and image. It’s deep and entertaining. As an introduction to McLuhan it is second to none.

References
Marchand, P. (1989) Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. New York: Tickner & Fields.
McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q. (1967) The Medium is the Massage. San Francisco: Hardwired.