Really enjoying thinking about the implications of planning a means of manufacture in citizens’ hands. It’s been a while since I did any serious work in this area and technology has caught up sufficiently to make this a fruitful area of design research again. The FISCAR10 conference I just attended was a great, jumping off point.

One thing that struck me are the parallels between the recent history of graphic design (dtp (an acronym from history), web and web 2.0, bedroom web design agencies) and the current emergence of rapid manufacture capability, the lowering of technical barriers to entry and diffusion of technology.

If the parallels hold true we can expect a ‘gold-rush’ scenario and a rush of pseudo-professionals looking to make a fast buck, a reappraisal of the industrial design profession and, after a few painful years, new forms of both design process and new types of products and processes will emerge.

Last time (graphic) design was on the back foot with technology and technologists dominating the debate and while this debate was going on, there was a groundswell of activity. Design needs to be more proactive, visionary and dynamic this time.

The recent FISCAR 10 conference in Helsinki had many highlights, a productive collaboration, a widening of my theoretical horizons, amongst others. I will be documenting these as time and energy permit, but one thing moved me to write NOW!

The conference had many instances of activity theory scholars moving into design in a slightly naive way. This is amusing (sometimes), and understandable. What is not forgivable is for someone from the design profession to make fundamental mistakes about the field they are supposed to be expert in.

We are not talking trivia or contested knowledge here, but rather the fundamental structure of a discipline universally agreed.

The graphic designer in question (educated where?), stated and then defended his assertion that the post-modern movement started in the 1880s and that post-modernism sat between Modern Art (taking place before the 1880s) and movements like Fauvism, Cubism and so on that started after post-modernism.

I thought this was either a typo or he was being tricksy. In ‘The Post-Modern Condition’, Jean Francois Lyotard argues that before something is modern it must first be post-modern. This paradoxical statement is an interesting and active area of debate and engages with notions of authorship, originality and the shifting nature of meaning.
Unfortunately ‘Graphic Design Boy’, actually someone my age (old!), was not thinking at this (or any?), level.
The repudiation of argument for Postmodern Graphic Design in the 18880s is either very simple – read just one book or even Wikipedia on the history of GD – or more complicated.

Put simply, there were no ‘Graphic Designers’, before the 1940s. The title was created to make a pay grade above ‘commercial artist’ in the US advertising industry.

As far as Art is concerned, read Clement Greenberg, Robert Hughes or any other art historian’s works.

The conference paper was about how life is more difficult for graphic designers now compared to the past, perhaps the time would have been better spent getting a little bit of basic knowledge first.

It’s hard to predict where the interesting concepts and ideas are going to come from and serendipity always plays an important part. As the bedrock of Open Innovation (OI), it was nice that this happened at the recent ENGAGE conference on OI. Clinton Bantock was giving a passionate case for complexity theory and post-structuralist thinking in business engagement and its relationship to the university. This was great stuff coming from a business development officer.

During his presentation he misspoke and used the term ‘bottom down’. I was intrigued by this idea and the possibility of ‘top up’, so I’m going to run with this allusion. To me it represents the expansion of possibilities. You have set parameters (top and bottom), and this takes you beyond these.

A response to my tweet during the conference suggested bottom down would be used for a project doomed from the start, but the sun is shining and I’m looking for more positive interpretations.

In our research lab we work quite a bit with the BBC. In a recent meeting, we were talking about how we could help them with a recurring innovation problem.

They often contract design agencies to develop ideas that address issues the implementation of new technology will throw up. The problem the BBC has is that often the suggested solutions are unworkable or inappropriate and rooted in old technology. In Imagination, we are going to run an event with 20 or so agencies to help with iTV development. But, it made me think that if there were one book everyone should read it would be

… hard to implement, but worth it if everyone could read …

Thomas Khun’s ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’.

This is not a very exciting title, but the ideas within this have a profound impact on design, science, engineering, Innovation and the way we think about thinking.

Kuhn argues that most ‘normal’ science uses agreed models and patterns and the evidence we collect is shaped to fit these models. Ptolemy is a key example of this with positively convoluted explanations being developed to place us at the centre of the universe. Kuhn goes on to argue that a time comes when the tension on a model is so great, it snaps, a revolution takes place and a new model gains ascendancy (Copernicus’s big moment reacting against Ptolemy).

This revolution represents a new paradigm. This is a very much overused and misused word, but if everyone understood the idea of understanding adapting or transcending models of use, it’s more likely iTV would get a move on a become a pleasurable experience.

I’m fairly well-known in my research lab for being ‘completely disinterested’, in sustainability, slightly to the consternation of some of the people that I work with. Of course, (like most short statements like this), this has an element of posturing, but beneath this is a more strongly held position.

I think empowering the individual and that the collective power of individuals trumps any imposed structures, especially when imposed through evangelism (whether religious, environmental or political). All successful structures are built and maintained rom the ground up.

This places the onus on the citizen (us!), to do the right thing, but also for us as designers and creators to respond to citizens. So far, so woolly lefty (and also right wing free market).

The practical implication for design is that a guilt trip about the environment is not enough to change consumer behaviour. To succeed new products and services have to be better in their own right, separate from environmental considerations.

The new Sainsbury’s low packaging milk solution is a great example of this. You buy flexible polythene bags of milk and slot them in to a re-useable polycarbon jug. This is clever for 3 reasons …

1. The mechanism for ‘installing’ the bag is simple and spill-free (not an easy thing to achieve).
2. The jug provides a substantially more pleasurable pouring experience. It is easier to control (there is no ‘glugging’).
3. The packs of milk are freezer friendly, making it more convenient to stock up than go back and fore to the shops.

Perhaps I’m going green after all, but perhaps ‘green’ is realising that sack cloth and ashes is no substitute for good design

Play is not the same as gaming and not withstanding my previous post on the significance of (computer) gaming I’m most interested in a more diffused Ludic sensibility than challenge, reward profiles.

This has prompted me to start a new literary quest.

George Perec is an excellent example of playfulness in literature that most closely resembles the design sensibility of playful; experimentation in structure and content. Part of a larger Oulipo movement, Perec created huge palindromes, playful structure/content – See Life: A Users Manual for a really sophisticated novel ‘about/exploring’, the jigsaw.

This post was prompted by Perec’s 1969 novel A Void. This is a 200 page novel that does not use any words containing the letter ‘E’ (credit here to Gilbert Adair’s translation into English, retaining this pattern).

For many years the book has been out of print and 10 years ago I abandoned my search for a second hand copy. I was happy to see Vintage Books republished this in 2008. It’s funny and a good read, as well as being clever and playful.

PS. Perec’s next work “Les Reveuentes”, ‘used’ the ‘e’s left out of A Void. In this book ‘e’ is the only vowel used.

I find the transcendental nature of game playing fascinating. The ease with which people can be transported out of their bodies, overriding time, meals, appointments, social interaction tells me that this must be a significant phenomenon. As someone half a step from OCD, I have to keep such things at arms length apart from the occasional 20 hour Civilisation session. The fact that books, music, art, films, so rarely grip us in this way is not necessarily a positive thing, but it is important.

In addition to the normal turbulence and buffeting my most recent blog ‘sabbatical’ has seen me increasingly thinking about knowledge exchange and the role play can have in this. A few things prompted this.

I have established a new relationship with a game design studio set up inside Huddersfield University. Run by Damian De Luca and Ruth Taylor, these guys have some interesting ideas about how games and visualisation can contribute to research and we are actively pursuing collaborations on a number of fronts.

The second prompt is the work of a colleague of mine in Imagination. Valerie Carr is an interior designer and researcher and is working on knowledge exchange through designing games with healthcare professionals. She has a completely different and very interesting perspective on knowledge exchange, drawing on Organisational Development (OD) as opposed to my post-structuralist ‘meta’ interaction design. Big thanks to her for giving me a guide into this (superficially dull), area, by giving me some good stuff.

The final area that was pretty new to me was Eva Brandt’s work on play in participatory design processes. Even though I met Eva in Hong Kong fairly recently, I was not aware of this aspect of her work.

I’m enjoying learning more about play from these and other dimensions. It’s time to ease off the intellectually draining running of events with companies for a little bit (as much as I can), and get back to some more abstract, enriching (fertilizing?) research.

Anyone who has read the really stupendously good and useful Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud will know he defines comics as a series of sequential images that are structured in an organised sequence. I certainly would not argue with him on this but I do think that there are images (like this suicide bunny image) that have so much suggested movement that we can not help but construct the sequence of images in our heads, making them for me, something close to a sequence, a ‘meta-comic’?

The concepts of open innovation, crowd wisdom, mass creativity, mash up user-generated content…) lets call it participatory innovation (PI). This will infuriate more or less anyone engaged with innovation, as really these terms are too disparate to be legitimately combined into one category. Participatory Innovation ideas are increasingly gaining traction in society and in commentary around innovation. Indeed there is a healthy debate around innovation and society that was not nearly as active a few years ago.

There have been a few articles in the press recently contrasting participatory innovation with Apple. The argument is that Apple is a (shinny, easy to control) dinosaur breaking the rules of Silicon Valley and beyond in shunning any PI variants and remaining resolutely closed. I’m going to let others evangelise for apple (this time) but I think this apparent dichotomy has some interesting implications for the design profession (and professional innovators as a more general and helpful description).

I have been developing, researching and promoting PI for close to 15 years in one form or another, and for a long time my conclusions were telling me that ultimately design was destined to become a universal set of skills available to everyone (like English or History) with a very small professional constituency outside education. In many respects if you believe that emancipating people is a good thing this is an inescapable position.

While I still think this will happen I am new convinced that there will be a role for professional designers in the future beyond helping everyone to be as creative and productive as they can be. This realisation is grounded in the innovation literature that promotes participatory innovation (von Hippel, Chesbrough, Christiansen, Ledbetter…). Here and elsewhere there is ample evidence of specialists in a field untrained in design or innovation being intensely creative (as I think most of us are). Here we see examples of radical invention (e.g. Heart Lung machine, created by a team of surgeons or kite surfing by enthusiasts) and there are many examples of incremental innovation but in terms of radical or disruptive innovation the case for PI is weak.

I think the reasons for this are underexplored but fundamentally this comes down to the trial and error nature of creative invention and the advantage of situational awareness and experience for PI (e.g. fanatical downhill bikers coming up with mountain bikes). Innovation (rather than a brilliant inventive idea) is hard, especially as increasingly this is reliant on a system that includes intertwined hard, soft and really soft (human) components for success. The case for trial and error in idea generation is well made by neurologists of creativity like Goel and more accessible by writers such as Lawson and Dorst. The implications of this are that to become skilled at innovation takes practice, time and lots of mistakes.

PI tends to be a one off action, crucially taking advantage of the situational awareness and life experiences that professional innovators do not have. This makes serial innovation very difficult as moving to a new challenge often means relinquishing the advantage of deep personal experience.

This is where professional innovators have the advantage, they have many opportunities to learn how to innovate across challenges and contexts so that while they may be disadvantages in some contexts they also have an implicit advantage that their innovation abilities can be more easily developed. The same applies for conceptual leaps that mark disruptive innovation, the mental agility developed through the practice of making many conceptual leaps are more likely to be available for someone while being trained in innovation than someone developing more specialist skills (this is an argument for universal innovation training).

The overall result of this is that PI is growing quickly, providing a richer ecology of innovation and increasing the total sum of innovative activity through improved communication and opportunities. This will be marked by proportionately less design activity as we know it (but more activity in education) but there will still be a role for the excellent, ground breaking design. In this respect the activities of Apple, in developing excellent, highly refined products fits well into this model.

Addendum

My current research is looking to find a way to help everyone access this ‘excellence’ through the creation of processes and systems in a practical, non-hierarchal manner not restricted by supply and demand so perhaps we (designers) are doomed after all.