Et par stykker af os havde i går fornøjelsen af at opleve Bill Verplank tegne og fortælle om Interaktions design ved Danmarks Designskole. I stedet for det klassiske foredrag - hvor powerpoint dominerer - var væggene dækket af papir, som Mr. Verplank  tegnede på, mens han levende fortalte om interaktion, design, metaforer og paradigmer.

Indholdet var velkendt, men formen var meget inspirererende. Herudover gav det ekstra stemning, at hovedparten af deltagerne var studerende - så der blev stillet spørgsmål uden forbehold.

Man kan finde et interview og video af Bill Verplank i den digitale version af bogen Designing Interactions fra oktober 2006. Desværre er han i denne video slet ikke så levende, som vi oplevede ham i går.

Beklager kvaliteten af billederne - iphone, tsk tsk. :)

Alle designvirksomheder beskæftiger sig i et eller andet omfang med designledelse. Men det er først inden for de senere par år, at man har kunnet tage en formel uddannelse i design management på dansk grund. Ekempelvis startede Syddansk Universitet sidste år en masteruddannelse i design management.

For et par uger siden var 1508 inviteret til at skulle undervise på masteruddannelsen i Design, som Center for Designforskning afholder. Temaet var design management i praksis. Altså hvordan udøver en designvirksomhed design management på strategisk, taktisk og operationelt niveau.

1508s tilgang til design management.

Design management er i høj grad en selvstændig disciplin for hver designvirksomhed, som ofte kun egne til det konkrete designmiljø. Hos 1508 er designledelse et fagligt udfordrende og spændende område, som vi bruger meget tid og energi på at blive til stadighed dygtigere til. Ligenu er alle vores projektledere i gang med en etårig designprojektlederuddannelse, som vi selv har tilrettelagt.

1508s strategiske milepæle.

Vi bruger forskellige kilder til få viden med henblik på at forbedre vores metoder og services – og har i dag udviklet vores definition og tilgang til designledelse.

Hvis du gerne vil vide mere om dette område, er her nogle interessant videnkilder, hvor man løbende kan blive klogere på dette fagområde, som udvikler sig voldsomt i disse år.

Bøger og magasiner
“Design Management: Managing, Design Strategy and Implemetation” af Kathryn Best
“Managing the perfect service firm” af David Maister
“Design Management” Brigitte Borja De Mozota
“Managing the perfect service firm” af David Maister
“Bossanova – Ledelse ude på gulvet” af Nicoline Jacoby og Lise Bræstrup
“Blue ocean strategy” af Chan Kim og Renée Mauborgne
“ZAG” af Marty Neumeier
“Creative Man” af Institut for Fremtidsforskning
“Design Management review” fra Design Management Institute

Konferencer
Design Management Institute: Løbende
Aiga: “Design and business” i New York, 23.-25. oktober 2008

Nettet
http://www.design-management.de/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_management

Har du andre kilder, så skriv dem endelig i et kommentarfelt!

Ellers god læselyst :-)

EPIC 2008 proceedings / Capturing the Intangibilities of Virtual and Physical Spaces 

Design anthropologist at 1508, Katja Øder Schlesinger, is giving a workshop at the annual international Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (called EPIC) together with anthropologist and PhD Bettina Hauge. The aim of the workshop is to capture the field of intelligent housing as a brand new area of ethnographic research. The aim is to explore the crossings between the physical (visible) and abstract (invisible) worlds that make up a particular challenge in this field. This will be done by presenting two cases of ethnographic research that has resulted in new product development within the field of intelligent housing and by exploring a Doll’s House method, which has proven to be a helpful method in order to reveal everyday routines, needs and preferences in relation to light and light control systems at home. By playing with the Doll’s House we hope  to gain experience, create methodological reflections and to further develop the method by applying the work areas of the workshop participants.

‘Serious Play’ is the title of the conference I recently attended in Pasadena, California. Is the title a paradox or does it actually make sense? To me it makes perfectly sense – that is, if serious equals values like: meaningful, absorbing and valuable.

After having interviewed his kids, John Hockenberry put it like this: “Play is so fun, that it’s serious!” In my ‘post-conference’ state of mind I will add to this: since being essential to our ability to learn, create and innovate, play is serious matter!

Consequently, I will claim that play is a seriously important part of the design process. Without knowing how to play, we will lack a crucial tool for creativity and for creating anything new and truly remarkable. To create new innovative and creatively splendid ideas, products or designs you may as well take playfulness quite serious!

During the conference ‘Serious Play’ was addressed from many different angles - from speakers of different professions to performers and musicians, during the workshops and as the theme for the evening parties.

Serious versus Solemn

Artist and Pentagram partner, Paula Scher took her outset in the distinction between the serious and the solemn. She emphasized the importance of changing focus before the serious, imperfect and explorative gets stuck in popularity and moves into the comfortable and all to perfect zone of ‘solemn’. Paula Scher further argued how you need to go places that you don’t know, where you can be a fool and where you can PLAY! Because this is where you learn and grow.

Role-play and prototyping

Among the featured speakers were also Tim Brown, President and CEO at IDEO, John Maeda, President-elect at Rhode Island School of Design and Charles Elachi Director at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, all of them integrating elements of play as an essential part of their professional careers.

In his presentation Tim Brown focused on tree aspects of the design process: exploration, building and role-play. All tree being an essential part of children’s games and their way of learning through play. He emphasized that in order to explore and be playful you need to feel trust. If not, you are not likely to take creative risks. Tim Brown emphasized the counter action between playfulness and seriousness and argued that play needs to have rules in order to be constructive – especially when playing in groups.

Tim Brown showed examples of how they have integrated these elements of play in the design processes at IDEO, providing the team with tools for generating and sharing ideas, for grasping form and functionality through building and prototyping and gaining insights and empathy through role-play.

John Maeda once again inspired through his engaging playful and experimenting approach and his ability to keep an open, creative mind. His design and art installations sparkes your curiosity and make you see things from a different angle - often adding a smile on your face. An example is his human computer installation, which showed how prototyping and role-play helped his students grasp the complexity of the computer. Finally he shared with the audience his concerns about how to fit unrestricted creativity into the academic world.

Charles Elachi gave a great example of how to keep a playful attitude in a complex context. Having worked as a principal investigator on a number of research and development studies and flight projects sponsored by NASA, Charles Elachi knows the value of innovative thinking, passion and imagination, - and seing some of the solutions for launching a satellite into space and make it land safely on a foreign planet, - you can tell that experimentation and creative thinking has been put into play!

Celebrating uniqueness and curiosity

(Photo © Matthew Barney; Gladstone Gallery)

Athlete and artist, Aimee Mullins, has a different motivation for being innovative and playful in order to affect her world. Aimee Mullins had both of her legs amputated below the knee when she was one year old. Being determined to live through her successes, Aimee Mullins shows how she used her obvious difference as a potential to opening up possibilities rather than constraining them. Wearing amputees she has learned to explore the fun of changing her personality – and her physical appearance.

Aimee Mullins has realized how we in childhood learn that differences are bad. Instead she encourages us to consider diversity as a quality that make us aware of our uniqueness and makes it enriching to collaborate. She asks us to see our potential and go for wild and improbable goals and to constantly practice our curiosity, - since curiosity makes us see possibilities and allow us to take risks.

Both Aimee Mullins, Tim Brown, John Maida and Charles Elaschi thus seem to agree with Paula Scher on avoiding the solemn.

The conference was great. Now go play, …seriously!

Jennifer Leonard from IDEO in Palo Alto dropped by 1508, and shared some inspiring insights on design.

Go get inspired yourself on Jennifers work:
blog: www.design21sdn.com/
Site: www.renegademedia.info, www.worldchanging.com 

More pictures on Flickr

This important and rather comprehensive question is raised in a newly published report by FORA

The answer in the report is ‘concept design’ - a new discipline that combines social science, business and design.

In the past most questions for consultancies has been ‘HOW? How do we develop a new product? How should it be designed?
Concept design is viewed as the means to answer the questions that a lot of companies are facing today: WHAT? What should we focus on? What problems should our products solve?

The FORA-report is based on an international study identifying a small number of ‘design hubs’ where companies working with concept design are located. The report concludes that San Francisco, New York, Chicago, London, Munich and Denmark are leading hubs - and 1508 is among the consultancies identified as a “concept design” company. Examples of other companies are Frog Design, IDEO, ReD Associates, LiveWork and Philips Design.

If you have read the publication, we would like to know your view on concept design. Is this really a new field? Do you see its potential? What are the potential (business) barriers of concept design?

The report is available for download in PDF.

When designers are working with text, they are often working with types and not as much with the form of the text. Many modern writers, on the other hand, are working intensively with the text form, though they are not concerned with types – and neither with visual aesthetics. So, perhaps there is a room for mutual inspiration?

One example is the author Per Højholt. This weekend I fell over the collected poems of Højholt. Actually, it was published a year ago, but this weekend was the first time I noticed it.

One of Højholts famous poems looks like this:

Each line in the poem says: ”solen se dens vældige horn mælken fryser i sin karton” (the sun see its immense horn the milk is freezing in its box), but the letters are placed on top of each other in a staggered arrangement. Hereby the text is a form which depth changes depending on how you view it. Hereby Højholt violates a central writing rule, i.e. that letters must follow each other successively, and by deforming the language this way the poem is actually emphasizing that rule.

The poems of Højholt made me think of another author, Simon Grotrian. He has written the peculiar and concretistic poem “Svaner set gennem tårer” (Swans seen through tears):

Well, admitted! Neither Højholt nor Grotrians solutions are very pretty, and as writers they are probably more interested in literature than in visual aesthetics.

But perhaps one or two of their ideas can be applicated for some design solutions?

Below is a small example, where I think it is done carefully and with success.

The stage play Kærlighedshistorier (Love stories) on the theatre Aveny-T is presented on this site. On the screen shot above the (red coloured) title Kærlighedshistorier forms a rectangular box. The box ends out in/behind the red shirt of the female artist on the bottom of the site.

The theatre name and logo to the left is placed in a 90-degree angle, and the lower arms of the female artist are rotated the same way, while the upper arms are positioned perpendicular to this general line.

And furthermore the text AVENY-T forms an arrow as a part of the company logo to the left.

This way the text angle and form is in harmony with the overall layout - without the text just being placed in squared boxes.

As seen below, this is a general design-line on the theatres website.

And on the front page it gets even better. Here the text in the coloured hearts is rotated and stresses the somewhat “nervous” layout.

Additionally the logo is moved to the upper right corner, and forms a line with the head and shoulders of the female artist. And lastly it symbols an arrow through the green heart – as placed by Cupid.

/Maate

Reading Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer a couple of weeks ago, I realised something that really struck me. Designing the Ipod, Apple did no user testing… Since Apples security is so strict, Apple didn’t want to test the Ipod, because there was a risk of revealing what was coming. However testing a user interface that is so new to the users as the click-wheel, would seem to be the only sensible thing to do. Apple chose to rely on Jonathan Ive’ designer skills instead of the users, and you could say that wasn’t such a bad idea. So my question for you:  Is user testing mostly for the unskilled designers?

By Rudolf

Colour associations are sometimes difficult to predict. Different age groups in different cultures at different times will experience colours in different ways. But many clients seem to agree upon one definite rule: Pink is for girls!

When flowers open and berries ripe, they turn red, orange, purple, yellow and pink to indicate that they are ready for pollination or consumption – a very efficient signal. Man made visual communication has a similar agenda. Go to a newsagent and notice the sea of warm coloured magazine heads yelling »pick me, pick me!« – one trying to be louder than the other.

As graphic designers we sometimes find that pink, or »magenta« as we tend to call it, would be just the right »young«, warm color to use for a certain job – red is so over used, yellow might not be dark enough, orange might be a little too »dot-com«, purple might be too cold etc. And yet – we often stop ourselves, or a project manager does so – or in the end a client. The argument being that magenta is too feminine.

But…

A succesful use of magenta was demonstrated by MetaDesign in their campaign for Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2004. The Museum of Modern Art in New York was closed down for three months and a large part of the exhibition shipped to Berlin for a visit. The first billboards were mysterious to many people. They said nothing but »MoMa kommt« and »MoMa ist der Star« in gold and black on a bright pink background. For a couple of weeks the billboards were the talk of town, turning curiosity into a regular hype when the exhibition opened. People left their houses at 6 o’clock in the morning to avoid the 4-hour queue – and they were not all pink-loving girls…

The British bank northern rock has recently introduced itself on the Danish market, with a more advantageous savings account and a series of pink billboards and adverts. Most banks would avoid the colour pink by any means. But does northern rock look girly to us? Or mayby just »refreshing«, »new«, »different« and »young« – which is apparently what they are after.

The telephone companies Telia and Deutsche Telekom both use magenta in their visual identity. As a consequence the Telekom cycling team has to wear an awful lot of pink. Occasionally one of them is lucky enough to be put in a bright yellow shirt and kissed simultaneously by two blond bimbos, thereby restoring any lost masculinity fast. But do they indeed look girly or gay in the first place, going up those mountains in sweaty pink shirts?

The gay magazine Butt is printed on pink paper, but then again - so is Financial Times.

Some may argue that the colour pink is more relevant to the world of culture as in the MoMa campaign or in these booklets for a German theatre (by heute morgen büro für gestaltung):

But this pink guide book for Naples is more about practicalities like transportation, hotels and meals. And it has obviously found its way into male hands:

Could it be that there is a certain difference between what we think of the color pink when asked to judge it, and how we experience it? And is this indeed a general rule about visual communication? Someone should look into this!

Cleo