“˜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!

So, I lost my beloved credit card the other day. The thing is, the credit cards in Denmark have recently been changed to a new type, with an embedded, more secure chip. This change changes the usage pattern of the cards as a whole. Before, you’d swipe your card through the terminal, wait for acknowledgment, enter your 4-digit pin, and put your card back somewhere safe, then proceed to pack your groceries. When the cashier was done, you’d press “Accept” on the terminal, and if the machine gods willed it, the payment would be accepted. The chance of forgetting the card in the terminal was next to nothing. As an added bonus, you weren’t taking up space in the line to the cashier, waiting for your transaction to complete.

The new usage pattern, changed by the chip cards are, well, more intricate. First, you place your card in the terminal, then wait for acknowledgment and acceptance of the card type, wait for the amount, then enter your pin code and press”Accept”. Wait for acknowledgment again, then remove the card and pack up your groceries.

The problem here is, while you could be packing up your groceries, candles, clothes or what ever, your are slowing the line down, waiting for the cashier to finish entering your items, so you can finish the credit card transaction.

Time is the most valuable resource we have, and every time I use my credit card, minutes are being wasted, unless I leave my credit card in the terminal, and go pack my stuff up. It’s a lose – lose situation, either I increase my chance of the forgetting the card / getting it stolen, or I waste everyones time.

Maybe I should just get better at remembering my credit card…

Clay Shirky has this wonderful little piece and 1508-colored illustrations on what design is. Design is Arrogance + humility, the hard part is to combine the elements. His blog is highly recommended – abriefmessage.com features design opinions in short form. 200 words or less, that is.

Yesterday we launched yet another website to be proud of – and this time it’s our very own!

For several months we have been wishing and working on a website that shows 1508 in a more visual and comprehensive way. Have a visit on the site and go on a journey into our past and present to get to know the true story of 1508.

We would love to hear your opinion about the site.  

The national identity of countries can shift radically and at a speed that leaves their inhabitants gasping. As the United States continues to suffer from low approval ratings all over the world, Paula Scher, one of the world’s leading graphic designers and a principal at Pentagram in New York, talks to Monocle editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé about how the US needs to overhaul its image, brand promise, name and messaging.

Watch it here

The graf above (Google Analytics - great software) points out an interesting shift in web navigation of today. The 28,87 % is the share of users landing directly on the Home Page of a Danish Trade Union. This means that 71,23% of all users on this Trade Union website skips the homepage and goes directly to sub pages of the site. Earlier on the share of users entering a site through the home page was much greater than today. One of the main factors in this change is the upcoming of search engines such as Google. Now people search for content and is directed to the relevant page immediately.  So why am I writing about this? Why is this interesting? Because this change in user behaviour should change the way we design for web.

Web Navigation 2.0, as I so webish called it in the headline, means that the need for navigational instruments and overview possibilities on sub pages is about to be redefined. I say this because users for the time being have no clue about the total content of a site when entering via a sub page. Besides what information they can get from the global navigation, content navigation and the sub page itself, there isn’t much overview. So I predict that related information, and visualisation of site content is going to be something we will hear a lot more about in the years to come. Agree?

PS. I just found this great example: Apples new homepage. Take a look to the left of the Leopard-box. A great way to offer tons of information in very little space. Try to imagine news, calendar, hot products and vacant jobs on a corporate website in this form. Cool hhm?

During last week’s Copenhagen screening of Helvetica, the director Gary Hustwit asked all graphic designers to raise their hands. A fairly large number of hands were not raised. It is hard to say if these belonged to very cool graphic designers who couldn’t be bothered, or if they were the hands of non-graphic designers (like Hustwit) who just happened to like type. Fact is that BBC World recently reviewed the Helvetica-film, that MoMA currently runs a very successful exhibition to celebrate Helvetica’s birthday and that the danish newspaper Politiken had an article on Helvetica last saturday…

Is typography becoming some sort of general hobby? Something to be discussed at dinner parties and on first dates in the future? Will »what kind of music do you like?« be followed by »tell me about your favorite typeface«? The film Helvetica certainly describes how graphic design and typography has been adapted by non-designers, and how it is used to express individuality and identity as on myspace.com.

The film features (among others) Wim Crouwel and Massimo Vignelli looking very pleased with themselves and their careers. But as they flick through their excellent helvetica-based design from the 60s, it is hard not think that their clients were much easier to seduce and persuade than today’s clients. That Crouwel and Vignelli were respected as specialists in a way that is sadly no longer guaranteed. Today we discuss size, colour and composition with our clients, but will we be discussing x-heights, terminals and ascenders in the future?

The article »You know the type (you just don’t know it)«, written by non-graphic designer Nils Thorsen:

Cleo

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 “œSvaner 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 “œnervous” 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