Jeremy Myerson
So, before lunch, we had three breakout sessions, three parallel sessions, and what we thought would be useful, obviously people heard only one of the three. So we thought we'd feed back on what went on this morning very, very briefly. So first of all I'm going to ask Nico McDonald to feed back on the Interaction thread.
Nico MacDonald
OK, thank you. Good afternoon everyone. Hope you had a good lunch. OK, the Interaction thread, ostensibly was called Interaction blur, and the panelists were Daljit Singh from Digit London, Durrell Bishop from Luckybite, and Andy Altmann from Why Not Associates. It was ostensibly about looking at the development of interaction design and the degree to which it has come from different skills or even disciplines, and it's in the process of formation and are the skills which it addresses ones which are applicable, across platforms and types of products. What kind of new skills are needed? Can they be encapsulated in one designer?
The panel actually went more widely than that which I allowed them to do. I just want to sum up the kind of discussions that we had around the objections and challenges which we identified. What is interaction design? The skills that are needed? The tools which might support those implications for education, broader challenges and future. So, I should be able to do that in four minutes.
So, the objections and challenges. One that Daljit identified was being able to supply information to people when relevant, and he reflected on the fact that WPP, which part-owns his company, is challenged when it comes to modern or future models for marketing and advertising. He also argued that we need to make things simpler, and we need to make technologies invisible. Although Durrell Bishop argued that we actually need to make technologies more visible or more understandable at least.
What is interaction design? Now, there is not an accepted view about this and it's perhaps not surprising, but we should be aware of the extent that we talk about this thing in an off-hand way, it means different things to different people, and it's still difficult to define.
Durrell talked about wanting to be able to see things, and the need for self-descriptive products and popped back to a theme which people may know about – products which are black boxes and don't have any semantics or clues to tell you what they do or how to manipulate them. So, he talked about needing to visualise invisible systems and being able to manipulate them. Andy claimed he doesn't know what interaction design is, which comes back to my original point, and pointed out that we interact with people all the time.
On the area of skills, Durrell argued for people having a deeper understanding of the skills that they have, and that was a general theme of the panel. You've got to have a deeper understanding of particular skills before you become a jack of all trades. That's a point that Andy made. He talked about mobile phones. U.I. [user interface] designers need to know more about electronics for instance, which his contention is that they don't. Daljit argued that we need to look for broader skills and talked about everything from theatre designing, or theatre designers, as potential inputs for these skills, as his own skills for learning to make sausages, which I think were called bangras? Okay, we'll come back to that. The joke was lost on me.
We also talked about needing a new lease on life for basic skills like drawing, and there was a quite interesting theme of sort of getting back to basics, getting back to a basic design education, partly because industry and tools are changing, and in order to work effectively, you need a good general design foundation, if you like. There was reflection on the fact that you need to re-teach students skills that they were supposedly already taught in college, or teach them new skills that are appropriate to new developments, which is a question about whether that should be part of education or not.
Durrell pointed out that skills are thought of as a way of implementing design rather than a way of thinking about things, and he wanted people to have design skills that helped them to work on what products could do rather than solving particular design problems. In the area of tools, Durrell talked about designers tools not getting any better, and in fact, in many cases, getting worse. The ways of getting involved and understanding behaviours of products and services and interfaces and so on, are disappearing. So actually the situation is getting worse. He said to uncover the things underneath, you need to experience them. You need tools such as processing, which is Ben Fry and Casey Reas’s tool, which helps you learn about what is around you, to understand the material, if you like. That point he also applies to education, in that if you don't understand and experience the things, you can't effectively teach them. Daljit talked about teaching design fundamentals. Don't focus on a medium that hasn't grown up yet. So again, back to our sort of nascent medium. All designers should be interaction designers was a point made from the audience by Gus Desbarats from Alloy, and Durrell talked about – sorry, I've repeated that point.
And then more broadly on education, we talked about the reluctance of design courses to take on digital behaviour as a theme of teaching, and teachers needing to know enough to be able to get students excited about things, and then perhaps bring in the right people who've actually had the experience of working with interaction type things in order to teach them more deeply.
The challenges, some we organised, are designers needing to understand marketing more, not just thinking about creating the products but how you sell them to people, how you communicate them. We reflected on the fact, Andy particularly, that graphic designers don't question user interfaces. So, the point that Durrell also made, that actually we work with these tools all the time, or graphic designers do, but don't question the nature of those tools. Andy argued that sometimes graphic designers are more interested in how cool something is than its interactions. We had an argument about that whether the iPhone, if it had a Windows mobile interface, would have the kudos that it has, whether people want it for the physical product artefact or for the interaction?
And the final point made was about whether communication design really subsumed interaction design, in terms of thinking about skills set and education and so on, it might take over from interaction design. I have a plug asked for by Daljit for a paper which related to these themes which is at digitlondon.com/moments, and I'll also post these notes on my website which is spy.co.uk. What's wrong with that?
Jeremy Myerson
Thanks very much. Thank you.
Vicky Richardson
Well, I'm not sure we covered as much ground in the fashion session, although it was a very interesting discussion, and I think quite a high-level, sophisticated discussion. I was quite relieved that we didn't go back to the old formula of discussing whether or not fashion is just a styling exercise and whether this sort of new trend for product design to embrace fashion is simply a triumph of style over substance. We kind of went a lot further than that, which was great.
We sort of talked about two parallel trends, I suppose, which is one, fashion labels and fashion brands embracing a broader range of markets for their brand. Brands diversifying which we're all familiar with. Tom Savigar was sort of talking about this sort of limitless number of products that fashion labels, or luxury brands, can now embrace. It seems there really is no limit to where a strong brand can go next, whether that's selling flowers or newspapers, furniture or mobile phones. So, we talked about brand complexity in that sense.
We also talked about, well Ignacio Germade talked about, what embracing fashion meant from his point of view at Motorola where he's Design Director.
The other parallel trend was some of the broader concerns, I suppose, within design itself, such as sustainability and how that interacts with fashion and exactly what do we mean by fashion? I suppose throughout the discussion we kind of got closer to a definition even though we didn't dwell on that. I think we talked about, well Sarah Maynard actually made an interesting point about how, for a long time, what a fashion labels have done really well is to be in touch with a youth culture, and that has been the driving force behind fashion itself, which is now beginning to come into a broader range of product design companies particularly. We didn't dwell on whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Although towards the end of the discussion, we began to take a more critical attitude and look at issues like sustainability and so on.
One of the big elements of discussion was on luxury because I think this seems to be a massively growing market at the moment. Whether you're talking about sort of fake luxury or real price tags. Again, a question of definition, but a lot of people felt that luxury was something that was really a mark of quality, and the search for luxury was more of a search for products that would last, that you could repair so that consumers might be more prepared to pay upfront for something that they can repair over a number years that's going to mature and grow with them. So, we had a fair amount of discussion over luxury in both fashion and the product context.
We also looked at the subject of co-creation and consumers as designers. On the opposite side, the idea of the badly behaved maverick designer, and the role of the creative individual in design, and perhaps whether that role is more dominant in fashion than in product design where you might be more constrained by technology or market research, or perhaps where the client is more risk adverse. Somebody very interesting from the audience talked about the idea of the magnificent generalist and said well this idea of crossing disciplines is nothing new. It's just that in the 70s and 80s we talked about the generalist rather than the multi-disciplinarian. So is there anything new to this? Perhaps this is just a revival of something that was fashionable twenty or thirty years ago.
So, I think I've covered the broad themes. Possibly we raised more questions than we answered but I think that by the end, as is always the way, the differences between the panel were coming out. If we'd had another half hour, we probably could have had some really good arguments but at the point people started disagreeing, I had to wrap it up. Couple of points of disagreement. Ignacio began to suggest the only difference between a cheap watch and a luxury watch was just that you were paying for the exclusivity of the label. I think he said that the basic mechanism is exactly the same. Whereas, Sarah was talking about a luxury more as the beauty of simplicity, honesty of materials, and the idea that people want to have beautiful things around them. And she felt that that was kind of the influence of fashion on product design. Certainly the story of her own work was quite inspiring and I think put a much more interesting spin on the idea of fashion going into product design where she was talking about her work for Aston Martin where she's designed a crystal starter button in the current Aston Martin. As she put it, you get into this wonderful machine, you press the button and the whole thing fires up, but the button itself is just a red bit of plastic that you might find in a child's toy. So, the challenge was actually to make the experience, reflect the experience through the materials. I think that's where her background in fashion and textiles really came into play.
Jeremy Myerson
Thanks Vicky.
So the third stream I just want to summarise was the business thread. The question was are D-schools the new B-schools? Our panel was Janet Abrams, Director of the Design Institute at the University Minnesota, John Bates, London Business School professor who's working very closely with the University of the Arts and Christoph Boninger ex-Head of Design at Siemens. I think the debate ranged all over the place. The think the conclusion we came to was summarised that we didn't need D-schools or B-schools, we actually needed C-schools. These were convergent schools.
We also probed the idea that it wasn't just about the intersection of design in business that was important. Design needed to intersect with everything that a university teaches right across the sciences and the humanities. And then of course, the issue was how far can design stretch? We'll come on to mission creep in a moment.
So, we tackled a range of issues in our section. Can you teach curiosity? The thorny dilemma of experts versus generalists, and whether the management education needed to change in the same radical way that design education was? And I think the conclusion was yes, it should. So we generated a lot of heat. So much so that we had to stop at one point for everybody to fan their neighbour. I hope that along the way we generated a little bit of light. A lot of people referred, most of the audience spoke, a lot of people picked up on Tim Brown's Venn diagrams, and the one about designers bringing a human element of desirability and the engineers and scientists bringing feasibility and the business people bring viability. And I go back to Frans Johansson's comment earlier this morning. He said not all combinations are created equal, in a sense that the three corners of a triangle are not equally weighted, and I come back to Billy Wilder's famous quote. He said “Nobody ever came out of a movie and said 'I really liked that movie. I heard it came in on budget.'”. So on that note, we'll move on from D-schools, and B-schools and C-schools, and move onto our first speaker of the afternoon.