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Designers can also be super heroes

Odd title, but I do think ‘Designers can also be super heroes’, title of the open talk I will be leading along with architect Penélope Plaza in Caracas, Venezuela  on 25th June. As part of the urban Festival ‘Por el Medio de la Calle’ (Through the middle of the Street) programme, we will share the the experience of leading the workshop ‘Futuros Gráficos’ (Future Graphics) and making a case for the potential of design as crime prevention tool, through the creation of innovative communication platforms within urban space.

Over the last 2 years (slowly but surely) the project ‘Conciencia Visual para la Vida Urbana‘ (Visual Concious for Urban Life) has been in development in partnership with architect Penélope Plaza.  I’m happy to say after many jumping many hoops and and an uphill journey, the pilot phase is ready for take off!   Visual Conscious aims to generate innovative crime prevention campaigns through the intervention of urban public space as a medium for their dissemination.

We have been invited this year by the Foundation Plátano Verde to participate in the urban festival ‘Por el Medio de la Calle’ (Through the middle of the Street) in Caracas, Venezuela and lead the one day workshop ‘Futuros Graficos’ (Future Graphics) as a first pilot activity. The workshop counts with the support of Prodiseño design school, Civil Asociation Paz Activa (Active Peace), +Pop consultancy, and designer Jacinto Salcedo as strategic consultant.

The workshop will be carried out on the 23rd of June with the participation of designers Jaime Cruz  from Prodiseño, Carolina Arnal, Jefferson Quintana & Ricardo Benaím from Manifiesta; Álvaro Bustillos from LaMarca, and Gabriela Fontanillas; a sociologist from the team of  Paz Activa,  social ommunicator Carlos Sánchez from +pop and eight young Venezuelan urban artists (El Calvo, Blue Chicken, Sink, Diep, By Pato, Flix, Seph y ERGO)  with the aim to promote multi-disciplinary collaboration to reach a better understanding of the social and crime context in Venezuela.

The workshop participant’s challenge is to produce creative and innovative social messages in order to create effective crime prevention campaigns. Once this is achieved, the eight street artists will then design and transfer  the messages into stencils that will be painted ‘live’ during the festival on the 26th June, 2010.

More info: www.conciencia-visual.com
Twitter @futurosgraficos

“WordPress is just a load of data”

A friend and I were recently discussing what format to use for her website. We came across this article  ‘Using Templates to Design Killer Blogs’ from Feast (istock photo),  which I thought was worth posting up for a think.

It has some good comments from:
• Jina Bolton , Designer at Crush + Lovely
• Dan Mall, Interactive Art Director for Big Spaceship
• Brendan Dawes, Creative Director at Magnetic North

Jina, when being asked what the most common problem with designing with CMS, I think nails it. “Usually problems that arise have to do with letting yourself be restricted by the perceived constraints of the CMS’s templating system”

As with a lot of these type of articles I’ve read, there is always the question of ‘Are designers being lazy?’ when using templates from blogging sites to create websites. The article discusses a more complacent aspect of that discussion.  The same goes for designers who use very simple portfolio cms like indexhibit, which has been very popular amongst young designers who want to update their sites as quickly as flicking a button but are not versatile in the coding or programming department (one of these designers would be me).

From my point of view, if it’s a designer who is using these sites to create his/her own on-line portfolio, what matters is the content because what you want is to showcase your work. So the cleanest the layout, the better. However, if it’s a client based site that should be completely customised to it’s own identity, look and feel…well I would say that’s a different story. If you use a template you really need to know and completely understand HTML and CSS to be able to fully customise it- that is if the client wants to update it quickly in-house.

Daniel, on this side of things is clear: “To customize templates, it’s important to hold high the sacred tenets of graphic design: typography, white space, grids, movement and hierarchy. Most blog templates are also created with HTML and CSS, so a firm understanding of them is crucial”

But that’s always the case. Understanding and knowing visual language in order to communicate effectively….isn’t it?

That is way at the end it is always done to the need and the best tools to address it.

By the way, another link mentioned worth a view is the SXSW interactive conference, with leading creatives on the panel “Is WordPress killing web design?”

Education and service. Let’s hit the high street

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was reading RSA’s Design and Society ‘Social Animals: tomorrow’s designers in today’s world by Sophia Parker, which makes a good case for incorporating service design into the design education curriculum. Parker argues that “education is at risk of failing its socially-driven students on two counts. First it’s not giving them the language and techniques to enable them to operate effectively in contexts where not all solutions come in the form of 3D products…Second, design education leaves little space for critical thinking about the deeper purpose of the discipline.” She also mentions that designers have been traditionally taught by responding to a set brief as problem solvers, however there seems to be a tendency to also see designers as problem finders. I would argue this has always been within the designer’s nature. We all know that as designers we are constantly full of opinions and suggestions of how things could be better. By suggestion meaning we have already spotted a problem  and given a hint to solution. And then again, we now find ourselves as designers striving for more sustainable proposals instead of creating more tangible (or intangible) products.

I was at a talk recently about design in the 90′s and how by that decade it had become glossy and global. Curiosly enough this is the same decade that IDEO began to talk about ‘empathic design’ and user-led design began to blossom. Which one do you remember the 90′s for?

The debate was then side tracked into a discussion about the discipline today and the trend for democratizing design, that leading to everyone having the same IKEA sofa. Within the whole 30 minutes, there was one sentence that struck me: “Well, the whole sustainable trend hasn’t reached by high street yet.” And it struck me like lightning! It is true that most service, sustainable, social orientated design efforts haven’t reached the high street. And if they have, they most certainly have not made the impact they were designed to have. Why? Is it because service designers, as Parker suggests, are few in number and can be found concentrated in the public sector? Now we know that service design has worked within the private sector and made it’s way over to public sector. I wonder when we will push the social approach to the high street. Does the high street care? I would like to think it does- this said in argument for the value of designers’ ‘intelligent naivety’ (and my wish to maintain it).

I must give some credit and say that we have been witnessing some initiatives within the high street to address sustainability. But what about society? What about the elderly? The young generation and it’s struggle to be understood? The women? The children? The isolated? The mentally ill? I would love to see private sector service design focused on specific social groups- for profit, for good. Is it a matter for these new designers in education and the socially-driven design student mass forming?

Facts show that running a business is the top career choice for 62% of young people. I can suspect that it’s because most of young students can’t see themselves fitting within the traditional job posts available and they are ready to introduce new ways of working. It is also a fact that over the next 10 years China and India will double in economic size whilst the UK will be only 25% larger. The UK’s wealth will also depend on service and creative industries, where the edge comes from innovation rather than price.

The big question is: How is (design) education preparing young people for this future?

Design thinks

Last week I attended Service Design Thinks 3: Service Design from Scratch. It was the first one of the Service Design Thinks events that  I come along to. I was really interested to see what the speakers Dr James Munro from Patient Opinion, investor Zaeem Maqsood from, First Capital and entrepreneurs Sophia Parker and Katie Harris from, The Resolution Foundation and Esro had to say about their experiences.

It was a good session of food for thought.

Patient Opinion was one that caught my interest. It is a website that has been created with the aim to improve the NHS, by enabling patients to share the story of what happened to them or their family when they were ill. Innevitably, by sharing stories it also helps them and others suggest how the NHS and particular issues in hospitals could be better. It is a very clever and simple way to engage people because there is nothing that we like more tahn have people ask us “What do you think?” It’s human nature to be full of opinions.hence the power of social media!

Munro spoke about these stories and suggestions as donations to the health care service. This was a very poetic way of speaking,  which resonated with me because it moved away from the designers language and terms of ‘service design,  co-design, people-centered design, etc’ and placed itself in everyone’s everyday language. It is just about people helping people do their jobs better with the organisations involved to support them and improve the service.

Although the evening was catered to service design I was glad to join. Although I’m not particularly a service designer, and not sure I want to label myself as such (but that might be just me and my issue with labels)  it was a discussion that every designer could join. I could see many ways of incorporating all other disciplines into the projects presented and how I could incorporate what I was hearing that evening into ongoing and future projects I’m planning to take on myself. Beautiful.

A good example of that was a tool presented by Zaeem Maqsood from First Capital. Now, get this: First Capital  is a boutique investment bank that specialises in fund raising and mergers and acquisitions advice for growth technology companies. I was so happy to see a venture capitalist figure in the room because if there is something that designers are not particularly good at is speaking business. We seem to have that ‘intelligent naivety’ which I would argue we still need to value,  but don’t have that hard-core business mind that we need sometimes (some of us anyway). It gave us an insight and served as a reminder.

What Zaeem introduced to my knowledge was a service called  ‘The Gauntlet’ which is a critical checklist to evaluate financial success of start-up. It is divided in different areas like Innovation, Team and Market, for example. What the ‘Gauntlet’ does is give you a score at the end based on your answers to see how solid your start-up idea is for investors. Some of examples of what each area covers are things like: benefit, development, impact and protectatibilty for the area of innovation. Now what struck me from the impact point of view is that the more disruptive the service or product is then investors see it as a higher risk because it is about changing behavior. Which we all know that many designers somehow try to do (some more successfully than others). It makes sense from an investment point of view but I hadn’t seen it that way (see what I mean!) The team area looks at skills, experience (if your team has anyone who has already managed a successful start-up before), network and attitude. And the market area, obviously looks at growth, customers, size (market segment) and competition.

On the night I also managed to pick up the RSA’s Design & Society panflet. This one titled: Social animals: tomorrow’s designers in today’s world by Sophia Parker. It was a particularly good find. I’m in the middle of reading it but so far so good. I keep nodding and contracting my eyebrows in questioning gesture as I go through it. So I’m sure a new post will come up soon on that one.

Stay tuned!