Design Writing

We were joking in the office today about pop and rock group brand extensions. My favourite (my own of course) was Coldplate -- raw food ready-meals from Coldplay.

There's probably a deep point about branding and identity to be made here but I've no clue what.

camper brand

I like the 'toðer'.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Dan Hill - New Soft City | IxDA

Dan Hill - New Soft City | IxDA.

Just think this is kinda cool.

Louise Campbell interview

Here the interview that I wrote about before: http://www.vimeo.com/5521909

Don Normal on writing as design

Just found this piece from design theorist Don Norman that expresses the idea that writing is a kind of design:

Writing is like design: design is like writing. Although it is useful to try to teach one based upon the properties and needs of the other, either attempt is apt to fail because people tend to be bad at both. To be successful at either task it is important to be able to take the other person's point of view, to understand their background and interests, and to make the work fit the powers and limitations of human cognition. A good designer and a good writer have to share certain characteristics, among the most important being "empathy."

I've been pondering this for a while, so hats off to him for expressing it so well. As he puts it himself, don't confuse easy reading with easy writing. I would like to dig into it a bit more. First draft as prototype. Punctuation as affordances. And then it would be interesting to explore how designers write and whether they use design principles. And finally how writing can be used in design and vice versa.

What to call this new design thing?

I did an interview the other week with Louise Campbell who is lovely, wonderful and had very interesting things to say about where design is today and where it should (and shouldn't) be going. The interview will be online soon and I'll post the link but she said one thing that really stuck me. She said that intangible design—all these new forms of design that doesn't always produce physical objects—isn't really design at all or at least it should be called something else. 

She almost convinced me. And then I thought about the birth of modern art and the tedious (and ongoing) debate about whether it's art or not. Now think about the newer forms of design, of how people are designing service interactions or systems that don't result in a physical thing. Is it really that different? You could argue, as Louise does, that we need to call it something else or you could expand your sense of what design is, in just the same way that we've had to expand our sense of what art is or could be. I must admit that I'm torn.

The unbearable sameness of design

I tend to write in a horizontal position. If there’s no sofa (or the sofa available is clearly a decorative object that is meant to convey a sense of pleasant working comfort but clearly not for sitting on) I make do with a chair for my feet (currently a Jacobsen Ant chair). Reading takes place in cafes. And meeting rooms are generally terrible places to meet. Hate them. Much better to go for a walk.Place matters. 

Richard Florida says that choosing where you live is the most important decision in life—everything flows from that. He could be right but it’s interesting how little sense of place there is in design.Take city planning. It’s all the same model these days, a kind of bourgeoise SimCity planning kit: 1 swirly art gallery, frothy coffee bars, boutique shopping, bike paths, a metro, pocket parks. It’s nice but really boring. Honestly it could be Rotterdam, or Copenhagen or anywhere at all. 

New York now has cyclists, cappuccino drinkers, swirly art galleries. Barcelona has cyclists, cappuccino drinkers, swirly art galleries. Munich has cyclists, cappuccino drinkers, swirly art galleries. Yawn. It’s the same with furniture or websites or graphic design. It’s all looking stupefyingly similar. And the cars! They all look the same now. When I was in Paris (new bike paths, coffee less frothy) last weekend I was teased for dressing like a frenchman, though I didn’t pack a special wardrobe for the city of lights. Clothes are the same everywhere. The only things that are different are that things that are old. And that’s sad. 

Efficiency is great and it’s cool to learn from other cultures but it’s no excuse for a lack of imagination. Go head and build bike paths but have them run over the roofs of buildings. Skip the pocket park and install a pocket farm. Make 10 small museums scattered across the city rather than one big swirly one. And ban the fucking frothy coffee.

Society of the Spectacle

Just a little plug for another blog that I'm writing, this time with a fellow Institute Without Boundaries graduate -- www.societyofthespectacle.ca

It's all about interactive technologies in communications -- what's interesting, scary, new or irritating about mixing computers up with trying to tell people things. My co-author is an interaction researcher and designer with some grand visions, so it will be worth taking a look every now and then.

Nostalgia of advertising

Just a random thought: it seems to me that as TV advertising disappears that it's not so threatening any more. And it's starting to feel like we can appreciate it again but not in a postmodern everything-is-the-same sense but actually for what it is (was) in itself. That is good, bad, indifferent, beautiful.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Design writing technique: cut ups

My best writing comes when I make a game of it. Figuring out how to do something in new ways keeps it fresh. It's serious play if you will. There are lots of ways to do this but the oldies are still the goldies, as this lovely little video shows:

http://vimeo.com/2412336