Passions and linchpins.

What are my passions? Well ... that’s a moving target these days as I’m discovering so many new creative worlds in my MFA studies. Art, design, and communication has been a huge passion in my life for more than 30 years and remains at the top of my list even today. And that passion culminated into a small, creative design group for the past 18 years. But it wasn’t just my passion for creative and distinctive design and communication that led me to the successes I’ve had in the business world. I was able to pick the right talent ... energetic young designers ... to work with me to collaborate on client projects. Most of the design staff at my business were young, either straight out of art school or within the first five years of their careers. They brought their passion to the group and became instrumental in helping me achieve my goals. And as the question has been put to me as to whether or not I am a linchpin, I don’t want to come off as arrogant, but would have to say ... yes ... I am a linchpin.

As an owner and Creative Director of a small business, my responsibilities go well beyond daily design duties. The inner workings of a small design group include not only managing the staff, but also managing the clients and vendors. While I enjoy the interactive qualities of those tasks, I found that it can create a drain on creativity. The day-to-day task of managing the different agendas and personalities of people has the potential to divert attention and focus away from what a person really wants to accomplish when it comes to creative development. While I believe the management of client needs, creative direction, and vendor management would qualify me as a linchpin, I feel my biggest success as a linchpin was recruiting the right creative talent to enable our group to produce distinctive, engaging, and successful communication materials for our clients.

But linchpins can break. The biggest obstacle I faced, and what got in my way, was a dysfunctional relationship with my former business partner. I won’t go into details on that subject as it’s very complicated, but after reading Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, my partner and I exhibited many of the negative traits outlined in that story.

As I’ve gotten older and have expanded my life beyond the studio walls, I’ve discovered a second passion. Through a 4 1/2 year position as an Adjunct Professor at Kansas City Art Institute, developing young designers at my design group, coaching youth sports for 10 years, and now mentoring undergraduates in the Champlain College design program, I’ve discovered that I have a passion for working with young people.

So, putting my passions for design and communication together with my love of working with young people, I’ve come up with the following positioning statement based on Kawasaki’s ten word limit:

Helping businesses ... and our youth ... create a beautiful world.

I look forward to continuing the mission.

Inspiration just ... happens.

I never know where I’m going to find inspiration. And it usually comes when I’m not looking for it. I saw a weathered piece of typography on a mailbox as I was driving in the country a couple of days ago. It was beautiful. I watched my son’s varsity baseball game last week. The determination they showed was exhilarating. The lilacs lining my property are blooming right now. The color and smell is amazing. I met a talented undergraduate design student in the Mac lab several months ago. His story was triumphant. All of these events inspired me. I find that inspiration happens to me mostly when I’m not searching for it. It just happens. That’s not to say that I don’t search for inspiration, it just seems to be all around me in the different aspects of my life waiting to be discovered at the right moment.

When it comes to my creative work, I read all the design magazines and annuals that I can get my hands on looking for inspiration. That’s great for following trends, but after I put them down, I don’t always feel inspired. In fact, I’m not too inspired by very many new aesthetic trends happening right now. When I look at the magazines and annuals, I’m more inspired by the exciting new ideas and thought processes that creatives are applying to their world using unusual methods.

I came across an article in Communication Arts several months ago about an ad agency in Toronto that implemented an idea to separate themselves from their competitors. It is an online documentary of a day-long event titled “Think.” The site includes the documentary film, images, and text from the project and explores everything that happened that day. Their contention is that the hundreds of ad agencies in Canada tout themselves as unconventional, but don’t follow through on that promise. The project consisted of eight interdisciplinary thinkers from Zulu Alpha Kilo crammed into a box in downtown Toronto where they asked passersby for creative challenges and then proceeded to solve them on the spot while “thinking inside the box.” This Web site is an online extension of the live event:

www.thinkinginsidethebox.ca

The “box” was equipped with all the technical requirements of an agency (fast internet, printer, etc.) and fed live animations to all the video billboards surrounding the square to inform pedestrians of what was happening inside the box. No question or problem to solve was off limits. This collaborative project is fascinating because there was no way to predict what types of problems people would bring to them, it allowed them to show their creative problem solving capabilities, and showed potential clients that they truly are willing to take risks to prove what they are capable of producing. This project is truly inspirational to me.

I believe that finding inspiration can be elusive. Therefore, I keep my radar up for that opportunity where it presents itself to me. For me, it comes from people, nature, groups, objects, books ... essentially everything and everywhere. I just have to recognize it. Earlier today I was inspired by my dog Scot. He loves to play ... and playing inside our environment is a great way to discover inspiration.

Inerface/Interaction

It’s hard to talk about interface and interaction over the past 20 years without referencing the impact computers have had on interplay in our daily lives. I’m not speaking specifically about personal computers, although they have affected both interface and interaction tremendously. A person cannot go about their daily activities without having numerous interaction with all forms of computers, whether we realize it or not. Our desire to have comfort, speed, accessibility, and safety has made the computer and their various applications become the largest single force of change over the past 20 years.

If I paint a broad stroke over interface and interaction over the past 20 years, I have to believe that technology has made interaction in our personal and professional lives a positive experience. We are connected with people all over the world through the Internet. That connection has become increasingly quicker and easier through developments in broadband technology and its accessibility in rural and impoverished nations. It is estimated that cell phone users will hit 5 billion this year (1). With Earth’s population estimated at 7 billion, that’s a staggering amount of people connected in the world. 20 years ago, cars were still essentially focused on transporting people. Today they are mobile computers from the engine, to the stereo systems, DVD players, GPS systems, climate control centers, and more.

But designing better products has led to complexity of operation. Donald Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things states, “Modern designers are subject to many forces that do not allow for the slow, careful crafting of an object over decades and generations. Most of today’s items are too complex, with too many variables, for this slow sifting of improvements (2).” A clock radio used to have the on/off button, snooze bar, and volume control. They still have those functions, but now they play CDs and iPods, can be set to daylight savings mode, show the room temperature, display the moon cycles, show dates, and more. It is now necessary to read the manual to operate a simple everyday device. In the early ’90s, I could work on a car. These days, it is nearly impossible unless you’ve had training and possess high-tech diagnostic equipment. While computers have made our lives easier in many ways, they have also made our lives more complicated. I would even venture to say that the complexity in our daily interfaces has made Apple products difficult for some people to use as they spend time looking for complexity that isn’t there. Are we so entrenched in a world of mediocre or even bad design that we may never get out of it? Had the design community followed the concept of participatory design practiced by Larry Tessler as early as the 1960s (3), the mindset of consumers would be to demand and expect the interaction with products to be intuitive and engaging as that standard would have been established decades before.

If we fast-forward to the next 20 years, I believe there will be a greater effort to develop products that utilize participatory design methods. Designers will develop interfaces that conform to people. I recently discovered a TEDTalk given by Jeff Han (and then saw it on our class resource list) where he has developed a multi-touch, multi-user computer screen interface that is being discussed as a potential end to the point-and-click era (4). This screen is simple and intuitive. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the digital technology of our homes and offices by allowing even the most illiterate computer user to become connected. As I project ahead into the next two decades, it is inevitable that technologies of this type will become cheaper, making it affordable for a mainstream audience to interact with this type of product. Keep in mind that the first CD players on the market in the ’80s started at a cost of around $1,500. When high-tech becomes low cost, it becomes scalable to cross many consumer categories allowing availability to the masses.

When Donald Norman describes the house of the future in his book The Design of Future Things, he envisions a smart-home with software that can read the emotions of the owner and perform tasks accordingly (5). This includes homes that control the lighting according to their perception of the owner’s moods, that choose what music to play or that direct the television images to move from screen to screen as you travel through the house. There is already discussion taking place about the new Semantic Web 3.0 where search engines will not merely search for words, but will be able to look at context and understand the meaning of words. My point here is that the future of interface in our world as it applies to technology will become more about how software applications will read our thoughts and emotions and act accordingly. Norman describes cars that will sense tenseness in the driver, survey the exterior environment, and be able to adjust functions like seat belts and suspension stiffness to protect the driver. This experimentation with software interacting with our personal thoughts and emotions is already happening and can be viewed in a TEDTalk given by Tan Le, the head of Emotiv Systems who has developed actual computer applications that read a person’s emotions, thoughts, and facial expressions and performs tasks simply by having the user think about the task (6). Brain computer interface technology has applications to our world that are practically infinite, but can have major implications in helping handicapped people. This type of interface will surely be common within the next 20 years.

As I look back at the past 20 years of products we consume, the interaction with technology and its applications has been about getting smaller, and faster with more and more added features for interaction. But without attention to participatory design, our interaction with these products has been complicated, lacking intuitive operation for the typical mainstream user. Moving into the future, I have faith that the next era of design, through education and awareness, will produce products that are more user-friendly. And combining that concept with the breakthroughs happening in technologies like brain computer interface technology, the next 20 years should be exciting times not only for designers, but also for consumers.


References:
(1) Physorg.com. www.physorg.com/news185467439.html. Web. 15 Feb. 2010.
(2) Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1998.
(3) Moggridge, Bill. Designing Interactions. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press, 2007.
(4) TED.com. www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html. Web. Feb. 2006
(5) Norman, Donald. The Design of Future Things. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2007.
(6) TED.com. www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves.html. Web. Jul. 2010