A Word In Your Ear

The Tax Payers' Alliance and the BBC

2009-10-14T09:34:00.001+01:00

I'm getting fed up with the bloody Tax Payers' Alliance. They seem to crop up more and more on the news and in newspapers, trotted out to provide a comment about council or government spending which usually involves them saying that whatever it is is bad news, and that tax payers demand better.

The Guardian has been giving them some attention recently, exposing their funding and ties to right wing politics. It's ironic that many of their highest profile supporters are also people who benefit most from government spending such as those involved in building the 2012 infrastructure (the Olympics being a TPA target) or transport subsidies (don't get the TPA started on that). The contradictions are rife.

As the cleverly named anti-TPA group The Other Taxpayers' Alliance points out, journalists seem keen to include quotes from an organisation that only has 20,000 "members" (they don't pay, just sign up to an email) rather than, say, a union that represents a million or more taxpayers.

It's worth visiting The Other Taxpayers' Alliance for some excellent analysis of the TPA and an amusing quote generator.

I read a story on the BBC's news website earlier that typifies the sort of crap we're having to put up with. Kent County Council has spent £20,000 on producing an online soap opera to help educate young people about issues such as sexual health and personal safety. Sounds interesting, sounds innovative, sounds like the sort of thing that other councils and organisations would be interested in hearing more about. Let's see some samples, let's hear from the people involved, let's hear from some of the target audience. What a great story! Does it work? Does in not work? £20,000 seems quite cheap...

Oh but I'm sorry! The story doesn't cover any of that. Instead it simply says how much it cost and then devotes a third of the story to a quote from Matthew Elliot, chief executive of TPA which the BBC describes as a "pressure group which campaigns for lower taxes."

Here's the section:

The TaxPayers' Alliance said people would prefer to pay lower council tax than spend money on experimental drama.
Matthew Elliot, chief executive of the pressure group which campaigns for lower taxes, said: "I'm sure most taxpayers would rather their money was in their pocket in the form of lower council tax, especially in the middle of a recession.
"Most young people will see through such blatant propaganda.
"It would be better to teach them about these issues in the classroom than try to be young and hip, reaching them by online television."

So here we have a problem. It's clear Matthew Elliot hasn't seen the video, or spoken to the people involved. He says "I'm sure most taxpayers would rather their money was in their pocket in the form of lower taxes". So he's not talking about research here - he hasn't gone out and asked anyone. He's offering an opinion. But he hasn't offered any evidence or context. For example, how much does Kent County Council spend on youth education and other projects each year? What's £20,000 as a proportion of that? How much does it cost to get someone off drugs? Or help a single teenage mother?
He then says "Most young people will see through such blatant propaganda" but hey, if a journalist at the BBC can't see through the TPA's blatant propaganda I think it's a fairly safe bet that young people will fall for anything too. Never mind, because there's another contradiction here: "It would be better to teach them about these issues in the classroom" because of course, young people will fall for anything if it's taught in the classroom in front of their peers rather than watched privately at home, won't they? You don't have to be a genius to know why online video is likely to be more successful than forcing a lesson on teenagers from a teacher who'd rather be talking about anything other than underage sex.

The Other Taxpayers' Alliance has a very funny media guide on their site which includes an analysis of a story on Moray council's advertisement for a street football coordinator. The TPA spat feathers and their press release was dutifully printed in various newspapers without any attempt at seeing the bigger picture. Their assertion was that spending money on someone to set up street football was a waste of money as all it takes is a couple of jumpers for goalposts and a football. Er, wrong! Street football is actually an excellent scheme that has managed to reduce petty crime and vandalism in areas where it's been tried out. It saves more money than it costs, but it needs coordinating because just dumping a couple of cardigans in the road doesn't cut it.
Street football is an excellent example of an easy, cheap scheme that gets results and should be encouraged. It saves taxpayers money, it doesn't cost them anything. But the arses at TPA don't care about that. They don't do research, they don't network, they don't think.

Well I give in. I just sent a complaint to the BBC which I've asked them to reply to. I'll post their response here when it comes. I think it's ironic that the BBC, a taxpayer-funded organisation that really should know better, is stooping to the same level as tabloids by failing to give value for money by simply recycling a press release and not entering into any actual journalism beyond getting a balancing quote from the council rather than, oh I don't know, talking to the people involved?
It's also ironic that the BBC is reporting this story without realising that the biggest producer of educational video tackling similar topics is... the BBC! Brilliant.

Here's my complaint:

In your story on an innovative scheme in Kent to educate young people on social issues using online drama, the report gives a great deal of coverage to criticism from the Tax Payers Alliance. There is no analysis and there are no examples of the videos in question.

There is no attempt to interview people who work in the area - for example social workers or teachers - or who have worked on the project, or to talk to the intended audience. Neither is there any context provided, For example, have similar schemes produced results? What are the costs associated with the issues being dealt with (for example, how much does it cost taxpayers to deal with the consequences of poor sexual health or personal safety?)

The quote from TPA is clearly one from someone who knows nothing about the issues involved, or who has seen the materials, or who has entered in to any research on the matter. The UK has many academics and professionals who would have been better options for comments based on knowledge, rather than politics.

This is a potentially very interesting story but has been turned in to the sort of thing I'd expect from a tabloid newspaper - hardly the standard I expect from the BBC. Perhaps the TPA should be asked if this is the sort of quality journalism we expect from our license fee?

I am particularly concerned that you have used the Tax Payers Alliance, yet again, for a comment. This organisation is not representative of tax payers, undertakes no research other than a trawl through local papers looking for odd-sounding stories and, as demonstrated in this story, is clearly willing to come up with some damning reactionary quote rather than look in to the story more carefully before offering a considered opinion.
It's "membership" is tiny, especially compared with, say, the unions that represent the people concerned here: social workers, teachers, council staff. Or, indeed, the many voluntary organisations that work in this area. These would have made far better sources.

This is a very poorly written story, and relies on an uneducated non-specialist comment to frame the project as "a waste of money" when in fact it could be money very well spent. A better-researched story might have offered illumination. Instead it demonstrates poor practice and poor journalism.

Bear baiting and cock fighting (aka US journalism)

2009-08-23T15:52:00.001+01:00

The last couple of weeks of The Daily Show have been particularly good - some sort of end of term feeling, perhaps? Or maybe it's the increasing frustration with the absurdities of the health care debate in the US (especially the bizarre claims about the UK's NHS which, incidentally, isn't even the model that's being proposed for the US).

Anyway, it's good to see someone in the US media call the "death panel" idiots out on their claims. It's a shame it has to be a comedian on a cable channel.
Here's the difference between UK and US journalism:
In the UK, someone makes a bizarre claim. Journalists investigate it and if it's loony they ignore it (and make a note not to listen to that person again). If there's something behind it, they report the story, not the claim.

In the US, it seems, the claim itself is the story. Irrespective of whether there's any substance to it. Just get that person on camera and let them make their claim, then ask someone to respond. It's like bear baiting, or cock fighting. Except the journalists are the owners, setting up a fight for the entertainment of the audience.
Where's the analysis? Where's the fact checking?

I'll tell you where: it's on the Comedy Channel! How screwed up is that?

What Jon Stewart and his team do is invite people on to the show and instead of simply letting them repeat their claims, they ask them for evidence. Or present them with reasoned, logical arguments. He did it with Bill Kristol recently and got him to admit that military health care for veterans was excellent - that would be government-run health care.

He also pointed out that a discussion on cable news about health insurance was sponsored by an insurance company. But not a health insurance company - no, a car insurance company. The irony being that it is illegal to drive in the US without insurance, but not illegal to have no health insurance.

Here's Stewart interviewing Betsy McCaughley, who identified the "death panels" in the health care bill. Except that when she's asked to show where it mentions those, she can't. She points to how doctors will be evaluated on their use and adherence to statements from patients about "life sustaining treatment" which as Stewart points out could mean "keep bringing me back no matter what" rather than mandatory "do not resuscitate" instructions.

Something Stewart points out but which is lost in the general melee is that "end of life counselling" was actually introduced by a certain George W Bush. It was seen as a great idea back then - allowing people to make their wishes known to avoid burdening loved ones with dreadful decisions or putting people through long and painful but ultimately futile treatment. But that was then. A Republican was in the White House. Now we've got a Kenyan Nazi (apparently) who wants to ship anyone over 60 off to the gas chambers.

Apparently that's what we do here in the UK. Really?

Er, no. Far from having death panels, and poor health care because of the NHS, the UK not only has a better life expectancy than the US but the number of 100-year olds is steadily rising to such an extent that it's no longer a big news event when someone reaches their century, as it was when I was a kid.

"Babies born nowadays in the UK are expected to live to the age of 100, while it is predicted that the number of centenarians will increase from the present-day total of 10,000 to 1million by the year 2074"

Compare "death panels" with the current denial of care that exists in the US, as covered in this fascinating but depressing story.

Or, for an uncomfortably funny/despair-inducing few minutes, watch as Jon Stewart tears apart the "death panel" argument with logic rather than rhetoric.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Betsy McCaughey Pt. 1

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Healthcare Protests

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Betsy McCaughey Pt. 2

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Healthcare Protests

Most of the images of "town halls" I've seen have shown politicians standing dumbfounded in front of the (somewhat organised and well-briefed, if wrongly briefed) critics. You really want them to say simply that their concerns are unfounded.
All praise to Barney Frank who had the guts to go one step further:

Interns - something needs to be done

2009-08-14T19:16:00.001+01:00

I'm getting more and more angry about the subject of design internships and the bizarre excuses that many in industry and, let's be honest, education, use to excuse the practice.

Internships, also known as placements, are "opportunities" for graduates to get experience of "real world work" which apparently makes CVs look better and increases your chance of getting a job.

The trouble is, the likelihood of getting a job is much reduced as a fair proportion of work is being done by interns working for free!
Or as Tory MP Philip Hammond recently told a constituent after being asked why he doesn’t pay his own interns: "I would regard it as an abuse of taxpayer funding to pay for something that is available for nothing"¹. This, unfortunately is the endless loop we find ourselves in: many people agree that internships are bad, however there are many people wanting to do them, therefore you either stick to your principles and miss out on all that lovely "experience", or you give in.

Internships strike me as evidence firstly that the design industry doesn't rate qualifications much, and secondly that it certainly doesn't think "outsiders" (i.e. design educators) should be the ones to judge who's good enough to work among its number². To support the first argument we can point out that the majority of designers don't have degrees - it's not a "degree-level position" and many degree-holding designers work at the same level, for the same "salary", as non-degree holders. In that sense, design is meritocratic - you're valued on how good you are, not on how qualified you are.
I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is undervaluing graduates. Other sectors don't do it - law, retail, medicine, architecture, teaching. What sets these apart is that either they recruit graduates in to well-paid jobs with responsibility and then train them, or they require a period of high-level apprenticeship which is highly structured and leads to a well-paid career at the end of it.

The argument that graduates shouldn't be paid because they are not experienced enough is, quite frankly, one of the most stupid fucking arguments I've ever heard a supposedly intelligent person make.
(And yes, I said fucking. It's unacademic, it's unprofessional, but it's how I feel, okay?)
Seriously, think about it for a moment. Try this scenario:

You go to visit your daughter's school to find out how she's doing. You chat to the young teacher who's in charge of her class, and who your daughter absolutely adores. She's young and you realise you're getting old for noticing. She talks expertly about your daughter's progress and clearly takes a lot of interest in her, and you're grateful. You later go to the head teacher and compliment her on the quality of her staff, making particular mention of your daughter's class teacher.
"Oh her," she says. "Yes, if she keeps this up we might start paying her and take her on full time. But only during term. We can't afford to keep her on during the school holidays".

This is plainly nonsense. It doesn't happen. New entrants to teaching are paid a decent salary (it could/should be higher, but let's not get in to that - the point is, they're paid a graduate-level salary and given responsibilities. They are also mentored and given time to continue with their development. Indeed, all teachers are. It's how people stay on top of their game.
But can you imagine if you discovered that schools were employing unpaid interns to do the teaching?

Compare that to design. New entrants are not given responsibilities, they are often not paid (and if they are, it's often peanuts) and, ultimately, they're not trusted. Internships or placements are trials. A company that uses them as a way of recruiting new staff is acting in a bizarre manner. It makes little sense.

When I left college at 19 I got a job as a designer/marketing assistant. I hadn't really wanted to be a designer but this was all I could get. So I effectively taught myself on the job, having gained a bit of experience with Pagemaker at college. Three days after joining the company, because of the oddities of their pay cycle, I received a payslip for three weeks' salary. I'd only just started, and I wasn't even up to speed. I didn't even know how to use the phone system, or have my own desk. Yet there I was with more money than I'd ever had before. Because I was - get this - working for them. Giving them my time in return for money. They didn't say "hey, you're new. We're effectively giving you our time so really, you owe us money. So how about we just don't pay you and call it quits?"

Which is interesting because that's exactly how internships work.

And you know how the company knew they wanted me to work for them and not someone else? They interviewed me. Twice. They looked at my work, they asked me questions about myself. They decided I was worth a chance and knew, as I did, that if it didn't work out, either of us could say "thanks but no thanks" and I'd be on my way.
Yes, employing someone is risky, yes it requires time and effort on the part of the employer but you know what? That's part of running a business. Building a team, nurturing it, valuing it.

I'm going to come back to this issue as there's much more to say but let me end this first instalment with a pointer to Seth Godin's blog where he talks about free work versus internships.
Like me he doesn't like internships for some of the same reasons. "Most of the time, the employer thinks he's doing the intern a favor, but he doesn't trust the interns to do any actual thoughtful, intelligent work worth talking about."

He loses me with the next bit: "And to be fair, most of the time the interns are busy hiding, not grabbing responsibility but instead acting like they're in school, avoiding hard work and trying to get an A."

I disagree with this assessment because an internship generally is not carried out as part of a course, it's a prelude to employment. I think he's mixing things up a bit here. Genuine work placements, part of a course, are rare. They shouldn't be, but it's not for want of trying. Many of the ones I know of are just a couple of weeks' "work experience" but a truly educational placement should be well-structured, include shadowing, not working, and be assessed. Which means the host has to be heavily involved in planning, implementing and evaluating it. And if that were the case, then anyone "trying to get an A" wouldn't do it by "avoiding hard work". For one thing, they shouldn't be working. That, after all, would be a case of the taxpayer subsidising free labour for the design industry, and in England and Wales, and other countries where students pay fees, it would be a case of the poor bastard literally paying to be "employed". But really, if Seth's first point is correct, that many employers don't trust people on placements, then I really couldn't blame anyone for not giving 100% in return. You get what you pay for, after all.

But Seth goes on to talk about the concept of "free work" like it's something else entirely. Now I have long advocated "free work" to my own students but I mean working for non-profits - local groups, charities, schools etc - as a way to give something back to the community and to get something in your portfolio. I would never advocate working for nothing for a company that can not only pay you, but is getting paid themselves. Seth seems to excuse it by its networking potential or karmic value - but you can network without selling your soul. It's this passage that really caused me to spit out my dummy:

"But you'd be amazed at how many fast-moving companies or influential individuals are all too happy to share credit if it helps the work get done."

As I twittered to Fergus Bisset, 'he says companies will "share credit". Wow! Thanks! Er, why not the money then?"'
If the argument is that a start-up needs help, and that if they're successful you will be too fails on a simple logic test: if that start-up is going to be successful you can bet your life they don't do it by doing free work for people. So why should you?³

And this ultimately boils down to the best argument against internships. I'll discuss the social impact of internships and the legal implications another time, but let me leave you with this: if the company you are working for is making money from the stuff you produce, they should be paying you. There is, as far as I can see, no reasonable argument against this. To do otherwise is theft, plain and simple. And something needs to be done.

[end of part 1. Coming soon: why internships are unfair and why they are illegal]

Update: as you may see from the comments, as well as Interns Anonymous, you can also discuss internships at The Water Cooler

¹For what it's worth, I made a complaint about Mr Hammond to the Low Pay Commission. Phil Willis MP is, quite rightly, raising the issue on his site and via a press release.

²Easy answer: stop recruiting graduates and start recruting school leavers and run proper apprenticeships! Oh you used to do that. What happened? Oh yes, you "subcontracted" the role to colleges, funded by taxpayers, and saved the money didn't you? Trebles all round, as Private Eye would say.

³There is, of course, another aspect to this which is the concept of co-ops or labour exchanges. In this, you contribute your skill or time to help others and in return others help you. ("Time Bank" is a similar idea).

The important thing is that they need to be organised with a strong social aspect. When I lived in Brighton there were a few schemes like this kicking around including a skills swap for techies where someone who knew a few tricks in, say, CSS, would give a presentation to others and learn something in return. Or maybe they'd help someone out on their small company's site. In return that company might "pay" with free printing.

In effect, it's not work for free: it's work for favours. It relies on strong social/peer disapproval along the lines of the attitude you get if people you occasionally drink with notice that you always seem to benefit from someone else's round, but never seem to buy one yourself. Before you know it, you're not part of the group any more.

I recently advised someone to try this method of getting work but it does depend on you being in the right location and tapping in to an existing group - or setting one up. One thing it's not, though, is "work for free".

Why eBooks must fail

2009-07-27T19:51:00.001+01:00

John Naughton, writing in The Guardian, identifies excellent reasons why eBooks must fail:

I own my copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four and can do with it what I wish. I can, for example, lend it to friends, family and students. I can, if I wish, tear out pages and send them to people in the post, or stick them up on noticeboards. I can sell the book - if I could find a buyer. I can donate it to the local Oxfam shop. I can read sobering or inflammatory passages from it at political demonstrations. And so on.

But if I had purchased an electronic copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four to read on my Kindle device, I would have none of those freedoms

[...]

Up to now, the debate about eBooks has been dominated by technical issues: ergonomics, portability, storage capacity, the readability of display screens, the quality of the user interface and so on. These are important matters, but ignore the biggest issue of all, namely the ways in which the technology enables content owners to assert a level of control over the reader that would be deemed unconscionable - and unacceptable - in the world of print.

He's right - designers tend to focus on the aesthetic and affective aspects - how useable is the technology, how open is it, does it replicate the "experience" of reading a paperback... but the real "experience" of reading a book is bound up in the tactile and the social. Lending a book to someone - or even just saying you'll lend it to someone, is an important part of reading.

All the hoo-hah about Amazon deleting books and tracking what you do with what you buy aside, the real issue with eBooks is that all the focus and research has gone into the technology and completely missed what it means to read a really good book.

(Via MediaGuardian.co.uk.)

Critical Response to Art Projects

2009-07-27T11:57:00.004+01:00

It's a dirty little secret in art and design education that the beloved routine of the "critique" or "crit" doesn't work. Although many tutors cling to it as an essential way of providing guidance and feedback, plenty of research has shown that it leaves the vast majority of students confused and, in some cases, distressed (trust me, I've seen the tears - and from normally "tough" students).
The only purpose the crit appears to serve is to emphasise the tutor's status as alpha male (or female, but it's usually male).

The crit was wonderfully lampooned in "Art School Confidential" by Daniel Clowes (transferred moderately well from comic book to big screen in 2005).

The big problem with crits is coming up with things to say. From my observations they have to sound profound, critical and completely vague and meaningless so that what a student thinks is "encouraging" can later be claimed to have been a warning of dire consequences. And with so many students these days, it's becoming much more difficult to come up with something new.

What we need is a tool to create endless amounts of critical responses to art projects (CRAP) from a few random seeds. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the CRAP generator!

Click the green button to start!

Disclaimer: the words come from a document circulating among staff at the university I worked at, and I don't know who wrote them (I added some of my own).

Incidentally, if you're interested in the research I mentioned, drop me a line and I'll send you a list. It's interesting that I've never found one bit of research that suggests the crit is a positive experience for anyone other than the person doing it.

Tentsmuir

2009-07-26T14:42:00.001+01:00

Some photos from Tentsmuir that I took a couple of years ago.

In case you skipped the link in the last post, here's the official website for Tentsmuir, a large nature reserve about five minutes from where I live. It has everything - seals, sand, forest, deer, red squirrels, rare flowers, rare insects (and their not so rare or lovely cousins, unfortunately), an icehouse, world war 2 pill boxes and anti-tank defences, an RAF airbase...

The odd cat...

Well worth a visit if you're in this (pardon the pun) neck of the woods.

You can see some of my photos of the area on my other website

Accidental bike ride

2009-07-26T14:24:00.001+01:00

Tayport to St Andrews and back
Find more Bike Rides in Fife, United Kingdom

I went for a bike ride the other day and decided that instead of the usual ride to Tentsmuir Sands through the forest near where I live that I'd head on to Leuchars. But when I got to Leuchars it felt too easy so I decided to carry on - to St Andrews (home of golf!)

The weather was pleasant and warm, I had plenty of water with me and even thought I'd never cycled that far, or that way, before I reasoned that as I was on part of the national cycle network I couldn't really go wrong (plus I had my iPhone with me so if I got lost I could locate myself on Google Maps).

It was a fairly easy ride through a couple of small Scottish towns. After Tentsmuir Forest it is, for the most part, a mix of small suburban districts and cycling alongside a small motorway - not much to see really until you get to just outside St Andrews when you once more begin to see the coast.

What was odd was that even though I'd cycled quite a long way, all I'd done was cycle inland a bit, following the estuary, cross the bridge and then cycle east again, which meant that just as I was reaching the outskirts of St Andrews I could easily see RAF Leuchars across the water, which made my achievement much less impressive!
(Cycling near the RAF base is quite impressive as aircraft regularly come in to land. Last week at the beach I'd seen about four or five come in to land in close formation, sweeping out across the North Sea and back in again. On this ride two flew just a few hundred meters - if that - above my head - again in close formation. RAF Leuchars lost a plane a couple of weeks ago when it flew into a mountain near Glasgow and even though it looks like they're going slowly from the ground, it must be a case of split-second timing inside the cockpit).

Anyway, just as I was reaching St Andrews I could see dark clouds looming from the south and realised why all the cows had suddenly started lying down when I was cycling through the fields just outside Leuchars. It began spitting at first but as I got in to St Andrews a steady drizzle started. Fortunately I'd packed my raincoat and went off to find a café to have lunch and a sandwich.
St Andrews isn't short of nice independent cafes but of course I ended up in Starbucks! As it turned out, I was served by one of my own students! Small world...
I could see outside that the rain was now quite bad so I went back to the bike and got my waterproof(ish) trousers out, intending to change out of my shorts. Which meant finding another café...

The cycle back was in the rain which didn't feel so bad but when I got back to the forest I took a wrong turn and ended up getting a bit lost, finding a small group of houses and following a minor road/track figuring it must end up in civilisation. I stumbled upon a bridge standing in the middle of a clearing. It didn't connect to anything, just an old brick bridge on its own. Turns out it used to be part of the railway line that led from Edinburgh to Tayport, back when it was called Ferryport-on-Craig and was the main route to the north. Before the Tay rail bridge was built you had to get a ferry (while still on the train). After the bridge was built the line became less important (until the bridge fell down, of course) and eventually it disappeared, leaving just the bridge standing alone in the forest. I'll go back and take a picture next week maybe - it's very strange.
It turns out I'd ended up in a nature reserve and in better weather I'd have gone looking for deer and highland cattle, but as it was I was now feeling rather wet and despite it only being about 4pm the light was very poor. So I kept cycling and found a row of telegraph poles and cycled under them for a while, coming out at a farm and onto the road just south of Tayport. Home at last.

When I got in I realised quite how wet I was - absolutely soaked to the skin. But feeling quite good. A few minutes later, after a shower and a change of clothes, though, I sat on the sofa and my body caught up with what had just happened...

45km or 28 miles. That's nothing to some cyclists, of course but considering my longest ride up to that point was about 18km, it's quite a leap. Three hours, excluding the rest at St Andrews.

So, a somewhat unplanned adventure but a good one - fairly flat and easy. I intend to do it again when the weather improves (we've had a week of sun and showers after a couple of weeks of hot sunshine when, of course, I mainly sat around). But I also fancy trying a few other local rides. The Salmon Run goes from Dundee to Dunkeld via Perth, following the Tay and the route the famous Tay salmon take. There's also a ride from here to Arbroath where the Smokies are produced (I could follow that route up to Aberdeen and then on either to John O'Groats or take a ferry to Orkney, but I think that would be a bit too much!). And the route to St Andrews carries on to Edinburgh and beyond in to England. You can see all the routes in the National Cycle Network at Sustrans's website. But all those routes are trickier, over hills and a mix of on- and off-road.

I had planned to use my holidays for this but they seem to have flown by with little achieved - which is of course the point of a break. But there's still plenty of summer left so time to do a few of these rides yet.

Microsoft's failed marketing strategy

2009-07-26T00:16:00.001+01:00

Having staked out a business that serves PC makers first, IT drones second, and consumers dead last, Microsoft is left only to advertise that its software arrives on cheap hardware that isn’t burdened with being cool or sexy like Apple’s. As a marketing strategy, that’s so blatantly moronic that it’s hard to imagine a Fortune 500 company could decide to do that.

Roughly Drafted Magazine on why Windows 7 is Microsoft's next Zune. It's a long article but well worth reading. Having lived through 1995/96 it brought back a lot of memories...

Big Brother Amazon is Watching You

2009-07-18T10:03:00.002+01:00

This is why I don't think books are going to be replaced by e-readers anytime soon. Bizarre (and ironic):

Amazon apparently sent out its robotic droogs last night, deleting copies of the George Orwell novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindles without explanation, then refunding the purchase price. As you can imagine, a lot of people caught in the thick of Winston and Julia's love story aren't very happy -- and rightfully so -- the idea that we "own" the things we buy is pretty fundamental to... ownership.

~~Jeff Jarvis~~ Kevin Marks says "I dread to think what happens if you buy Fahrenheit 451 for your Kindle..."

The Guardian covers the story too and Talking Points Memo is calling it a "big, big step backwards" for the platform. David Pogue of The New York Times is also covering it.

Designing music. (Theme and variations for piano)

2009-07-07T21:25:00.001+01:00

Download now or listen on posterous

Piano theme and variations 2.m4a (3690 KB)

I think I write music the same way I design - messing around with initial ideas until something clicks in to place. I do the same when I write computer code too. And DIY and housework! I'm self taught in all these things so the process is one I developed rather than was shown.
I'm clearly a born tinkerer.

I wrote the initial theme (the opening few bars) for this back in 1991 and then promptly forgot about it, except that every so often I'd find myself humming it. Eventually, about 12 or so years later I wrote it down and began messing about with it. I can't remember where the next theme came from but I'm sure it's pulled out of the opening chords somehow - I can never remember how I wrote some pieces but the usual way I compose is to pull threads out of the first thing I produce and then weave them in to something else via some form of transformation.
And that's what happens here - the second theme is woven over itself and where harmonies occur I fill them in to produce chords. The whole thing seems to flow quite nicely.

The moment at the end of the second section was harmonised more recently and I rather like the delicate nature of it. Playing it softly seems to make the whole thing work so much better.

What happens next is something I keep meaning to come back to - section three is an inversion of section two (i.e. it's turned upside down). It's a simple technique for composition and sometimes it produces interesting results - usually needing some sort of work but sometimes not.

Anyway I haven't really thought what to do with it - I kind of like it but I don't. It's too "Chinese" (a result of octaves and what I suspect is a pentatonic scale, if you want to be technical). It sounds like the sort of thing you'd hear at a pantomime or accompanying a silent movie when the Chinese villain arrives. I've had ideas how to fix it but never got round to it. So here it is in all its "glory".

Interestingly, when I was in Beijing in April I got a bit lost looking for the city walls and ended up walking in completely the wrong direction past Beijing railway station. As I did, the clock struck the hour and the chimes rang out a tune almost exactly like this one - spooky!

After the third section's over the introductory theme comes back. Originally it just played the once but one day I was humming it over in my head and I wondered if it worked in canon, just as the "variations" in sections two and three did. It seems so obvious now of course, but it completely passed me by at the time. So I took the main theme and began layering it over and over to see what it sounded like - and I liked it!
There are actually two themes working together but separately and the more I listened to it the more I "heard" a third part - it wasn't there but my mind was filling it in. So I sat down and started to write it down. It wasn't until I had that I realised I'd cribbed a bit of Beethoven, part of the double fugue in the second moment of the third symphony. It's one of my favourite pieces of music and I wonder if I'd been listening to it when I wrote that first theme all those years ago... (I actually think I was more riffing off the theme to Blake's 7 but that's another story)

Anyway, it's something I mean to come back to because while I like it, it is obviously "Beethoven" which could be seen as a joke to some people, making them smile, or pretentious by others (comparing myself with Beethoven? How dare I! Ha).

So, there you go - it's called "Theme and variations for piano" at the moment. There are two other versions floating around, one for church organ (which I rather like) and one for piano quintet (which works quite well, each instrument coming in at different times). At the moment the latter version is the finale of a quintet I've been working on over the last few years which will never see the light of day at this rate. But it keeps me off the streets.

Have a listen, see what you think. Ignore the Chinese bit and keep going to the end. :-)

A logical response to the "too many design students" argument

2009-06-28T23:47:00.001+01:00

One of the common complaints that crops up every now and then from "industry" is that there are too many design students. In fact I had a go at Ken Garland about 18 months ago after he got up at a panel I was on and said exactly that - basically his argument was that design was a "special" craft that only an elite few should be allowed to pursue which, as I told him then, is a bloody stupid thing to say. I'm not one for hero worship, me.

But the usual motivation for complaining about the number of design students is either that it must in some way mean the overall quality is rubbish (oh really? Funny how that argument never gets trotted out when we call for more doctors, or teachers, or policemen. Or, indeed, plumbers), or that it's unfair on students and/or employers because we're training people the industry just can't absorb. (In fact, the complainers are almost always employers* who, let's face it, couldn't give a tinker's cuss about students or graduates because if they did, they'd pay them decent salaries and give them decent jobs instead of expecting them to work for nothing until a "vacancy" arises).

Now of course the correct response to this argument is that education isn't about training - that a good undergraduate education in design produces... graduates, not designers. Same as a degree in history produces graduates, not historians. And so on.

But for some reason that argument just butters no parsnips with some people so here's a better argument. It's perfect because it's beautifully logical.

If you have a vacancy in your company, what would you rather have? A choice of one candidate, or the pick of ten?

Well there you go, then.

----
*What's worse is when students say there should be a limit on the number of students. Nothing gets my wick up more than that. Well, almost nothing.

Satire

2009-06-26T07:56:00.001+01:00

"Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students."

"Interesting Times", Terry Pratchett

Wangfujing Night Market

2009-06-17T09:57:00.001+01:00

Some video from my recent trip to China - tucked away off a busy shopping street in Beijing is the famous night market where you can get pretty much anything to eat (except burgers, deep fried chicken and fish and chips).

This short video tries to capture the feel of the place but it's pretty much impossible. It was packed, noisy, smelly (mostly nice smells!) and a lot of fun. The dumplings were a disappointment but the octopus tentacles were interesting. I didn't go for the scorpion kebabs or the deep fried bugs (but I did have fried wasps earlier in the week and they were actually rather nice).

Handel 250 - a musical tribute

2009-05-28T19:32:00.001+01:00

Download now or listen on posterous

Handel 250.m4a (3227 KB)

This year is the 250th anniversary of Handel's death (in 1759 in case you can't work it out!) Originally of German origin Handel settled in England and became very much a member of London society, so much so that he's now seen as an "English" composer (at least by the English...)

I wrote this piece years ago and have been tinkering with it ever since - it's based on Handel, but it's not Handel. Except that it is. I'll leave you to ponder that and if you really want to know the "secret" I'll reveal all...

The arrangement's a bit muddy and I keep meaning to fix it but at this rate it'll be the 500th anniversary before I get on with it. So here it is for the first time, released for public consumption: Handel 250. I'm quite proud of it (bear in mind I'm self-taught at this music writing lark) - hope you enjoy it.

Overgate Scene #1: On Seeing A Fat Girl In Bright Yellow Lycra

2009-05-23T15:25:00.001+01:00

A poem I wrote while waiting for my friend in Dundee's Overgate shopping mall.

A rather large girl and her friend walked by, inspiring me to verse.

It's not anti-fat, it's anti Lycra and skin-tight jeans.

You're a great big yellow idol
To the north of Gregg's and O2,
And you made me lose my appetite
When you lumbered in to view.

I wonder what you're thinking
When you dress yourself each day.
You clearly do not worry
What others have to say.

You waddle by oblivious
To your sin against good taste,
As you dig in to your pasty
Letting nothing go to waste.

It's not so much the rolls of fat
Like some gross lemon jelly;
It's the way the cloth rides up your side
Showing off your fearsome belly.

And I see you have a skinny friend
Who's no oil painting either.
But she stands a chance of pulling guys
With a slug like you beside her.

As you pass your ass strains at the seams
Of your skin-tight denim trousers,
And I wonder if you really think
That your taste in fashion wows us.

May he who invented Lycra
Burn forever in hell's fires
For the crimes it's since committed
On girls' fat round spare tyres.

"Decisions, Decisions" composed by me!

2009-05-03T23:57:00.001+01:00

Download now or listen on posterous

Decisions, Decisions (pizzicato).aif (23178 KB)

An old girlfriend of mine used to perform Poulenc's "Trois Mouvements Perpetuels" on the piano and I wrote this to see if I could mimic its style. It's one of my first compositions, dating from around 1992/93 (I'm self-taught so forgive me!) Originally it was intended to be performed by a wind quartet and sound like it had come straight out of a French art house movie. The version here is for pizzicato strings.

The title, "Decisions, Decisions" comes from a long email exchange I had with a student about five or six years ago.
She kept changing her mind about her dissertation topic and kept coming back to the same idea, which is really how this piece works. Up until then it had the title "Happy Dance" which I'd always meant to translate into French or something to make it sound a bit more pretentious ("Danse Heureuse" I suppose).

Incidentally, Poulenc is a strange composer - his music is very rhythmic and uses odd intervals, timings and discords, but it's often very exciting and beautiful. Listen to the Domine Deus from his "Gloria" for example:

The whole piece is worth a listen if you can get hold of a good recording. I took part in a performance of that piece at York University conducted by the composer John Rutter. Blimey, he was a bad tempered guy that day... Went right off him.

White Noise - Love Without Sound

2009-05-02T22:07:00.001+01:00

Download now or listen on posterous

01 Love Without Sound.m4a (3055 KB)

Great track from the 1969 album An Electric Storm http://tiny.cc/3RsEp

Graphic designers and cabbies

2009-04-12T16:59:00.001+01:00

In a discussion with a journalist from Times Higher Education last week about Twitter he asked how I responded to critics who said Twitter threatened to "dumb down" education and research I speculated that the same complaint was probably made about moveable type (Guttenberg, not the blogging tool).

Stephen Bayley over in The Observer asks if technology makes us stupid.

All new technologies, going back to fire and the wheel, by way of movable type and light bulbs, de-skill people. Old crafts are abandoned or lost in favour of automation. And when you de-skill someone, you alter not only his culture, but his personality. Satnav has done this to black-cab drivers. Once this proud tribe had a private religion known as the Knowledge; all of London's streets had to be memorised. It was an amazing feat achieved only after great effort, and consequently it was admired and therefore empowering and dignifying. The Knowledge gave black-cab drivers what the marketeers call a "point of difference".

Now any larrikin can buy a satnav for £199 and tell you how to get from Edmonton to Peckham by using rat runs. The USP of the black cab has disappeared in a miasma of pixels. As a result, some urban anthropologists have noted a change in behaviour of cab drivers. Once known for courtesy and reliability, many have become sullen and aggressive. This is because technology has democratised their proprietary knowledge and beliefs.

When I read that I thought "you could say the same about graphic designers as for cab drivers". By which I mean the invention of Photoshop, QuarkXpress and so on. I know, I was there at the time. My first job interview consisted of a guy throwing me out of his studio because he wanted a paste-up artist - a skill - not a Mac operator. His business didn't last long after that.
Funny thing is, I still hear it. Bitter old men (and not so old, and not always men) bemoaning the loss of respect for their once proud profession.

The thing is, being a cabbie is more than just taking someone from one address to another. Surly cabbies are missing their real USP if they think the satnav has castrated them.
There is a difference between "skill" and "craft". And "the knowledge" is more than knowing the quickest route from A to B.

Designers need to bear that in mind, too.

Ye Sacred Muses

2009-04-09T20:56:00.001+01:00

Ye Sacred Muses is a song written by William Byrd after the death of fellow composer Thomas Tallis. It's one of my favourite pieces, usually sung by a male alto (as it would have been originally).

I rearranged it a while ago as an experiment, so here it is for your listening pleasure!

By the way "ye" is pronounced "the" - the "y" is actually a "th" written in a way that makes it look like a "y". So "ye olde tea shoppe", like you see in certain English towns, should actually be pronounced "the old tea shop".

I've never heard a recording of Ye Sacred Muses that gets it right...

Download now or listen on posterous

Ye Sacred Muses (Byrd arr. Baldwin).m4a (3709 KB)

It's not funny! You shouldn't laugh...

2009-04-04T12:15:00.001+01:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/7981904.stm

I'm not dead yet!

2009-04-02T14:57:00.001+01:00

Buying travel insurance for my imminent trip to China (Shanghai and Beijing over two weeks - very excited!) I was a little concerned at some of the small print in different policies.

One insurer offered to pay me £50 every day in the event I am kidnapped. Up to a maximum of £500. Go figure.

Another promised to pay for me to be cremated or buried, but omitted the clause "in the event of your death". Fearing some overzealous undertaker knocking on my hotel bedroom door, I decided not to go with them.

Reminds me of this classic sequence from Monty Python and the Meaning of Life:

Or this, from The Holy Grail

Jon Stewart takes down CNBC and Jim Cramer

2009-03-14T14:09:00.001Z

If you've been watching the Daily Show over the past week you'll know that Stewart has been exposing the shoddy and dodgy advice that CNBC gave out before the collapse of the stock markets. That led to a war of words with Jim Cramer which culminated in his appearance on Thursday's Daily Show.

If you missed it, here it is in three parts. It's crazy that it takes a comedy show to expose the bullshit that came out of that network but this is exactly what satire is for:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Scary times for recruitment. What should designers do when supply outweighs demand?

2009-03-14T10:49:00.001Z

Some freelance design is still being commissioned, though everyone is being asked to reduce their fees, and there is less work around – about 30 per cent in our experience.
Full-time work agency side is really hard to come by – very few studios are recruiting.
Many brands, especially some of the high-end fashion brands we work with, are bringing their graphic design / branding / digital work in-house, to cut agency costs. Our in-house vacancies have increased by 50 per cent, and with many brands developing brilliant studios, designers are increasingly likely to consider taking a role in what was once regarded as a less creative environment.

Supply still outweighs demand – we are finding that the designers who are getting work are not only very creative but, perhaps more importantly, have the right attitude.

via blog.eyemagazine.com

Design recruitment consultant Mike Radcliffe on the downturn in the design market.

Posted via web from Jonathan's posterous

Is MacHeist's Tweetblast an example of how advertisers will destroy Twitter?

2009-03-08T17:33:00.001Z

Like many people (19,000 at the last count) I took part in MacHeist's recent "tweetblast" which, as Cult of Mac explain:

is a simple concept. All you have to do is post a tweet on Twitter using a particular phrase, which in this case is:

‘@MacHeist Yeah, I’ll take a free copy of DEVONthink! http://macheist.com/tweetblast #MacHeist #free’

And once you’ve done that, you can claim a license code for DEVONthink worth just shy of 50 bucks.

I did it for several reasons - firstly I thought it was DEVONagent I was asking for, which is a rather good internet research tool. But it wasn't - it was DEVONthink which is also a neat tool but which, as an Evernote user, I don't really need. Secondly I wanted to make sure I didn't miss out on MacHeist which in the past has led me to getting hold of someinteresting software at knock-down prices.
But mainly I was intrigued. I'd seen companies use Twitter for promotional purposes before - for example Evernote themselves are asking people to send tweets on Fridays for a chance to win prizes, while of course at the same time telling anyone who follows them about the product.

But Evernote's strategy relies on people being bothered to compose a short and meaningful message - to me it's still within the realms of what Twitter is all about. The MacHeist approach is different. To get the "prize" (which is guaranteed) you simply have to send a set phrase. It's easy to do - in fact I read someone else's tweet and simply copied and pasted it and sent it on. It's the equivalent of a chain letter. It's not a meme, before anyone uses the term, as a meme is an idea that develops and mutates. This is cloning, not memetics.
It strikes me as being similar to those advertising campaigns where you would have to find someone or be approached by them and say a certain phrase word-for-word to win the prize. They still happen: radio stations phone people up randomly and if they answer with the required phrase they get money, but anything else (like "Hello?") loses.
It's sort of exciting, but it's also very useful for the organiser because it's a sure fire way of getting hundreds, thousands, if not more, people to memorise a phrase and rehearse saying it over and over. Then telling their friends.

There's no memorising going on here, of course, but there is certainly friend-telling. Tweeting the message ensures it's seen by anyone who follows you and, if your updates aren't protected, by anyone looking at the public timeline. Because it will happen quickly, it means the timeline will be flooded with the same message for an hour or so, and that it will crop up in any clients that track popular topics.

It's very, very clever. But it's also rather worrying. Why? Well I'll let Cult of Mac explain:

By asking people to turn their Twitter streams into advertising billboards, the MacHeisters are damaging the community there. Twitter’s supposed to be about the sharing of status, it’s all about conversation. I find it sad to see it being co-opted by commercialism. Sad, but not surprising.

The more Twitter grows, the more advertisers are going to try and game it. I don’t want the people I follow to be tempted into doing the spammers’ work for them. I don’t want to see advertising where I expected to see real people.

I think this is right: MacHeist has distorted Twitter to suit its own ends and I fell right in to it for a piece of software I didn't need (I even had to unprotect my updates temporarily to take part). Skittles did something similar last week, turning their home page in to a Twitter search for #skittles - the only problem being that it resulted in people posting racist and crude messages. MacHeist's approach is cleverer. If other companies cotton on to it (which they will if people like me blog about it!) we could soon see Twitter flooded with advertising messages like this one:

‘@Coca-Cola Yeah, I’ll take a free can of cola and the chance to win a trip of a lifetime! http://whatever.com #Coca-Cola #free’

You get the idea...

Why Friends Reunited Failed

2009-03-02T15:05:00.001Z

Andy Budd offers a couple of pointers to why Friends Reunited ultimately failed.
The first is familiar to anyone who understands the link between social viruses and biological ones, or who's read The Tipping Point

Like all social sites, Friends Reunited relied on the network affect, so when membership reached its tipping point the whole site went viral. However a lot of viruses burn through their fuel so quickly they die almost as fast as they grow, stifled by their own success. So with Friends Reunited once you’d registered, seen what your old friends were doing, connected with the ones you’d wanted to and had a laugh at the (hopefully) tragic lives of your childhood tormentors, there was very little reason to stick around.

The second links to my oft repeated point about how the design of the site (in terms of its graphic look and feel) isn't as important as people think.

The design of the site was delightfully amateurish, which was no surprise considering the background of the creators. However it had a low-fi ascetic that made it feel genuine; something it shares with it’s later contemporaries like MySpace. The truth is, while a better design would almost certainly helped its fortunes, people are willing to ignore bad design and usability if the perceived value is great. With Friends Reunited there were no credible alternatives or competition so people were happy to make do.

The greater the perceived value of something the less "good" it has to look. This is my Pizza Flyer Theory of design. Aesthetic value is inversely proportional to use value. The less useful something is, the more "beautiful" it has to look. Also the look of a thing has to match the purpose. For more see this article I wrote for Speak Up.

(Via Andy Budd::Blogography.)

The Studio Unbound: Social Networking in Design Education

2009-02-26T07:20:00.001Z

The Studio Unbound: Social Networking and Design Education from Jonathan Baldwin on Vimeo.

University of Dundee Master of Design student Lauren Currie, and design writer Kate Andrews explore the power of online social networking, and demonstrate the tools students they use to move ideas forward, form networks with practitioners around the world, and build a reputation before and after graduation.

“For the designer to become a producer, she must have the skills to begin directing content, by critically navigating the social, aesthetic, and technological systems across which communications flow.” (Ellen Lupton, 1998).

In highlighting the creative people all over the world using social networking to their advantage, Lauren discusses the dynamic, conversational value of online networking and shows how ideas of teaching and learning need to move away from the confines of the studio towards other, often ad-hoc and virtual, venues.

Joining from London via video conferencing, Kate Andrews, design writer and networker extraordinaire, shares her own insights into the potential offered by new technology.

Focusing on the new possibilities and opportunities the digital world presents, this talk will demonstrate that the world has changed and is changing, and that design courses must change with it if they are to stay relevant.

How do you define an under-utilised graduate?

2009-02-05T07:09:00.001Z

My current research is looking at the way in which the design industry uses graduates of any subject in design and non-design roles (according to the Design Council only 15% of the UK design consultancy sector is made up of designers, and only 40% of those are graduates).

One of the central theses is that the design industry is not very good at utilising graduates, especially in design-related roles, compared with other industries. (This varies - I suspect that the service design sector does better here than the fashion sector but that some areas of fashion are better than others. The term "the design industry" is problematic).

An early issue in the research has been "how do you define a graduate position"? Mason (1999) studied the chemistry, steel and financial sectors and found that when the supply of graduates started to increase in the early 1990s different sectors took different routes. The steel industry started upgrading a lot of previously "non-graduate" roles so that they took advantage of graduate skills and knowledge, or began creating new roles to attract talent and benefit from what was available. In particular, they began to expand their employment of graduates in roles related to design of products and systems*.
The finance industry, on the other hand, simply replaced non-graduates with graduates often without changing the roles they were expected to do. This he views (rightly) as under-utliisation of graduates.

I suspect the UK design industry is more like the finance sector than manufacturing in this regard. The campaign by representatives of the fashion and textiles industries, Skillfast-UK, to get universities and colleges to ensure graduates are skilled to be pattern cutters is an obvious example of under-utilisation of graduates. But I'm also interested in how graduates from non-design disciplines are used, for example those from English, accounting, law and business. I have a suspicion that there may be a significant difference which points to a failure to acknowledge the potential degree-level design qualifications offer. However it will be interesting if there is widespread under-utlilisation of graduates in all areas of the design business. This would certainly change the current emphasis on blaming educators for the perceived malaise in the design sector and instead focus on how the industry recruits and uses graduate talent.

A common definition of "graduate level" employment is simply one of responsibility. Is a graduate employed in a role with some strategic responsibility, with a degree of autonomy? It's not a satisfactory definition because you could categorise a lot of jobs in this way: someone working behind a perfume counter could be argued to be autonomous and to have responsibility to meet sales targets using their initiative. But basically working in a shop like that is not viewed as a graduate-level job while managing a branch of a large retail chain is. To many, including me, the reasons are obvious but the problem is explaining why. And linked to this is another issue, which is a value judgement. To many, managing a branch of a major retailer is not seen as "worthwhile" - I can imagine several former colleagues of mine thinking a graduate of theirs were a failure if this is what happened to them. And it leads to contradictions: a jewellery graduate working in a jewellers is probably seen by some to be working in a related field to their degree** while another who is training to be a police officer with fast track promotion is not. The former is in a non-graduate design-related post while the latter is in a graduate but non-design related post.
So who is better utilised? And of whom should we be prouder?

Something I found useful in Mason's paper is a set of three simple criteria for judging whether a graduate is being utilised properly or not, and which removes the value judgement. I mapped these as a flow-chart for ease of reference:

(The third criterion may be problematic for some but Mason explains it: "The latter condition is one way of testing for the possibility that graduate performance in unchanged jobs is significantly better than that of non- graduates and is recognised as such in higher salaries" - in other words, is the graduate performing better and being recognised as such even though the role does not meet the first two criteria).

This of course strips out questions of whether the job is a good one, if the graduate is enjoying it and so on, but I suspect it is value judgements like those that need to be removed from the equation, at least at the initial stage because it points to company policy towards graduates. Questions of whether the jobs are challenging, enjoyable, offer paths to promotion etc are important but can be tackled later. What the flowchart offers is a quick and simple way of evaluating if a graduate is being utilised as a graduate and this will tell us about the company's attitude to graduates - are they employed strategically or seen simply as people to fill vacancies? In Mason's research, the steel industry was doing this very well, while the finance industry used the sudden growth in graduate numbers to place graduates in to jobs traditionally taken on by school leavers.***

With some adaptation I think this flowchart could be a useful tool for very quickly judging if a design company is utilising its graduate workforce. If the artworkers are a mix of graduates and non-graduates, all on similar salaries, then the answer is no. If the pattern cutters are all graduates, the answer is no.
And if it turns out that agency X is utilising its non-design graduates well, according to the tool above, but under-utilising its design graduates, it points to a further issue which I'll let you ponder.

My suspicion is that "the industry" is a mixed picture. That there are some companies that make good use of graduates from all disciplines, there are some that do not, and there are some that value graduates in some areas of its business more than others (e.g. a graduate in a business management role compared with a graduate artworker or pattern cutter).
What's important is that the tool be used not to condemn those that don't do it, but to educate them. It's far better to change expectations and understanding of what a graduate offers a design company than to alter courses to meet incorrect beliefs. Instead of changing all fashion courses so that graduates are well-trained pattern cutters, we should change the fashion industry's recruitment strategy so that it hires school leavers or manual workers from other sectors and trains them, and recruits graduates in to more strategic roles.

---

Mason. (1999) Graduate Utilisation and the Quality of Higher Education in the UK. www.niesr.ac.uk

---

*It's worth noting that despite what the design industry thinks, designers do not just work in design companies, but in-house. In this regard, its claims to be the "customers" of design courses are questionable. That would be like tabloid readers demanding that a newsagent stops selling broadsheets. Makes sense to the tabloid readers, but little sense to the shopkeeper.

**(And the former student will be seen by many in academia as "on their way" - it's often claimed that design graduates take their time to make their mark which is an argument I get annoyed with. Barristers make their mark from day one. So do doctors, nurses, teachers. Why does the design industry think it's okay that graduate talent languishes behind shop counters or in pattern cutting rooms? What if we changed that?)

***This, of course, inflates the number of graduates because if the only way to get an entry-level job is to get a degree, there'll be a growth in demand for degrees. And if the only jobs on offer to graduates are entry-level, why bother putting in much effort? You can see where this argument leads: claims that the quality of graduates is dropping may be better explained either by the quality of the jobs on offer (advertising an entry-level job to graduates is not going to attract the best candidates) or by the minimum requirements (a degree). To further complicate things, expecting a graduate to have "school leaver" skills (a famous designer who shall remain nameless once complained he couldn't find a design graduate who knew how to answer his phone properly) will only lead to a perceived lack of quality. If you hire a French speaker to deal with your Spanish customers, whose to blame when you find they're not very good at it? Similarly, then, if you hire a design graduate to cut cloth, where should you look when it turns out they can't do it?

Design versus innovation

2009-01-15T10:54:00.001Z

I've posted a long (and typically, I hope, controversial) entry over at Design Cultures on the debate between design and innovation. I'm experimenting to see if a more provocative approach to that student-oriented blog will get them more involved rather than passive readers.

We'll see...

Here's a choice extract for you:

"Why do we still see the ability to draw a naked woman as the primary qualification to be a designer?"

Head over to see the rest and please add your comments!

English Ways of Saying Goodbye

2008-12-20T12:47:00.001Z

My friend Qin, who is Chinese, rang me the other night and after about 30 minutes the time came to say goodbye. I had to go do something (can't remember what - eat, I think) so I said so. "Okay, bye" she said.
I panicked. "What?"
"Bye" she said.

This was new to me. Normally when the English (I would say British but I don't know if it's true of the rest of the UK) say goodbye they enter into a protracted process of drawing things to a close. I first became aware of this when watching The West Wing, and then other US TV shows. In those, a telephone conversation would suddenly end, often without any form of goodbye at all. The last sentence would be spoken and bang the phone would be hung up.

How rude. How very un-English. But how efficient.

I think most of my hang-ups (no pun intended) about the telephone revolve around the whole process of starting up and winding down the conversation. It is almost entirely redundant but you start off with the "how are you?" stuff that takes up a few minutes before you get on to the meat of the conversation. If you're calling someone you've never spoken before you have to give your life story and explain who you are.

But it's the "good bye" that is particularly draining. We can't just say "bye" and hang up. When I told Qin I had to go eat I was telling the truth but I was signalling that I would shortly have to go and do this. I wasn't saying "go away I need to have food". To the English the signal is like the coda in a piece of music. It says "right, we're all done but let's bring things nicely to a halt". Saying "well I suppose I'd better go let the cat in" is just that - it's a polite signal that the conversation has run its course, you have nothing new to say and, much as you may love the person on the other end of the line, pretty soon all you'll be able to do is resort to a bit of heavy breathing cos you're all out of conversation. The signal is a way of politely saying you know you're both about to get to the end of the conversation and moving the discussion on to a roundabout way of acknowledging it.

When Qin said "okay, bye" it pulled the rug from under me. "What?" I said. "Bye" she repeated.

If she'd been English she'd have said "ok - what you having?" I'd have said "a ham sandwich" or something and she'd have told me what she'd had to eat, or was planning to eat. We may have riffed on that for a minute, swapped recipes, delighted in each other's preferences for mustard or mayonnaise, brown bread or white before gently bringing the conversation to a halt. "Okay, I'll let you get on" is often the preferred conclusion to the coda, the imperfect cadence, if you will, (to keep the music metaphor going) that leads to the final "good bye" and hang up.

It always has to be the person who made the call who "lets the other one go" - the receiver of the call can't do it.

I tried to explain to Qin the etiquette she was breaking by simply accepting that I had to go and hanging up but she couldn't get it.

There are similar things in English behaviour: we can't buy anything without saying thank you several times, for example. I seem to remember hearing a comedy routine on this years ago but can't remember. Basically it goes like this...
We take our goods to the counter and put them down. "Just those, thanks" we say. The cashier puts everything through and tells us how much. "£5.65, please". We hand over the cash. "Thanks" we say. We get our change. "Ta". We gather up the bag. "Cheers". We head off "See you later. Thanks" We may add another "Cheers, bye" and then we're off.
I count at least five or six instances of "thank you" or its variants.

It's hard work being English, sometimes.

What will we do?

2008-12-02T14:14:00.001Z

Via hellojenuine

The ultimate Christmas present

2008-11-13T07:14:00.001Z

For the person who has everything, a customised Muppet for only $90

I tried to make one that looks like me but it came out looking a bit like Boris Johnson.

Hooray another design manifesto!

2008-11-11T21:58:00.001Z

Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week (one of the few non-design publications to take design seriously, and arguably one of the few publications full stop to take it seriously) was at the World Economic Forum in Dubai, where design was discussed. The result? A new design manifesto:

Throughout history, design has been an agent of change. It helps us to understand the changes in the world around us, and to turn them to our advantage by translating them into things that can make our lives better. Now, at a time of crisis and unprecedented change in every area of our lives – economic, political, environmental, societal and in science and technology – design is more valuable than ever.

The crisis comes at a time when design has evolved. Once a tool of consumption chiefly involved in the production of objects and images, design is now also engaged with developing and building systems and
strategies, and in changing behaviour often in collaboration with different disciplines.

Design is being used to:
Gain insight about people’s needs and desires

Build strategic foresight to discover new opportunities

Generate creative possibilities

Invent, prototype and test novel solutions of value

Deliver solutions into the world as innovations adopted at scale

In the current climate, the biggest challenges for design and also its greatest opportunities are:

Well-being – Design can make an important contribution to the redefinition and delivery of social services by addressing acute problems such as ageing, youth crime, housing and health. Many designers are striving to enable people all over the world to lead their lives with dignity, especially the deprived majority of the global population - ‘the other 90%’ who have the greatest need of design innovation.

Sustainability – Designers can play a critical role in ensuring that products, systems and services are developed, produced, shipped, sold and will eventually be disposed of in an ethically and environmentally responsible manner. Thereby meeting - and surpassing - consumers’ expectations.

Learning – Design can help to rebuild the education system to ensure that it is fit for purpose in the 21st Century. Another challenge is to redefine or reorient the design education system at a time of unprecedented demand when thousands of new design schools are being built worldwide and design is increasingly being integrated into other curricula. Designers are also deploying their skill at communication and visualization to explain and interpret the overwhelming volume of extraordinary complex information.

Innovation – Designers are continuing to develop and deliver innovative new products at a turbulent time when consumer attitudes are changing dramatically thereby creating new and exciting entrepreneurial opportunities in the current crisis. They are increasingly using their expertise to innovate in new areas such as the creation of new business models and adoption of a strategic and systemic role in both the public and the private sector.

I don't disagree with any of this but call me an old cynic... I'm fed up with manifestos. I want action!

(Imagine the scenes from Life of Brian where the supposed revolutionaries are sitting round arguing about the wording of their demands. Then wonder what would have happened if, say, Barack had sat with Michelle and never got further than writing down things they'd like to do. Or if John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been happy just to write and not to act?)

In a discussion on sustainability in design education today I got quite frustrated with colleagues who kept saying that changes to the curriculum need to happen slowly, over time, to help people adapt.
No, I said, they need to happen now. I've been hearing that line about gradual change for ten years.

"People don't like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another."
(Terry Pratchett, Making Money)

We have a choice: we try to be nice about it, persuade people, get them to come around to our way of thinking, and then in 20 years time we can look back and see how far we've come. Which, if we look back 20 years to 1988 and think how far we've come along, won't be much.
Or we can say "look, we haven't got time to piss about. This is serious. If you're with us you're welcome. If you're not, then go off and tend your garden 'cos we've got some windmills to chop down". I appear to be mixing my literary allusions there but you get the point. Shirking the challenge isn't an option. We claim to be creative, radical, free thinking, revolutionary. It'd be nice to show that were true. (I happen to think at Dundee we're well placed to do that, and already are, with great results).

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one"
(Spock, The Wrath of Khan)

Manifestos don't work if all that happens is students write essays on them and critics celebrate them years later for what they said rather than what they did. Forty years on from the First Things First manifesto, what's happened? Oh we got an updated version in 2000 and that's about it. Forty years on from Victor Papanek's Design For The Real World, what's happened? It got reprinted for the anniversary.

What we need are not more manifestos which, by the way, are all saying pretty much the same thing. What we need are courses, institutions, industries and governments who say: "stop talking, and just do it".

As it happens, my colleagues and I are currently writing our own manifesto for our course but the key thing is it won't say "we should", or "we want", or "we envision" or even "we hope". It'll say "we will". And "we do". And "we have done". Essentially, the difference between a wish list and a real manifesto is the grammar.

Actions, not aspirations. That's my manifesto.

Stephen Fry live blogging new film trip

2008-11-10T14:53:00.001Z

Stephen Fry is currently off around the world filming a follow up to Douglas Adams's radio series "Last Chance To See" for the BBC and is not only Twittering the whole thing (with often hilarious results) but uploading his photos as he goes.

Check them out.

National Novel Writing Month

2008-11-04T08:05:00.001Z

I'm taking part in National Novel Writing Month in November - trying to balance it with my other commitments. I'm already a bit behind. :-(

A former student of mine is taking part too. The badge below shows our relative progress towards the 50,000 word target. At the time of writing this I was well behind her (I'm the top line).

Might catch up a bit today...

Northumbria University Design School

2008-10-31T20:32:00.001Z

I was invited to go down to Newcastle on Wednesday to give a talk at the University of Northumbria's School of Design, now situated in its rather spiffy new building (the one on the left in the second image below)

Northumbria is Jonathan Ive's old stomping ground. Like me, he got his first break designing for the toilet industry so it's almost like we're twins. Er...

I was given an open brief which is always a bit tricky so I decided to do an amalgam of two talks, my annual "Good Design/Bad Design" lecture (where I challenge conventional wisdom on what 'good design' is) and the best bits of the keynote I gave in Texas in June (where I suggested university-based design education should be about making a difference in the world, not just churning out industry fodder).
When I arrived in Newcastle (I hadn't been there for a while and had forgotten how cold it can be, despite it being a few hundred miles south of where I live now) I was pleasantly surprised to see this sign:

Resisting the urge to add the missing apostrophe and correct the spelling of my name (ahem) I quickly took a photo with my iPhone and emailed it to my boss. I've now decided to make similar notices and pin them up around my own uni to make me seem much more popular than I am.

The lecture theatre we were moved to unfortunately was a little lacking heat-wise which (and here's my excuse) led to me forgetting quite a few of the points I wanted to make, as did the fact that the head of design for Philips was in the room and I had planned on making quite a few criticisms of some of their products, including an electric shaver I was asked to review for Amazon.co.uk! (I must post that this weekend, in fact - suffice to say it doesn't get very good marks from me, largely because of the excessive packaging and use of proprietary chemicals for cleaning). Needless to say I hastily skipped all the slides relating to that but because I couldn't quite remember where they were I was keeping half an eye on my presenter display ready to click my remote furiously.
I was told later he'd have loved to have heard my take on things. Oh well.

It was, incidentally, a pleasant surprise to be greeted by a never-before seen sight: students voluntarily sitting on the front row:

Despite the cold (the hats and scarfs above were a necessity) and having to skip through the last bits due to time constraints (top tip: when combining two different talks, both an hour long, you might want to chop half of it out if you still want to stick to 60 minutes) I think it went okay. I'm always a bit nervous about these things - as an outsider I'm able to be a bit more controversial than I could be normally and drop a few metaphorical bombs before leaving them to carry on the discussion, and I had planned a few zingers but was in the end a bit more restrained than usual, even skipping my traditional (half joking) rant about typography. Oh well.

I was also a bit down what with it being my birthday - enough to depress anyone the wrong side of 35.

Excuses, excuses.

I was really pleased to be asked and appreciated the audience's participation in some of the 'magic' tricks (one of which I tried on a colleague in the pub when I got back to Scotland that night and, much to my surprise, it worked). I won't tell you any more about it - if you want to see it you'll have to invite me to come and talk ;-)

My thanks of course to the students who found their way to the new venue and suffered through the cold (and my talk), to Jamie Steane, Head of Visual Communication and Interactive Media Design, for inviting me, and to Dr Joyce Yee for taking me to lunch and giving me a tour round the new building. Design is clearly a feather in Northumbria's cap and the university's investment in the building sends a clear signal about that. One that, I noticed on my way home, lights up for all in Newcastle to see at night:

Vote McBlinky and Winky

2008-10-16T16:40:00.001+01:00

According to Sarah Palin you can't blink. It's a sign of weakness.

But it's okay to wink

Mmm...

McBlinky & Winky 08

Speaking in Newcastle later this month

2008-10-15T22:11:00.001+01:00

I'm giving a talk at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle on 29th October - my birthday, as it happens!

Pickle the Hunter

2008-10-07T11:16:00.001+01:00

I had a couple of friends over for dinner the other weekend and I got up early to make a Summer Pudding and tidy up (two women = very critical).
Having a break I heard the cat come in through the bedroom window (it was the last warm day of the year and I was taking advantage of it) accompanied by some muffled miaows.

I didn't think much of it and carried on watching Quincy. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw Pickle with what looked like a kitten hanging limply from her mouth. Except it wasn't a kitten. Oh no.

I think this was her contribution to the dinner party. I should say that a) I live on a harbour not a waste dump, b) it was very clean, c) while filming I'm also thinking how the hell I'm going to get rid of it and d) it was actually quite tasty in the end.

Being too literal in logo design

2008-10-07T09:15:00.001+01:00

Cross posted from my other blog:

In one of my lectures, on visual communication, I use a little exercise to illustrate an aspect of semiotics.

I give the students a brief: they are to design a logo for a law firm that specialises in family law, dealing with families who are facing some form of legal entanglement. I tell them they have two minutes to come up with an idea.
Two minutes later I stop them and ask them all to stand up. I then start eliminating them by saying things like "sit down if you drew a police badge". That usually gets rid of about half. A gavel gets rid of several more, as do jail bars, a law book, a police light and so on.
Before long we're down to the last few students and I can usually get rid of them too with 'hands' or 'cut out people'. I also eliminate anyone who used just words or initials (words aren't so bad of course, I'm just being mean, but initials for firms always bemuse me - IBM and a few others aside, of course).

If there's anyone left standing it's either because I've missed a really obvious one (last year it was a bird, this year it was a court house) or because they've done something quite abstract - this year it was a square with four circles around it. Nice one. We have a winner.

(Just remembered, Orlando Weeks now of The Maccabees, "won" this a few years ago when he did a logo of "a unicorn jumping over a rainbow". Mmm...)

The point I'm trying to make in that exercise, other than it being a bit of a break from them listening to me drone on, is that when faced with a quick challenge like that, students (everyone) tend to to think not in cliches (I happen to think cliches are good things - they're how we communicate) but in too literal a sense. The last thing, I say, someone who is facing juvenile court on a shoplifting charge wants to see is a logo for a lawyer that screams "you're going to jail!".
Look at supermarkets - how many of them have logos that show a basket of shopping? (I seem to be the only one who thinks the Lidl logo looks like someone pushing a trolley)

I came up with this little game (which makes more sense in the context of the lecture than it does here) a few years ago when some graphic design students at a previous job were asked by a local law firm to come up with a logo for a similar brief. The winner was a half open door with light coming through it. The tutor loved it, the clients loved it. I hated it. They thought it said "there is hope". I thought it said "you're doomed". But then, that's me for you.
It did, however, make me look anew at logos to try to find the overly literal. And while there are a few, they're pretty rare and almost universally poor. I won't link to any here - look for yourself you lazy git.

All of which brings me to something that amused me. A couple of years ago, after I'd done this exercise with them, some students came in to my office with something they'd found in the Yellow Pages. An ad for a law firm which fell in to exactly the trap I'd laid for them (click on the image for a larger version). I think this is a pretty amazing/bad piece of advertising - I'll have to add prison tattoos to my list for next year's lecture.

Sarah Palin at the UN: The secret footage

2008-09-25T23:06:00.001+01:00

(I'm not the only one to spot the similarity - Andrew Sullivan got there first)

Argh! Make it stop!

2008-09-25T22:53:00.001+01:00

If only this film were real:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Oh wait a minute. It is:

Watch CBS Videos Online

And in case you've still not scratched your eyes out of your head...

Autumn lecture programme

2008-09-24T09:46:00.002+01:00

Here's my Autumn semester lecture programme in 3D. Click on the link for a higher definition version. Of course it looks better in the flesh on the big screen :-)

(The timeline was created in the rather clever program Timeline)

University of Dundee Design History, Theory and Practice lecture series from Jonathan Baldwin on Vimeo.

Funniest cartoon I've seen in ages

2008-09-22T09:12:00.001+01:00

This cartoon was in the current edition of Private Eye. It's had me chuckling all weekend.

Designers win medals too

2008-09-19T11:32:00.001+01:00

This is something I wrote for the study guide for my Design History, Theory and Practice (DHTP) module which starts next week. The first lecture asks "what's the point of DHTP?" and I try to head off the usual complaints about having to write and read and go to the library. I've found spending the first lecture on making the case for approaching design from an intellectual point of view not only saves time later, it tends to improve attendance and grades!

Plus, I happen to believe in it.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics offered a showcase not just of excellence in sport, but in design as well. Everything from the equipment being used to the garments being worn was designed. Ask the average person what we mean by this and they will undoubtedly talk about what things look like - the ‘style’ of the outfits, the shape of the bikes and so on.

But to take a view like that is to miss what we might arguably call the ‘real’ design, the design that’s the product of years (if not decades) of intense research into textiles, alloys, aerodynamics, ergonomics and more. When people talk of the millions of pounds spent on sports in the UK, they may think that all gets spent on training. But it doesn’t. Chris Hoy’s bike, Rebbeca Adlington’s swimming costume, Charlotte Burgess’s bow, and Deborah Brennan’s wheelchair are all the result of investment worldwide in design research.

And then there are the games themselves - everything from the obvious opening and closing ceremonies to the transport networks, the global television feeds, the ticketing systems, the catering, even the queues — all designed.

Design history and theory are no longer simply endless slideshows of the great and the good; pictures of this designer and that piece. Over the next three years you’ll be exposed to, and encouraged to discover, not what’s gone before but what’s possible. DHTP is about the future as much as it’s about the past. It’s also about broadening your view of what design is, from the ‘man on the street’ idea of design as style to something a little more ambitious and all-encompassing. And it’s about encouraging you to pursue a role in the cutting edge through your own research.

If I get the time, I'm going to do a video to go with it too...

Sarah Loves Charlie

2008-09-13T14:55:00.001+01:00

I ran Sarah Palin's Charles Gibson/ABC interview (part 1) through title="Wordle: Palin 1">Wordle and, as suspected, she uses "Charlie" like it's some sort of punctuation mark. A great bit of coaching by her handlers.

If you read the transcript and substitute your chosen expletive, it's a lot funnier. And God knows, reading it back, we need all the laughs we can get...

Quick summary: the woman knows nothing. Heaven help us all.

Americans left abandoned by Bush

2008-09-04T13:00:00.001+01:00

The parallels were amazing: in the wake of Hurricane Katrina thousands of Americans were huddled together in a sports centre wondering where their president was. And in the wake of Hurricane Gustav, thousands (just about) of Americans were huddled together asking the same question.

I was glad to see The Daily Show spot the irony. This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. Enjoy:

Diplomas explained

2008-09-03T14:49:00.001+01:00

The Guardian has a handy summary of changes to the school curriculum in England from today, including this summary of the new Diplomas:

Starting this term are the first five diplomas in engineering, construction, information technology, creative and media studies, and society, health and development. There will be 17 in place by 2011. [including product design - see this post for news of the announcement]

The new qualifications are intended to be an alternative to GCSEs and A-levels for 14- to 19-year-olds, blending hands-on learning and theory.
There are three different levels of diploma: foundation (level 1), higher (level 2) and advanced (level 3).

All are made up of three parts: principal learning; generic learning and additional specialist learning.

Principal learning is made up of qualifications, or units, specifically developed for the diploma subject and a project.

Generic learning includes 'functional skills' such as English, maths and ICT, alongside presentation, communication and teamworking skills.

Additional specialist learning involves more academic theory, an extended project and other qualifications, such as a GCSE or A-level, chosen from a catalogue of approved awards.

Diplomas will also involve 10 days' work experience, ideally in a field related to the diploma subject.

Remember, if you recruit English students to design courses at college or university, you need to know what's in the diplomas as they are intended as entry qualifications to FE and HE. They won't show up for a few years yet, but they will eventually. It would be worth finding out if a school near you is offering a diploma in your subject and getting in touch to make sure there's no mismatch between what's offered and what's needed, and maybe to offer some time to give a talk or demo.

The problem with graphs

2008-09-02T09:39:00.001+01:00

Take a look at this graph. It accompanies a story on the BBC News website about the property market and today's announcement of Government measures to boost flagging sales.

The graph plots the change in house prices as measured by two banks, The Nationwide and The Halifax. On the face of it things look pretty dreadful.

Except that the graph is wrong*. The values it is plotting are 'rates of change', so it's a bit like plotting a car's speed by plotting its acceleration and deceleration. You wouldn't really do that as you can't use such a graph to say what the car's actual speed is at any one time, without making some tortuous calculations.

Let's give an example. The graph plots changing values from April 2007 to August 2008. But the individual points relate to the relative change in house prices during the year to that date. So if you look at the point for the Halifax figures in April 2007 you see approximately 11%. What that means is that a house bought in April 2006 for £100,000 (good luck finding one that cheap) was typically worth £110,000 in April 2007.
Now look at April 2008. The graph shows that house prices fell by 1% in the previous 12 months. So that house which was worth £110,000 is now worth £108,900 - so it's still 8.9% higher than it was two years previously.

What you can't do with this graph is look at the August 2008 part of the graph and say what the value of that house is now, because it wasn't bought in August 2007 - the figure is meaningless, therefore the graph is meaningless. (This is the same problem you get with monthly inflation figures - a figure of, say, 5% might be seen as high but it means prices went up 5% over the last 12 months, not in the last month. If prices stay at the same level, inflation will be 0% but that doesn't mean things are getting cheaper. It means they're staying just as expensive as before)

If I had bought that house in April 2006 I couldn't use these figures, or this graph, to predict what the house is 'worth' now. But that would still be irrelevant unless I was thinking of selling now. But house purchasers don't tend to buy and sell in a year, but after several years (often decades). A graph on that principle would show a steady and sustained increase in the value of houses. There's a lot of people worrying over nothing - if you're not thinking of selling your house then you have nothing to worry about, yet this graph is intended to make you worry.

(Let's say that house price inflation stood at -10% in April 2009, then I could calculate the value of my home. It would be £98,010 - a drop in value for sure but of £1,990. In other words my house would be worth 1.99% less than it was when I bought it, not 10% less. See how it works?)

The only conclusion I can draw from this graph is that whoever inserted it is attempting to make things look more dramatic than they really are.
Which leads to a suggestion: the best way to increase confidence in the property market would be to ban stupid measures of the market that plot relative values over 12 months. The housing market doesn't work on such small cycles.

(*Actually, 'wrong' is not the word, rather it's 'misleading', but it's so misleading it might as well be wrong)

New design-related schools diploma - competition or support for product design degrees?

2008-09-01T16:54:00.001+01:00

The Guardian reports that:

The government's qualifications regulator, Ofqual, has accredited five new diplomas that will be taught from September next year.

The diplomas will be in business, administration and finance, environmental and land-based studies, hospitality, and manufacturing and product design.

Whether this diverts potential design students straight in to industry rather than in to colleges or universities remains to be seen. And of course, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing also remains to be seen. But the immediate(ish) implications are clear: in the next few years product design courses will start to see applications from students with diplomas, not A-levels. That needs some preparation.

Ten Freedom Points if you guess where this happened

2008-08-31T10:37:00.001+01:00

Guess where this happened:

Protesters here in [XX] have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the [XX] police department and the [XX] handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than 'fire code violations,' and early this morning, the [XX] sent teams of officers into at least four [XX] area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

A: China

B: Russia

C: Cuba

D: Minneapolis, USA

E: Tibet

F: Iraq

Read this in full to see if you were right

Being runner up in Miss Alaska is great practice for being runner up in November

2008-08-29T19:06:00.001+01:00

Apparently Sarah Palin, McCain's pick for Vice President, was a runner up in the Miss Alaska competition. (The swimsuit round must have been nippy, no pun intended - but go ahead if you spotted it).

Seeing as the female population of Alaska numbers around 260,000, that's not saying much. Given those odds, I reckon if I padded up and wore a dress I'd stand a pretty good chance.

On a more serious note, given that she is three years younger than Obama and has even less experience of government than he does, it seems inconsistent to argue that he's not ready to be President but that she is. Watching her next to McCain earlier just made him look even older and more wooden than usual. In a few weeks time I think the Republicans who thought this was a good idea will think again.

MacUpdate Back to School promo

2008-08-29T09:51:00.001+01:00

MacUpdate have released their latest software bundle and it focuses on tools of use to students.

Among the titles of particular interest to anyone writing or researching essays and dissertations are DevonAgent, which is quite a useful tool for online research (I've found it great for finding links between different topics) and BookEnds which helps compile bibliographies.
A word processor, Mellel, offers an alternative to Word that promises to be helpful in compiling long documents with different sections.

As more bundles are sold, other programs get unlocked and MacJournal has just become available - another useful tool this time for keeping notes and ideas.

Highly recommended - all these titles would cost $600 (£300+) but are available for just $49.99 (£25+)

Click the ad below for more details or visit the MacUpdate promo page.

A moment in history

2008-08-28T14:28:00.001+01:00

The BBC's Justin Webb on the nomination by acclamation of Obama:

It was stunning - a moment of brilliantly produced political theatre and a moment to cherish forever. Television conveys something but to be there, to see a death and a birth; that was something else.

What made it was the chaos, the crowd, the press of bodies, the tears, the consequence of it all. It reminded me of the British parliament at its best, rowdy and physical yet serious of purpose and aware of its potency: consequence.

People died years ago for America's right to be able to have these moments and their descendents have done them proud, though in a way most of the nation's founders would have found impossible to imagine.

The roll call went state by state (Hawaii happy, talk of sunshine, Michigan miserable, talk of lost jobs in the Bush years) and all was proceeding with that ceremonial and genteel decorum that America is so good at ('Guam, can you repeat your numbers please? Oh thank you Guam!') - and then came New York.

What made it was the physicality of the moment - she swept in from a tunnel, on to the crushed, cramped floor, arm-in-arm with the governor of the state and its other senator. When she took the microphone, it was not at a distant podium with music and autocue and clocks to time the start and the finish.

There on the floor Hillary Clinton uttered the words that she needed to utter, in slightly courtly language (reminders of the Brits again) but clearly and with awareness of their consequence.

Then Nancy Pelosi called for the seconder to the motion that Obama be selected, and the roar was surely felt down the years. She did not pause for those opposed - they were crushed too. That, too, is politics. A reminder that all this is the exercise of power, of one group of human beings forcing others to accept their dominance.

As people cried and hugged each other and the music blared, I thought of the little black children stolen from their parents, the daily cruelty and humiliation suffered by black people in this country for so long in what one historian calls 'America's Original Sin' and, to a lesser extent, the daily miseries they still endure. From slavery to the nomination of a black man as the leader of a major party. Sometimes it really does appear that our political evolution matches our physical progress...

(Via BBC NEWS | Justin Webb's America.)

It certainly looked dramatic. Up until then the DNC had made even British parties' annual conferences look like things of substance.

Prediction Obama 311-227 McCain

2008-08-27T22:56:00.001+01:00

I watched Hillary's speech to the DNC on C-Span (via BBC Parliament) and I very nearly applied for citizenship there and then. Blimey she was good. And I got the feeling a lot of people in the crowd were thinking "what have we done?".
Too late, Hillary, too late. But Michelle Obama was good too - you get the sense she won't be the sort of First Lady who sits quietly and smiles on the official Christmas card.

Based on my extensive knowledge of US politics (I watched every season of West Wing at least twice and saw every episode of Commander in Chief before it was cancelled) here's my prediction.

Mind you I got the last one wrong - I still remember sitting there with my pack of American Hard Gums waiting for the results to come in, and giving up in the early hours after Kerry's spokespeople started looking glum.

My rationale this time round is any state with a coast will likely go Democrat because there has to be a link between passport ownership and common sense; if the margin in the last election was within about 3% it will go Democrat; Florida and Ohio will not make the same mistake as last time. (Although I'm not sure about Alaska - both the people who live there tend to vote Republican if memory serves, but the latest poll had them down for Obama. But the whole Russia/Georgia thing might make them nervous enough to vote Republican) [Addendum - Sarah Palin makes it certain, I think. Alaska's going Republican]

I thought about giving any state where a candidate lives to that candidate, on the basis of home advantage, but given the current uncertainty over the number of homes McCain possesses (he can't remember how many he has, apparently) that might result in a clean sweep for the Republicans.

Having said all this, I'm just guessing. But then so are all the people on the US news channels. All I'll say is this: when McCain lambasts Obama for being loved by the rest of the world, just remember that when electing the self-proclaimed "leader of the free world" it's polite to consider who the rest of us think that should be.

Pollster.com currently puts Obama 10 EVs away from the winning post. It would be sweet if the national vote is close but the electoral vote gives it so clearly to Obama.

Designers asked by UK Government to tackle MRSA

2008-08-27T09:40:00.001+01:00

Design Week is reporting that five UK design consultancies are being sought by the Department of Health and the Design Council to collaboratte with scientists and healthcare professionals. They will be asked to develop "innovative design-led hospital furniture and equipment that could improve cleaning and reduce patients’ exposure to healthcare-acquired infections".

The programme, called "Design Bugs Out" starts with a briefing on 2 September and will focus on research in three hospitals, identifying key problem areas.

Having identified five key areas, each team will be asked to focus on one and given a £25,000 grant.
After the closing date for submissions on 10 October, final teams will be announced ten days later and given seven weeks to develop prototypes. Winning designs will be exhibited next summer.

Art and design degrees 'need overhaul', say academics

2008-08-26T20:37:00.001+01:00

The Guardian reports that:

A group of 50 academics have called for major changes to be made to the teaching of art and design at UK universities after a review concluded it was not fit for purpose.

The Group for Learning in Art and Design (Glad), a forum of academics who discuss learning in the sector, said teaching needed to better prepare students for work in a fast-paced, changing world.

[...]

Students should learn more than the bones of their own subject to reflect 'the multi-disciplinary nature of the creative industries', and work with different groups of people during their studies.

Prof Linda Drew, dean of academic development at the University of the Arts London and editor of the study, said: 'The creative industries have changed dramatically and so must we. Art education is at risk of becoming conservative – it is important that art and design remains at the cutting edge of higher education.'

Teaching staff should also be given extra training to improve the general quality of education, says the report.

The GLAD conference is taking place next week where I'm assuming this report will feature prominently.

This echoes much of what was discussed at New Views 2 in July (see this post, this one and this one).

So we're all agreed. Let's get on and do it, shall we?

Chinese Cooking

2008-08-25T14:22:00.001+01:00

After the Olympics closing ceremony yesterday, my friend Qin cooked me dinner - quite an honour! I thought I'd capture the moment so that anyone could follow along at home:

In case you're wondering, it tasted lovely. :-)

Kermit on Visual Thinking

2008-08-25T14:08:00.001+01:00

Via Qin Han

Filling buckets

2008-08-25T13:47:00.001+01:00

"Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire."

WB Yeats

Happy as a pig in sh*t

2008-08-21T19:12:00.001+01:00

I spotted this poor chap today in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh. The worst thing about it was the fact that the pig seems to be smiling.

I find its slow disintegration from the back rather worrying too.

Looks bloody tasty, though...

"You have to scream"

2008-08-16T22:53:00.001+01:00

Here's a clip from my recent trip to Brighton and a short ride on a fast machine.

I should explain that just before the thing got going, I felt my harness come undone. So I spent the whole half hour (in actual fact it was probably less than a minute) clinging on for dear life. So when my friend, Qin, says "you have to scream" I am in fact holding my breath in anticipation of being flung out to sea. Rest assured, you'd have heard me scream then...

HSBC. The World's Dumbest Bank?

2008-08-16T22:46:00.001+01:00

Spotted this ad in Dundee today. A few points spring to mind. Firstly, it's a crap ad (sumo wrestlers do budge - it's the whole point of the sport. In fact they don't half get a wriggle on sometimes...)

But most importantly, given the strapline "The world's local bank" it should perhaps be pointed out to whoever at HSBC signed off on this space being hired that, erm, there is no HSBC branch in Dundee.

In fact, the 'local' branch is a half hour drive away in Perth. Might as well be in Japan - which is the only thing that might help this ad make some sort of sense.

Rimer Cardillo

2008-08-11T09:21:00.001+01:00

I met Rimer Caardillo when I was in New Paltz, New York in April visiting State University New York. I was really impressed with his work and his approach to print-making which was reflected in his students' approach.

Rimer has an exhibition coming up shortly in Andes, NY so if you're in the area you should pop along. Check out his web site here.

Chace-Randall Gallery

Contemporary Fine Art

49 Main St, Andes, NY 13731

845-676-4901

August 15 - October 5, 2008

Reception: Saturday, August 16, 5-7pm

John Oliver analyses Fox News

2008-08-09T14:42:00.001+01:00

I loved this when it was broadcast on The Daily Show. Take a look - as well as being extraordinarily funny, it's also pretty good analysis of an appalling "news" network.

Part 1

Part 2

What design is versus what design was

2008-08-04T06:28:00.001+01:00

Aaron at Product Behaviour contributes to an age-old discussion:

What is ‘design,’ anyway? Is it the ability to draw stuff? Is it the ability to cobble together a mechanism? Those may be part of it, but they miss the real point. Design is how you decide what to draw, and what to cobble together.

[...]

The project teams are made up of smart people with widely varying backgrounds. They’re capable of analyzing the situation in the field, coming up with solutions, building and testing prototypes. What they need help with, in the end, is making decisions: filtering the requirements; rating the criteria for a ‘good’ solution; knowing when to stay within the paradigm of current solutions to a problem and when to develop completely new technology.

Those are the things ‘professional’ designers really do. The technical skills are important, sure, but it’s decision-making that separates an OK solution to a problem from a great solution.

(Via Product Behavior.)

This ties in to previous posts here, and to the thinking at the New Views 2 conference. Design, at university certainly, shouldn't be focused solely on 'skills' as traditionally perceived (life drawing, typography, pattern cutting etc) but on 'higher skills' (strategy, decision making, analysis), and the design industry should be employing graduates in roles that use those higher skills.

Unfortunately, look at any issue of Design Week or Creative Review, or look at the D&AD student awards, and you see higher skills almost completely ignored in favour of technique and aesthetics. And this drives what design courses try to achieve, meaning that what design is, as defined above, gets shoved out in favour of what design was.

"It’s a shame that the design industry looks to other places to do the groundwork and expect the finished article to turn up on the doorstep"

2008-08-01T18:32:00.001+01:00

Great comment over atThe Serif where they're debating comments I made on internships in design companies:

"I graduated in 2006, and am currently working as a team secretary in an office, because I needed to pay my bills and survive basically. There’s two points I’d like to make. [...]

I started working at this office as a temp. (Paid well, I might add) I got taken on as an admin assisstant full time and within a couple of months I was being trained to become a team secretary. It’s a shame that the design industry looks to other places to do the groundwork and expect the finished article to turn up on the doorstep (the majority anyway). The main point here is that, yes, taking on a graduate is a gamble for companies, but that is no excuse not to pay someone while you make your minds up. 3 month contracts will do. Then there’s an option at the end, the person gets paid in the meantime."

work+play: Notes from New Views

2008-07-30T08:32:00.001+01:00

Laura Chessin's thoughts on the New Views conference:

I was challenged by the view that ‘Graphic Design is in Crisis’. I developed a conviction that graphic design is undergoing an evolution and it is those who operated under previously–accepted assumptions and systems who are in crisis themselves.

I think she's right here, and this is an important way of looking at it. To amend my earlier post, it's not graphic design that's dead, it's the old way of looking at it that should be put to rest.

Does design education work against 'Indie Fever'?

2008-07-24T10:31:00.001+01:00

As Michiel van Meeteren points out in 'Indie Fever', one of the hallmarks of the independent programming community on the Mac is their willingness and desire to share tips and discoveries. Will Shipley is a good example of this - he blogs code, sets puzzles, and twitters. John Gruber of Daring Fireball is another example of what Gladwell would call a 'connector' - indeed it was via him that I found Michiel's paper.

I said in my last post that I thought this paper has implications beyond the programming community, and that this sharing of knowledge is typical of design in general. But then I wondered if this is true. While I can think of many examples of designers who blog, and who run workshops for others, or who meet up socially to discuss what they do, I can also think of many more who guard their knowledge jealously.
This even happens among design teachers - I once worked with someone who told his students "I'm not going to tell you how to do this because you might be a competitor one day", which half the class actually thought was entirely reasonable!

Design education is horribly individualising. We set students briefs and then set them against each other, making it all a competition to see who is better than everyone else. The 'critique' or 'crit' is a great example of the sort of judgemental, competitive element we've built in to how we teach what we teach.

Of course, most programmes include 'group work' which, as a colleague and I tried to explain to others recently, is not really the same as 'team work'. I'll let you try to figure out the semantics of that one.
But team work isn't really 'taught' - we just put students in a group, tell them to get on with it, then punish or reward them for producing something at the end based on whether they got on. Teamwork needs to be taught, not just assumed to be a natural talent.

Whatever, team work is pretty much a 'tick box' exercise, something programmes include because it's on the list of key skills, but it's not something students enjoy or see a value in doing (because what happens if they're in a 'bad' team?) and I haven't met many teachers who are particularly good at it (either teaching it or, let's face it, doing it themselves)

But team working, or rather collaborative working (another important distinction, see below), needs to be part of the culture of design education, not the focus of a single project, because it is the culture of design practice.
There are many who do this, or encourage this. In my own teaching I've encouraged students to collaborate in 'tutorless tutorials', peer mentoring and chats over coffee (or even beer), and though it's unscientific I suspect there's a direct link between students' desire to talk about stuff socially and their grade.

But there is a proven link between collaboration and success: Angela McRobbie's study of fashion graduates from Central St Martins makes it clear that success is not a measure of the skills you're taught at university, but the social and cultural capital you acquire just by being there (something that the 'skills agenda' being driven by industry at the moment completely misses). Every time I think of that I think this is what university should be about. Not the accumulation of skills but the accumulation of social and cultural capital. Without this, you stop learning the moment you stop being in class. With it, you never stop learning.

And so my programme for second years next year is based around collaborative 'design quests' that are all about developing this sense of shared knowledge-finding and out-of-hours discussion. And in the past few months we've launched a book group, a sustainable design group, and a documentary film club to get this culture of sharing going. (Some people reading this will no doubt have been doing things like this for a long time, or their students will).

The future of design practice depends on collaboration, not just at the client/designer level, or even designer/end user level (co-design) but more fundamentally between designers for continuing development and research. The indie developers Michiel writes about are working for themselves, by themselves. Yet they still collaborate and this definition of 'collaborative working', as opposed to 'group work' or 'team work' is not something we encourage in design education.

It's something we need to make a core aspect of what and how we teach.

---

Two quotes worth sharing. A jewellery student complained to me about having to work with others. "It's a waste of time, I don't need to learn that. I'm going to be a jeweller, I'll never work with other people".

So wrong on so many levels, but do you see how a culture of 'collaboration' rather than 'team work' might have helped here?

And my favourite (told to me by a colleague) from a computing student: "I'm not very good at working in teams, but that's okay because I'm going to be an academic".

Indie Fever

2008-07-24T09:27:00.001+01:00

Michiel van Meeteren (University of Amsterdam) has published a study of the Macintosh independent programming community as a PDF. It looks like it might be interesting to anyone involved in programming, but also has wider implications for the studies of communities of practice and how people share knowledge to improve their own skills - in other words 'design thinking' in general.

Excerpted from Michiel's website: "

‘Indie Fever’ is the first result of a multi-year human geography research program to investigate the social and economical world of so-called ‘Indie’ developers on the Macintosh platform. ‘Indie’ is the self-chosen nickname of software developers that serve worldwide markets from the Internet, hold their artistic values in high esteem and celebrate their ability to make high quality software as small companies. [...]

Indies have organized themselves informally but strongly in a virtual community. Although they are scattered over several continents, they continuously interact over the Internet, share rumors and code, and discuss business and private interests as if they were coworkers while –technically– they are competitors. They share a common culture which is intertwined with the history of the platform they develop for and the Cocoa programming environment in particular. [...] it analyses how Indies sustain and reproduce their particular culture primarily through online means, something that is argued to be rather difficult in the social-scientific discourse.

Almost 50 hours of interviews were recorded for Indie Fever. These interviews were combined with the results of extensive data mining of blogs and other online resources. The resulting thesis focusses on both the cultural and economical aspects of the Mac Indie world and the ways these reinforce each other by applying theories of, amongst others, Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Porter, Norbert Elias, Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell."

Bourdieu and Gladwell, eh? That's basically my reading list for my first years...

Check out the site for a link to the PDF (I would link here but I suspect Michiel would like to track numbers). There's also a blog related to the research project.

Coincidentally, at the same time I heard about this I also read several reports about a new website launched by developers of iPhone apps for whom the Non-disclosure agreement they effectively signed with Apple means they are forbidden from sharing knowledge and tips - precisely one of the things that defines the indie culture. When you see the title of the site you'll see they're not best pleased with the restriction. According to a publisher (I forget the link, sorry) the NDA is also holding up publication of books on iPhone programming.

Fun with fonts

2008-07-22T22:55:00.001+01:00

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Proof that McDonald's beverages are undrinkable

2008-07-22T20:48:00.001+01:00

A story in The Guardian that Fox News channels in the USA have started selling McDonald's the opportunity to have their iced coffee on morning programmes comes with this interesting bit of info:

Two cups of coffee, their cubes of ice glinting in the studio lights, now daily stand before the channel's morning presenters. The presenters conspicuously do not drink from the cups, which is just as well – the cups contain a bogus fluid and fake ice to prevent the cubes melting.

From my recollection, in the UK McDonald's tea has always contained an undrinkable fluid so it's nice to see some consistency.

Spot the difference

2008-07-22T14:43:00.001+01:00

(Via http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.)

Yes, that's right. There's a disembodied knee in the bottom picture.

TV adverts to be quieter. Still annoying, though

2008-07-20T23:21:00.001+01:00

Hurrah!

According to the Guardian:

after decades of receiving complaints about TV adverts sounding louder than the programmes, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has finally acted: as of this month, commercial breaks may be no louder than the transmissions in which they appear.

I can't remember the last TV ad I saw. I don't watch live TV anymore except on rare occasions and if I ever watch a commercial channel I pause it, then wait 15 minutes before beginning just so I can fast forward through the bloody things.
Mainly because they're just too loud.

Interestingly, however, despite fast forwarding through ads I can still tell you about the different campaigns. I think they've cottoned on to people like me and are deliberately making them so they're as easily understood at x32 speed as they are at normal rates.

Except perfume ads. They'll always be unintelligible no matter what speed you play them.

Like-ability does not equal ability

2008-07-19T11:24:00.001+01:00

Jamison Fraser on why the US media's obsession with politicians' "like-ability" is a bad thing

Voting for president based on who seems the most likable -- or, in the media's favorite shorthand, based on who you would rather have a beer with -- is a spectacularly bad idea, what with the almost total lack of similarity between talking about the Knicks over a bottle of Bud and running the world's most powerful nation.

It requires very little judgment or analytical skills to determine that the Knicks stink. Deciding whether to send Americans off to die in a foreign land is (or should be) a little different.

(Via Media Matters for America.)

What replaces oil?

2008-07-19T11:11:00.001+01:00

This is one of those questions that keeps me up at night. I don't mean 'what are the alternatives to oil' but something far more puzzling...

All these billions of barrels of oil that have been sucked out of the ocean bed and deep beneath the ground must leave holes behind, right?

So what do they fill the holes with?

There... that's stumped you, hasn't it?

Nice to see the US media focusing on the real issues in the election

2008-07-17T07:57:00.001+01:00

Good grief

During the 10 a.m. ET hour of the July 16 broadcast of MSNBC Live, host Monica Novotny devoted a segment to discussing Sen. Hillary Clinton's 'new look,' specifically the 'short[ness]' of Clinton's hair and the fact that Clinton 'shifted her part from the left side to the right side.'

At the beginning of the segment, Novotny contrasted a video of Clinton's July 15 speech on the floor of the Senate with her official publicity photo in order to illustrate the difference, stating, 'All right, if fashion -- as far as hairdos go -- isn't your forte, Clinton's hair is apparently shorter than it used to be, and she's shifted her part from the left side to the right side.'

Novotny asked MSNBC congressional correspondent Mike Viqueira, 'So, it's Hillary's part that's shifted to the right? Not her political positions?' Viquiera replied: 'Monica, all I can say is, I'm not really crazy about standing here talking about a senator's hair, especially Senator Clinton's hair, but I'll just say this: When it comes to senatorial hair, she's way ahead of the game. I mean, we've got some combovers around here that are engineering marvels, modern engineering marvels, I tell you. And look, I mean, you know the price of Grecian Formula these days -- I could use -- I could use a raise for that, and some Rogaine.'

Novotny later stated: 'Look, I'm just going to say this: I mean, you remember there have been some other reports where people were focused on other things, so I say, better the coif than the cleavage. That's just me.'

As Media Matters for America documented, on July 30, 2007, MSNBC devoted a total of 23 minutes and 42 seconds to segments discussing Clinton's (D-NY) 'cleavage' between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET.

Better the coif than the cleavage... oh yes, I get your point. We wouldn't want people focusing on other things in this election, would we?

(Via Media Matters for America.)

New Views discussion

2008-07-16T12:58:00.003+01:00

It's an hour or so long but if you really want to listen in on the (at times rambling) final conversation of the Responsive Curricula group at New Views 2 feel free.

Bear in mind some of the trains of thought relate back to two full-on days of discussion so may not make sense. Oh, and because I was holding the camera, my voice is the loudest...

Apologies for the jumpy video - something wrong with the encoding, not sure what, but the audio's fine.

(If you were involved in the discussion, or want to add comments, use the (+) button to type your thoughts, bookmark important points or clarify anything that needs it)

Double standards from the design industry

2008-07-16T11:11:00.001+01:00

Design Week carried a story last week about some reaction to Kingston Council (outskirts of London) asking potential design companies to take part in a free pitching process. The story continues today:

The Design Business Association and the Chartered Society of Designers have both responded vociferously to free pitching, following the recent revelations reported in Design Week.

Transport for London is currently running an open competition to design a new bus for London. While the top three ideas will receive prize money totalling £45 000, none of the other entrants will be paid for their work.

‘Designers will want the prestige of having their name attached to the new iconic bus for London,’ TfL director of surface transport David Brown told Design Week by way of justification at the launch of the competition on 4 July.

The DBA says it wrote to the Mayor of London Boris Johnson ‘on this issue’ last week. ‘The Mayor has been illadvised on this,’ says DBA chief executive Deborah Dawton. ‘Both the DBA and CSD have extensive experience in running competitions that meet industry requirements.

This one is so far off the mark we’d have to go back to the starting grid. Prize money of £25 000 goes nowhere near covering the design investment.’ She continues, ‘I think we'd all rather travel on a bus that was designed by someone qualified to do it.’
[...]

CSD chief executive Frank Peters is calling on the Design Council to take a lead in stamping out malpractice. In a letter published in this week’s Design Week (see page 11), he urges the Design Council to ‘educate clients away from such practice. As a Government body, they should be wellplaced to ensure that no Government department adopts this practice [of free pitching]’. Meanwhile, Kingston Council has received at least two letters of complaint from designers angered by its unpaid tender to fill its graphics roster.

The latest, from Watershed Design managing director Paul Widdup, argues, ‘If you are tendering for accountancy services you would not ask them for an audit to prove their credibility.’ Kingston Council wrote back to Widdup, claiming that, ‘The council is not seeking “free” design work. To identify the most suitable candidates we need to be able to establish the quality of services that potential partners can provide and the value for money they can offer taxpayers. Our experience of procurement is that businesses are well versed with tender processes and see it as an opportunity to win work and develop their client base.’

Dawton believes that getting public bodies to observe best practice would be a major achievement.

‘A commitment from Government to drive up best practice in [its] procurement of design would benefit the whole country in one fell swoop,’ she says, adding, ‘Why should small commercial businesses subsidise it in this way?’ The DBA intends to start showcasing examples of best practice on its website. ‘We hadn’t thought about doing that before now,’ says Dawton.

Now think about this for a moment. The design industry is opposed to free pitching. Paul Widdup makes the very good point that accountancy firms are not asked to carry out a free audit before being given work.

So why does the very same industry allow many of its members to ask graduates to work for free before offering them a job? It's variously called 'work experience' (I call it 'work' just without pay, so not really the full 'experience' wouldn't you say?) or an Internship, which seems to give it a bit more credibility. This is an industry which claims to contribute billions to the UK economy, but thinks it acceptable not to pay its own staff. They may say that they need to do this so that they can employ 'experienced' staff but you know what, other jobs pay you while you gain your experience.
Imagine if every other industry operated like this - doctors not being paid until they'd done a series of two-month placements at different hospitals; policemen not being paid until they'd arrested 100 villains; teachers not being paid until they'd seen three whole classes through their SATs.

I heard a story the other week about a graduate who's been doing the internship round for so long he's currently on his second stint at a rather well-known agency, working on real briefs for real clients, but for no money. How does he live? On income support (i.e. the taxpayer) and his parents' re-mortgaged house. Since when was advertising a state subsidised industry?

Asking someone to carry out creative work for no pay is wrong. So long as it's called free pitching. But call it an internship and everything's okay.

Double standards.

Why isn't the Chartered Society of Designers doing something about this? And why isn't Design Week reporting it with as much concern as a bloody meaningless 'design a bus' competition?

This US comment from Graphic Design Rants (20/4/07) sums things up pretty neatly, if somewhat ineloquently:

But the current trend where and INTERNSHIP is your first real job out of school instead of a Summer job. Rather SUCKS with your degree, $80,000 in Student loans, dropped $10,000 on Computer gear and Pro-class $oftware, and paying rent in NYC with four psycho roommates. And entry level salaries have slipped back to less than what a decent receptionist makes with a GED and a push-up bra.So I rather have an issue with our profession being not-so-gently-hammered down to working class.

Valuing design graduates and academics

2008-07-16T07:39:00.001+01:00

On February 11, during London Fashion Week, Skillfast-UK staged a mock protest outside the Houses of Parliament in which models dressed in toiles (the technical mock-up of a garment) waved placards calling for, among other things, ‘pattern cutters, please!’ A press release sent out to the media entitled “Research Warns: Lack Of Technical Skills Threatens London Fashion Week” gave more detail:
“Today MPs including Skills Minister David Lammy threw their weight behind a new campaign “No skills, no fashion,” launched by Skillfast-UK, the Sector Skills Council for the fashion and textile sectors. The campaign aims to encourage fashion colleges and universities to put more focus on pattern-cutting, garment construction and other technical fashion skills.”

Lammy was quoted as saying “The Government is committed to increasing the level of skills training and advice available to employers, as well as encouraging colleges and universities to form partnerships with local companies to ensure young people are equipped with the specific skills they need to succeed”

The campaign has so far gone unchallenged. But they contain a series of assumptions and misconceptions, as well as signalling a somewhat dangerous approach to the concept of ‘skills’ that is more of a threat to London Fashion Week than anything Skillfast-UK have identified.
At a very basic level, the questions we need to ask are these: if the fashion industry needs pattern cutters, why doesn’t it train some? Why does it expect degree programmes to do it? And why is the fashion industry recruiting graduates to be pattern cutters anyway? This is like asking history courses to award degrees to students who can colour in pictures of the Battle of Hastings without going over the lines.
In medieval times the trades and crafts established guilds, in part to retain independence from the role of the church in education. Taking control of who could practice, and what standards they had to achieve in order to do so, was vital to not only maintain quality, but to control demand, respect and prices.

Membership of the guild required the completion of a period of apprenticeship, resulting in an apprentice piece demonstrating the apprentice’s abilities. Successful completion of this period would result in entry to the profession, but starting at the bottom and undertaking another, higher level, apprenticeship.

Over time this responsibility for training, which involved broader in loco parentis roles, was passed to technical schools and colleges. The ‘contract’ between employer and college was that the latter was now taking on responsibility for training potential entrants to the profession to an accepted standard.

As educational provision expanded, and as courses began to develop in to degrees, the nature of this relationship changed. Degrees are not intended to train people for specific jobs but for a range of possible futures. And the number of students on such courses expanded to suit demand, destroying any link between the ‘need’ for new workers and the ‘supply’.

Meanwhile demand from students for vocational qualifications dropped in relation to degrees, and so the supply of the sort of entry-level worker began to dry up. But as degrees became more popular, they began to be seen as the basic requirement for entry to the profession and, as a consequence, a mismatch developed between what employers assumed degrees were for (apprenticeships) and what they provided (a liberal education).
The end result is that the ‘guilds’ are seeking to reclaim their authority over the ‘church’ (academia). But they are doing this not solely by developing an alternative (a new apprenticeship) but by simultaneously demanding that degrees become apprenticeships, imposing a set of standards on them that weaken any distinction between a degree and a vocational training-based qualification.

The danger is that degrees seeking approval from the trades will no longer offer broad liberal qualifications, and will restrict their numbers closing the study of design to anyone except would-be designers. Apart from the fact this would call in to question their status as degrees, it also flatly contradicts the need identified in the Cox Review for ‘design thinkers’ to populate all aspects and levels of society and industry.

The obvious solution to industry’s ‘need’ for core, basic and entry-level technical skills is for industry to initiate a new form of qualification - which they appear to be doing via the Creative Apprenticeship - and allow degree-level provision to remain independent, looking forwards and educating free-thinking and independent graduates who can transform the industry quickly, rather than entry-level employees who might take 5-10 years to emerge in to management roles.
According to Skillfast-UK “In the UK, approximately 3,000 students graduate from fashion courses each year – yet top designers and clothing brands say they struggle to employ quality staff, because new recruits lack the technical skills and production knowledge to turn their creative ideas into achievable designs”

On the face of it this sounds rather damning. But stop for a moment and think through this logically. 3,000 fashion graduates every year? According to Skillfast, (http://www.canucutit.co.uk/top-tips.cfm) “the supply of fashion design graduates outstrips industry demand by about 600%” (which means that there are only around 500 jobs each year, something that sounds unlikely, but let’s take their word for it). That means there are six candidates for every job. And out of those six, some employers are unable to find people with the right skills? How hard are they looking?

This is plainly rubbish, but sadly pointing out the obvious isn’t enough so let me try to explain through logic (if not in fact, as this requires more research) why I’m sure that Skillfast-UK are wrong in their assertions, and their strategy. And as a matter of convenience I’ll also try to show why the whole design industry seems to be getting things wrong when it comes to graduate recruitment.

Pop along to Careersbox.co.uk and you’ll see an interview with Linda Florance, head of Skillfast-UK. It contains some revealing information: http://www.careersbox.co.uk/video/skillfast.wvx

My interpretation of it is this: the fashion and textiles industry is in need of bright, talented, ‘young’ people from a range of disciplines. It requires people skilled in marketing, in technology, in chemistry and so on. Some of these people will develop new products and markets, and take British fashion and textiles in to new markets.

Oh and they also need ‘creative’ people to make things that look nice.
In other words, this is an industry that values and craves graduates in all sorts of disciplines, but undervalues fashion and textiles graduates, seeing them in very narrow terms.

Part of this relates to the problem that the design industry in general simply hasn’t grasped yet what the value of a design degree is. Evidence for this can be found on the canucutit.co.uk site, where potential employees are told “you are highly unlikely to walk straight into your dream job therefore show that you are willing to start at the bottom, will listen to others, are not afraid of hard-work and will be dedicated to the job.” This ‘start at the bottom’ attitude is typical of the design industry but what’s most disturbing is that this is the advice given to Masters graduates!

The salary new entrants are tempted by, for this ‘start at the bottom’ opportunity is just £12,000. Compare this with Arcadia, Britain’s biggest fashion retailer where graduates are offered £20,000 and a structured, fast track training scheme leading to a management position within a year. Next, the retail fashion chain, offers pretty much the same along with share options and health insurance. Not bad.
Given a choice between working in fashion as a buyer for £20,000 or being expected to ‘work your way up’ from cutter for £12,000 a year, what do you think a lot of graduates will say? Could this be why “top designers and clothing brands say they struggle to employ quality staff, because new recruits lack the technical skills and production knowledge to turn their creative ideas into achievable designs”. It’s nothing to do with the skills or the quality of the graduate, it’s more to do with the attitude of the employers, still stuck in 19th century ways of doing things and seeing ‘production’ as the least important part of the business and - worse - design graduates as shop floor fodder.
An industry that rapidly promotes graduates is likely to be one that develops quickly and stays ahead of the competion.

And industry that hides its graduates away until they emerge after years of working their way up is likely to be one that is overtaken by the competition. And this is exactly what is happening with the design industry, according to their own predictions. But apparently it’s all the fault of universities…

The design industry doesn’t value design graduates. There are glowing exceptions but these do rather prove the rule. It should also be remembered that the big fashion houses we talk about are actually not representative of the industry as a whole which is not the modern, high class vision we tend to see promoted in the media.

Design graduates are seen as entry-level employees because, among other things, a lot of design courses see their role as producing entry-level employees. Too many degree courses turning out graduates who are trained to very narrow ideas of what a design graduate is for.

It could be argued this is not restricted to design, and that the general ‘oversupply’ of graduates is a universal problem wherein “Many graduates are doing fairly menial jobs for which they do not need a degree (or anything like it)” (Fantasy Island p. 78) But a quick overview of destination figures for graduates from UK universities shows that those who study non-design subjects are more likely to enter graduate-level employment than those in design subjects. Even the usual claim that many undertake part-time work while developing their practice appears not to be borne out by longitudinal data and, anyway, surely a graduate could undertake a graduate-level job while doing this instead of working full time behind the counter in a chemist?

Perhaps the answer is that we are either not equipping our graduates with truly graduate-level skills (a skill that can only be exchanged within a closed system is not really a skill at all but an ability) or we are producing graduates who think, rightly or wrongly, that they are only qualified to work as designers, or failing that as shop assistants.
In this sense we need to ask what a design degree is for. What do four years at university offer that couldn’t be gained on the job? On the face of it the only attractions are the social life and the debt.
There must be something more distinctive about a degree.

Charles Handy in The Elephant and the Flea describes how his classics degree landed him a job in an oil company where he quickly became an economist. He realised then that his degree wasn’t so much a license to practice, but a license to learn.

Angela McRobbie in British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? notes that graduates from London fashion courses who were most successful achieved their success not by using skills learnt in college but by using the cultural and social capital they had developed incidentally. This use of social and cultural capital was also identified as a key factor in the cultural industries by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

Even outside design, the most valuable contribution university makes to a person’s future has long been recognised as the network it gives you - it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Of course, with the expansion of higher education and the focus on skills, the one thing that has clearly disappeared from university life is the time to build this important capital investment - another contributor perhaps to the decline in ‘quality’ graduates, perhaps. Too skilled, not enough nous.
But all these ‘incidental’ or even ‘accidental’ benefits aside, why else would someone go to university? I’ll come to that question later because it’s becoming even more urgent.

Skillfast-UK’s cognate sector skills council is Creative and Cultural Skills which covers many of the other design disciplines and the industries that use them. It has been working with The Design Council (too closely, some would suggest) and in 2007 published High-level skills for higher value, a policy document outlining some issues and strategies for developing skills in the design sector.
The document outlines that the design industry needs to develop its base of knowledge (not ‘skills’ - a key differentiator I’ll come to later) in cultural awareness, global awareness and business awareness. These are undeniably important.

But the report cancels this presience out by going on to say that university courses need to focus on technical skills and on business skills such as accounting and business planning. To explain why this is a little odd, imagine if accountancy degrees suddenly had to teach students typography…

Go back to what I said about ‘global awareness’ and ‘business awareness’. This is about understanding how design impacts on different cultures and how it is itself affected. It’s about understanding the effects of globalisation and the threats and opportunities it offers. We could teach that on design degrees - in fact we’d love to. But when it comes to teaching ‘business skills’ we actually focus on showing students how to use Microsoft Excel and how to write a business letter. Or we do to those who bother to turn up because, even though we’re accused of not teaching these things, the sad truth is we do, but students vote with their feet and don’t come. Don’t blame us, blame students!

But is this really what the design industry needs from graduates? People who can create a simple spreadsheet but don’t know why they’d need one? Especially if their job has been taken by someone from abroad who thinks business is a little more complicated in today’s world than just working out how to create a macro?

The design industry does need higher level skills, and degrees are exactly the place to develop them. But where’s the incentive when our graduates are being taken in to such crappy jobs and when we’re brow beaten in to dumbing down our courses into a check list of low level ‘skills’ like pattern cutting in fashion and its equivalent in other disciplines?

The content of a ‘core curriculum’ is a tricky one. My first job interview was for a job as a layout assistant for a small design firm in Harrogate. I went along with my portfolio containing the sort of thing they did - a series of two-colour leaflets I’d done for my local MP’s constituency office.

The only trouble was, I’d done them using Pagemaker on a Mac Plus. This was 1989 and the technology was still very new. The owner of the business gave me a long lecture about how I’d wasted my time learning how to do it on a computer, and that he needed someone who knew how to use Cow Gum. (For those who don’t know these things, graphic design included the ‘paste up’ process where artwork was cut up into pieces and laid out on paper or board using a type of glue that kept things in place but allowed you to reposition things and peel them off again).
In fact I’d been taught (or rather, as is often the way of things, left to find out) how to use Cow Gum and was not bad at the job. It’s just that I wasn’t overly bothered with it, given as I’d seen ‘the future’ as it were and could think of much easier ways to do the job. But for this guy, there would always be a need for people with traditional skills that would never die out.

I meet people like that all the time but over the years they’ve gone from protesting about the need to learn how to stick things down with glue to learning how to process film, how to program in Lingo, how to use Pagemaker, how to… you get the picture. For every profession there’s someone who thinks the way they do things is the only way, and always will be. Some people are simply sad that traditional crafts will disappear, and I can understand that, and sympathise, but the role of higher education is not really to keep ancient technologies on life support but to advance things. We won’t lose the skills, they’ll be reborn and rediscovered.

Let’s go back to Skillfast-UK and their Westminster protest. This is what they had to say about it: “To make it to the top in this competitive business, you need the skills to turn a great idea into a practical garment that can be produced and sold.”
Let’s rephrase that. To make it to the top in the old days, you had to not only design it but make it too. Maybe that’s not the ideal way of doing things? It’s certainly not the way things are done in the countries that are apparently about to drain the lifeblood out of our fashion industry. Employing someone to design and make clothes makes one wonder if the fashion industry ever heard of Adam Smith and his peculiar obsession with pins.

But let’s get one thing clear. I’m not suggesting that a fashion designer doesn’t need to understand how clothes are made, and I can imagine how a designer who makes the clothes will have a deeper understanding of the process than one who doesn’t. (Although I don’t think it’s a given). But it may help to take a slight diversion in to the world of architecture for a moment.

Some time ago I was discussing this issue with some Masters students, one of whom was a graduate in architecture. “You were taught how walls are constructed, weren’t you?” I asked her. “Yes,” she said. “And about load bearing, stresses, and different materials?” “Yes”.
“But you weren’t taught how to lay bricks, were you?” “Of course not”, she replied.

And there’s my point. There’s a difference between an architect - a designer - and a brickie. You don’t go to university for four years (more, in fact, for architecture) to learn to lay bricks, and if the construction industry stopped training brickies and instead waited for them to graduate, there’d be no construction industry. And if it recruited architects and put them to work laying walls, the same thing would happen: bye bye construction industry.
So why does the fashion industry expect its architects to be brickies? It makes no sense.

Maybe though design education does have a lot to feel guilty about. Industry thinks architects should be brickies first, and so do we.
We construct courses based around the idea of an apprenticeship and the linear accumulation of knowledge. There are certain things it’s essential to know before you can move on and learn the next thing. And then when you’ve done if you’re lucky you can go into industry and start at the bottom and work your way up.

That’s how it was for us, and that’s how it will be for you. And then if you ever become a teacher that’s how you’ll do it because that’s the way of things.

Except it isn’t. Or it shouldn’t be.

The design industry is vibrant but it’s under threat. And the reason it’s under threat is not because of a lack of technical skill, it’s because all these wonderful thinkers are recruited in to firms that then put them to work in beginners jobs. They’re lost, and their knowledge is wasted because - well maybe because the old timers who worked their way to the top feel threatened?

Design educators need to educate employers about the true potential a design graduate can bring a firm. We need to stop training employees who then undergo yet another apprenticeship and instead start educating game-changers who’ll transform the industry and take it forwards.
And if we don’t do this because philosophically we know it’s the right thing to do, then we’re going to have to do it because we ourselves are under threat. There are some new boys on the block and they make four year degrees look like a complete waste of time.

There have always been alternatives to degrees. In fact, the design degree is relatively new on the scene. You don’t need a degree to be a designer: I was a successful graphic designer for ten years and my degree is in history.

But over the last few decades the design industry has begun to see degrees as a key entry requirement.

This is changing. The Foundation Degree was launched in the early part of this decade and has replaced the old Higher National Diploma (HND) in England, and is likely to do the same in Scotland. The HND was a good old fashioned vocational qualification (whereas the BA is supposed to be an academic qualification). Its purpose was to train people to work in certain industries. There’d be an academic element but many courses paid little attention to that. After all, why do you need to write an essay if you’re going to be a designer?

The Foundation Degree (FdA) is a slightly different beast. For one thing the academic aspect is more heavily emphasised, on paper at least. It incorporates formal work-based learning, and it is designed to be studied part time by people working in the industry they’re learning about. In that sense, it’s a lot like the old ‘sandwich courses’ people used to do, working three days a week and then going to college to learn the trade for two days a week. Finally, it’s two years instead of three or four for a degree.

Despite a lot of criticism, the FdA has been very successful and there are thousands on offer around England, many of them in creative disciplines.

As an alternative to a degree it scores on several points. Firstly, it’s work-based. Secondly, it’s two years in length. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it offers exactly the same curriculum as a four year degree.

I’ll say that again: there is nothing to distinguish a Foundation Degree from an Honours Degree. But there should be.

A former colleague of mine once described a degree as an HND with a bit more writing, the purpose of the extra year being to get a bit more practice and a bigger portfolio for job interviews. That view is entirely wrong, however it’s not uncommon for people to see the extra year or two spent on a degree as a chance to refine skills rather than extend knowledge and understanding.

It’s the fact that we can’t seem to explain what it is that doing a degree offers over a Foundation Degree that poses the biggest threat to our recruitment - and to the employment of our graduates. Ignoring the cultural and social capital, which most of us do anyway, what does an honours graduate have that an FdA graduate doesn’t, apart from a bigger overdraft?

It’s not just the FdA that poses a threat. In the last few years the ancient concept of the apprenticeship has been reborn (as the ‘modern apprenticeship’) and marketed to kids who don’t want to, or wouldn’t be able to, study at college. An apprentice goes to work with a firm where they are trained, and that training is accredited leading to a qualification.

At the moment there are apprenticeships in areas that overlap with design subjects, including graphics, jewellery and textiles.
But in the creative disciplines the apprenticeship is about to be replaced by: the Creative Apprenticeship.

The Creative Apprenticeship has been developed by industry and is backed by some big names including Aardman Animations and the BBC. Within graphic design and advertising there will be apprenticeships that give young people the opportunity to leave school and start work - paid work - with a leading company, being trained on the job.

While the plain old apprenticeship is perhaps aimed at those who might be perfectly competent, it’s likely the Creative Apprenticeship will attract ‘high flyers’ - exactly the sort of people design courses used to prefer. After all, if you’ve got the choice of going away to university to study design, or going to work in the BBC’s graphics or scenery departments, which would you choose?

The UK Government announced (22 February 2008) there would be 5,000 apprenticeships of this kind available at first - that’s a significant figure when compared with the number of applications to study design at university.

So with FdAs being aimed at vocationally-minded students, Creative Apprenticeships being aimed at vocationally- but not study-minded young people, and modern apprenticeships being aimed at the educationally ‘disaffected’, what does that leave for design degrees?

Well if we do nothing, it leaves us in a mess. But if we do something it leaves us with an opportunity.

And this to me is what was so exciting about some of the outcomes of the New Views 2 conference - a large gathering of academics and practitioners in London that really seemed to conclude that something has to change, that degree-level and postgraduate design education has to resist the political push to follow industry, to see its role as training workers and instead do what they do in other disciplines: lead, innovate, transform. The British design industry makes big claims about its contribution to the economy and says this gives it rights to demand things of universities and colleges. But the UK higher education sector takes every £1 of taxpayers' money and turns it in to £5 - it contributes far more to the economy than design does. If this were a pissing contest then it should be the design industry asking universities how they can help rather than the other way round. But this isn't a pissing contest. So let's stop the sort of language that permeates the websites and publications from Skillfast and Creative and Cultural Skills.

An industry that says it is under threat from external competition and poor skills firstly needs to put its own house in order: start paying decent salaries (in fact, just start paying salaries - asking design graduates to work for free is criminal), and start offering decent career paths with proper training. Start recruiting talented graduates into graduate-level roles instead of letting them disappear into entry-level jobs. And start doing what other industries do: treat universities with respect instead of disdain and recognise that what they have to offer is not an endless supply of pattern cutters and Mac monkeys but innovation and understanding. You don't see the biomedical industries demanding that universities churn out lab technicians; you see them encouraging research into cures for cancer, and lapping up graduates taught within that culture of research-led, not industry-led, teaching.

Imagine for a second what a design industry with that sort of relationship with universities could be like. Then stop imagining and get on with it.

Assistance provided

2008-07-15T17:17:00.001+01:00

Spotted on Brighton pier. Remember, it's dangerous to swim or dive unless someone from security is helping...

"You have to scream!"

2008-07-15T13:11:00.001+01:00

Qin in Brighton from Jonathan Baldwin on Vimeo.

After the conference finished last week in London I met my friend and colleague Qin off the train and took her to Brighton. I've been telling her for a while that it's somewhere she had to visit, and I'd arranged for us to stay for a couple of nights with my former students, Shaun and Amelia. We also met up with Matt, another of my prodigies (or is it progeny? Is that rude?)

Having lived there four years I can safely say I never did the whole touristy bit so I took her to the pier, the funfair, the museum and the Pavilion (which, let me say, is absolutely fantastic inside. I never realised. You have to go). Qin was fascinated by the chinoiserie inside, the Western idea of what China was like in the 18th/19th centuries.

I took my new Flip video camera with me and followed Qin around so she had a souvenir. Here's the video. My favourite moments: in the seaside rock shop after she'd spend several minutes looking for messages appropriate for her friends, Qin pointed to sticks of rock that said 'Man City' all the way through them. I thought for a few seconds and then realised her mistake: "It's short for Manchester City, the football team" I told her.
Then at the end of the video, about three minutes out, we're on a roller coaster. I hate roller coasters but decided to risk it. Just before we set off I felt my harness come undone but we started going before I could point this out to someone. So I went round the whole thing clinging on for dear life. As we went round each bend my feet came out of the car and I tried to push back down. Meanwhile I was also trying to point the camera somewhere meaningful.
Turns out my harness wasn't undone after all, but that's not the point. Qin told me the views from the top of the roller coaster were amazing. I missed them all. "You have to scream!" she told me. I told her I was saving my last breath so I could say something poignant as I was flung out into the English Channel. Something to be remembered by.
"What were his last words?" people would ask. "You should see the view from here!" perhaps...

What the New Yorker teaches us about visual literacy

2008-07-15T12:40:00.001+01:00

Richard Adams on the New Yorker cover 'scandal' makes a valid point:

John McCain can say that he doesn't know much about economics and later deny it flatly, then have one of his top economic advisors say it will take one term for a McCain presidency to balance the budget, only to turn on a dime and say it will take two term, and almost nothing of it gets reported in the media. But hey, Jesse Jackson gets overheard using the word 'nuts' and it's time to break out the ink.

If that's what the 'mainstream' news media can do when left to their own devices, a cartoon is nothing.

Seems to me, as one of the commenters on this article says, this is another example (like the 'nuts' episode) of the media reporting on itself rather than on the stories.

But it also suggests something else: when we start summing up complex issues in illustrated form the scope for misunderstanding is huge.
At the New Views conference it was asked why critiques of design have to rely on words, why can't we use design? (Similar arguments are made in favour of letting students create 'visual dissertations') Because writing depends on redundancy - it contains clauses, clarifications, opportunities to go off on tangents or rehearse devil's advocate positions. Create a design to critique a design and you can't guarantee that the message will be decoded correctly. The irony here is that I've just read several thousand words explaining what the New Yorker cartoon is supposed to be saying.

I think the New Yorker cover is a brave attempt to highlight the way the media and others pick apart minutae like the Obamas' fist bump, unpicking images (often because there's not really enough real news to fill a 24 hour news 'culture') but falls foul of precisely the same problems: images have no redundancy. The article that accompanies the cartoon is a few thousand words long and makes it clear what it is saying. The cartoon has no words and is consequently translated differently depending on who reads it, or (importantly in this case) reads about it. If the cover had instead been a cartoon alongside the article it might have made sense. As a cover, it doesn't and simply exacerbates the problem it seeks to analyse.

Barthes famously said that images are polysemous, they have multiple meanings. Text, he said, fixes meaning.
I don't think we've yet reached a level of visual literacy (or ever will?) where images like this can be divorced from the textual context.

BBC News reports "Warning over universities' future"

2008-07-14T00:08:00.001+01:00

This article from the BBC backs up perfectly the predictions being made at New Views 2:

Some universities will face closure or merger as they struggle to compete for a dwindling number of students over the next 20 years, vice-chancellors warn.

A report for umbrella body Universities UK says unless institutions adapt quickly to the changing demographics, some institutions will become unviable.

The number of 18 to 20-year-olds is set to fall sharply between 2009 and 2027.
This means universities could face a smaller demand for places and hence a drop in public funding, it says.
The Universities UK report looks at three different scenarios predicting what will happen if institutions react in different ways to the changing demographics and a more difficult economic climate.

[...]

In the second scenario, non-traditional private providers enter the market pace and "cherry pick" course areas with low entry costs.
A greater increase in e-learning also leads to partnerships with private firms. [...]
In this scenario, damage to the education system is predicted as private providers gain degree awarding powers and a small number of elite institutions seek to leave the publicly funded sector.

In the third scenario, the university sector becomes more employer-driven and flexible and there is full development of technology-based learning thanks to public and private investment.
Most students end up studying part-time on a virtual basis while they continue to work, but full-time undergraduate study does remain part of the system.
This leads to universities grouping together strategically with employers and establishing themselves as major regional providers along side further education colleges.
Again, private providers cherry-pick vocational provision which will net them substantial profits and they also take over failing institutions.

What this report suggests is that if design education is to survive as a university subject, it has to let go of its vocational roots, no longer training designers (leaving that to the FE sector and private colleges) but educating strategic thinkers. Exactly what we concluded.

D&AD is on its last legs too, it seems...

2008-07-13T23:36:00.002+01:00

While at New Views 2 I happened to take part in or overhear about a thousand conversations regarding D&AD's education briefs and the New Blood show.
Everyone involved had one opinion: if they had their way they would not set D&AD briefs anymore and would spend the money for New Blood on something more productive.

I've long been a critic of the D&AD briefs and it was interesting to hear such views expressed publicly and with such strength. The consensus is that the briefs are pedagogically unsound, and that there is nothing to be gained from students doing the same things as every other graphic design student in the country. The industry reps I spoke to or heard were in agreement here: if you're coming for an interview, don't put a D&AD project in there. They want to see something more representative of you and your course.

So will courses start pulling out of D&AD? Mmm... I think this is one of those 'either we all jump together' things. No one wants to be the first (although having said that there were a few leading courses represented there who said they refuse to set D&AD briefs and don't go to New Blood). But I certainly think if there's another gathering like this there could be an agreement for a mass pull-out. But most concerned said their preference would be for some negotiated remodelling of the relationship - less preachy, less 'industry telling education what to do', less patronising and more supportive. Design educators feel hard done by at the moment in the UK, and it's no wonder. If D&AD were to remodel itself as a representative of academia to industry it might have a future but for now, I'd say the relationship is on seriously rocky ground.

Graphic design is dead. Long live... what?

2008-07-13T09:35:00.004+01:00

The New Views 2 conference held in London last week produced more light than heat - something far more design conferences would do well to aim for.
All credit to Teal Triggs (LCC), Laurene Vaughan (RMIT) and the organising committee for arranging it around conversations rather than presentations. (Russell Kerr agrees - this was an engaging format)

(picture from cluster 6 via Flickr)

I heard that some of the conversations erred on the argumentative side but, surprisingly, the one I was involved in, looking at the area of graphic design education, was remarkably consensual.

Despite the various focuses of each cluster, the subject of what we teach and why seemed to come up everywhere and when the final presentations were given at the end of the two days it was clear that there was one overwhelming conclusion: graphic design, as we know it, is a dead subject. As we recited at one point in the international language of Monty Python, it has ceased to exist. It has gone to meet its maker.

This does not mean we think graphic design itself is no more, but that as a university subject it makes little point to teach people about something so limited in conception. Almost everybody complained that students arrive with what they think GD is, which means any attempt to broaden their horizons meets with resistance. Meanwhile, as my talking point made clear, too many employers are recruiting our graduates into unpaid (or at best low-paid) jobs at the bottom of the food chain instead of strategic roles.

There are plenty of vocational qualifications out there that produce well-trained graphic designers. When the question was put forward "what is it that a degree, an academic qualification, offers that is different", nobody had an answer. We could say what we thought it should offer, but were frustrated that we didn't. There was also a strong rejection of the notion that universities should follow industry; instead we should be mapping out new territory through our research and involving our undergraduates in that so that when they left us they could go in to industry - and not just the design industry - and start making changes.

So differentiation is the key. Degrees shouldn't be technical qualifications with a bit more writing, and an honours year (or even a Masters year) should not simply be an opportunity to make your portfolio fatter. There has to be a difference.

Having agreed that, the next question was "what do we teach" and there was a struggle to move away from the desire to list core competencies. Instead we tried to imagine what somebody graduating in 2028 would need to be able to do, not just as a designer, but as a person.
We came up with an impressive list which, when I get hold of one of the photos that was taken will post here. What was impressive was not its comprehensiveness but the fact that when we looked at it the word 'design' wasn't there and it very closely matched the description that the UK Quality Assurance Agency already has of what a generic 'graduate' should be. As a few of us Brits lamented, if only people running courses would actually read those, things would be miles better.

We had been looking for a paradigm shift and this was it: we currently see design education as teaching people to design. Instead we want to teach people through design.

So we believe that graduates need to be politically and socially engaged. You'll never achieve that teaching Photoshop and yet this is what we fool ourselves in to thinking and claiming. Instead we shift approach and teach students about the world in which they are living, using design as the tool to do that and allowing them to demonstrate what they have learned through design. Learning Photoshop then becomes a skill that is picked up to show understanding of the world, not because it is a skill in itself. This moves us away from training designers to educating graduates. They can still design, but what they are designing is a model of the world, a worldview if you like, rather than (god help us) a double page spread and a web site.

There's no point in teaching people to design web sites, magazine layouts and so on - certainly not at university. Instead there's an urgent need for graduates who can identify problems and design solutons to them, and these go way beyond the narrow concept of 'graphic design' - graphic designers can't tackle crime, for example unless you think a nice leaflet will do that. But as 'Design Against Crime' has shown, designers can. Losing the word 'graphic' opens up so many possibilities it's hard to understand why anyone would resist.

This philosophical difference between a degree and other qualifications is one that I think everybody at the conference with one or two exceptions subscribed to. So the next stage was "how do we do this?"
The conference was attended by over a hundred designers - practitioners and academics - from all over the world. In my group we had representatives from the US, New Zealand, Australia, the UK (including England, Wales and Scotland), Qatar, Turkey and a few others I forget. We also had people who were at the beginning of their careers, students (as delegates and as observers recording the proceedings), those in the middle of their working lives and those approaching or even past retirement. To get so much agreement considering this range of people was amazing but as I pointed out to Teal and others, the danger with conferences like this is that you get comfortable thinking "Wow, I'm not the only one who thinks like this" but then you get back home and find that there, you are. Most people I spoke to knew that even though the conference had a large claim to legitimacy, that it was a gathering of experts and leading thinkers in the discipline, that they would arrive home and be told by colleagues that the future lies in not changing a thing. Yet the clear message coming from every country represented there was: change or die. In the US and Turkey, delegates warned, the rise of private universities offering narrow vocational qualifications is sapping students who simply want to fit in to a junior and well-defined role. This leaves the students who want to think and explore a discipline, but they are simply being given exactly the same courses except over a longer time and for more money. If we don't offer something different we'll lost them to other subjects.

(Interestingly, when I said I wondered why we still insist on taking students who study art at school, then braced myself for the reaction, others agreed and two delegates said they'd already stopped looking at portfolios and instead made offers based on school grades. As a result they'd started recruiting students who had studied languages, sciences and more with no fall in standards and often better results. Although it's something of a stereotype there was agreement that the danger of insisting students took art at school is that we attract people who think that's all you need to do, or that our subject is easy. What these approaches seemed to do was filter out those who were good at painting and drawing but didn't read or think or write critically. Design's future lies in people like this, not people who have nice portfolios demonstrating skills in different mark-making media).

So lonely though it may be at the front of the pack, we need to keep going and for this we need someone to help us keep the pace. And that's where networking comes in. We were determined for this not to be another conference where we collect business cards and then put them somewhere 'safe' on our return. I offered to look in to making a networking bid to the AHRC to get us back together soon, and there was an offer from Qatar to do something similar.

We also talked about an Open Source model, that instead of prescribing a curriculum as industry is attempting to, we agree on an international set of principles with our list as a starting point, and that individual institutions decide how they are going to get there. AS we develop modules or projects we share them with others so they can use them or adapt them and share them back. This could even be done by students who could build their own programme by matching intended outcomes ("understanding of ecological impacts" to give a deliberately broad example) and find a project brief from the library that they adapt to their circumstances. There would even be room for collaboration between students in different countries.

So we're hoping to set up a web site that will allow the conversation to carry on, and to begin collecting ideas for this library of open source materials.

We all agreed, I think, that this is not the sort of change that should happen slowly - we haven't got time. To misquote Terry Pratchett, if you drag this sort of change out people resist. If you do it quickly you just move from one state of normal to another. Graphic design hasn't got 20 years. It has to change now, and degree-level design education needs to define itself so that it offers something to the world beyond simply churning out people who can make a leaflet selling crap nobody wants.

My MA thesis Wordled...

2008-07-08T18:29:00.001+01:00

This is rather nice. Wordle is a web tool that takes a bunch of text and converts it in to something akin to a tag cloud, with word size based on the frequency they occur.

Here's my 2001 MA thesis on polysemy in advertising:

Click on the thumbnail to try it out yourself, and take a look at these created from the subtitles for various episodes of Doctor Who.

Rituals of Violence

2008-06-25T13:50:00.001+01:00

As a prelude to a radio programme on the rituals of violence, Laurie Taylor writes about his memories of following my own football team, York City. The last line is a great image...

I’ve supported York City ever since I took up my lecturing job at the university in the late sixties. There have been a few magical moments over the years since then – a 3-0 win over Manchester United at Old Trafford in the 1995-6 League Cup – but most weeks the fans have to dine on pretty thin gruel.

Like other supporters of lesser teams, though, they keep themselves going by telling jokes about their own team and its relative lack of success. They’ll talk about the time the new and much criticized striker finally earned a corner and the entire team did a lap of honour. And they’re bound to come up with the story of these two York fans fighting each other on the terrace. A policeman jumps over the barrier to separate them and says ‘Why are you two fighting. You’re on the same side.’ And then the fellow who started it all points to his protagonist and says ‘It’s not my fault. It’s his. He tried to shove a season ticket in my pocket.’

At some matches the only thing that enlivened the proceedings was the prospect of a little hooliganism. Even though visiting teams rarely brought more than a couple of hundred fans with them, these were routinely segregated from York supporters by a line of constables.

All was usually relatively quiet for the first half-hour of the match. Nothing much more than the routine chanting of insults between the two groups of fan. But then, after a particularly nasty foul, or a dramatic goal-mouth incident, matters would escalate and fans from each side would attempt to breach the police line, waving their fists in the air and shoving and pushing.

From close-up, it might have been disturbing but viewed from the other end of the pitch, it had a deliciously ritual quality. Half-a-dozen fans who were braver than the rest would shove against the police line, while their rivals would shove back the other way. And so it went on with neither side striking a blow until one fan – there seemed an element of arbitrariness about this – was picked on by the police and then, to cheers and chants all round, escorted along the touchline and out of the ground.

In the old days what added even more to the ritual quality of the hooliganism was that at half-time away supporters were often allowed through the police line so they could join home supporters in the queue at the tea stall.

A room with a view

2008-06-25T13:43:00.001+01:00

Tayport sunset - 01, originally uploaded by artistry.

I hadn't planned on moving house but, after two years in my flat and just as I finally got round to unpacking the last box, my landlady decided she wanted to move back in and so I was out on my ear.
She gave me three months' notice, though, but as I hate the whole process of moving I decided to get looking.

The first few flats I saw were pretty awful and then this one came up, right on the harbour. I snapped it up and even though I'm still lacking in furniture (a bed would be nice) the view from the front window is more than paying for itself - this photo is one of a number I took recently. At the height of summer it doesn't get dark here until after 11pm and this is a month before midsummer's night.

I also have some resident swans who come by every now and then.

A great find - knowing my luck the landlady will sell it before I've even put the bed together...

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The Abridged Script | The Editing Room

2008-06-20T00:06:00.001+01:00

This abridged script of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pretty much sums up my feelings about the film:

HARRISON gets away, only to find himself in the middle of a NUCLEAR TEST SITE that is apparently located within walking distance of AREA 51.

HARRISON FORD

Holy shit, a nuclear bomb! I’ll hide in this lead-lined fridge to protect myself from the radiation that will permeate the area shortly after the ten-million degree heat generated by the blast is done obliterating every single object in a 5 mile radius!

Somehow, this WORKS. HARRISON FORD emerges from the fridge with his face covered in black soot, holding a sign that reads ‘ouch.’

Read in full, especially the bit where

SHIA LEBEOUF flies up into the FUCKING JUNGLE and swings like FUCKING TARZAN along the FUCKING VINES with a FUCKING ARMY of CGI FUCKING MONKEYS. That actually FUCKING HAPPENS.

To hell via Chicago

2008-06-10T23:35:00.001+01:00

I just got back from a great conference in Dallas organised by the chaps on the Visual Communications programme at the University of North Texas. I'll write more about that when my brain catches up with me - suffice to say I really enjoyed it and met some fantastic people.

But I thought I should share the hellish experience I had on the way back. I wrote this at Edinburgh Airport and haven't had a chance to edit it - it was one of those 'get it out of my head in one go' things...
My thanks to American Airlines for making my journey so, erm, eventful.

I arrived at Dallas Fort Worth airport well before time on Sunday for the flight to Edinburgh via Chicago and Heathrow. When I got there I saw the flight was delayed by an hour (thunderstorms in Chicago - the news was full of floods in Louisiana and other states, quite bad), but as this was the flight to Heathrow anyway it didn't matter. The poor buggers going to Brussels were given a choice: go to Chicago and hope, go to Chicago and stay over, or stay in Dallas.
For me it was just a case of getting to Chicago and waiting till they'd refuelled.
So the flight to Chicago is packed, mainly with domestic flyers. I'm sat next to a young lad who clearly hasn't flown before as he asks me all sorts of questions, like I'm the Ancient Mariner or something. He's going to Jordan.

As the flight lands in Chicago, the pilot tells those of us going to Heathrow that we need to go to gate L8 and get a plane from there instead. So a few of us confirm what we've heard and, not knowing what time it's going (the information screen just, very helpfully, says 'on time') we all leg it to L8 which is about half a mile away in the same terminal. You have to go through all the shops and things and step over people sitting down on the floor using their laptops or calling on their phones.
Eventually I get there and discover the flight to Heathrow isn't going until 6pm, so an hour to kill. So I kill it - having gone to the desk to check this is the right flight. It is.

Come 6pm the flight just starts to board and as the guy at Dallas helpfully moved me forwards in the plane I'm one of the last groups to be called forward. I give the woman my boarding pass, she swipes it and... a red light flashes.
"You're not on this flight you need to be on AA86" she says. That's the flight I was on before, the one they told us to change. She shouts to another woman "is AA86 gone?" They're still boarding, apparently. "You'd better run".

So I run. It's half a mile at least and everyone's really slow and really fat and I've got my laptop bag on and my leg's sore from a cramp that morning, and it's hot hot hot.
I don't think I'm going to make it but I run to the desk and see the words 'Heathrow boarding" and throw myself in front of them, breathless. "Calm down sir, you're fine" says one of the staff there. I don't feel fine, I tell her, through gasps.

She scans my pass and checks me in and I go to join everybody else in the departure lounge. I don't see any of the other people from the earlier flight and I wonder what happened to them.
There's another flight letting people on and an attendant goes up to the girl and says 'all done, let's go' and they both step on to the plane and I watch the bridge retract, leaving the plane alone on the tarmac. By now I'm beginning to catch my breath and I look around and see another passenger looking at the screen I'd seen earlier. "7.45" she says and I assume this is when my flight is going, which is too late for my connection to Edinburgh. So I get up to go to the desk to check I can make a later flight at Heathrow and I see the words "Heathrow: Boarded". I look back to the window and I realise: that's my fucking plane! And it's going!

There are two passengers talking to a lone attendant at the desk and a religious-looking guy behind him. I decide not to be British and interrupt: "Excuse me, that's my flight! I'm not in it!" I'm staying calm inwardly but screaming like a madman externally.
"Didn't you hear the call?" she says. There was no call, I say. I was waiting for the call. In Britain if you check in but don't get on the flight they shout your name from the rooftops. "I can't get you on the flight, sir, there's nothing I can do."
"But my bag's on there," I say, at which point she thinks. The thing that surprises me about the US and Chicago in particular: the security is tight. At DFW I had to go through a body scanner that puffed compressed air at me and made some grinding noises, which interestingly had no one staffing it, so I suspect it was just some bicycle pumps and an old washing machine.
And there are no calls. At Chicago the only calls I heard were that members of the military service were welcome in the smoking area (which is public, so it's hardly a perk) and that the current threat level is amber. And I think that's what's got her concerned so I press the issue: "How can the plane leave with my bag on it? Surely that's a security risk?" One thing I know after Lockerbie is that they introduced rules that say baggage that's checked in by a passenger can't go if the passenger isn't on the plane. Which is one of the reasons they make all those calls for "Passenger X" to get out of the bar or the duty free shop and get to the gate before they have to go through all the bags to get theirs off.
This hadn't happened here, and they hadn't even done a head count: 500 passengers checked in, only 499 on the plane equals, as Dickens might have said, a might cock up.

She took my name and disappeared for a minute, then came back with a man. "You'll have to get the bridge back out there" she told him and he rushed me to the door. I stopped to gather my stuff, dropping bits everywhere.
Now you know that scene in Star Wars where Luke and Leia are running from Stormtroopers and they come to a retracted bridge? Luke nearly falls in but Leia pulls him back.
Well this was very nearly what happened as I ran after the little fat man but didn't notice that he sidestepped into a control booth while I clattered towards the open door leading to the tarmac. He started moving the bridge while I steadied myself. Eventually it hit the plane and he, get this, *knocked* on the door! Like he was just popping round for a cup of sugar. God knows what they were thinking inside but after a few seconds the door opened and I fell inside, completely unable to speak, dropping things everywhere. The attendants smiled at me and asked for my boarding pass - but I'd lost it! I only had the ones for the first and last leg of the journey, not this one! "I'm in seat 23H" I said, remembering it from the ticket.
"I trust you" said the head woman - you trust me? It's bloody amber alert out there and you TRUST me??
Suits me, I thought, and went to get to my seat, still dropping then picking things up.

I get to my seat and I'm sat next to a young woman who smiles at me like "bugger I thought I was going to be sitting on my own" but then an attendant comes up to me and says "that row's free" and points to the back row in the front cabin, lots of lovely seats all unoccupied except for one American woman who spreads herself over three of them and says "they're mine" while miming sleep. Fine, I think, and sit down, still sweating from the half mile jog.
After this the flight seems to go smoothly except there's a screaming baby up the front and across the aisle from me there are four American lads who don't know the meaning of the words 'quiet whisper' who talk and laugh all the way through the flight. The woman next to me knows them (turns out she's their teacher) and tells them twice to be quiet so others can sleep, which they are for about five minutes. At about 4am UK time I tell them to shut up too and that works for about three minutes. Bastards.

The flight makes up time and we land an hour late. I notice my connection to Edinburgh is actually half an hour later than I thought so I have time to make it. I rush off the plane to get the bus to Terminal 5 (third visit now, still don't see what the fuss is about) and then through security, which is held up, as last time, by a lack of trays to put stuff in. Unlike last time I don't have to hold a random baby while his mother folds up the push chair, but I do worry about the large old American lady who's puffing away behind me while telling the staff she can't go through the metal detector because she has a pacemaker.
I get through all that and rush to the gate... and the plane's delayed anyway. Of course.

On the flight to Edinburgh I find I'm sat next to a compulsive throat clearer. But not just a normal bit of throat clearance - he makes a meal of it (well, not quite literally) getting a good run-up to it. Every few minutes. For the full 55 minutes of the journey plus the 20 minutes sitting on the tarmac. But at least I made my flight - I'm going to be on time getting back home despite everything!

The flight lands (during the flight the staff try to wheel the breakfast trolley up the aisle while the plane's still ascending and all the meals slide out on to the floor, but as I got mine I don't chalk that up as a personal event in teh catalogue of disasters) and we all go to belt 6 to get our bags. Now I remember joking with the guy at DFW as my bag disappeared behind him. "Will it get transferred all the way to Edinburgh?" I asked him. "It should" he said, "but this is an airline". I watched it go off fearing I'd never see it again and wondering if I'd been insured for the trip.
Belt 6 goes round and bags appear. Last time I did this the first thing that appeared was a suitcase handle. Just the handle, with the airline luggage tag attached to it. No suitcase. Poor bugger, I thought and, judging from everyone else's faces they were thinking the same too.

The belt went round. More bags. More bags. Then not so many bags. Then just a couple. Then more bags! But this was the next flight. Eventually I gave in and went to the baggage office.
"Was there any problem with the flight?" the guy asked me. "Any delays?" I wanted to tell him the full story but I thought it might get in the way of any film rights I could exploit, so I just murmured something about delays in Chicago. He typed something in to his computer. "It's on the next flight" he said, "should be here at 12.30. Do you want us to send it on?" When he learned where I lived he said it wouldn't arrive with me till tomorrow so I said I'd wait the 90 minutes. "You sure?" he said. "Oh yes" I said and then I went to have a little cry but couldn't. So I sat down with a cup of tea (a real one! Yes!) and typed this.
I'm going to be writing a brief letter to American Airlines soon to suggest that their boarding procedures might need a little bit of tightening up. And maybe a few useful announcements in the airport instead of telling us we're good to smoke if we're soldiers or that we need to keep our baggage with us at all times. I'm beginning to think I learned that particular lesson.

Back to the 'one room schoolhouse'

2008-05-26T10:20:00.001+01:00

David armano reports on a talk given by John Seeley Brown (JSB) at ID's Strategy 08 Conference in Chicago.

JSB's talk was aimed out how we are learning and being educated and how much change is happening in this area. His framing of the subject matter was to think about education as an institution which needed to be re-built from the ground up. In essance, his call was to re-define what an actual instutuiton is—from something which is controlled and overly structured to something that still has shape but is more flexible and pliable.

But for me—John's talk came down to one statement he made.

'We are going back to the one room school house'

I believe JSB was pointing out the irony of what's happening with how we learn. In the one room school house, the teacher acted as a guide and students learned from each other. The setting was obviously intimate because it was small and the students all knew each other. I'm taking a few liberties with his metaphor, but the one room school house is a really interesting way to look at things. JSB called out that there is a renaissance in 'tinkering', a soft skill which in the past has been marginalized, but is being taken seriously as a way people learn. Some would call this learning by doing. How do you think I learned what I have about 'social media'?

Lastly and possibly most importantly JSB discussed a shift from instruction based learning to 'interest-driven participation'. While he did not define this in depth, I believe that it reflects other shifts that are happening in all types of fields. Connected and empowered individuals are no longer content to sit back and be lectured to. Information has been set free. Monologues have been replaced by conversations and increasingly we learn by doing—from watching what our peers do, from using what's been made into open source. So the classroom got a lot smaller—and we're back to influencing each other directly.

This interests me because it describes a model I think we're trying to move towards in my university, where the idea of disciplines gives way to the idea of personal and developing interests. The idea that a student wanting to solve a problem will move from one area to another, acquiring skills and knowledge (or 'buying them in') opens up all sorts of possibilities that make the future of design look bright.
Of course there will always be those who decide they are a certain type of designer (say, graphic or product) and follow the traditional path.

One of the problems with this model is that probably the only way to accommodate both approaches, the 'learning for learning's sake' and the 'learning for a defined job' (for want of better, less value-laden phrases), is to increase modularisation. The irony is that flexibility comes from a clearer structure. Modularisation has not been popular in academia because it is seen as a management imposition and goes against the romantic idea of the accumulation of knowledge over time.

I think, however, that a lot of the things that many academics claim to despise (learning outcomes, assessment, modules and even, in some cases, teaching) are despised because they're not done very well.

My degree, with the Open University, was pretty much the ideal of the model described above - one year I was studying education, the next Beethoven, that was followed up with Pure and Applied Maths then Shakespeare. The end result - a degree that opened up my eyes to all sorts of things because I linked everything together. What did it qualify me to do? To learn.

When done right, structure permits the most flexible of outcomes - look at cathedrals, all built to the same basic layout but each unique. Or what about trellises you get from a garden centre? Buy six, each identical, and watch your plants grow. No conformity there. Or, if you want to get really fundamental, look at DNA...

I'm going to disagree with David's summing up, though - or rather, the phrase he uses rather than what I think he means. It may seem like a semantic point but I don't believe in learning by doing. I believe in learning through doing. The former implies that repeating something you're shown will lead to understanding, but it won't - it just leads to repeating (think learning your times tables at school; you may be able to tell me what 10 x 13 is off the top of your head but can you tell me what 2.342 x 11.456 is? Learning by doing/repeating doesn't teach you how to multiply, it teaches you to recite).
Learning through doing implies demonstrating what you've learnt through what you produce, but the learning is not the act of production.

Okay, I know that makes little sense but that's the trouble with semantic arguments!

(Via Logic+Emotion.)

The Post-American World

2008-05-03T11:05:00.001+01:00

Bruce Nussbaum reviewing The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria.:

When the US was the overwhelming power, everyone else had to learn American culture. The big change in the 21st century is now the US has to learn everyone else's culture. It needs to share power, build coalitions, create legitimacy, in order to lead and prosper. It has to stop being the Voice of Authority and learn to Curate a Global Conversation--or many of them.

(Via BusinessWeek Online - NussbaumOnDesign.)

Can't be arsed to be rational

2008-04-26T22:09:00.001+01:00

Michael Lewis, Professor of Art at Williams College claims in the Wall Street Journal that

It is often said that great achievement requires in one's formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others.

Sometimes you want to give a really reasoned and rational response to things like this.

And sometimes you just want to say "bollocks".

It's funny how the only people that say these things are the people whose jobs and reputations depend on it being true...

Friends

2008-04-14T06:46:00.001+01:00

(Via Geek and Poke.)

Creativity

2008-04-13T21:00:00.001+01:00

In New Paltz, New York last week I gave a presentation to senior students there on the Master of Design programme at the University of Dundee. One of the core philosophies of the course is its concern with 'design for a changing world'.

I illustrated this by showing a satellite image of the campus, courtesy of Google Earth, showing the proximity of the University's life sciences building to my own office in the College of Art and Design.
On the image I placed two labels, one saying 'Anti-cancer gene discovered here', the other saying 'my office'.

The point I was trying to make was that when it comes to the word 'creative', surely it's the people who work on cures for cancer, among other things, who are engaged in true creativity? Designing logos and leaflets doesn't really compare at all.

It was interesting to note the vigourous nodding of heads at this. I felt like someone explaining this new thing called fire to a group of people bathed in electric light.

At the start of the academic year I asked my new undergrad students to choose a term from a grid I presented on the screen - terms such as 'ageing', 'poverty', 'ethics', and 'disability' - and consider how their own disciplines were affected, or could affect, that particular area.
After a few minutes I asked what people had written.

"What do you study?" I asked one.
"Graphic Design".
"And what did you choose from the grid?"
"Disability"
"So how can graphic design intersect with disability?"
"Well graphic designers can design the signs that go on toilet doors so you know which one is for the disabled".

Now it's easy to laugh at that, and to dismiss the student, but remember this is someone starting out and, to be honest, that's how graphic design represents itself. In the last lecture of the year I ask students to return to that exercise and ask themselves if their ideas have changed - if they have, I've done my job properly.

To a lot of people,'creativity' and 'creative thinking' means exactly what that student said: coming up with good-looking ways to communicate a fact. You're disabled, you want to know which toilet is for you, here you go.

What I think we're trying to do in Dundee (and I'm speaking entirely for myself here) is to change that idea: creativity and creative thinking are about changing attitudes to disability, not designing ways to describe it; about designing the world in such a way that a disability is simply a physical condition, not a way of life or an obstacle.

Can graphic design do that? That's an interesting question - one that makes it ripe for that type of study. The Masters programme is more interested in the question-asking than the answering (although if the questions are answered, that's great of course) and this makes it an exciting course to work on.
Being in Dundee means we're well-placed to interact and work with other disciplines: medicine, law, economics, education, computing, engineering. And in doing so we've in part got rid of the one thing that stops interdisciplinarity happening: disciplines.
So although we occasionally describe a Masters student by the discipline they studied at undergraduate level (graphic designer, textile designer, architect, weaver etc) we don't ask them to identify a problem and say "How can I, as a graphic designer, tackle this?" We ask them to say "How can we, as designers, help tackle this?"
Because designers shouldn't be constrained by disciplinary boundaries, they shouldn't work alone, and they shouldn't claim to know better than anyone else.

Personally I think it's a shame this level of thinking has to wait till Masters, but until the creative disciplines start being creative about their own practice, I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

When I was a child I used to be taken to Mass and week after week read the words on the order of service. The longest of sections was the Credo ("I believe"). It wasn't until I was about 13 or so I realised this thing actually consisted of words and sentences, rather than just sounds (Vatican II really not working in my case), and I began to wonder if I actually did believe in these things at all. When I started teaching design I found colleagues telling me how they taught and assessed. Unlike them I'd never gone through 'art school' and so my first reaction was to think "why on earth do you do it like that?" They were reciting the credo, enacting the rituals, despite the fact that the world had moved on and it was clear that few of the methods worked anymore (if they ever did).

While at New Paltz I met the inspirational head of the print-making course. He was lamenting the burden of tradition within his own discipline. I asked him if he knew anything of the English Reformation. At the time, crowds of people went through the medieval churches, cathedrals and abbeys ripping out and smashing statues, icons, stained glass and anything that smelt of Popery. It is widely held to be one of the biggest acts of cultural vandalism the world has seen, and something that set it aside from the more general reformation happening on the continent. Yet it also meant that as far as English crafts were concerned, everything had to start again - there were no models to work from, no statues to copy or paintings to emulate.
This, in part (and until European methods of teaching art and craft invaded our shores) explains why English craft, thought and science developed the way they did. Unburdened by tradition, without the constraints of paying deference to all that had come before, the English Reformation, for all its evils (and there were many) paved the way for innovations we take for granted.

(An historian of the period would no doubt go ashen faced at my summation here but, hey, I'm being 'creative'!)

Design education needs that reformation, a bold sweeping away of tradition. It needs to stop being so disciplined and learn to embrace the mess of fuzzy logic, intuition and sheer creativity that comes from letting go of the past. Whatever was true of design in the 19th and 20th centuries is no longer so true today. We are no longer the 'creative disciplines' because we like tradition too much, and see skills as rituals rather than a grammar - like people intoning a Mass without understanding the meaning of the words they're saying. Or teaching in a certain way without wondering if it does more harm than good.

We can't wait for a Martin Luther or Henry VIII to turn up and change things. We can do better.
Subject area aside there is one thing that separates the 'creative disciplines' from the truly creative disciplines: they eat their own young. By which I mean they identify their best students and they keep them. They continue teaching them, they let them do research, they show them how to teach. And then they let them loose on students and start it all over again.
In design, we identify our best students, spend ages on them so they can win an award or two, help them get jobs at prestigious firms and then either get them in every so often to give guest talks and praise us (after all, we must be good cos look what happened to them) or we wait thirty years until they're burnt out and then ask them to come and teach when they repeat the rituals they went through (after all, they must be good cos, etc etc).

This myth, that only practitioners can teach, has to be ended.
Our Martin Luther is sitting in our courses right now. And there's more than one...

Choosing water suppliers - when is a service not a service?

2008-04-01T09:33:00.001+01:00

Talking of service design, the news this morning carried a story saying that businesses in the UK are now able to choose their water suppliers.

The presenter on the radio asked the question that crossed my mind: if it's the same pipe, and the same water as before, how can you change 'suppliers'.
The answer was that you're not paying for product, you're paying for the service.

I had a bit of trouble understanding this. In fact I've been wondering about this ever since you could change gas and electricity suppliers. My gas comes down the same pipe as my next door neighbour's gas. But he's with British Gas and I'm with E.On. Same with the electricity.

My tiny little brain assumes that when I use a kiloWatt of electricity, my supplier puts a kiloWatt into a big vat of energy, and when my neighbour uses two kiloWatts, his supplier puts that amount in the vat. I may get some of the energy his supplier has put in, but I pay my supplier not his.

What the guy this morning was saying is what we're really paying for is not the stuff in the vat, it's the service that goes with it. In the case of water this would be cleaning the water (a national standard meaning cheaper doesn't mean worse quality but better efficiency), fixing the pipe outside my home if it bursts, and sending me a bill. If they can do these things as well as (or better than) the competitors for a lower price, I win. If not, I change 'supplier'.

I think I'm beginning to work this out. The problem is, why do we call them 'suppliers' at all? There must be a better name because at the moment if my water turns brown my 'supplier' can easily claim it's nothing to do with them, because it's my neighbour's pipe that's broken, and they don't 'supply' him. 'Service provider' is a slightly better term.

This has other ramifications. Last night I rang BA to change the booking from my cancelled flight to the one before. I was told I had to go through the travel agent I'd booked with as until I started my journey, my contract was with them, not BA. This is despite the fact that a) I bought a seat on a BA plane, b) BA cancelled the flight, c) I only found out it was cancelled by good fortune, d) the travel agent was shut and e) it made no sense whatsoever.

What was the service here? And who was the 'supplier'?
According to BA the service is the booking, and the supplier is the agent.
But to me, the service is a flight, and the supplier is BA.

Dropclock

2008-03-31T23:04:00.001+01:00

If you love Helvetica this much, here's a screensaver for you...

New York visit

2008-03-30T22:19:00.001+01:00

Just a quick update to say I'll be visiting Pratt in New York City on 7 April and State University of New York at New Paltz on 8 and 9 April, when (among other things) I'm hoping to speak to final year design students about Masters study here at Dundee.

Percentage wars

2008-03-30T13:00:00.001+01:00

Anna Pickard in The Observer:

Marvellously, The Apprentice brings with it a welcome return of moronic businessisms, as candidates trot out trite examples of things that sound fine in brightly coloured motivational books, but idiotic when tumbling out of mouths.

A favourite is the search for the highest percentage. You may have thought that the highest percentage would be 100, but that would be naive and non-managerial.

For some time, it has not been enough to give 100 per cent effort. To impress, nothing less than 110 per cent is necessary. Or 150 per cent. Or 200 per cent. Percentage wars have broken out and 1,000 per cent is bandied about.

At this point, the notion of percentage flies out of the window and the contestants find themselves stuck in a 'who can think of the biggest number' competition. These are, apparently, some of the best new business minds in the country. Which terrifies me 38,476 per cent.

Time for designers to take responsibility for Terminal 5?

2008-03-29T09:17:00.001Z

When Heathrow Airport's terminal 5 opened it was hailed as a marvel of engineering and design. Now that it's all descending in to disaster, everyone seems to be blaming British Airways and the British Airport Authority. Why not the designers?

Take a look at this excerpt from The Guardian:

The overnight BA inquest looked at how luggage was loaded on and off the airplanes - one of the biggest failures in Thursday's fiasco.

According to airport sources, the baggage hold-ups were caused by handling teams being in the wrong place to pick up checked-in bags, which had been delivered down chutes from the main conveyor belts.

If those bags are not picked up and loaded on to planes, the sources added, the chutes become full and the conveyor belt overloads.

If this had been a success you could guarantee that someone somewhere would be hailing the miracle of service design, the technical feat of automated luggage sorting systems and, ooh, doesn't the ceiling look lovely too?
But now it's all going pear shaped the role of designers in the mess is being ignored.

Design can't be selective. It can't crow about its successes and then vanish in to the night when it falls apart.
No doubt in 50 years time it will crop up in lectures as an example of 'when design goes wrong' but that's too late. It needs to be looked at now as a case study for current designers to learn from.

Update

Having just had my flight from Edinburgh to Heathrow cancelled, the first leg of my trip to New York, I'm not best pleased with this story.

Jeff Howard says it's system design at fault, not service design and he's technically right, but it's really just semantics - I don't separate systems from services and I'm not convinced you can. Indeed that's a problem we encounter when trying to teach service design - people come up with great ideas for services but ignore the back-end stuff that makes it worse. I suspect selling service design is rife with the same problem.

The 'service' here is checking in your bags. The system supports the service and it's all part of one big whole.

But Jeff's right to point out that the problem is exactly the back-end aspect of the service. Seeing the images of all those cases piled up makes you realise that no matter how shiny the terminal building, or how long the conveyor belts, at some point your bag is going to be tossed on top of hundreds of others by guys in overalls.