Light Show - recursive animation

Here's a short animation I produced over Christmas that uses recursive patterns to produce an interesting effect.

The music's "Decisions, Decisions", something I wrote around 1992.

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Eye Forum on Design and Education

I will be one of the panellists at the third Eye Forum being held at London College of Communication on 22 January.

If you've got a question on the topic you can email it to the magazine or contribute from the floor on the night.

If you're coming along, let me know!

Eye Forum no. 3: ‘Design and education’

The third Eye Forum promises to be the best yet, so we hope you can come. The Forum takes place at the London College of Communication (LCC) on Tuesday 22 January at 6.30pm. Please come along to debate some of the ‘burning issues’ in design education, together with broader issues such as recruitment, lifelong learning, design literacy and the role of self-taught designers. As before, after the main event in the lecture theatre, there will be drinks, canapés and plenty of time to network and socialise.

There’s plenty to talk about, so we are again inviting delegates to submit questions – in the manner of the BBC’s long-running TV show Question Time – which can be short or long, plain or nuanced, serious, heartfelt, flippant or funny. And this time, I'd like to encourage delegates to read their questions from the floor. The chair will open up each question to the audience, so that everyone is free to join the debate, and to challenge or develop points made by the panel.

Please get involved.
To submit your question(s), email eye.freelance@haymarket.com by 7 January 2007, or add them to this blog.

Here are some of the ‘burning issues’ already suggested for the Forum:
* Standards: is everyone speaking the same language?
* Do educators select students on their mark-making ability – at the expense of communication?
* Do employers regard new talent as a renewable source of cheap labour?
* Is design art? Is it time to separate the two?
* Is it important to have a visually literate nation (in a post-literary world)?

Our distinguished, expert panel will comprise:

• Jonathan Baldwin (design historian and lecturer, University of Dundee),


• Jamie Hobson (head of marketing and admissions, London College of Communication).


• Lesley Morris, (Design Council),


• Tim Molloy, (head of design, Science Museum)


• Simon Sankarayya (art director, AllofUs)


• The chair will be Alan Livingston (principal, Falmouth College of Arts)

Please come along to join us for ‘burning issues’ and warming drinks on a cold night - Tuesday 22 January 2008.

To book your place, email clare.mcnulty@haymarket.com, call 020 8267 4804, or go online Tickets cost £30 (£25 students) including wine and canapés.

Be seeing you

John L. Walters, editor, Eye

The sponsors for this Forum are Represent, the bespoke recruitment agency and Quark.

"Do let me know if Mr. V. Williams has an important premiere in the future as this findability might allow us to reconsider"

There's a great (and somewhat worrying) article over at The Guardian about a forthcoming documentary on one of my favourite composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams:

One of television's most imaginative film-makers has condemned Mark Thompson's leadership of the BBC as a 'catastrophe' and accused the corporation of undermining its worldwide reputation by insulting the intelligence of viewers.

Tony Palmer, who has won more than 40 awards including Baftas, Emmys and, uniquely, the Prix Italia twice, criticised the director-general after the BBC turned down a documentary of his. The film, about English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, has been produced by Five instead.

Palmer said he received an extraordinary rejection letter from a BBC commissioning editor explaining that, 'having looked at our own activity via the lens of find, play & share', it had been decided the film did not fit with 'the new vision for [BBC] Vision'.

Bizarrely, Palmer said, the letter concluded: 'But good luck with the project, and do let me know if Mr. V. Williams has an important premiere in the future as this findability might allow us to reconsider.' Vaughan Williams died in 1958.

It's worth pointing out that Palmer is refusing to show the letter to anyone or name its author, and the BBC claims ignorance (and that it is already making a documentary on Vaughan Williams). If it's true, though, it's very sad in so many ways, as it suggests that there are people acting as gatekeepers at the BBC who have no knowledge of British culture, and that what Private Eye refers to as 'Birtspeak' is alive and well. 'Findability'? What the hell's that?

However, The Guardian has a nerve. A later paragraph in the article says "Vaughan Williams, whose best known symphonies include The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on Greensleeves"... Duh. RVW wrote nine symphonies and not one of them was called The Lark Ascending or Fantasia on Greensleeves. They are works for orchestra (the former for violin and orchestra), but most definitely not symphonies.

Fools.

The good news is the 2.5 hour documentary did get made and will be shown on Channel 5 (the former soft porn channel, no less) on New Year's Day. Can't wait.

Intersections podcasts available

InterSections podcasts are starting to appear - essential listening for anyone interested in the future of design.

The conference was a gathering of hundreds of designers and design users to talk about how the different disciplines are breaking down traditional barriers and contributing meaningful solutions to real problems.

The first two are from Tim Brown of IDEO and Richard Seymour of Seymour Powell.

Click this link to subscribe in iTunes.

24 - lost pilot from 1994

If you ever used AOL back in the 90s (I was a Compuserv user - same sort of thing) this video will bring back painful memories of not being able to use the phone and the internet at the same time, life before the world wide web, hourly charges, annoying 'friendly' voices and 'channels'.

Campbell on Branding and Innovation: Oh?! Design school? That's cool!

A student on the Institute of Design's Masters in Design Methods writes:

Many people still think of design in terms of creating logos (graphic), cars (industrial), or the good ol' haute couture (fashion). These all fall under the broad umbrella of big D Design, but for a marketing manager at a Fortune 500 to leave to work on what many envision is a degree in making logos and pantsuits doesn't really make sense to a lot of people. So to make sure they don't have a mental image of me appearing on Project Runway, I inevitably fill in the pause after 'That's cool!' with a five-minute explanation of what design-centered thinking, planning and strategy is, how that leads to innovative products, services, business models, and ultimately revenue to a company, and how it's the Future of Business, and that programs like ID are years ahead of mainstream business, fancy MBA programs and super narrowly-focused 'design as a trade' schools. Not surprisingly, I often end up boring people. In fact, I might have just lost some of you readers.

Therefore, I thought I'd try my hand at writing up a brief explanation of design in the context of the program I'm attending. A quick way to get the gist across when I tell someone what I'm currently up to. Here it goes:

Design is a strategic way of thinking that places the user at the center of all decisions, using an iterative approach to deliver on unmet needs that creates real value for users and thereby for the organization.
Does that work? Is it too light on conveying the power of design? Is it too vague? What do you think?

Forget the wall of fame. Design schools need a wall of shame for real inspiration.

This video of Bruce Nussbaum (from here) is interesting for several reasons, but it really strikes home with me for one in particular.

About a year ago I went to a teaching and learning event in Dundee which attracted colleagues from all over Scotland. The event was quite successful with people being quite imaginative about changing the way they teach design, and approach the subject.
But late in the afternoon the discussion turned to the environment in which we teach. It was suggested that the traditional art school, with its plaster cast statues everywhere, its portraits of famous designers and pictures of 'classic' designs, sent out completely the wrong message to students in the 21st century. Why not replace the sculptures with plasma screens showing what was going on that day, or showing video of design in action? The presenter went on with some pretty good ideas for turning design schools in to modern, energetic environments rather than fusty old museums to the 19th century way of doing things.

Somewhat predictably, the idea was shouted down pretty vociferously. A colleague from an august institution in a city that rhymes with 'has go' went quite pale at the suggestion. "Those statues are what tell a student they're entering a place of creativity" he said. "They're inspirational".
Really? I found them quite off-putting. Certainly I wouldn't walk in to some of the design schools I've visited and think "wow, this place is forward looking - this is the place for me to learn how to innovate and tread the cutting edge". Instead I'd think "blimey, I've walked through a time warp".

The equivalent of Nussbaum's swapping of the CEO's photos would be to rip down anything that spoke of the past without criticism, and replace it with images of the present. And not 'great' design - 'crap' design.
Get rid of the photo of the Bauhaus founders and their chairs and lamps. Get rid of the William Morris prints and furniture. Throw away the plaster cast sculptures and the Neville Brody posters.

Instead lets get photos of children learning in schools that haven't been updated since the 1960s, of people using cars that are creating smog, of kids slaving away in China to produce the textiles we design, of towns gridlocked by congestion, of factories blotting out the sun, of people waiting in villages for buses that never turn up, of individuals in wheelchairs who can't get into places they should be able to get into, of farms that have been rendered barren because the dye from the local denim factory has left a thick crust everywhere...

Those are are the questions we face as designers, the challenges. And through the door, on the courses, would be the answers, taught by people who are angry that the world is the way it is and determined to educate the people who will change it. Screw 'employability' if by that you mean entry level jobs just repeating the mistakes on that wall of shame. We shouldn't be happy if our students get jobs like that, we should be ashamed.

It's the only way to change the mindset of those who practice, teach and study design. Stop looking to the past and start looking to the present and the future.

It's too easy to get a degree in design

Richard Roty on Foucault's (inadvertent) influence on English departments:

"I think that the English departments have made it possible to have a career teaching English without caring much about literature or knowing much about literature but just producing rather trite, formulaic, politicized readings of this or that text."

Substitute 'design' for 'English' and I think you get a pretty good analysis of the problem facing design education generally:

I think design departments have made it possible to get a degree in design without caring much about the design process or knowing much about how design works or affects people, but just producing rather trite, formulaic, aesthetic things with an eye on entry level jobs and the odd D&AD award. A degree has to mean much more than that

Too much focus on 'making and displaying' means the world is full of technically competent artworkers or prototypers or craftspeople, but who don't understand the enormity - or potential - of the design process as a whole.

As I said elsewhere, making is to design what voting is to democracy - they're just tiny parts of big and complex processes, and just as democracy can exist without everyone voting, so design can happen without someone making something.
I'm not sure why design education is still stuck in the idea that a student should be assessed (or even allowed in) based on technical skills rather than thinking skills.

(Via Foucauldian Reflections.)