Design versus innovation

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

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?

Via hellojenuine

The ultimate Christmas present

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!

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

 

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

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

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: