But if I’m participating in cocoa based adrenaline sports my immediate concerns are nothing to do with design. I’m much too busy wondering if my heart rate will recover and my hands stop shaking before I touch heavy machinery. I’m not thinking about design, and neither are the people who pause on their way to the bus stop, admiring the confections in the window. They aren’t thinking about design when they look into the chiller cabinet, and decide whether to go for a mexican wrap over the BLT, and the couple who are sitting reading the papers near the door couldn’t care less about shadow gaps or mitred corners. As I sit there, everyone around me is immersed in the stuff of life – food, drink, conversation, reading, thought.

Even the owner of the Manna House, Drew, isn’t thinking about design. He’s mostly thinking about what to put into his new window display next, and that his turnover has risen substantially since he was able to display the beauty of what he makes, and since three more covers were created near the door. When With Kerlaff made three elements of new furniture for the bakery, I fretted about whether the back of the Cake Sofa that we made for the window has a consistent language with the other elements. But looking at people enjoying the food, the furniture has been bang on target: in second place, exactly where it should be.

I’m not pretending that design is not important, because it is, enormously. Good design can enrich our lives, and there is great skill and hard graft involved in making it work so well that people don’t even see it. But in championing good design, we should never confuse the design itself with those things it should be enriching, supporting. We shouldn’t confuse design with the sensation of eating chocolate, because there is no contest.

Image: Vacuum Cleaner ‘Fuck Off’ Logo Recall 

In terms of design strategy, the new stripped down Starbucks execution does make eminent sense. What was surprising was that it was out of step by a decade or more with other major global brands in the trend for reductivist logos as ubiquitous signature (you may have noticed the likes of Nike relying less on the old ‘swoosh’ and offering up heritage themed diffusion lines like Nike Sportswear, to get the hipsters back in tow).

The real design innovation is coming down the line (Digital Networks and Facebook tie-ins) and this little bit of
re-engineering just clears the path for that.

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Anyway, this is where we’re at. A big logo gets thrown into an ocean of design blogs and a quickly polarised debate of “I liked the old one better” vs “Isn’t that clever” emerges*. But little else beyond.

I’m curious about how the design community reacts, evolves and positions itself in relation to the notion of ‘branding’ in the real, everyday world. I’m being honest here. I find it confusing, and hard to take a definite position sometimes – where are the ethical boundaries of what we do? What are the aims of designers –  to make things better? To make things look better? To just sell more stuff?

By the way, I’m not saying coffee is evil. Or design for branding is for that matter. That’d be stupid, I indulge in and rely on both on a daily basis. (In fact that might be a vicious circle I need to get out of). I did spend some formative years in the midst of anti-capitalist marches, Adbusters, and Naomi Klein. It’s good they’re still fighting and arming us with information, but ultimately I found their strategies to be laudible, but predictable and a little bit lame.

This is really just a call out, at the beginning of this ‘Focus On Design’ month, for an upping of the ante when it comes to online design criticism – here or anywhere else. Let’s scratch at the surface now and again. Stoically defending the industry in the face of lazy journalism about how much design costs is encouraging, but lets also be honest about the true value of what we do.

I’m optimistic about the development and redefinition of ‘branding’ and design. I enjoyed Neil McGuires recent link on here to Metahaven’s rebranding of Wikileaks, and their notions of ‘image economies’. Their apparent short-circuiting of a countercultural publishers is pretty funny. Ultimately I’m interested in how they’re signposting new strategies for design and branding, and their understanding of what happens online, and that maybe it’s less about ‘brand’ and more about identity.

Links:

Articles on Starbucks Rebrand:

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2011/january/starbucks-new-logo

http://www.logodesignlove.com/starbucks-logo-evolution

http://www.thedrum.co.uk/news/2011/01/12/17584-starbucks-to-bring-free-digital-network-to-uk-/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/poll/2011/jan/06/is-starbucks-makeover-worth-it

Vacuum Cleaner ‘Fuck Off’ Logo Recall

http://thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/recall/

http://www.starbuckscoffee.org.uk/sos/home/index.html

Metahaven

http://mthvn.tumblr.com/page/2

http://www.manystuff.org/?p=9986

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1019019367/urbanized-a-documentary-film-by-gary-hustwit

Anyway, one of interest for both filmmakers and designers and architects.

Image: DRB62 under creative commons

Consider a vacant gallery. Large area, high reflective ceiling, plaster walls, hard floor – very reverberant! It’s a new museum space, eventually to be filled with interior displays, graphic panels, projection surfaces, video monitors, interactive screens – oh and sound, lots of sound – video soundtracks all playing at the same time, interactive sound effects, music from this exhibit here music from that exhibit there. All in the one area! Unbelievable? No just your average Visitor Attraction. Welcome to the world of the museum sound designer / consultant / acoustician. It can be frustrating, exhilarating, rewarding.

How to avoid this potential cacophony? Give me a loudspeaker that places sounds where I want them and nowhere else, that plays full frequency range material and can be as loud as necessary. Oh and it should be invisible too. Unfortunately such a loudspeaker doesn’t yet exist so until it does it’s down to working with proven acoustic principles and knowing how various sounds can work together in sympathy.

Actually it’s not all that bad as long as the design company engage you early enough in the design process. (It’s not easy to change things when drawings have reached the ‘For Construction’ stage.) So choose the correct loudspeakers for each exhibit and it helps if they look nice. Argue your case to include acoustic absorbent treatment to selected areas – it makes the audio spill less and sounds much cleaner. Consider very seriously the playback content of each exhibit and advise against two exhibits playing different music tracks only 1 metre apart!

Soundtracks will not sound the same in the studio as they do on site – different loudspeakers, different acoustics, competing sounds. So do a final mix of your soundtracks in the actual space applying essential equalisation to minimise tonal colouration and make it sound as near as you can to your studio mix.

Then sit back in the gallery and listen and hope you have avoided the whole space sounding like an amusement arcade, unless that was the intention.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Peter Key

Designers upload images of a new product for potential customers to pre-order. They will have agreed a price per unit with a manufacturer for a given number of the product. Once that target number of orders is reached the manufacture goes ahead and customers receive their purchases.

Designers, manufacturers and other interested parties may well meet on the site. Social networking helps spread the word. Since no product is manufactured unless there is a customer, there is no wastage, no cost of storage of product and overheads generally are less.

It is only when the target is met that funds are taken from customers accounts and the takings are transferred to the designer, less 10% commission to the website. Other on-line stores take considerably more than this.

 Customers are delighted to receive what may be a unique product, not available elsewhere.  A similar design marketing idea has been successfully on-line for some time in the States.

If the target number isn’t met, the designer has still been able to showcase the product idea, free of charge.

Take a look at www.getitmade.com and upload your new designs, free of charge.

On the face of it, the process of making a striking, freestanding, screen using Stephen’s Braille based pattern seemed fairly simple – just apply to an existing template that works well, take a few photos and and hey presto, new product launched. But much as I’m a fan of the path of least resistance, it didn’t seem appropriate to knock out more of the same. In fact, the three panel folding screen that is the most clearly identifiable image of the Shadow Screen range is not really a ‘product’ in the conventional sense – it was created for a Beruit Spa, who needed a lightweight, moisture resistant, folding screen. The impetus for it’s development was context driven, and like all good design, it justified it’s presence by creating value in response to this context.

The dilemma of speculative product design is that it has no real context, or at best an assumed one, and so its claim of creating value rests on the believability of a fiction. Because the Shadow Screen service creates value by responding appropriately to the needs of particular contexts, through the means of screening, filtering and defining threshold space, it seems counter intuitive to choose fictional context over reality. Context is arguably essential to showing the value of the Shadow Screens, and particularly so if the winning design is to be used to show the potential of the collaborative work.

The judging panel were attracted by Stephen’s design not only it’s simplicity and economy, but also by the potential to encode site specific content into the work. The digitally based means of fabrication inherently offers freedom from the constraints of tooling set up costs, and the best design has always fully exploited the potential of production. it makes an enormous amount of sense, therefore, for the made design to respond to real contexts, not only formally, but through site specific content. Buildings have long been judged on their appropriateness to context. It will be fascinating to see if product design, like the best architecture, can respond intelligently to place.

Its fully evident that university education (like many other parts of the ‘public’ sector) is in for a fairly significant assault in the coming weeks and months. While as a general issue, this could merit further discussion, i suspect that is better covered here, here and here, and what I really want to focus on is design education in particular.

The prospect of cuts raises some fundamental questions. What are we educating designers for? Can we entertain a pluralistic and broad-based definition of design in the face of increasing modularisation and ‘skill aquisition’? If designers are creative problem solvers, what problems are they solving and who do they belong to? If design students are paying for the status of attainment, how is that measured, and what is it?

I think in response to these questions, the following resignation letter, written by Laslo Moholy Nagy to the Bauhaus over 50 years ago, captures the key issues far better than I could;

“For the Bauhaus begins now a time of stabilization conditioned by the length of its existence. As a consequence of the growing scarcity of money, it is demanded that it be productive, efficient – today more than ever.

Even though human and pedagogical considerations are not eliminated intentionally, they suffer because of this stabilization. Among the students, this reorientation is noticeable in their increased demand for technical skill and practical training above anything else.

Basically one can’t object if human power wants to measure itself on the object, the trade. This belongs essentially to the Bauhaus program. But one must see the danger of losing equilibrium and meet it. As soon as creating an object becomes a specialty, and work becomes trade, the process of education loses all vitality. There must be room for teaching the basic ideas which keep human content alert and vital. For this we fought and for this we exhausted ourselves. I can no longer keep up with the stronger and stronger tendency toward trade specialization in the workshops.” (Fuller version here)

This letter captures the twist that often occurs when educational investment is taking place — ‘Design’ becomes a noun (as in the profession) rather than a verb (as in the activity, moving, as Milton Glaser puts it, from an existing condition to a prefered condition). But this isn’t some sort of nostalgic defense of the university or an ‘open’ design education. What is really interesting about the current debates around education is that they also include some acceptance that the university system can be fraught with cronyism, beauracracy, and does have a lot of room to change. However it is the direction of that change which is in question. Design can be conscious of and engaged with professional practise without being in thrawl to it. Graphic design can deal with typography without necessarily taking to or, (that classic art school cliche), “breaking” the rules, and so on and so forth…. All of the above can be achieved within looser (less costly) structures that still aspire to excellence but have a far more relaxed and far less measurable idea of what that might be.

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Thanks to David Kerr and Keith Dodds for their key part in this blog post, (unknown to them).

I often talk about design values when I introduce myself or industrial design as a topic. For me, these are things like elegance, sustainability, honesty and empowerment. Others’ values might be functionality, aesthetics, or humour. A company might value profitability, a school, learning, or for a family it might be economy.

I think this is a great way* of interrogating oneself or the task one is undertaking, and draws into focus all sorts of aspects of your reasoning and the constraints that related parties are putting on the design process.

And when your values are directly at odds with those of a colleague, you know that it probably isn’t a match made in heaven.

One beautiful example of this is last summer’s story of one user of i.Materialise, an online 3D printing bureau, attempting to commission an ‘ATM skimmer’ for production (that is a parasitic device used for collecting bank card details as the card is inserted into a cash machine). The printers refused, fraud presumably not being one of their company values. The story throws up some interesting questions:

Were the printers right to refuse? Should the designer of the 3D model have refused? Was the purchaser the same person as the designer? Did the designer know the intended use? Could this disagreement have happened within a closed manufacture model (ie. one where design values are imposed throughout the production process)?

Design, like anything created by humans, is a medium through which values are embodied and questioned. I would say, for some reason, it happens to be a particularly good interrogator!

*one that the Product Design Department in DJCAD introduced me to.

With the support of the Design Council, Central Station has recruited Andy Harrold to be our Design Champion. Here we talk to the man himself to find out more about the role and to hear his ideas for making Central Station an even more effective tool for designers.

Tell us a bit about your background.

My design experience was shaped by my passion for contemporary and mid-century design which I converted into a business called Nicehouse back in 1989. At the beginning, I scraped a living on a £40 / week enterprise allowance scheme invented by the conservative government to create more business start-ups. Once established, I subsequently championed local design talent. This was an unmet need of both designers I knew as customers and my wider market. I produced local designers’ product ideas because that differentiated my business. Products from local designers initially featured only in my retail store but eventually by working with UK based architects on commercial projects lead to commissioning the production of contemporary furnishing for bigger projects. This led to my own production of a collection of plastic furniture and lighting in 1999 with my design partners “one foot taller” and “graven images”. A few career highlights were winning the prestigious UK government Millennium Award Status for our chairs production, The 2001 Peugeot Design award a £7k prize for our designers which also led to exciting exposure for our products on the set of Big Brother 3.

Alas, Nicehouse didn’t last, and since then I did a Masters in Design Thinking and have worked as a freelance consultant with design teams. Now I own and run a Glasgow based practice called Buro-Designthinking.com.

What is the role of ‘design champion’ for Central Station?

MA is the new MBA / Design is Business / Business is Design. My ambition is to turn these maxims into real connections for our design community at Central Station. The community of creatives who make things that people use should have a higher expectation for this network and should be making it easy to signal what types of collaboration they are looking for.

So one question I’m asking is: should business graduates be encouraged to use this creative network? Definitely! I’d like to test that ‘idea dating’ theory I’ve had for a while, I suspect collaboration is going to be an essential part of the designers toolkit to be tested on Central Station. Why stop at Business graduates? What about social scientists and anthropologists? Basically, the network should encourage any people with insights and ideas to create new outcomes for people’s needs.

My question is do members of the network want to go down a more proactive business development road? I’m currently having this design dialogue with some selected players as I write. My insights will be revealed in January sometime.

Can you give us a taster of some of your ideas/aims for the role?

I’d like to begin by putting focus on the design of things we use, rather than things we see, (and rather than individuals just for the moment) which is well represented at Central Station. I’d like to harness the energy of product/service designers to a real market demand for good ideas. So coaching product and service designers into being more visually explicit on the Central Station network would be good start. But actually good ideas don’t usually thrive unless they meet a business need.

So, as outlined in the previous question, I’d like to introduce other creative partners to this network, so long as they share an ambition to make something better than it is now, specifically by coming together with this community of designers.

Will there be an opportunity for members to get involved? If so, how?

It is imperative that designers get involved. I haven’t worked a full plan up yet but I do fantasise about creating a micro-financing system to prove the concept of entrepreneurial projects that designers and their partners initiate. Even better, I’d like to give any individual /organisation a reason to engage with our design community in particular, but not exclusively, with product/service designers. These first baby steps should be about building trust and credibility with outside collaborators to engage with our community of local product/service designers on projects of any scale. I think some public design problems put in an open tender would be a good starting point. Perhaps even forcing some designers to work on problems in diverse teams. Including those designers like myself who only look for the insights that might motivate others into action. All of which means I need to work fast, prove a demand and source resources to make it real.

Tell us about your own design inspirations/who you find inspiring working in design today?

Particularly in Scotland but it could be relevant to northern Britain: I get the feeling that the new product development process is a bit broken. There is just not enough of it going on. I’m inspired by the many seemingly innocuous stories of businesses that are transformed into world players because at some point “design thinking” was embraced by the boardroom and a “deep design culture” ensured success was the outcome. Design became their market advantage. I’ll be posting on stand out case studies as time goes by.

At the moment I’m inspired by the design thinkers who get this mood down on paper, so players like Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman Business School, writer of The Design of Business. Tim Brown’s Change by Design also makes clear how it is achieved, the currency of these ideas is the design narrative I want to build upon inside Central Station.

Supported by:

The Design Observer iPhone app is a great resource in handy pocket-size. More here.