Jasonmcdermott

Archive for November 2011

Little printer

November 30, 2011 Thoughts No comments

I’m genuinely blown away by the sheer quality, ambition and craft of this latest offering from BERG – Little printer.

As Russell says, this is masterful in so many ways.

Seriously, just take a look at that. The video which goes along with it is just superb, stop everything you’re doing and check it out.

Hats off, once again to the geniuses at BERG.

Today I came across Matt Legend Gemmell’s site, after many many abstract references (coming from 512 pixels, daring fireball, parislemon et al), specifically in relation to an essay he had penned on copycat products and the reasons why one should avoid producing them. I read the whole essay, pausing from time to time to think “yes, but..” and found it incredibly tempting to pause and shout my immediate reactions on the web.

I’m glad I didn’t.

The post is full of contentious statements, but I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment involved. Copying the design of others doesn’t only limit you creatively, it tacks on additional layers of complexity and doesn’t really give you the insight into a product and it’s inherent design decisions which will help you when the proverbial hits the fan. Inspiration is one thing – blatant and reverse-engineered copying is another.

I’d highly recommend you read his post in full, it’s more than enough brain fodder for one sitting. I’ll illustrate by pulling a few small choice bits, for your edification;

The issue is that real design jobs aren’t about creating something absolutely new – instead, they’re about innovation. The etymology of the word ‘innovation’ means something like “renewing”, or changing an existing thing by adding something new or doing something differently. Not a clean-cut, start-from-scratch scenario – that’s not what innovation is, and that’s why it’s hard.

It’s thus pretty easy to see why copying happens – because when you see a mature product that’s somehow managed to innovate (to be “new” whilst balancing all the constraints and annoyances of the existing problem), it becomes almost impossible to see how you could do it any other way. Design blindness sets in: the most successful product is the only possible design. Which, of course, is nonsense – but a very convincing, insistent, tempting sort of nonsense.

I think the elephant in the room here is the question of how hard these designers are prepared to try, how far they’re prepared to work at something (perhaps even without knowing much about what it’s consequences might be). Is it good enough? Not yet. Why not? Let’s just pack it in and say it’s done. Design is never about knowing what the outcome is, it’s about working through a problem, thinking about the bigger questions inherent in any problem, and how they can be helped by this decision.

The lesson of the technology industry in the past five years is that really successful products dare to NOT copy. They’re pure, in that they’re actually designed from first principles – they’re based on the problem and the constraints, without being viewed through the lens of someone’s existing attempt. You know, the kind of thing you actually wanted to work on when you got your degree and were still unsullied by the lazy, corporate machine.

Some might call it ROI. Some might call it optimization. Some might even call it business acumen. Thinking about how much return you will get on this effort – and the cost of not doing so. It has the unintended consequence of making businesses lazy. Why aren’t you trying harder to make not only the immediate thing you’re making – but the entire organization and microcosm it lives in – better?

I’ll leave you with one last nugget from MLG;

If your boss won’t let you do that, get another boss – because life is too short, and there’s always another boss (or client), and I really hope you can’t put a price on your self-respect.

Hear, hear.

Slides

November 29, 2011 Thoughts No comments

I’ve very recently come to the conclusion that I don’t like slides. It’s a bit of an odd revelation, given the frequency and nature of my presentations (and the tendency to use slides as visual mental bookmarks for an audience to file away). Perhaps it’s related to a few text heavy presentations I’ve prepared recently, which had held high promise for helping guide an audience on a conceptual journey, but felt quite flat in delivery. Perhaps also it’s related to an unpacking of ideas around what a journey looks/feels/sounds like, transferring this thinking into the tangent space of the verbal pitch (in the sense that all conversation is an attempt to understand or to be understood, and in a presentation I’m the only one doing the talking) which is mucking about with my flow. I’m just not sure.

Irrespective of the cause, it’s a nagging thought that won’t let me go.

So what’s the underlying need we’re trying to discern here? I want to deliver a story, a concept or a narrative that helps people understand something quite close to my heart. The work I do, the reasons I have for approaching my work in this way, the potential value I see possible by unlocking a few small doors. Traversing this terrain is, quite simply, complicated. It’s in the realm of explaining a new take on what might be considered well trod ground – what is behaviour and how do we as designers influence it – that has given me pause. I don’t feel comfortable writing and delivering essays as presentations, that’s never felt right. And yet, the more dense and complex the information needing to be delivered, the harder it is to abstract and guide an audience without relying on written cues. Preparing diagrams takes time and focussed thought, and tend toward the (perception of) permanence that the written word can evade. Showing images works quite well to lodge an idea, but which idea is being lodged and to what end? It’s not the simplest of matters to join these dots.

I think the simplest distillation of these struggles is that I have often found myself babysitting the slide deck. Poring over, and pouring hours into the preparation of a small set of (what really ought to be visual) cues, only to make the point much more succinctly and eloquently in speech. I prepare this material, to help prepare my mind, and then throw away the textbook.

I’m not sure what the answer is, or if there even is an answer to begin with.