AKA a (trying not to be douchey) design manifesto for myself while designing for the Internets.
Message
It’s not about what program you’re using, it’s about the message you’re trying to communicate. Choose the tool that satisfies your objectives.
Integrity
Form follows function.
Think
It’s not about whether designers should code, or whether everything should look like Material Design, it’s about whether designers should think. We need to think about the platforms where our work lives, how it’s developed and how it’s deployed.
Concept
Think about what are the cultural and historical references to the work you’re creating. Think about why you are building something a certain way and what influences those decisions.
Gray areas
We need to have space for lateral thinking. There aren’t too many concrete answers, things are amorphous and we must be comfortable in that. There is no black and white in design.
Thinking 3-dimensionally
Much design pedagogy comes from industrial design. In the meantime, while user experience and digital product design catches up, these are the pillars we use. It makes a lot of sense that as web design practitioners we should think three-dimensionally. When you’re navigating through a website, there are many similarities to navigating through architecture. Sometimes you don’t mind being lost, and sometimes you need the signs to guide you. Create frameworks that provide structure and a reference point for visitors, but that also leave room for interpretation.
Explaining our Work – Three zoom levels
All the way out for strategy to pitch our work, medium zoom for creative direction and user experience, and zoomed all the way in for graphic design and details.
Business
We are working for businesses so business objectives need to be priority.
Stand up for yourself
Be bold. If something’s not right, call it out and do something constructive to solve it.
Don’t lower your standards so that others will feel comfortable.
People won’t like you more for being mediocre.
Be original
Remember why you became a designer. If it was to make websites that look like everyone else’s, then you should probably go back and think of a better reason.
Communicate
Talk to everyone involved in the project, at every opportunity, every day.
Empathy
Listen to your team members, listen to your users and listen to your clients. And try to keep in mind everything you’ve learned throughout the process.
Eliminating waste
Find the core element that gives the essence of the product. We can simplify our products and reduce unnecessary complexity.
Vow of chastity (Adapted from John Morgan’s famous letter)
Design nothing that is not worth reading.
Design is design
The fundamental principles of design are the same across all disciplines. Human behaviour is the same and so the design principles are the same, whether you are designing for a mobile screen or a giant billboard.
Design for people
Only collect data if you are also going to use it to improve the experience for people.
Open your mind
Look at art, go to shows, look at architecture, read literature. Other disciplines can feed into your work and make it better. But most importantly look around you! The sights, sounds and characters of our everyday lives are sometimes the most inspiring thing of all.
Specifically on Being an Designer/Entrepreneur
Talk to everyone, but LISTEN to the right people.
And be independent enough to ignore the ones you need to.
You can’t do this alone.
Surround yourself with the right people that will give you constructive criticism and sound advice, and find a partner to share responsibilities of growing a business.
It was a day the art world had never seen before. Last Monday at Christie’s auction house in New York, a Picasso painting sold for $179 million, which sets a record for the most expensive item ever to sell at auction. In total, the auction house sold more than $1 billion of art over three days – a new record for the art world.
Jeff Koons, ‘Balloon Dog (Orange)’
This 12 foot sculpture of a balloon dog is the most expensive item ever sold by a living artist. The price tag was $58.4 million.
Despite numbers like these, emerging artists are meant to accept the fact that they cannot make a living from selling their art; The money simply doesn’t filter down to the emerging market. Understandably, advice for new art grads is often, “Don’t quit your day job”, but when all of your waking hours are spent doing something other than what you love (which is making art), how does that impact the diversity of the art world overall?
In the tech world we talk about disruption all the time and it’s become such a buzzword, but the truth is that companies who are disruptors identified and solved a unique problem to their industry. Uber solved transportation problems, AirBNB solved hospitality problems, Snapchat solved messaging problems. So what are some art world problems?
1. Transparency
Buyers and sellers at large auctions can remain completely anonymous, and thus no one truly understands what drives irrational market forces. And similar to the financial markets, those who have insider information have leverage and control of market demand and therefore profits.
“Dealers operate in a murky shadow world, and money flows from information asymmetries. The ones who make a profit off the art market are those who know the industry front-to-back and have the deep pockets to buoy the markets of their artists when interest wanes.”www.blouinartinfo.com
2. Diversity
The perpetual promotion of a few top earners leaves a larger population of artists out in the cold. For art dealers and advisors it’s becoming common to go down a list of top artists and tick of the blue-chip names that “need” to be in the collection, just like stocks in a financial portfolio.
3. Accessibility
The art world overall, and especially the gallery system is inaccessible for most people. It’s not working for emerging artists, and it’s not working for collectors who don’t have buckets of cash. New collectors may find the art world overpriced, intimidating and elitist. Hard-working emerging artists may not have been born into the right circles of influence to create demand for their work.
There is some grumbling even within the establishment. After 41 years, New York’s McKee Gallery is closing down and the founders attributed their decision to their disgust with the current state of the art world. “The value of art is now perceived as its monetary value,” their statement reads. “The art world has become a stressful, unhealthy place; its focus on fashion, brands, and economics robs it of the great art experience, of connoisseurship, and of trust”.
There is a trend towards collecting for the sake of making a conspicuous investment, as newly minted billionaires in China, Russia and the Middle East vie for their cultural legacy. New collectors who enter the art world through the lens of the market are understandably more conspicuous in their purchases of what they believe to be ‘profitable’ artwork. There is less risk being taken with difficult or challenging work, which leads one to wonder if the art market overall has lost confidence in artistic values. Artist Olafur Eliasson believes it has – he’s gone so far to say that the art market is counter-productive to creativity.
I’m (obviously) fascinated by the art market. I worked at an arts nonprofit in New York that was very well connected to the art scene there, and I remember the founder curating our fundraising auction based on what seemed like a gut feeling. I even asked what made one artists work more valuable than others, as it didn’t seem based on the work alone. She had twenty years of experience as an art dealer before founding RxArt and knows the intrinsic value of the work – the organisation places contemporary art installations in children’s hospitals, aiming to improve the patient experience – but she also understands market forces.
Many times the value placed on an artist’s work is as much about the artist and their connections as it is about the quality of the piece. In the traditional art industry, these connections are forged and validated through the gallery system. However, galleries don’t necessarily support the careers of emerging artists, and take a minimum of 50% commission on all sales of work. There must be a better way to introduce new collectors to the artistic community.
It’s quite a shock when a gallery that’s founded on the fundamental principle of talent and ability is breaking new ground in the art world. The founders of The Unit Gallery in London have said in a Guardian article, “In an industry so often governed by commercial viability, back stories and nepotism, we proudly stand by our commitment to only showcase work that we genuinely believe in and nothing else.”
The tech sector has a knack for giving full access to goods and services where we were previously limited to less efficient, traditional industry standards. The art world needs us, but the industry needs to be open to some big changes.
So how can technology help?
People are buying more art online, which can begin to democratise the industry. While it won’t do anything to change the astronomical price tags at the top tiers of the market, it could do a lot to encourage new collectors to get involved and help emerging artists to have more control over the way their work is shown and sold.
Of the 5.1 billion pounds in 2014 sales from Christie’s last year, 21.4 million was from online only sales. And while that’s only around 4% of total sales, that figure spiked 54% from the year before. And this percentage is increasing year after year.
Gerard Richter, the most expensive living European artist, has a “very good website” (it’s terrible) that dealers believe contributes to his sales, allowing new collectors to thoroughly research his life and works.
I’ll mention a few of my favourite tech companies that are making progress towards solving the problems I mentioned of transparency, diversity and accessibility.
Art List (https://artlist.co/) is a peer to peer selling network, like the AirBNB for art sales, who aims to reduce the need for large auction houses who have a history of shortchanging artists on resales. They take a 10% commission on sales, which they share 50/50 with artists.
Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Art) has recently made it’s foray into the art market, partnering with around 150 galleries who give up a slice of the commission on each sale – between five and 20 per cent – in return for Amazon bringing their art to a larger, international audience. DegreeArt.com is one of the galleries collaborating with Amazon in this venture, who for ten years has been the UK market leader in online art sales, specialising in UK student and graduate art sales.
Paddle8 (https://paddle8.com/) is an online auction house for fine art, with themed auctions from selected nonprofits. So instead of all auctions being forced through the traditional houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, smaller organisations (such as the one I worked for) who are fundraising can reach more people. They take around a 20% commission on sales, which seems like a lot but is actually good compared to larger auction houses standard commission of 35%.
There are these and many more companies making progress towards breaking down barriers to entry, but there has yet to be a service that’s come along to disrupt the traditional way of doing things.
There are big opportunities to explore.
An intrinsic value in art (separate from its price tag) is something best communicated by artists themselves. I propose a service that gives control to the artist to tell the full story of the work, that completely de-commoditises art while educating people about its virtues.
…wish me luck making that profitable.
By the way, I’m working on a product that aims to solve some of these problems. You can find more info about that here. This post is based on a talk I gave last Tuesday at Digital Shoreditch called ‘Disrupting the Art World’.
Very excited for this one. My talk is called “Disrupting the Art World”.
I have a 10 minute slot on Tuesday 12th of May at 12:50pm. There will be many interesting speakers (probably more interesting than me) so definitely worth checking it out one day.
Customization has become de rigueur in the web technology world, and so the trend towards prolific data collection and algorithm-controlled experiences continues unabated. Not to be confused with “big data” in marketing, the data I’m referring to lives in the ecosystem of the product you’re creating to hopefully deliver a better experience. For example, Facebook uses data from whom you interact with most to customize your news feed.
This is rather uncomfortable for some people, and Frog predicted a backlash in their first tech trend prediction for 2014. They announced the rise of products and services that center around user anonymity. Now we’re seeing the massive popularity of self-destructing images with Snapchat, and now self-destructing text messages with startup Confide. These services don’t want your data, and they’re helping you to erase any evidence of it.
However, product designers of customized services are responsible to use the data collected to improve the product on offer. Along this line of thinking I’ve decided to include a “like” option for each creative work featured on Tomorrow and Today, because I would eventually like to create a valuable service for users on the platform… very excited about it and more to come on that.
THE VALUE OF HUMANS
The content you’ll find on Tomorrow and Today reveals the network of creative work and activity happening behind closed doors and on the street. Focusing on places of massive cultural transition, each place featured on the site has its own personality and experience.
We can not rely on a machine to make these connections with elements of chance and synchronicity. A human touch is required.
In a New York Times Bits article analyzing the monetary value of human contact, Quentin Hardy writes, “We’re moving towards a ‘post-automated’ world, where the valuable thing about people will be their emotional content.” The human mind and emotions are incredibly complex and machines have not caught up yet. In the meantime, human analysis, curation and creation will continue to be more valuable.
“Word of mouth” is still the most influential marketing tool. We crave the recommendations from people with the most intimate knowledge about us, and these suggestions rate much higher on the influence scale of what we might buy or do.
This website Not Recommended for You plays with the idea that actual human beings can provide a more intimate recommendation than anyone else. But imagine if you could have this site customized for you by all of your friends and family? SO much better than a robot.
Roland Barthes wrote in his essay “Death of the Author” that it is not about the meaning the author gives to a work – it’s the reader that gives text its meaning. Along the same lines, for my current project Tomorrow and Today my intention is that the varying perspectives of others will give the work its meaning.
The discovery of artistic work happening behind city walls gives a proper sense of the way city inhabitants are recreating the city with every step. Everyone has their own perspective and creates their own experience – artists happen to express it in ways that can be captured and conveyed. Each artwork – whether music, film or painting – combines to form a colorful tapestry of the creative life behind city walls.
When I first moved to London last June, I picked up a pamphlet from Create London who have a rich arts program with events, workshops and community practice. They launched the Create Art Award in 2008, which encourages East London artists to deliver socially engaged projects by working with their neighbors.
They ask questions such as, “What is the value of having an artist in a community?” and “How can an artist uncover and harness the imaginative potential that lies within us all, for positive change?” Artists have a powerful ability to bring new perspectives on ordinary surroundings, and perhaps create commentary or reflection on social and environmental issues through their art.
Three years ago my MFA thesis exhibition was about the history of a building in downtown NYC, but the way the installation was constructed meant that the meaning was interpreted differently by every passerby. Likewise, this is a key component of Tomorrow and Today – that the interpretations of a place are as multitudinous as the history and people of the city.
Tomorrow and Today focuses on areas of massive transition – pretty much the entire East End of London. This project focuses on spaces with multiple layers of cultural transformation, conveyed through the lens of the creative work within and the surrounding network.
The meaning of the artwork, which is in this case the place or neighborhood, is created by the inhabitants. Visitors to the site who will experience the work will be able to add their own perspective, in the same way that Barthes’ reader gives his text his or her own meaning.
Earlier this summer I spoke to my first set of artists and gathered initial thoughts on the site. Something that stands out to me is that artists want a sincere and interesting way to talk about their work that’s not so commercial as many of the current platforms. Attaching their work to a place, and offering the synesthesia of all of the significance of that place – people in their network, music they’re listening to, books they’re currently reading – is a new way to talk about their work. Eventually there will be a platform for artists to have complete control of the experience, to develop a long-form artwork about a particular place, or a list of inspirations related to the work if they are so inclined.
It’s not the death of the author per se, but its allowing the people who gain the most value from your site to create it for themselves.
In the last Elephant magazine, curator Rafal Niemojewski explains his views that the exhibition model is a remnant from an antiquated time. His doctoral studies were on the role the biennal as offering the artist more structural flexibility with which to exhibit art, now imagining the next curatorial phase will take place in the public, with artists more in control of how their work is viewed. This will allow for different forms of art to thrive, including long-duration pieces for example. “…now there’s much more art coming to the street and to public spaces. I think in the coming decades public art will be the most prevalent type of practice.” (Elephant Spring 2014)
With Tomorrow and Today I envision a platform for artists to contribute content in a narrative, long-form or some other way. I’ve talked to a few artists that are interested in how relevant it would be to their work.
My question is how we can learn more about the world around us with technology? How can our bajillion devices provide a deeper (yet nonintrusive) connection to our surroundings, and the cultural and historical significance hiding behind every wall? By connecting the exhibition experience with place-based applications, can artists get exposure to a wider audience? Can digital technologies potentially provide a new exhibition model, where the artist is in complete control of how their work is shown?
A BIT ON TECHNOLOGY
The technology that I will be using to build the MVP will be pretty simple – a mobile web application, but eventually the data points for each place will be available via geolocation so that you receive notifications when you are nearby points of interest.
I explored some of the latest AR apps – Yelp Monocle, Across Air and Wikitude (although eoVision is interesting) – and feel that the experience is still too glitchy to be incorporated into this project. I’m thinking something more along the lines of Google Now or the more recent Field Trip, in which you can look at a view with Google Glass and simple cards pop up with relevant information.
Each place on the Tomorrow and Today map will have a network of people and artworks connected, and the user will be able to scroll through and experience the content randomly. E-commerce links to purchase art prints or concert tickets will also be folded in – what you can do to be a part of this place now or in the future.
Amber Case and the team at Geoloqi are doing really interesting work on location-based services. I’m thinking the Google maps API will be sufficient for this project but I’d be interested to learn more about the capabilities of the Geoloqi system. Case is emphatic that technology can help us improve our lives, but it better get out of the way when you don’t need it. I agree – once technology is no longer in our view and is simply an enabler, integrated into our lives, we will have a much smoother existence.
A friend of mine uses Google Glass to record her painting process, and she uses the phrase “shortening time between intention and action” to describe wearable technologies. It’s a powerful change to suddenly not need to reach for our phone and lower our gaze to search for something, capture a memory, or discover new information. It is a paradigm shift in human behavior.
In The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman ponders the most recent technologies and their repurcussions. He writes, “Couple the use of full-body motion and gestures with high-quality auditory and visual displays that can be superimposed over the sounds and sights of the world to amplify them, to explain and annotate them, and we give to people power that exceeds anything ever known before.” Using hands-free devices means that we are much closer to our natural behavior and that much closer to technology easily and fully integrating into our lives. I’m most excited for the possibilities of apps like Field Trip, that can enhance our experience in the city with useful information.
I’m reminded of Marshall McCluhan’s theory that the nature of the media by which we communicate shapes our society more than the content itself: “The Medium is the Message”. McCluhan spoke of the environments of the electronic age as an invisible, pervasive multi-dimensional space. His predictions couldn’t be more relevant in this era of ubiquitous computing. Will behavior changes resulting from new technologies improve our lives, or be a distraction or worse?
On display at Digital Revolution yesterday at the Barbican, (besides Lady Gaga’s flying dress) there were examples of clothing and beauty products embedded with technology to communicate the wearer’s personal data. This really will be “Big Data”, with massive benefits for people selling our most intimate details. Companies with Internet of Things (IoT) products are having trouble creating storage systems to house the treasure troves of data they are collecting from their customers.
However, with great power comes great responsibility. Thinking about the implications of data collection will hopefully help us move past the wow factor. As Bruce Sterling said in his closing remarks at SXSW last year, we must not forget about history in the scramble towards the future. He cautioned, “We don’t just play and experiment: we kill.”
There are people are doing good things with big data. One example is the rapid development of sequencing of the genome, which according to the KPCB report, “will be at the heart of a new paradigm of precision medicine that is evidence based and rooted in quantitative science”. There will be giant leaps ahead in medicine, investment, driving and quantified living, but also giant leaps ahead for marketers and advertisers who will seemingly be inside our brains offering their products at exactly the moment they think we want them. There are even more scary things underfoot as well, such as these nine companies you’ve never heard of that probably know more about you than your closest friends. Big data from IoT will add exponentially to these mounds of personal data that strangers are collecting from us, and that might be enough to make some of us want to run and hide. But this is the future and it’s not going away.
This is also where the money is going. In the tech world recently I’ve noticed a sharp increase in funding for early stage IoT startups.
While there are evident drawbacks to wearable tech and IoT with privacy issues and evil uses of our data, the potential for sincere life improvement is great. Simultaneous, pervasive relationships with technology will allow seamless integration into our lives, informing us of things we didn’t even know we needed to know.
In the near future I’d like to see the Frog prediction come true, “the consumer will own data” – otherwise it feels like we’re getting lots of corporations like Google and Facebook rich with little in return. How do we get there? Well, it’s time put our heads together and figure it out.
I recently realized that I don’t really make websites anymore (captain obvious!). I’ve been immersed in product design and startups for the last year of my life, and have been designing web products that have more requirements than designing a pure content site.
There’s lots of banter about “website vs app”, but one of the main differences between the two is that many web products collect data from users to customize the service over time, while content sites can have thousands of anonymous users and the experience doesn’t change. Now does a website become an app if they add a “like” button? I don’t know, I’ll leave that for people to continue bantering about.
Data collection can be in the form of “likes” or “preferences”. One of my favorites is the sign up process of fashion e-commerce site Lyst. It’s quick and engaging – honestly didn’t want to stop clicking. They get loads of data from me but it improves the recommendations and now I open (and drool over) every email newsletter. They win (but so do I). During the design process, startups like Lyst need to ask themselves what are the main characteristics of users that we need to identify right away when they sign up? The service is built around the core feature of the “stylefeed” so they simply ask users which designers they prefer. It’s so simple but considering they’ve already raised over $20 million from high-profile investors, it’s a powerful concept to give people exactly what they want.
I wonder how Modernist designers would have reacted to these new technologies. What would the Bauhaus have done with these mounds of data? One of the pillars of Modernist theory was “Form follows function”. In the web world, this translates as learning from users to determine the features of a web product. Safe to say, Bauhaus designers would have used customer data to improve their products.
When we customize a human-centered web product it improves the experience for users because, as in the case with Lyst, relevant content is being delivered with no obstruction or distraction. This requires businesses to really think about their offerings and determine priority of content. One of the questions I ask my clients is, “Of the laundry list of features that you’d like to include, what would be the greatest value to the user and most helpful to achieve business goals”. In the life of a developing startup, this is a really hard thing to do!
With fashion B2B startup Sundar I worked on creating a flow through curations and realtime data, to begin to move away from the idea of separate pages for content. We also moved (far) away from the dashboard concept, which is not user friendly for all devices. With a feed, everything is still there on the page but content is prioritized to provide a simplified, integrated experience.
The Internet trends report from KPCB’s Mary Meeker has a great section on the evolution of apps. She documents first the unbundling of apps, then their disappearance altogether to morph into a service layer. Matthew Panzarino of Techcrunch describes these new invisible apps: “They aren’t for idle browsing, They’re purpose built and informed by contextual signals like hardware sensors, location, history of use and predictive computation.” Examples of service layer apps include Foursquare Swarm and Runkeeper Breeze.
We are seeing these early stages of these trends more and more in real life, through human-centered improvements to everyday technologies. Facebook recently began unbundling their service to provide a focused experience for the many elements of the site – messaging, news feed, etc. One of the results being Paper, which I am completely obsessed with – the clean and engaging design, interactions, and gestures will hopefully set a precedent for others.
Meeker’s report also mentions AirBNB, Uber and Spotify among others as companies that have re-imagined the user interface for their respective activities (finding a place to stay, hailing a cab, and finding music). When we talk about improving UI what exactly are we talking about? We’re talking about better user experience. It’s better design because it centers entirely around people’s needs, and that’s a good direction to be going in – the Bauhaus would be proud.
In a recent Fast Company article, artist Olafur Eliasson proclaims that architects are not artists. “I think architects are much too sophisticated to be artists, and they are trained in the great art of making compromises to keep the client happy.”
The subtle dance of the designer/client relationship makes completing a great work of architecture an incredible challenge. Eliasson designed the exquisite glass facade of Reykjavic’s new concert hall with shimmering geometric glass “quasi-bricks”. He has 12-14 architects working for him at any time, so he does have deep understanding of the subtleties of the two fields, however I don’t think its quite as black and white.
Ettore Sottsass, Casa Olabuenaga in Maui, Hawaii Image via Design Milk
When I see architecture such as this designed by Ettore Sottsass, the hard line between art and architecture fades. Starting in 1989 he worked closely with the owners of the property, Adrian Olabuenaga and Lesley Bailey of ACME Studio, to design the space according to their needs. The architectural colors were chosen by Sottsass and reminiscent of a work of abstract modern art. According to many including Eliasson, this is not art because the vision of the architect is compromised by the needs of the people who will be using the space. Working closely with clients to deliver a service is a characteristic of design professions and separates these fields from art, but there are many examples which blur the two.
Eliasson is an artist who finds it fulfililng to collaborate with architects. He describes the art world as self-obsessed, and it’s refreshing for him to work with people who “build real buildings for real people”. Art may not have the same aspect of co-creation as architecture that works within a community with its own social values and problems to solve. Designing architecture requires a sense of pragmatism that the creation of art is liberated from.
In 1970’s London, artist Stephen Willats was on a quest to redefine the role of the art gallery in society. He studied the neighborhoods surrounding Whitechapel Gallery and conducted interviews with local residents. He wanted to find out how they imagined that their world could be different in order to reflect this vision in his work. He maintained these relationships throughout the life cycle of the exhibition at the gallery and community feedback continued to inform the work.
It was quite unusual at the time for an artist to co-create a work with the community themselves, but the idea was to express another model of society, so who better to create that than the society itself?
Willat’s process is an example of what we now know as human-centered design – delving deep into a community to find out their pain points and real needs. The only difference is that the outcome of Willat’s work currently on display at the Whitechapel Gallery, seems inconclusive. Although the process set a precedent at the time, I didn’t get a coherent sense of what was gained from the vision of the community that he had painstakingly documented. Check it out for yourself – the exhibition is on until September 14th.
