In a new world

Defining roles that defy definition

I went to an Ada’s list event a few days ago and someone asked me what kind of design I do. For a moment I had no idea what to say. I told her that my background is in graphic design and nowadays I eat and excrete digital. Working on a team in an agile environment definitely makes me stop to think about how I would classify myself as a designer now. If I even need to.

There is no creative director. There is no project manager. Everyone on the team has relatively equal responsibility and is expected to pick up the slack of anyone else’s parts. There is a non-linear flow that I started to click into this week – you connect with the person you need whenever a block arises.

Every project begins with strategy. In my MFA program at Pratt we spent so much studio time talking talking talking talking talking about our projects and their implications in larger contexts. At the time I wanted to spend more time making but I suppose it has prepared me for what’s next. I’m comfortable with living in conceptual space but at a certain point decisions need to be made and a strong direction needs to take shape. Things need to get made.

Friday night I went out with a friend who works as a fashion designer and he reminded me of the traditional notion of the creative director who ideates and dictates their vision in service of the brand. This model was passed down to many other disciplines including advertising, and in my experience that’s the structure I’ve worked within.

One of my freelance projects recently was for a startup creating a scientific discovery platform, where my role was user experience and design. I also provided creative direction for the brand, looking at Mailchimp as an example of friendly and engaging tone of voice. In our case with Sparrho, the more the user interacts with the site by saving and sharing the more accurate the results will be, so the tone of voice of the site needed to be friendly and attractive to encourage interaction and extended use. Voice and tone is a great site created by Mailchimp to provide creative direction for their content creators. It provides a template for every type of messaging on the site, how to relay the service’s personality and make people feel “at home”.

I find that there’s a feeling of rootlessness and ambivalence in a design solution when there isn’t a strong creative direction. But in the digital product world there are many other factors that take priority, including user experience, service design, business objectives and technological feasibility. The “brand” is not necessarily prioritized before any of these things, and design direction is not prioritized either.

This seems to be the direction that our world is going in, no longer the one-sided advertising model with the brand as dictator convincing you of its greatness. Now all power is shifting to the hands of the consumer. The brand is simply a vessel to meet the needs of the people who will use it. There was a link going around from the Harvard Law blogs – a concept called vendor relationship management is being anointed as the new customer relationship management (CRM). The idea is that instead of getting people to talk about a product, you’re giving them the power to create and price it themselves.

On my team we rely heavily on something called service design, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what that is lately. I find it interesting that every time I ask someone to define service design I get a different answer. I asked someone the other day and they wedged it in between two other disciplines – “above” interaction design, and “below” strategy. Ok, well… Here’s wikipedia’s definition: “Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers.” I like this definition but I think the job description changes for every project.

With web projects at large organizations there’s a whole ecosystem of stakeholders and wide array of networks that could help or hinder the project. The organizational work is almost more important than the actual project you are doing. If you can’t get past the most critical people it doesn’t matter how amazing your product is.

That’s also why the incremental approach works really well. If you release prototypes in tiny increments you reduce the size of a potential failure. It helps to bypass large bureaucratic structures, and is also healthy for scrappy startups because there is little investment needed for each stage. I just started reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, which forms the intellectual roots of this kind of approach.

Designers in an agile workflow have a huge responsibility. We need to think at 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. When I’m really deep into a project and doing creative work my brain shuts off in a way, so it takes a moment and some strategic thinking to explain it to my colleagues and clients. I’ve never thought of our job as sales, but it so so so is and I’m trying to get better at it. We also – somehow – need to keep in mind everything that we’ve learned along the way from our users through the prototyping phases.

This job is going to be a much needed change of pace from my lone ranger lifestyle as an independent contractor, but I need to rework the idea of creative director passing along their genius for everyone to follow and fit it into my current process. The true design challenge will be working cohesively as a multi-disciplinary team and getting the job done.

Designers of the signs that guide you

I’m starting a new full-time (freelance) job in two weeks here in London. It’s with a digital product agency called Made by Many and I can’t wait to be one of the Many… who makes web things. My transition to the new job is making me pause and reflect on some of the experiences I’ve had.

I came across this article today when I randomly looked up Glen Cummings on Twitter – an oldie but goodie. Quite possibly the only NY Times article, ever, to bring attention to designers of signage and wayfinding systems. The Ruedi Baur-designed Vienna airport is probably the most famous example of a graphic system with character in an airport.

The large bold letters are slightly fuzzy but still legible and I love how the green exit signs pop out against the grays and whites. Unfortunately most airports don’t give quite as much attention to the graphic quality of their signs. And this is to the detriment of all of us, as the loudest visual component are the advertisements on every imaginable surface. In fact, I’m surprised they haven’t figured out a way to advertise on the side of airplanes.

When I was living in Spain early last year I worked with Base Design on a signage system for a recently renovated building in Madrid, and my contribution to the proposal helped us win the contest by the government of Madrid and architecture organization COAM.

Our concept was really minimal. Since the building has so many different types of materials – three different woods, metal and floor to ceiling glass – we wanted to let the building “speak” to guide people on their way around. So all of the text and icons would be in relief, raised from the walls of the building. Another aspect was that all of the arrows would bend around the columns and corners, literally folding itself around the building structure.

The super modern renovation in the historic neighborhood of Malasaña

I spent a lot of time creating databases like this, which would explain how the signage system works to the client and also the production team. For every floor we determined a code and placement for the sign, then mocked up a panel to show what the sign would look like.

The concept for the parking garage was a bit more lively. We chose vibrant but dark shades of four different colors, then divided the five levels of the parking garage into four color-coded sections based on the exits. As you drive down into the garage, the stripe on the columns gets slightly lower, so you have a visual cue as to what level you’re on in addition to the number. Continuing the concept of using the building materials from the upstairs, the numbers fold around the square columns so that you read it in full on a diagonal.

I was really looking forward to seeing this in action, but unfortunately the Spanish economy ate this project and I won’t ever see the fruits of my labor. And especially now that Base doesn’t even operate in Spain anymore! At least I learned a little Spanish.

Having fun

Sometimes I have no idea where it’s all going but my sketches are an attempt to make sense of and organize my thoughts. Maybe it’s a way of looking at the world around me. Most of the time I think about logical outcomes though – that side of me took over for a while and I created a proposal for a new app. These are one set of wireframes so far (above). Now I’ve oscillated back to exploration phase, almost comfortable not knowing what it’s going to be.

In the process I’ve realized that design projects have no soul without a client. In order to activate the project it needs someone who the service will be for. A user, or audience. But with art that’s not the case. So I think that’s where I am right now with this project, closer to art than design. Anni Albers once said, “We come to know in art that we do not clearly know where we will arrive in our work, although we set the compass, our vision, we are led by material and work process. We have plans and blueprints, but the finished work is still a surprise.”

It all started after I discovered the work of the Situationists a few years ago. I created a book – a psychogeography of New York City with a protagonist named Ella.

Ella is searching for something all over the city, then wakes from her dreamlike state and discovers that what she’s looking for is actually within herself.

Shortly after creating Ella, I read Tony Hiss and began wandering the streets trying to decipher atmospheres and the factors that create one. I created a sound installation by recording ambient sounds in various New York City neighborhoods.

On top of the pedestals were abstractions of the form of an antique streetlamp. I challenged visitors to guess which of four neighborhood the sounds were recorded but I don’t think you could really tell the difference. An atmosphere is related to our “sense of place”, and while it’s relatively clear how elements in our physical environment create one, I’m trying to figure out how digital architecture can provide something similar.

I’m also interested in how behavior is affected by our architectural surroundings. And in digital architecture? I think more than anything it depends on your purpose. Just like my acting teacher used to use the metaphor of a canoe floating down a river – the canoe is the intention and the river is the script. The movement of the river guides your intention. In architecture (the river, in this drawn out metaphor), your intention has a strong effect on your experience of the place.

Liz Danzico writes about frameworks on 52 weeks of UX, and she relates designing them to creating opportunities, possibilities for action for the user. Just as in architectural space, if the frameworks are too strict it limits the possibilities for movement – there is less freedom. However, if there is no structure or organization, then it leaves open the possibility for chaos. Designers have the responsibility to create a balance between these two extremes.

Erving Goffman, who works in the field of framework analysis, describes the delicate balance: “Frameworks allow people to locate, identify, and label an infinite number of concrete occurrences. People can move through the complex framework of a city or a website, but they’re unlikely to be aware of it or even be able to describe it if asked. People fit their actions into the ongoing world that support a set of activities—the “anchoring of activities.” It gives them context and interpretation from their point of view. Be clear, but leave room for stories to be told and to flourish.”

On the web, the framework we provide is critical – the more engaging the site, the more people will be attracted and encouraged to be themselves and interact. The framework in digital architecture can be compared to the sense of place we have in physical architecture.

So, continuing the journey of how I got to this point… When I arrived in Madrid in 2011 I began blogging about secret stories hidden among the city walls (inspired by John Stilgoe), and continuing my work exploring the streetscape by drawing windows and minerals.

Album artwork for my brother's band — Album artwork for my brother’s band

In cities, windows comprise a large portion of our surroundings, and provide a viewpoint into the soul of the city – human and architectural. Interestingly, we enter digital space through windows – the frames of our monitors, browsers and webpages. I am obsessed with these comparisons, and my work explores the concept of viewports as windows into both worlds. I’m mainly interested in exploring the 3D aspects of digital space, hence the app idea, which plays with augmented reality.

When I arrived in London this summer I became fascinated by the space between architecture, the nothingness. I thought maybe if I focused on the empty space it would turn my experience inside-out. I drew streetscapes and wanted to create code for each piece of the city landscape and recreate the relationships in the digital world. In this way I’m creating order, priority, and simplicity from a complex landscape. Is this similar to what I do in my day job as an interaction designer – creating wireframes as blueprints for experience.

My space-between sketches are a map of my experience in a way, and I’m imposing my own order with shapes and figures. The one constant is always the outline of the skyline. There is always that break between sky and architecture. The other figures in the urban landscape have been built over centuries by various architects.

So that’s where I am now. I‘d like to take the city prism idea forward, to break apart elements in my environment, codify and re-engineer the fractured pieces into the shape of a mineral, incorporate story and poetry just like Ella, then experiment with this and the windows concept in code to see what I can create.

Spitalfields (first page of my new sketchbook)

Process and pedagogy

There’s a conference happening at the moment a few blocks away from me at the Barbican. It’s bringing together all of the biggest names in graphic design – Paula Scher, Kenya Hara, Tony Brook – for a couple days, to spark dialogue. The idea is that instead of designers pontificating at the audience, they will be interviewed and debate amongst themselves as the crowd watches in glee.

My job title a few years ago was graphic designer. I find it fascinating that my new job title is interaction designer as I’ve fully integrated myself in the web world with skills on either side of graphic design – user research and (some light) coding.

In my perspective everyone in the web world has an understanding of every discipline, from content strategy to native app development, but a deep knowledge well in their particular field. That field for me is graphic design.

Design for the web is soooooo different but there’s still no pedagogy, no intellectual foundation. Industrial design, yes, but that’s quite different from what I do. The human-computer interaction programs are looking at future technologies as 3-dimensional products, not necessarily screen design. Or if so, interface design is last priority. Maybe as it should be. The concept and interaction needs to be strong and bulletproof before a visual interface is designed.

Even graphic design is lacking depth of intellectual pillars. We were grasping at straws in my MFA – relying on Michael Rock, Tibor Kalman and Andrew Blauvelt – great thinkers but designers from recent generations, not historical ones. And most of my inspiration comes from other disciplines like architecture and industrial design anyways.

My experience before the masters degree was a branding, consumery-based approach. I knew I wanted something deeper and wanted to move away from the marketing perspective of design. I thought graphic design training would provide me with that foundation.

It did. My design education got me going on a unique path. My thesis began my life-long preoccupation with the relationship of humans to their environment, which grew entirely out of my fascination with psychogeography. Add a technology layer to that and that’s where I am right now.

I suppose everyone needs their own personal project. What is your work/life preoccupation? This is the lens from which you base all of your work and interests, discussions and writing.

What a contrasting way of life from places I’ve worked in the past. Large agencies where I’ve worked on a tiny superficial slice of a giant project, or where we’ve been more concerned about hours than actually creating a strong design solution. The agency model doesn’t empower designers. We are at the bottom of the chain of command. And often, I have not been expected to think about the work I’m doing at all.

Jenny Lam talks at length about this in her creative mornings presentation. She encourages designers to break free from the existing context where designers are near the bottom of the decision ladder.

http://vimeo.com/35395120

She also touches upon how the field of user experience is still in it’s infancy. She explains, “User experience is bleeding edge, and those curriculums are only beginning to be developed.” I would love to be one of those teachers creating the UX curriculum.

I participated in a conference yesterday that seemed to be a remnant from when “mobile” actually referred to the device. It seems and I hope that they are getting away from thinking of mobile as a noun and instead focusing the conference around the idea of mobile as an adjective.

I didn’t get a strong theme from the conference except that we were organized into workshops based on one of seven user modes: augment, explore, create, consume, control and communicate.

The workshop guided by Lennart Anderson of Veryday, based on the user mode of co-creation, was my favorite part. It was really nice how Lennart gently guided us and allowed space for lateral thinking. Some people in the group seemed frustrated but it reminded me of the teaching style of one of my favorite professors, Alex Leibergesell. He had a very strong spirit of experimentation and thought of each class as a design project in itself. Everything was wrapped up into a larger abstract concept, which provided meaning and direction to our work.

To become more sincere and thoughtful, the tech world needs to pry itself loose from the latest/best syndrome. We need to encourage inquiry from everyone involved – what are we really accomplishing here? I hope that as designers we are always thinking of the big picture. So clearly something needs to change in the halls of power and I think it is, but might take some time.

I’ve worked hard in the past 3 months to get experience in the startup world, and also to brush up on my coding skills. I’ve experienced what an agile workflow looks like, I’ve experienced the startup process firsthand and given value to the business with UX research, an identity and style guide. (The beta launch of sparrho.com expected in a few weeks)

As designers we have the perspective of craftspeople with specialized skills that we can offer as a service to clients. But I would encourage us to recognize the tremendous value we are offering the agencies and businesses we service.

Admittedly it’s super hard to think about the big picture when you’re faced with a mountain of design or code to work through. Maybe that’s the dilemma – in the need to make a living and how easy it is to get bogged down in detail.

This reminds me of this debate du jour over whether designers should code – talk about getting bogged down in detail. Loads of people are talking about it – like here and here and here. To me the point is not whether designers should code or not – it’s whether designers should think… Think about the platforms where our work lives, how it is developed and how it is deployed. And the answer to that couldn’t be more obvious.

Evolution of a designer’s process

I lost my Muji file folder with a notebook I used for my work with Base Madrid. Admittedly it made me nostalgic for those days. Most of the time I think nostalgia is useless, but it made me reflect on the evolution of my process – from that time when it was more conceptual and rooted in strong graphic principles, to something a bit more agile.

Not much has changed since then in terms of the kind of projects I want to work on. What has changed is that I’m fully immersed in technology, and that was exactly what was missing. I remember the time in my typography class at Pratt when I said “I didn’t want to create another printed thing”. Print work was already starting to bore me.

At Base, I worked for two full days researching and creating a strong concept for our proposal, which won a contest with the Madrid city government to design a signage system for a renovated historical building.

In the web space, working within an agile methodology you tend to skim over that part. In my experience, digital agencies tend to work fast and superficial.

I think there can be a balance. Research needs to happen but within a certain timeframe and depending on the complexity of the project. Concept and design thinking can be built in to an agile way of life.

If one discipline is ruling over the entire process then there is inevitably something missing. I’ve heard some visual designers complain that their role has been reduced to “hitting it with the pretty stick”. Visual design shouldn’t be superficial, it should be the component that elevates the concept. Things don’t have to be so literal. In fact, I’m drowning in the endless how-to reading material and practical hands-on conferences that populate the UX sphere.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working with a startup to create a scientific discovery app. Our concept defining the creative direction of the site is “a birds eye view”. This provides strong visual language that lends itself to the abstract canvas of our newsfeed with a grid of articles.

How-to books and conferences are quite useful but it’s crucial to expand a bit into the abstract realm. We are still talking about visual design, which is a close cousin to fine art.

Bruce Sterling gave quite harsh and inspiring closing remarks at SXSW earlier this year. He urged techies to own up to what we’ve done and what we continue to do every day. We aren’t just playing and experimenting – we’re killing. And the past is dead.

He asked how we can bring some level of inquiry, or moral seriousness to the latest technologies? My favorite idea he had was for evil Google glass. He explains that as-is the product is quite literal and not good fodder for a sci-fi novel. But if you reversed the four design principles that Google defined for developers working on Glass: 1. Design for Glass, 2. Don’t get in the way, 3. Keep it timely, and 4. Avoid the unexpected. Then things start to get interesting…

I recently interviewed with an agency that does beautiful work and they explained their process to me. They focus on content, and specifically what each piece of content is communicating and what may be the best way to edit and experience that content.

This is a very print-based approach but it seems thoughtful and sincere. They spend a lot of time up-front, in the research phase, defining and editing every piece of content as it own experience for the user, and an overall guiding principle for the design of the site.

The medium is the message – the form of the site and the user experience should communicate the message as much or more than the words itself.

With technology like google glass, the message is complete transparency and integration into our lives. As Sterling pointed out we’re already living a kind of Alan Kay world, where computing will vanish into our walls and ceiling.

We’ve moved on from high-horse, cold, modern architectural perspective to more user-centered design solutions. But you can’t be a slave to the user at the expense of good design. The designer needs to have a strong vision to use as a guide. It reminds me of a parable I heard a while ago – a ship with sails set firmly towards a goal is less affected by the directions of the wind.

The future is (almost) here

I’ve been to many conferences so far in my burgeoning life as a web designer. There are some that seem heavily used for PR efforts and some that are just an utter mess, so it’s nice when it feels like a really well-organized, sincere and thoughtful event. dConstruct is one of the good kind. I left Brighton on the speedy train back to London last night filled with loads of motivation, mind-bended by some of the incredible speakers. Yay, Jeremy Keith, best one yet, many people said afterwards.

My biggest overall takeaway from the conference is that we should think beyond the user interface, at least the concept of the UI as we know it. With the bajillion input types that Luke described, ubiquitous computing and ambient location, designers should be focusing ever more on user behavior than visual design. How and why is someone interacting with the web, at what time, and in what context? These will be the biggest questions in the near future. Web products will wrap themselves around our lives and customize themselves based on our behaviors, instead of us sitting at a desk visiting a static web page.

As (cyborg anthropologist) Amber Case was saying, the best technologies will get out of the way and let people live their lives, but when we need assistance to help us with a task, then that technology will become visible.

There are two more things that have stuck with me since the conference, besides Adam Buxton just being insanely funny. One is the shared Google doc that Maciej Ceglowski distributed to Pinboard fans for user research, and the other is the CCTV footage that Dan Williams demanded from his UK bus company.

The Pinboard google doc became something like 55 pages of self-regulated feedback that required intensive study by each user before adding a comment. It’s unbelievable to think about opening that can of worms but it’s actually not a bad idea. The community was already close-knit and passionate – they cared so much about the product that they would spend hours to make it better. Fervent fans provide all the accountability you will ever need. In his book Undercover User Experience Design, Cennyd Boyles recommends using the same technique for consolidated user feedback and I might use it for beta testing the web app I’m creating now for a startup in Cambridge.

Another good point from Maciej: building a website and adding some social media options does not a community make. It can’t be engineered; a thriving community develops organically over time.

Dan Williams was a great speaker, charismatic and passionate about the persistent surveillance infiltrating our lives. He brought detailed (and difficult to find) research to illustrate all of his points. I didn’t even know about the surveillance drones planned for NYC, although the Bloomberg quote “get used to it” sounds just like him. Bloomberg argues that we are already under surveillance from every building on practically every street corner – what’s the difference between that and unmanned aircraft snapping our candids?

Dan mentioned the hilarious CCTV filmmakers project, which uses footage from existing CCTV cameras to produce short films and performances. He thought he would try it out when he found out that his entire bus ride through the UK was filmed. However he could only get one photo (you can request footage through a freedom of information act – info on the UK government site here. CCTV is required to obscure everyone’s face except for the requesting party, so they would have had to manually black out (with what looked like a sharpie) everyone’s faces in every frame for the entire three hour ride.

Also didn’t know and was shocked to find out that there are cameras in some bars in the US tracking customers gender, age, and physical characteristics to pass along to services like dating apps or for advertising.

Besides being creeped out at times, what a great experience and I’m so glad I went. I‘m going to try to stay in that mind-expanded space as I work on web applications for clients, and develop my own product that will push the limits of augmented reality and ask how technology can provide a deeper connection to the world around us. I especially want to dive deeper into geolocation.

So often with web design we talk about conventions and staying within what users already know. I think that’s valuable advice, but let’s not be restricted by it so that we end up creating the same website over and over again. We can move beyond traditional interaction patterns as these new technologies become more accepted, slowly but surely.

However, none of the speakers were as titillating as the conversation I had with Jeremy Keith and Richard Rutter of Clearleft afterwards. At what point does a french fry become a “chip”? A question that has perplexed me ever since I moved to London three months ago. Where is that dividing line – what is maximum french fry size and what on earth pray tell is minimum chip size? Someone help, before I lose any more sleep over this.

Oh wait, one more big takeaway (and good note to end my epic blog post) that Nicole Sullivan brought to the table – don’t engage with the haters. Focus on the positive things that people are saying and give the negative, non-constructive (usually anonymous) feedback none of your time. In fact, sometimes we can even be our own worst enemy and troll ourselves – true fact. Cheers to a troll-free life for all. You heard me, drink up!

Concept, play, and the space between

In web design, each project begins with user experience and develops with a focus on the subtleties of interactions rather than making a bold, design-first, graphic system, especially if it would get in the way of proper navigation of the site. I must admit, I was envious of Lobe’s work. It’s aggressive, and risk-taking. I would like to take these graphic design lessons with me into the web world where I’m currently working. One of the questions after his presentation was, how do you get this work approved? He said he’s been asked that many times but that he hasn’t run into much resistance. Hm. When there is a strong reason for the design, he explained, then it is hard to argue against it.

I think the genius of his work comes from the ability to think from a birds-eye view. Literally. Many of his design solutions for architectural space involve a graphic device imposed upon the floorplan of the site, which is then translated to the three-dimensional space.

The translation of this system into the interior space is visually intense and slightly disorienting (I’d have to see it in person to know for sure), but a powerful graphic concept successfully applied to the space. They maintained the curvature of the circles on walls, ceilings and floors, to guide the visitor through the space. No matter how small of the fragment of circle you see, you know where the exit is depending on which direction it’s curving.

I was turned on to the Jacques Greene site by Hoverstat.es today, and found myself relating this experience with the feeling of navigating a transparent modern construction like this one. There are a group of windows at fixed sizes, all playing an individual snippet of the video for this song. But within those windows, there are other windows. So you feel like you’re navigating through a fuzzy glass-walled fantasy dream with lots of trees, and a young expressionless girl.

I’ve never seen a music video broken into individual windows. As I was playing, I was asking myself a whole number of nerdy design questions. How does one window experience differ when it’s separated from the rest? Do you need all of them together to understand the full story? You can’t close or resize them so there is strictness in the playfulness, and maybe a little too limited because the fun ends there. But I was able to get a full experience of the music without altering the visual experience in any damaging way.

In fact, it was cool to move the windows off screen, stretching the common idea of screen real estate.

This made me think of the A List Apart redesign, launched earlier this year.

By using off-canvas real estate to park the blog header and footer, besides frustrating people (including myself), is there a conversation that they are trying to have about the current paradigms of the web? My immediate reaction was that I couldn’t scroll up to see more of the logo – the fact that it’s cropped activates an existing paradigm that there is more content to see. I thought of Facebook’s use of the half profile photo when you first land and you have to scroll up to see the whole thing. But maybe the designers are telling us, PLAY! Don’t be so contained within this navigable space. Go out of bounds. It’s the adult equivalent of coloring outside the lines with your crayons.

Also, people need to chill. Not everything can be explained. I braved a Matthew Barney presentation at the NYPL a couple weeks ago, and the interviewer seemed scattered and irrelevant at best, offensive at worst. In all honestly, it was just as awkward as one of his films, which was just perfect. I felt like he was trying to get inside Barney’s brain.

After a 25 minute preview of his upcoming film, they began to discuss Barney’s current show at the Morgan Library. We saw an image of the drawing above, then viewed a video of the creation of the drawing. The interviewer asked, now what do we know about this drawing now that we’ve seen the process? He asked Matthew Barney this question! Barney took a beat, and said “the sun in the upper right.” And waited for utter confusion to set in. Then he said, “I think it’s the most transformative.” It was incredible. Not everything needs to be explained, at least in the way people want it to be sometimes.

Barney is inspiring to me because of the way he abstracts concepts from the things that interest him. All of his work is based on the narratives from literature by Norman Mailer and other masculine literary figures and athletes. He has a major focus on the concept of the masculine.

A strong underlying concept provides a bounded space, which allows room for experimentation within, and the work doesn’t stray too far outside of those lines.

I was trained by students of Yale modernists, who practiced design by stripping down meaning to its most basic form. I love that process of finding simplicity, but I also love how school taught me to always think of something as something else, everything is contained within its larger category and classified in a way. Like Barthes explains the Japanese theater as the antithesis of theater, as creating distance and of performing the void, where there is a lack of meaning. This is opposite of western theater where it is packed with layers of meaning.

In my work I’ve found myself more interested in the space between. Nothingness. Emptiness. Spatial relations among architecture for example, are fascinating to me. Windows and the viewpoints they create, portals and perspective in physical space and on the screen. I just finished my freelance work at Code and Theory in preparation for my move to London, and now that I have some free time I’m going to start on a self-initiated project that I think will be a lot of fun. I need a better camera.

Concept, play, and the space between

I went to see Sascha Lobe speak on Tuesday night at MAD, as part of AIGA design talk extravaganza. He runs L2M3 in Germany. And he’s really hot. Once I got over that and started paying attention (lets be honest, I still haven’t gotten over it), it reminded me of the work I did with Base Madrid. What a great opportunity that was, and the last time I was able to work on a client project with a strong graphic system.

In web design, each project begins with user experience and develops with a focus on the subtleties of interactions rather than making a bold, design-first, graphic system, especially if it would get in the way of proper navigation of the site. I must admit, I was envious of Lobe’s work. It’s aggressive, and risk-taking. I would like to take these graphic design lessons with me into the web world where I’m currently working. One of the questions after his presentation was, how do you get this work approved? He said he’s been asked that many times but that he hasn’t run into much resistance. Hm. When there is a strong reason for the design, he explained, then it is hard to argue against it.

I think the genius of his work comes from the ability to think from a birds-eye view. Literally. Many of his design solutions for architectural space involve a graphic device imposed upon the floorplan of the site, which is then translated to the three-dimensional space.

In response to the odd fact that the building entrance is section E and they weren’t able to change the coding, L2M3 created a graphic device of concentric rings to guide the application of the wayfinding system. It’s as if a pebble were being dropped down at E and rippling out to other parts. The occupant is mtz Münchner Technologie Zentrum, and that is the extent of my knowledge about this company. Their website is really boring. And in German.

The translation of this system into the interior space is visually intense and slightly disorienting (I’d have to see it in person to know for sure), but a powerful graphic concept successfully applied to the space. They maintained the curvature of the circles on walls, ceilings and floors, to guide the visitor through the space. No matter how small of the fragment of circle you see, you know where the exit is depending on which direction it’s curving.

Images snagged from L2M3

The lightboxes in the lobby give a directional cue for each building area as the letters float in their respective color. The direction that the letters move determines the direction to walk. They infused this boring space with so much imagination and visual interest, I wonder if its made those serious employees have more fun.

I was turned on to the Jacques Greene site by Hoverstat.es today, and found myself relating this experience with the feeling of navigating a transparent modern construction like this one. There are a group of windows at fixed sizes, all playing an individual snippet of the video for this song. But within those windows, there are other windows. So you feel like you’re navigating through a fuzzy glass-walled fantasy dream with lots of trees, and a young expressionless girl.

I’ve never seen a music video broken into individual windows. As I was playing, I was asking myself a whole number of nerdy design questions. How does one window experience differ when it’s separated from the rest? Do you need all of them together to understand the full story? You can’t close or resize them so there is strictness in the playfulness, and maybe a little too limited because the fun ends there. But I was able to get a full experience of the music without altering the visual experience in any damaging way.

In fact, it was cool to move the windows off screen, stretching the common idea of screen real estate.

This made me think of the A List Apart redesign, launched earlier this year. By using off-canvas real estate to park the blog header and footer, besides frustrating people (including myself), is there a conversation that they are trying to have about the current paradigms of the web? My immediate reaction was that I couldn’t scroll up to see more of the logo – the fact that it’s cropped activates an existing paradigm that there is more content to see. I thought of Facebook’s use of the half profile photo when you first land and you have to scroll up to see the whole thing. But maybe the designers are telling us, PLAY! Don’t be so contained within this navigable space. Go out of bounds. It’s the adult equivalent of coloring outside the lines with your crayons.

Subliming Vessel, Matthew Barney at The Morgan Library and Museum

A strong underlying concept provides a bounded space, which allows room for experimentation within, and the work doesn’t stray too far outside of those lines.

The freelance life/ Moving on

Over the past few years, I’ve learned a lot about working as a designer. I have a lot of passion for what I do, and doing good work is very important to me.

As a freelancer, I’ve felt a bit like a nomad. I’ve worked on great projects for large and small clients, and appreciate the experience of working at agencies of varying size, in-house, etc. While the freelance life has given me flexibility and wisdom about many different environments, there have been situations where I haven’t been able to make the level of contribution that I would like to.

There was one time in particular when I was working on a very large team and I felt that it would be impossible to actually do good work (which is unfortunate by itself), but what was really disappointing to me is that I felt that regardless of how hard I fought for it, I wouldn’t be able to make much difference. I realize now that no one is going to give you that entitlement, regardless of your employment status as freelance or full-time. Since then I’ve decided that I will always take a strong stance and do my best to prevent a situation that could compromise the quality of my work, even if it causes me discomfort.

I am truly ready to land somewhere full-time, making the highest level of contribution possible. I honestly can’t wait.

Making connections

In the past few years since I started this blog, it’s biggest purpose has been to make connections between the thoughts in my head and the work I’m doing. I have a major connection to make, that gets to the heart of why I do what I do.

For the past four months I’ve been working at digital advertising agency LBi (now MRY). It’s a hidden behemoth of a space behind Flatiron’s grey walls. You could literally work there for four years and not meet everyone, but I’m working in the creative department among a bustling extravaganza of interesting folks.

LBi calls themselves a marketing agency for the digital world, so my job is to design beautiful online advertisements in the form of websites. I suppose it could be argued that every website is that, however the websites I’m designing are promoting consumer products like this one for Neutrogena.

This is a new one for me but it’s reminded me a lot of what both of my parents devoted their lives to – marketing consumer products. My mom started her own direct marketing business in the 80’s and People’s Bank and Harrah’s were among her clients. My dad worked at General Foods for a thousand years and was VP of Sales and Marketing.

Every trip to the supermarket was analyzed for product placement, and every commercial on TV was picked apart. He spent so much time managing the Maxwell House brand I remember I had a mixtape with all of the different options for “jingles”…

I feel more of a connection to them with this work because the feedback we get from the client might be feedback that they would have given to a creative team. It doesn’t make it any better (ha!) but at least I understand the client perspective. As a designer I have this practical side that was probably instilled by my corporate parents. Design is a perfect balance for me (even though I will always secretly wish I was a conceptual artist). I love helping people to develop their brand, and providing the valuable service of design, and working within the energy of a creative team.