Mark Boulton

Yester­day I atten­ded a BBC run design event called Digital Futures, for internal design­ers and invited guests, on the future of design in a digital soci­ety. There was a eclectic mix of speak­ers planned for a packed day.

• Neville Brody: Typo­grapher & founder of Research Studios
• Brian Col­lin: Exec­ut­ive Cre­at­ive Dir­ector, Ogilvy and Mather, New York
• Bill Drum­mond
• Paul Mijk­sen­aar: Graph­ics for Ori­ent­a­tion and Navigation
• Marco Susani: Per­vas­ive Media. TV in the age of seam­less mobility
• Lisa Straus­feld: Pen­te­g­ram, New York

So, quite a dis­tin­quished list and it prom­ised to be a inter­est­ing mix of presentations.

The event began with me nurs­ing a hangover out­side in the fresh air (you know the feel­ing, dizzy, too hot, too cold), thank­fully after a good cup of tea and a few deep breaths I seemed to knock it into touch. Although I was pretty tired from put­ting up with a hotel room which was as hot as the sun. 

After the usual pre-conference milling around, meet­ing new people and catch­ing up with col­legues from around the coun­try, we all filed into the National Film Theatre on London’s South Bank. What a fant­astic theatre and quite pos­sibly the most com­fort­able seats in the world, and it was dark, I was at the back, and tired. Could be dan­ger­ous. These speak­ers had bet­ter be good. 

First up… Brian Collin

First up was Brian Col­lin from Ogilvy and Mather in New York. I really didn’t know what to expect but it turned into per­haps one of the most mem­or­able present­a­tions I’ve atten­ded. I can’t go into too many details because of copy­right, but what he had to say was pretty inspir­ing. There was chocol­ate, soap and pir­ates along with every presen­a­tion tech­nique in the book, all delivered like a seasoned stand up comedian. 

He chal­lenged my expect­a­tions of not brand and advert­ising but of pro­cess and hand­ling cli­ents. The over­all idea was to chal­lenge, not only your own expect­a­tions, but the pub­lics and the cli­ents. Break everything down to the most basic ele­ments, then build it back up and see what you get. 

Next… Neville Brody

I was really look­ing for­ward to this one. I’d writ­ten essays about this bloke in col­lege, I know his work very well but had never met him or heard him speak. 

He star­ted off by going through some cli­ent work and took about twenty minutes to get warmed up to a very rushed, but incred­ibly inter­est­ing, final ten minutes. 

Mr. Brody seems con­cerned. Not only with the dir­ec­tion of design but by the way it’s led by tech­no­logy. As design­ers we seem to have lost our way, unaware of our roots and as a res­ult pro­duce mean­ing­less work. Is this ok? yeah, prob­ably (I think that was the gen­eral feeling).

It wasn’t until the pan­els that Neville said some truly pro­found things, at least for me, which really struck a cord. He told a story of a friend of his in New York, a designer in his 50’s, who’s lived by the man­tra — “Form fol­lows Func­tion”. We’ve all heard it right? Some of us, me included, are begin­ning to under­stand it. At least that’s what I thought before he star­ted talk­ing about it. He said that his friend began to feel guilty because he liked cer­tain things — designs, products, whatever — that were beau­ti­ful, but also quite rub­bish, but he still liked them. Neville went on to say that beauty, enter­tain­ment, aes­thetic appeal is all part of the func­tion of a design and it’s ok to like things where funtion fol­lows form, because form maybe part of the func­tion anyway. 

Inspiring. 

Lisa Straus­feld

Lisa is an Inform­a­tion Archi­tect work­ing for Pen­ta­gram mostly on exter­ior inform­a­tion spaces. She gave an inter­est­ing present­a­tion on the use of inform­a­tion in a vir­tual, and real, 3d environments. 

I’m quite into inform­a­tion design and spe­cific­ally the pro­cess of break­ing down com­plex, rich, multi-layered inform­a­tion into an easy to under­stand, nav­ig­able space. 

She began by show­ing examples from her work at MIT and then on to some com­mi­s­ioned work for rail­way sta­tions in New York. Most of this work com­prised of inform­a­tion envir­on­ments to real space and com­prised of Media Walls and Sig­nage. Some really great work was on show and i’m sure you can look at some of it on the Pen­ta­gram web site. 

Paul Mijk­sen­aar

Most people, design­ers included, don’t notice sig­nage. Or at least don’t notice good sig­nage, when it’s doing it’s job well.

In the UK, we have great road sig­nage, we have a world fam­ous, won­der­ful Tube Map in Lon­don. It’s such a shame our air­port sig­nage is gen­er­ally rub­bish. This is where Paul Mijk­sen­aar comes in. 

Paul began a hur­ried present­a­tion by going through his the­or­ies on way­find­ing and the pro­cess of people get­ting from point A to point B and most of the cog­nit­ive pat­terns in that pro­cess. Really inter­est­ing stuff. He talked about col­our cod­ing and max­im­ising col­our com­bin­a­tions for legib­il­ity and highest con­trast. All of this stuff about sig­nage, as i’ve said before, is incred­ibly rel­ev­ant for design­ing web sites. We need to be look­ing at tra­di­tional way­find­ing and sig­nage and mov­ing the model into design­ing for the web. 

Inter­est­ingly Paul talked about the death of pic­to­grams in a future where way­find­ing will be done on a mobile device. I’d never really thought about it before but it makes sense. Pic­to­grams exist so man­u­fac­tur­ers don;t have to cre­ate signs in many dif­fer­ent lan­guages. Once a user can choose their lan­guage, pic­to­grams become use­less, or rather they become sec­ond­ary to the words. Or is it that pic­to­grams are more rap­idly under­stood than words? Cer­tainly made me think. 

Marco Susani

Mar­cos present­a­tion was all about con­ver­gence of broad­cast­ing onto sev­eral plat­forms, pre­dom­in­antly mobile, and how those devices integ­rate with other devices in your life — TV’s, phones, com­puters, video record­ers etc.

An inter­est­ing present­a­tion which was very focussed on tech­no­logy but to be hon­est i’m get­ting a little tired of tech­no­logy presen­ted in this man­ner. there’s simply too much of it going on. Call me a little jaded, but I know there are going to be devices which integ­rate with telly, I know you’ll be able to watch movies on your devices on the train. I know all this stuff, but still ques­tion the motives to pro­mot­ing the tech­no­logy. Yes, com­pan­ies want to sell products and yes they need to edu­cate the pub­lic to do it. But it’s all too much. Too much tech­no­logy, too many gad­gets and too many com­pan­ies telling us we need to keep up. By this point I was get­ting tired. 

Bill Drum­mond

Bills present­a­tion was a breath of fresh air. I won’t go into the details of the con­tent as I got the sense that he didn’t want expos­ure for what he was doing but what I will say is it involved mak­ing soup and God. Let’s just say it made me re-evaluate my motiv­a­tions for not only design, but for life in gen­eral. Deep eh? 

Thank you Bill, you cer­tainly woke me up. 

Time for a pint

After the event we all walked over the bridge to get on a boat on the Thames and enjoy a drink or two before rush­ing to catch the train back to to Cardiff. Some­times it’s great to listen to people who not only under­stand you, but inspire you also. Top notch, look­ing for­ward to June now for @media 2005. 

Dis­claimer: This art­icle rep­res­ents my views of the days pro­ceed­ings and does not rep­res­ent the views of the BBC or the attend­ing speakers.