I am a fan of cities. Big cities. Cities that overflow unapologetically with the sweaty messiness of the human condition. Having lived in no less than 8 of these cultural mosh pits, I have deep convictions as to what makes great cities great and the less great predictably less great. Broadly put this comes down to the interplay between randomness and predictability; between the mundane and the miraculous. Over time – with sensitivity, persistence and a fast eye – living in the state of enforced intimacy a city demands, bestows upon you an appreciation for the accidental beauty inherent in all types of human interactions: A veiled argument between husband and wife, a kiss without end between teenagers, the hot tears of a child bemoaning some soon to be forgotten injustice, the loud incredulous embrace of long lost acquaintances – it’s all part of the mosaic. It’s fleeting, it’s intangible and yet it’s entirely palpable.

James Nares “STREET” currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum in NY provides a glimpse into this elusive greatness. And in the process, lustfully satisfies the voyeuristic tendencies every city dweller harbors within themselves. Using a high-speed/high-definition camera, Nares canvases the streets of Manhattan from Harlem to Times Square, Midtown back to Washington Heights – in a process that transforms the banal into the brilliant. Played back at slow speed the images reveal rhythms and subtleties lost to the human eye. A lingering yawn, the drunken flightpath of a cast off cigarette, the poetic movement of a backpack lanyard – it’s all there vividly presented for the viewer to soak in and savor without interruption. Paired with a discordant acoustic guitar riff performed by Thurston More of Sonic Youth, the 61 minute piece takes on the ethereal tone of some oddly conceived opening sequence: one that never seems to culminate into narrative. And yet — narrative is there. The camera works its magic; focal length creates subject matter, movement, color and the idiosyncratic nature of facial expression all conspire to establish the full range of characters we are programmed to seek out.  Heroes, villains, damsels in distress, jokesters – they’re all there captured unwittingly at 780 frames per second. If you are a lover of New York, the human condition or of that particular brand of beauty that emerges from the mundane, you owe it to yourself to seek out this glimpse of this invisibly visible New York.

Want a taste? You can see a clip from “STREET” here.

I love tracking trends. Social trends, food trends, fashion trends – all of it fascinates me. But aesthetic trends, specifically those that bubble up in design, fascinate me most. Why? Because picking up on a trend and chasing it back to it’s source is a bit like sleuthing. It’s damned good detective work. You can see the signal (evidence) but the reason (motive) takes a little more digging and a fair amount of intuition. In the past 20 months or so I’ve been fascinated by two trends in particular: the wide edge and the bird cage.

The Wide Edge tracks the proliferation of broad, flat-surfaced geometries that have become the de facto aesthetic statement of our digi-centric lives. Masses are minimal, surface development nominal and fit and finish or “joinery” (how the pieces come together) is where the character of the thing comes to life. These geometries create broad canvas-like surfaces which give designers and CMF specialist a lot of space to experiment with ever subtler color and texture mash-ups. In fact the color pallets applied to these forms, usual muted on large forms and super intense on small forms, have become much more sophisticated than the standard whites, black and chromes of just five years ago. What’s more; to pull it off really really well requires a deep commitment to good tooling and high quality production. It is not a visual strategy for the lazy nor cheap. Looking at geometries that use this language I can’t help but compare over developed surfacing to something akin to skeuomorphism rise and decline in the interaction design space; a buttery deception that may taste savory at first but which quickly becomes sickening and overpowering.

The Bird Cage tracks a genuine curiosity; the growing tendency to wrap all manner of objects within a seemingly arbitrary exoskeleton. I first saw this trend emerging around lamps but in recent months have seen it applied to stools, vases and desks. I’m still up in the air on this one a bit, but the celebration of this external structure seems to have its roots in two artifacts of the digital design process: the lattice structures which some 3D printers use to support builds and the tessellated or polygon surface representation prevalent in CAD packages. So far this one seems a bit more stylistic than the Wide Edge but I wouldn’t count it out, time will tell if it can develop into something more functional; a light-weight frame, a permeable mass, sculptural antennae – who knows?

As for me? The wide-edge is driving me to revisit the work of 70’s sculptor Donald Judd. Master extraodinaire of minimalism. Aesthetics come in elliptical orbits – habituating one’s self to their rhythms is not only good practice, it’s sure to impress friends, peers, and clients alike.

There’s no way around it, for as great as NYC is at Xmas it’s also meat city for the thousands of homeless (to say nothing of those hundreds still displaced by Sandy). I shot back for the holiday break and was able to soak in the sights, catch up with family and friends and generally just afford myself a chance to decompress and it was – as is to be expected – cinematically great! But at the edges of the scene there was no way of getting around the fact that there is an awful lot of squalor, pain and suffering in gotham.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on CORE77 – see it here

The other night, I caught myself riveted to one of those blocks of cable programing one stumbles upon with increasing frequency: back-to-back episodes of some show you’ve never heard of. On this particular evening the focus was Animal Planet’s Monster Inside Me. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, each episode is a gruesome account of parasitic infestations and the effects they wreck on their human hosts. While not quite appointment viewing—the show is definitely compelling in an ‘I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing’ sort of way. On this night, as I settled into my 3rd straight episode, I found my thoughts drifting towards creativity; specifically to how organizational operations, like outsized autoimmune systems, often function in pitch-perfect opposition to creativity and innovation efforts.

This idea first started knocking about in my head a few months back when a client lent me a copy of The Other Side of Innovation by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble. The book presents some interesting arguments as to why innovation efforts frequently fail. It’s not merely that these efforts generally traffic outside the norms of the organization, according to Govindarajan and Trimble, they operate in direct conflict with them. Think about it: an organization strives to achieve a certain measure of success and that success, if met, leads to growth. Overtime the organization necessarily figures its business out; they learn how to do what they do. Growth is the proof that they’ve cracked the code for doing it in a manner that’s repeatable and in balance. This state of equilibrium, and the mechanism that keeps it all humming along smoothly and without friction—is the performance engine. A codified system of hard won practices and truths that keep the flywheel spinning 24/7. It’s the recipe that works within the context of the business as it is.

But innovation efforts by their nature don’t generally concern themselves with what has worked—they seek to answer a very different question: what might work? And therein lies the conflict which Govindarajan and Trimble describe. Called upon to address issues other than day-to-day operations, innovation efforts are characteristically out of phase with the rest of the organization. Viewed in this light, they are anomalies, outlying activities that are alien to the ecosystem in which they find themselves and just as frequently misunderstood. Little wonder the performance engine, with its system of metrics and measurements, starts to try and contain the damage. But that response, while understandable, can prove detrimental to the organization’s well being—especially when it thwarts evolutionary change.

In one episode of Monster Inside Me, a young girl contracts anisakiasis—a condition brought on by ingesting a waterborne worm called anisaki. Within a few hours of ingesting the parasite, her condition deteriorates as her immune system goes into overdrive trying to neutralize the parasite. The result? An obstruction of life-threatening proportions forms in her intestinal tract requiring emergency surgery. Ironically, had her immune system not responded—something it has specifically evolved to do—the parasite would have passed through her body without incident. In the case of anisakiasis, it’s not the parasite that will kill you, it’s your body’s defensive response that will. Alternatively, in another episode a California man whose debilitating asthma has significantly impacted his quality of life, decides to infect himself with hookworms in a desperate effort to combat his allergies. This controversial approach harnesses the hookworm’s apparent ability to ‘switch off’ our immune system; greatly reducing, if not eradicating, our body’s allergic responses.

In the first case, the body’s natural response ends up in direct conflict with the well being of the individual themselves. In the second, a counter intuitive decision (to knowingly infect oneself with a harmful parasite) leads to alleviating a chronic condition. In both cases the natural functioning of the immune system turns out to be at odds with what may ultimately be in the best interest of the individual. Whether it takes the form of a parasitic infection or say, a shift in the marketplace, change provokes a response and what’s tried and true isn’t always helpful. Today as more and more formal structures falter in the face of persistent change, adaptation and the adoption of new, seemingly radical solutions, isn’t so much bold as it is good practice.

Robert Safian’s cover piece for this month’s issue of Fast Company “How to Lead in a Time of Chaos” brings more support to this argument. In his article, Safian references Margaret Wheatley’s trail blazing book Leadership and the New Science which, when originally published some twenty years ago, challenged long held beliefs on organizational wisdom. Specifically, what Wheatly took issue with was a culture of organizational thinking that she believed relied too heavily on closed-system/cause and effect paradigms. This mindset, as Safian points out, had some rather deep roots: 17th century Newtonian physics to be precise. Simply put, it was a worldview informed by observation of the natural world; hence the emphasis on cause and effect. That model stability, manifest through an elegant equilibrium of actions and offsets, was the overriding goal of operational management. But as Safian reminds us, today we live in a hyper-dynamic post-Newtonian world: one where stasis often signals demise; stability is elusive; and scientific advancements reside well beyond what we can observe or intuit from the visible world. His point? Leadership needs to adopt a more sophisticated view of operations and management; one that eschews simple models and convenient conclusions in favor of hybrid solutions that mix and match hierarchy with flexibility—the tried and true with frequent and persistent experimentation.

This emphasis on experimentation mirrors the advice ultimately put forth by Govindarajan and Trimble who advocate for running innovation efforts as ‘disciplined’ experiments modeled more on scientific inquiry than operational procedure. No matter how an organization ultimately chooses to reconcile innovation efforts with the day-to-day functioning of their organization, one thing is clear: old models aren’t delivering credible results. In fact, they may well be distracting us into a false sense of normalcy; one that dangerously institutionalizes outdated practices and prevents organizations from understanding problems as they truly are.

So what is one to do? Consider inviting a useful antagonism into the organization. Bring the outside in, make a habit of exposing your organization to what it isn’t, and most importantly, if you are in a position of leadership, be willing to sustain disbelief long enough to let contrary ideas reveal their insights in earnest. Today Outsider is what topples; Other is often leaner, faster and less concerned with precedent; and Outlier succeeds because it doesn’t know that it can’t. Outsider, Other and Outlier are gleefully unaware that whatever it is they are proposing ‘can’t be done’ or has been ‘tried in the past’—and it is that selfsame ignorance that can, and on occasion does, enable their success to magnificent effect.

I’m not advocating for wholesale disruption or the indiscriminate adoption of unvetted practices, but I am taking a cue from Monsters Inside Me. The lesson of the parasite is this: be willing to infect yourself with ideas that go against your assumed self-interest. Smoothing out the wrinkles of the world in order that they might better conform to what benefits the organization directly is painstaking, costly and frequently futile work. Clay Shirky has said that ‘One of the best ways to know you are completely wrong, is to behave as if you are completely right.’ My advice? Admit some doubt into your ecosystem. Start incubating what threatens your business: those ideas that represent your assumptions at their most inverted. Then, take a deep breath and work backwards. Is it risky? It needn’t be. If the Center for Disease Control can warehouse some of the most virulent pathogens on earth without contaminating the rest of us, odds are you can find the means to expose your organization to the new without risking calamity. Call it innovation. Call it change management. Call it strategy. But whatever handle you settle on, just remember that the best way to build up resistance is though controlled and repeated exposure. So go ahead. Pull up your sleeve. Make a fist. And infect yourself. Set against a backdrop of habitual disruption, this type of controlled exposure might not only cure what ails you, it might just mutate your business from one that merely survives into one that genuinely thrives.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for TEAGUE – see it here

Last week we had a bit of time in the studio, and as invariably happens in studio cultures, we used the downtime to do some creative housecleaning; we closed a pair of internal projects we’d undertook a few months back with the University of Western Washington.

As an organization that earns its keep by means of a point of view, TEAGUE thrives by maintaining an informed understanding of what is happening in the various sectors that impact our clients’ businesses. Program work is of course one mechanism for this—the right client mix acts as a sort of index fund, allowing the organization to organically track the market place in ways that fit neatly into the rhythm of the company’s primary business model: fee for service. Countervailing this is yet another mechanism—internal programs, self-directed efforts that are vital in expanding our knowledge and broadcasting what we think is important in the world. As investigations that telegraph beyond the immediate marketplace and aim for a target somewhere north of the zeitgeist, internal programs are an important albeit tricky undertaking. They bubble up, take form, linger, fade, and in some cases, blossom. The one bankable thing about them is how stubbornly fragile they are –in this regard they mirror the creative process itself. Planning internal efforts is more an exercise in framing than prescribing; you can set up the conditions but what makes them bloom is a serendipitous combination of momentum, excitement, topicality, and individual drive. What’s more, even when all of those factors coalesce, the spark that sets them in motion remains so delicate that without organizational commitment and the dogged persistence of a few—they seldom move past conversation.

The projects we recently completed with the students at Western bear this stubborn truth out. Building off the ‘community’ theme that informed TEAGUE’s Chairmanship of the IDSA conference last fall, we challenged the students to explore the territory of collaborative consumption; an economic model that replaces traditional ideas of ownership with access to goods and services. Embarking from a simple brief: ‘to create a product-service offering that gets better the more people use it,’ the students meandered, backtracked but ultimately charged headlong into an investigation that resulted in two proposals—Vote+ and Local Kitchen.

The results genuinely exceeded our expectations.

A core conceit of collaborative consumption is the belief that access to goods and services frequently trumps the benefits of ownership. What makes this proposition work is the type of tightly choreographed access that communication technologies enable. As a result ‘social’ is an implicit part of collaborative consumption. The propositions the students arrived at examine this promise in two equally compelling, but ultimately very different ways.

Vote+ revisits the idea of democracy as a social experiment and ups the ante by framing voter participation as a product-service proposition. If you want the product of equal representation that democracy proposes, you’ve got to participate in the functionalservice of voting. Recognizing the motivating power of self-interest, Vote+ uses local issues to ladder individuals into broader participation in the electoral process. What’s more, by artfully navigating four co-dependent factors (self interest, convenience, security and experience) Vote+ lays out a compelling model of what 21^st century democracy could look like. One where social media, Facebook-style ledger boards and choice architecture combine into a user experience that breathes new life into our admirable but admittedly dusty democratic process, resulting in an experience that’s smart, well-branded and ultimately way more engaging than the present one.

Local Kitchen, the second proposal tackles a completely different, but equality thorny social problem: healthy eating. Recognizing that healthy eating is the result of several factors, income, education and access to quality produce—Local Kitchen strives to reduce many of these barriers by combining social media, customer loyalty programs, and edutainment trends. Located in participating grocery stores, Local Kitchen provides users a fully stocked kitchen space that comes staffed with knowledgeable staff and all the supporting services one needs to prepare any meal suggested by the service. Participation begins online where users can review menu options by cost or meal type. Once a dish is selected, cost can be reduced by inviting others to join your meal or by joining other groups. On the day of their booking users proceed to participating grocery stores, purchase the necessary ingredients and check into the Local Kitchen. When preparation is complete users can choose to eat on site or box it up and take it home. By orchestrating needs and wants across retailers and consumers Local Kitchen achieves three objectives: it lowers per plate costs, it imparts knowledge, and it strengthens community.  When compared to the fast food chains and other options that comprise most Americans food options, Local Kitchen offers a noteworthy vision for how we might tackle issues of community and individual health in an age of increasingly challenged resources.

Vote+ and Local Kitchen offer hypothetical solutions to complex social challenges, in each case the solutions were arrived at by playing need against choice. While the brief we presented the students anticipated a topical ‘landing’ for the effort, the results were never assumed. When the course work concluded in April the TEAGUE team chose to continue working with the students in an effort to help them better realize the full potential of their ideas. As one might imagine, this quickly became a test of resolve, but we kept at it for two reasons. The first reason was simple, we had promised the students we would help them see the work to conclusion and assist them in pushing the results out into the blogosphere. The second gets back to the value internal projects provide to extend our understanding of a given domain. In so far as collaborative consumption reconciles self-interest with collective needs, it offers a powerful model for what one might call ‘practical sustainability’; a model that maintains the free-will of consumerism while simultaneously organizing individual actions into an ecosystem of hyper resource management that satisfies the greater good.

Access over ownership is a dynamic we currently don’t get to explore in all of our client work, but with its implicit overtones of service-design I’m fairly confident that collaborative consumption has something to teach all of TEAGUE about the future direction of our offering. Choice architecture, brand experience, and behavioral economics – they all reside within collaborative consumption. When viewed in this light, the opportunity to mentor the students through these problems, while on the surface of it an act of goodwill—is in truth really just as much an investment in ourselves. This double purpose is an inherent component of internal efforts, it’s great when they hit their mark and generate traction in the blogosphere but we should never loose sight of the fact that their real value is the role they play in keeping creative teams sharp. Preparing creative cultures, even if indirectly, for the project brief of tomorrow.

Check out the results of the collaboration at Core77.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for CORE77 – see it here

Watching last month’s meteoric funding spike for Alerta’s Pebble Smartwatch you no doubt caught your inner voice asking: Could I do that? The weekend of April 21st—as the project rocketed from roughly $3 million to $4.5 million and on to approximately $7 million by week’s end—what was truly impressive wasn’t that Alerta’s ask was for a mere $100K, but rather that the project still had a 30-day drive left to go. As the funding surpassed $8 million then $9 million with little sign of abating, the blogosphere frothed with the predictable range of rants, encouragements and forebodings.

Ultimately the project raised $10.3 million—impressive coin to be sure.

Coming on the heels of last year’s TikTok/LunaTik story—which earned a then impressive $950K, the Pebble story raises a slew of questions for any designer with even the most modest entrepreneurial urge. While the signs have been out there for a while, crowdfunding is now indisputably hitting its stride—and its impact on design, and culture at large, is something all of us should be taking note of.

Everywhere one looks, whether it’s the recent purchase of Instagram for $1billion, Facebook’s mid-May IPO, Kickstarter success stories like Alerta’s, or the simple fact that every other business article today seems written by, for or about some start-up founder—entrepreneurial fever is in full effect. The slow-breaking realization of this fact got me reflecting on some longstanding opinions I’d held tightly to over the years. Historically, when asked for career advice, I’ve regularly encouraged young designers to get some consulting experience in under their belts before considering a stint in corporate. My logic being, you’ll learn a lot, get stress-tested, work a variety of projects and come out the other side with some strong skills, good time management practices and a surer sense of what really matters to you. To this I’d usually reflect for a beat on my own corporate experience and add a bit about consulting being a sprint and corporate being a marathon. And for years that advice felt fairly legitimate.

Today, I don’t know if that advice still holds true.

In a landscape of long odds, the chance to be an active agent for change in your own life wins out over being a bit player in a narrative of stasis.

Four years of mediocre economic performance served up with partisan bickering in Washington and stock price leadership in the boardroom has created what I imagine must add up to a rather un-inspiring ‘now’ for design school graduates. The majors, with a handful of exceptions, have proven they are either devoid of new ideas, or worse, have lost the will to gamble on them. Instead they sink millions into acquisitions and legal fees in an attempt to better position themselves in a seemingly endless game of patent collecting; a tightly scripted play in which building and creating takes a very public back seat to defensive maneuvering.

Contrast that picture with the appeal and purpose of start-up culture, by which I mean the broadest possible spirit of entrepreneurial ‘get up and go/make it-happen’ culture. True, overnight success has a much longer ramp-up than most of us (or the media) care to admit, but none of this dampens the attractiveness of that narrative. Why? Because action attracts; because in a landscape of long odds, the chance to be an active agent for change in your own life wins out over being a bit player in a narrative of stasis. Beyond the allure of a big pay off, an event like Alerta’s funding drive makes clear that there is an awful lot of opportunity off-radar from the majors and well below the spectrum of traditional VC funding. Whatever their original intention, crowdfunding sites are quickly becoming the de facto financing model for the mainstream entrepreneur.

So if you are in design school and about to graduate, you now have a very credible 3rd option on the table: consulting gig, corporate job or Kickstarter enabled gap year. And this last option, under the right circumstances, can offer recent grads an invaluable tutorial in full throttle product development; a stint that regardless of outcome, may well prove invaluable later in their careers. So much so, I find myself wondering why design education isn’t doing more to co-opt crowdfunded design efforts into their curriculums? Even if an idea should tank or receive only a lukewarm response, a run-up on Kickstarter offers students an experience packed with valuable lessons in marketing, production and order fulfillment. On the flip side, should their idea prove to be gold, they just might find their path forward taking shape in front of them.

Critics will say that success on Kickstarter or other crowdfunding sites does not a business make—and that’s true. But the value of crowdfunding doesn’t lay in jumpstarting the next Facebook or Apple, or even the next Pebble watch—it’s more modest than that. By dramatically lowering the cost of entry and making the idea of entrepreneurship accessible, Kickstarter and similar sites are attracting a generation back to the type of small and medium production that once helped define our economic success in an era before IPOs and Wall Street valuations became our only measures. What’s more, by engaging participants through passion and interest, crowdfunding reminds us that the journey toward success doesn’t start with a guarantee, it starts with doing. If we’re at all honest in our desire to get the economy moving again, we’ve got to stop thinking about business in terms of the ‘big’ idea, the billion-dollar payday; that road leads to indecision, missed opportunities and regret. If we can bring our sights back down to earth and school a generation of entrepreneurs on the escalator of returns crowdfunding so elegantly creates, we may well end up with a future business culture that pursues value creation out of passion rather than profit alone.

Design organizations need to get serious about appropriating the appeal of this new entrepreneurialism into their operations or risk committing themselves to long term disadvantage.

What does all this renewed focus on entrepreneurship mean for design, for consulting firms as well as corporate groups? Well, that depends on where you sit. For consultants it means a growing new pool of potential patrons and work partners. For corporate groups, it means new strategies and sources of competition. For both it represents a significant rival for talent. Design, from a human resource perspective, has always been a business about talent—attracting it, developing it and keeping it. For decades one of the chief benefits organizations (design or otherwise) extended to talent was predictable access to opportunity and capital; the chance to work and the resources to fund that work. But today those benefits find themselves subject to a strange set of circumstances. Inside organizations access to them is ever more tightly constrained and monitored while outside the organization developments like crowdfunding and shifts in consumer behavior are radically challenging how funding occurs while authoring entirely new opportunities for products and services. Complicating this state of affairs is a marketplace defined by accelerating waves of disruption that consistently catch large organizations off-guard or, at the very least, ill prepared. In contrast, the start-up not only finds purpose in capitalizing on these disruptions—it offers talent similar benefits of opportunity while extending a laser-like sense of purpose. A prospect, which when coupled with the potential of financial reward, often overrides concerns about job security. Net effect, for a generation weaned on hacker culture, DIY projects, Maker Faire and the like—starts-ups present themselves as business without bureaucracy.

The combination is not new; start-ups have been claiming talent for years. What is new is our cultural circumstance. Against a backdrop of chronic job insecurity, this new entrepreneurism may be as much a strategy of self-preservation as it is an expression of autonomy and optimism. Whether to attract the best employees or better prepare themselves against an uncertain future, design organizations (like all businesses) need to get serious about appropriating the appeal of this new entrepreneurialism into their operations or risk committing themselves to long term disadvantage. Talent needs a reason to believe; a sense of organizational purpose that connects legitimately with today’s values, ones that go beyond financial compensation and address factors of social benefit and cultural relevance. What’s the first step? Take a page from start-up cultures: stop asking staff to think like owners and start tapping into the vast reservoir of ideas and energies that comes from treating them like owners. If, as Daniel Pink famously asserted inDrive, the motivators of the 21st century workforce are autonomy, mastery, and purpose—why the hell wouldn’t we?

Post Script: for more discussion on how crowd funding and crowd sourcing are impacting design cultures check out these two links, here and here for a video discussion with Yancey Strickler of Kickstarter, Ben Kaufman of Quirky, Scott Wilson of MNML and Tom Gerhardt of Studio Neat from IDSA’s 2011 International Conference in New Orleans.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for TEAGUE – see it here

Designers, in my experience, are a curious lot—fiercely competitive, at turns obsessively egocentric, but capable nonetheless of limitless magnanimity when it comes to advancing their trade and the community of design. I was reacquainted with this fact on a recent trip to Pune, India. Along with a group of designers from Adidas, BMW, Volvo, Orange Telecom and RKS, I was there to celebrate the inauguration of the DSK International School of Design —a joint enterprise between the French and Indian governments. After the conclusion of our formal duties, conducting workshops, giving lectures, we were ushered under a tent and introduced to the local press pool. Quickly exhausting the standard questions: our impressions of India, design’s prospects for brining about economic transformation, etc., the conversation took a more interesting turn, a detour into the murkier domain of professional aspiration. As each designer tackled the question of what India’s design future might be, what emerged was a genuine desire for India to reach the rather mundane, but altogether rare achievement of developing a contemporary design culture with its cultural heritage in tact.

Perhaps it is the inherent nature of globalization, or the leveling effect of capitalism, but ‘global’ design as we know it in its most familiar form: big box retail—seems systematically intent on burnishing down all the messy, non-conforming bits; the personal idiosyncrasies and peculiarities that would otherwise communicate place of origin.  Reflecting on design’s recent path through such culturally rich locales as South Korea and China, the general consensus of those of us assembled in Pune was that while the successes of those nations was admirable; it had clearly come at the price of place. Anonymity, it appears, is the levy design and manufacturing are willing to pay in their quest for international success.

Compare that achievement to the integral, if accidental role ‘place’ has played in the exported design success of Europe, North America and Japan. Not too long ago ‘made in’ and the incidental export of cultural values and attitudes was part of the experience, indeed a backhanded benefit, of buying importedgoods. In that era place of origin was inevitably mixed in with the experience of ownership. A Braun razor, a pair of Levis, a Sony Walkman were not only useful products, they broadcasted the aspirations and ingenuity of the places they came from. Design not only spoke of manufacturing prowess, it telegraphed the ‘brand’ of nations as they vied for recognition in a rapidly converging marketplace.

Have we lost that? Why can’t the path ahead for places like India and Brazil return us to a similar era; one of cultural diversity in mainstream design rather than a future defined by antiseptic uniformity? A future where the manufactured object once again participates in the transmission of ideas and solutions, and where exposure through commerce can inspire us —designers and consumers alike—to contemplate new ways of doing. The path to economic transformation across which emerging markets progress is rife with social, economic, and environmental challenges, the solutions to which might prove every bit as relevant to developed markets as they aretransformative to domestic ones. Before you dismiss that idea as merely a romantic notion informed by too much mid-day sun, let me make a case for two benefits real cultural diversity could deliver the global toolkit of design.

EXTREMITY

If you read about design with any regularity you’ve no doubt heard the term ‘trickle-back’ or ‘blow-back’ innovation; the phenomena by which innovations and product advancements acquired in emerging markets find application in developed ones. In some cases the improvement is genuinely new, in other cases it’s often little more than an outsized process improvement ‘discovered’ in the process of addressing some basic oversight on the part of the exporter. But in the best cases, the ones that present insights for new ways of doing, something more akin to an extreme use case scenario lays at the heart of this insight. In extreme conditions long held assumptions break down, and the remedy to that condition, once identified, actually advances the product class or service in a way that finds broad application with mainstream users. This dynamic, this ‘stress-testing’ of assumptions happens so frequently in emerging markets one could very well make the case that emerging markets are the world’s laboratory for creating a steady supply of ‘extreme-users’; users who through cultural bias or context aren’t reflexively accepting of brands and solutions that have been ginned up in some foreign context.

So what informs this disposition? Why are emerging markets such reliable incubators of insights that contradict prevailing wisdom? Perhaps it’s in the numbers. With populations that generally tip the scale at close to a billion, the domestic market in places like Brazil and India serve up a sampling of users that encompass a hyper diverse range of needs, biases, and outright peculiarities. Let’s face it—the needs of Western Europe, North America and Japan are not exactly representative of the more basic needs that the rest of the world grapples with on a day-to-day basis. Designing for the disabled is no longer ‘elective’ in a population such as India’s where roughly 12 million are blind (20 million if you include the additional 8 million blind in one eye)*. Thelanguage of the consumer, either as a result of regional dialect, or the effects of illiteracy are no longer ‘shared’ in a market of such unfathomable dimensions, population density and historical diversity. What’s more, the transformative wealth and prosperity these nations aspire to, require some fundamental reconciliation with these ‘outliers’ if it is to be realized in a way that doesn’t invite social chaos. In China by comparison, economic transformation has been regionalized for years, so much so, that even in that tightly choreographed society labor inequality and social injustice threaten to slow its once boundless prospects for wealth creation. India and Brazil have a chance to pursue another path, one that’s a bit more equitable and less intrinsically volatile, and their cultural legacy suggests they just might do so in a manner that reconciles the extremes of their society more artfully in the process.

 NARRATIVE

European Design and American Design, while arguably different are still ultimately birds of a feather. The hegemony of western design, even if it is more and more frequently executed in Asia, has remained pretty much unchallenged for nearly seventy years. It’s brought us some great things, fantastic ideas about individualism, mobility, technological accomplishment and, of course, beauty, the Porsche 911, Dieter Rams, Memphis Style, Philippe Starck, Apple, Nike, Herman Miller—examples of western culture’s apparent conquest of our shared visual landscape is vast. But to some degree, in all the years of its dominion, and right up to its present hurrah in Asia, western design has in many ways come to represent a somewhat dated narrative: one of supreme convenience for the individual. Sure, there are exceptions to this over simplification, but Dr. Dre’s Beats, 60inch plasma displays and the latest Bouroullec brothers meditation—while cool as hell, are in no measure about addressing the more contemporary needs of we.

My point here is not to judge the right of everyone who might aspire to have the latest gadget or luxury novelty, consumer culture is after all global. But as design spools up in emerging markets, where the cultural values of  ‘the West’ are often perversely refracted, I can’t help but hope that an influx of new narratives and perspectives might lay just around the corner; ones that incorporate different social conventions, new aesthetic vocabularies and perhaps most importantly—new values. Think about it: What does ‘green’ mean in a nation where systemic poverty means every thing finds reuse—not through recycling, but through repair or repurposing?  What does transportation mean in a country where roughly 370 people occupy every square kilometer?*

Context and cultural perspective make all the difference in how design tackles any given problem. Porsche didn’t invent the car, Apple didn’t invent the computer, rather these companies cracked the code as to what these products could mean. Their solutions, authored by German perfectionism on one hand and West Coast counter culture on the other, became exemplary because of how powerfully they blended technical proficiency with a point of view informed by national character. Looking forward I’m willing to bet that as the unmet needs of consumers in emerging markets come into focus, the Western perspective will increasingly find itself having to keep pace with a host of domestic ones that bring fresh insights to long standing problems. The designs that emerge from these markets as global success stories will, like their predecessors before them, excel by infusing a common need with a singular perspective that transcends international boundaries while simultaneously exporting national values.

Design is a dynamic process—a living activity that evolves day on day, hour by hour. Today more so than perhaps at any other time in its short history, more and more people encounter design as a formal activity; one that is no longer viewed as haphazard or episodic, but rather as the result of people actively contemplating an opportunity and using their skills and actions to deliver value around a given problem. The west has had a prolific run delivering solutions that democratized convenience. Asia took a page from that playbook and geared itself toward scaling design and production to keep pace with a global market’s rising desire for more of the same. Today that equation, scaling convenience, shares the stage with new concerns, ones that entail notions of community, sustainability, and the reconciliation of individual needs with the common good. To tackle those types of problems, emerging markets will need to add new pages to design’s playbook. In its short history Design has amassed a considerable war chest for working this new class of problem, and in this regard emerging markets will invariably build on the successes of their predecessors. But to surpass them, and create an enduring place for themselves in Design, they will need to temper those tools with perspectives that are undeniably their own and which transcend definitively the western perspective. And that’s where culture becomes an advantage.

Reflecting on all this, I can’t help but think —in spite of myself—how much the mechanics of global trade and cultural export mimic another well-worn path in the cause of economic advancement: immigration. If the parent immigrates in hopes of a better life, abandoning all they have for the prospect of a better future. The child of the immigrant, in their efforts to acculturate entirely to the norms of the new country, is generally all to ready to reject any notion of that past. They master the style, the values and—in the surest sign of their ‘belonging’—achieve mastery over a language their parents struggled to attain competency with. But then comes the child of that child. Who, liberated from the burden of their ancestry, actively seeks out ways to regain it anew.  Seen in this light, the achievements of China and South Korea, who have so completely embraced and to some degree exceeded the accomplishments of the west, strike me as analogous to those of the immigrant’s child; they have mastered the language and the culture of design production as it was defined by the west. I sincerely hope that the next wave of emerging markets will build on the successes of their ‘parents’ and wear their cultural heritage with a bit more ease and lot more self-confidence. If they can, their design solutions will be all the more compelling. Returning us to an era where the export of design didn’t just satisfy a need, it invited us to contemplate and understand. In a shrinking world with a growing number of shared troubles and tensions, I can’t imagine a better by-product of design and commerce than that.

* Seely Brown, John and Hagel III, John. “Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia.” The Innovator’s Cookbook . Ed. Steven Johnson. New York: Riverhead Books, 2011. 133-135. Print.

* by comparison the US comes in at 32/ km² and Western Europe 73/ km²

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for TEAGUE – see it here

Over the winter jump I picked up a copy of Debbie Millman’s “Brand Thinking”, a compilation of interviews exploring the meaning and function of brand. Reading through the twenty or so conversations included in the book, I found myself reminded of Stephen Colbert’s 2005 neologism Truthiness. Wikipedia definesTruthiness as ‘a “truth” known intuitively “from the gut” or through feeling without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.’  Colbert used the term to satirize the state of political discourse, but perhaps its relevance to matters of brand stems from the powerful influence ‘emotional-knowledge’ wields over the intersection of culture and persuasion.

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN for iF BEST CREATiFES 2012

For centuries human ingenuity has been propelled by access to two critical resources: ideas and capital. And for almost as long, the relative scarcity of those resources kept innovation sequestered within the tidy domain of private institutions and universities. Today the democratizing nature of technology—its tendency to disrupt and to reduce barriers is turning innovation out into society. Wild, unbound and subject to new influences, a new class of innovation is taking shape—one that harnesses emerging behaviors and digital tools to new ends. The net effect is a variety of ‘open’ innovation that stands entirely outside formal organizations and is as likely to be carried out by amateurs as it is professionals. A number of factors conspire to give this spin on open innovation new vitality: a foundation of near-universal access to the Internet, the emergence of no-to-low cost coordination tools and most importantly—a surge in our desire to connect with others in collective action. Examined independently, each of these factors proves a powerful enabler of behaviors conducive to innovation. Taken as a group, their intrinsic ability to reinforce one another creates a potent cocktail of interactions, one that elevates the odds of successful innovation while simultaneously undermining the formal organization’s exclusive ownership of the process.

If you are a student of the web, or of marketplace dynamics, you are no doubt familiar with the dynamics of scarcity and abundance. Most of recorded history took place in a landscape defined by scarcity. If you wanted food or goods, or information for that matter, you had to seek them out and as a result you paid handsomely for them—either in monetary terms or through physical effort. Within this environment creativity and innovation happened in discrete pockets—conducted either by the individual or, in those instances where capital was required, by formal organizations. Furthermore, once innovation occurred, the means for broadcasting it were decidedly centralized: the university, the church, the conquering army, etc. Information technologies, the web and a few centuries of modernization have changed all of that. Today we live in a marketplace defined by abundance. Whether it manifests as cheap consumer electronics, supersized meals or low cost Internet service—abundance and the mechanics it prescribes are hard at work all around us. Within this context, ideas and information become similarly affected, resulting in an ever-expanding cloud of content.

Keeping this abundance from disintegrating into noise is the critical role of the search engine, those clever little algorithms we rely on as we navigate the sheer volume of this abundance. Put simply, they make discovery easy, allowing us to casually call up page upon page of even the most obscure content. By drastically reducing the effort required to access and transmit ideas, the web creates a universal ‘shelf’ of thought starters. One that is open 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Elevating the frequency with which ideas are shared and found, this vast repository of ideas provides a tireless mechanism for coincidence, statistically transforming serendipity into intention.

Within this ecosystem of ideas how does innovation take hold? How does the discrete idea progress forward into something that can truthfully be called innovation? Historically the chain of events that typically transformed raw ideas into innovation was vulnerable to the mercurial alignment of time, place and capital. Ideas percolated up within the organization and proceeded through a series of gates, each of which held the potential to encourage or discourage their advancement. Adding to this delicate chain of dependencies, if the idea challenged prevailing logic or conflicted with an organization’s existing business model—that idea, no mater how valid, stood little chance of progressing toward realization. Today these types of barriers, often political in nature, are increasingly offset by the ‘openness’ of the web.

Anyone who has visited a crowd funding or crowdsourcing site has witnessed firsthand the power of the web at organizing discrete actions cheaply, effectively, and to impressive effect. Kickstarter, a popular funding site founded in 2009, has to date raised over $100 million across 10,000 projects; a powerful demonstration that when you bring ideas and funding together—stuff happens. Sites like these, where participants (or backers) vote with their wallets, may not presently constitute a true alternative to traditional innovation, but they do suggest that in an age of cheap, ubiquitous communication, how an idea takes shape and ultimately moves into the marketplace may once again become a matter of genuine merit rather than one of organizational self-interest. Operationally defined by outside interests, sites like Kickstarter circumvent the type of closed-loop decision-making that leads many formal organizations to solutions that are defensible against internal metrics but at odds with long-term opportunity. By virtue of their intrinsic ability to avoid ‘group think’, crowd sourcing delivers wild innovation one of its greatest assets—intrinsic objectivity; a critical component in any innovation process.

Driving all of this activity is perhaps the most impressive piece of this new breed of innovation: collective action. Inherent in every ‘crowd’ based activity, be it Twitter, Facebook or Kickstarter, is a level of participant engagement that rivals the productivity of the best corporate cultures. Fueled by passion and common interest the human capital and expertise these sites assemble should give us all cause for reflection. Internet commentator and author Clay Shirky calls this resource cognitive surplus, an emerging pool of collective idle time that the web makes available and increasingly exploits. Using Wikipedia as an example, Shirky has illustrated that the entirety of the online encyclopedia was constructed in what represents a mere fraction of the time North Americans spend watching television in one weekend alone: 100 million hours. What Shirky and others are starting to recognize is the untapped potential of participant culture to tackle problems with a speed and efficacy that rivals, and in some cases out paces, formal organizations.

Participation and the nurturing effect it has on ideas—either in the form of funding or volunteering time and expertise—is a tremendous aid in vetting raw creativity into starting points for innovation. In an economic climate of continuing uncertainty, compounded by limited financial resource and organizational indecisiveness—the dynamics of participation represents a fresh means for value creation and economic growth. It’s unlikely that these new forums for innovation will replace organizational innovation outright seem, but given the vulnerability of the traditional process to factors of timing, resource and politics, unless we can radically shift organizational cultures in the short term, the economic prosperity innovation once promised remains a long way off. Today a handful of organizations are starting to experiment with many of the tools wild innovation embraces. In response to growing criticisms regarding runaway costs and structural inefficiencies, DRAPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has initiated its Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) program, a series of publicly sourced efforts that examine new approaches to the design and manufacture of complex defense systems and vehicles. Another interesting signal is the creation of the Eco Patent Commons, a group of elite tech companies (IBM, Nokia, Sony, etc) that have made publicly available their patents that reduce waste, pollution, global warming and energy demands in an effort to stimulate development of solutions that remedy the effects of pollution on our environment. In both examples we see formal organizations adopting behaviors that, while perhaps atypical, ultimately serve their greater needs and objectives.

Wild innovation has allegiance to no one other than the collective wisdom of the crowd. It can result in abject failure and triviality but it can just as easily lead to genuine greatness. Reflecting across the broad set of coincidental factors upon which this process of innovation relies, it’s easy to recall the infinite monkey theorem. That theorem, which also relies on coincidence, states that an event is ‘almost surely’ to occur if it has a probably rate of one; just one occurrence. If a thousand monkey hitting keys at random for infinite time can statistically produce the complete works of William Shakespeare, imagine what the decedents of those monkeys can stumble upon through intent?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on CORE77 – see it here

I’ve been giving ‘collaboration’ a lot of thought. I guess that’s inevitable when you work in a company that’s partner to one of the longest running collaborative gigs in design consulting. In design circles, especially around award time, collaboration gets a lot of airplay—but what happens to it the rest of the time? Why is something we praise as being so conducive to design success so infrequently discussed in design forums? More to the point, what is it about collaboration that makes me giddy with optimism on one hand while forcing me to contemplate popping an antacid with the other? I guess, when I come right down to it, it’s that collaboration, by definition a joint enterprise, is often invoked by persons or interests having very little patience for the stuff. Sure it’s nice to make a lot of noise about it, but should you act on it, or call upon it in earnest, you’d better be sure collaboration is what the folks sitting across the table have signed up for.

As a young designer, I always believed that when someone spoke to me at length about collaboration it was some veiled reference to my impending need for behavior modification. Alternatively, when I found myself in cultures that used the term liberally—my gut shrank up trying to determine if ‘collaboration’ was code for ‘the client-is-always-right.’ Three and a half years after returning to the world of consulting, I’ve come to believe that collaboration is quite possibly THE pivotal dynamic in generating great design results. No big surprise right? But when I think about collaboration, what I increasingly imagine is something I like to call competitive collaboration, an all out, skin-in the game style of cooperation that requires real commitment from both parties, not the whimsical feel-good stuff that so easily dissipates at the first sign of trouble. With that in mind, I thought I’d share a few observations on behaviors that I believe lead to successful collaborations and, when we’re lucky, great design programs.

WORK HARD aka ENGAGEMENT

As Philippe Starck has eloquently observed “Design hates lazy people” and it does. Design is hard work for clients and consultants alike. The best results stubbornly defy us by the elliptical fashion in which they arrive. You can work your ass off on a given problem and move it an inch or, you glance out the studio window and move it a mile. The rub of it is you can’t count on either track to yield consistent results. Instead we work. And work again. Some might say it gets easier with experience, and it does, but the fact of the matter is, if you find design problems getting easier—you are most likely repeating yourself. Attacking a problem with fresh eyes means daring to start fresh—and that is hard work. Beyond the adrenaline rush of the creative chase, the thing that makes this otherwise intolerable process bearable is engagement; the zone in which we find ourselves fully committed to the pursuit of that first spark and the subsequent journey with which we eek out its promise. The only way I know how to get there is through deep engagement—my own, my colleagues and my clients. Without it, programs drift leading dangerously toward indifference, which in design most often leads to mediocrity and crap.

GET DIRTY aka PROTOTYPE

While you’re doing this ‘hard’ work, you will of course get dirty. Which is just another way of saying you’ll need to check your ego at the door, roll up your sleeves and be willing to fail—more importantly, be willing to make. Making is an inextricable part of good design exploration. PowerPoint is an abstraction of an abstraction. Things don’t fail quickly in abstract. Nothing brings clarity faster to an abstract conversation like a ‘thing.’ If you want to drive powerful, effective decision-making with your client, the type that leads quickly and brutally to decisions—my advice is to MAKE. Whether we are talking about things, experiences or otherwise—prototyping, putting your ideas into action so that they might (more often than not) prove you wrong, is critical to the mechanism of design. Today we have an arsenal of tools at our disposal to make and fab: Dimension machines, Aruduino boards, After Effects, you name it. There is little excuse not to make. Which begs the question, if the team you’re collaborating with isn’t bringing ‘things’ to the table, what are they bringing? Talk? If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d be willing to bet a prototype is worth two thousand, easy. The difference between a good idea and a great idea is execution. My advice: make.

FIND UP aka EMBRACE AMBIGUITY

If design had a heartbeat it would be ‘Finding up.’ Finding up is the innate rhythm of the design process; a complicated mix of intuition and deduction informed by experience. Or, in the absence of experience: tenacity. While it became fashionable in recent years to conceal the messy business of design in the sanitizing shrink-wrap of ‘design thinking’ and ‘process’—design remains at its core an imprecise science. Luckily for us, and our clients, it’s not unpredictable. Having worked at three design consultancies and two corporate groups, it doesn’t surprise me that all of those experiences have shared certain indisputable rhythms: the common trajectory of exploration, discovery, reflection and execution. You can change the names, invent acronyms, draw diagrams—but the foundation is always there. The biological beat of inquiry. One of the greatest challenges to ‘finding up’ however is safeguarding the time to find. In our fast-paced, left-brained world, schedules and meetings chew up a lot of ‘finding’ time. The design process needs distraction, a chance to open the windows and let in fresh air. When this isn’t allowed for, ideas become stilted, growing into outsized caricatures of their former selves. In my experience, great collaborators understand this and work hard to defend the time needed to find.

PUSH PEOPLE aka CHALLENGE ASSUMPTIONS

Heidi McBride, Teague’s director of strategy, talks about challenging orthodoxies; I call it pressing the point. No matter what you call it, a good collaborator should stand ready to challenge assumptions and push people. Why? Because a great idea is usually unfamiliar; if it weren’t it would merely be an idea. When confronted with the unknown people necessarily pull back, but this behavior shouldn’t distract us from the fact that the new and unfamiliar are where economic and creative opportunity usually coexist. The importance of the push isn’t an invitation to be arrogant or rude, it’s a challenge to both parties (consultant and client) to be ready to hold uncomfortable conversations for the sake of delivering the value your time and their money are paying for. Most people shrink when you talk this way about client interactions, but the great thing about design is that it’s goal-driven. We don’t, or at least we shouldn’t, make too much of a habit of pursuing the process of design without the intent of delivering on it. This focus on goals gives design teams latitude to engage in conversations that invariably trigger passionate reactions. That’s good. Passion is a key component in understanding ‘what’ motivates people and organizations. The early stages of a design program provide a great opportunity to probe your client and figure out what’s culturally set in stone and if so, why. The trick is to understand the difference between pushing for the betterment of the project vs. pushing to get your way.

REPEAT aka HUMILITY

While some might find it disagreeable, ego remains the catalyst that converts the subjective world of ideas into objective reality. Consequently it’s a critical ingredient in creativity and design collaborations. Why? Because in a world of shareholders and committees, the path to commercialization is littered with Noes and Can’t be dones. In this landscape, it’s an evolutionary necessity that creativity and the design process attract personalities blind to habitual rejection. What keeps this potentially disruptive behavior in check is the leveling-out the design process affords. Even the most headstrong designer or entrepreneur, once they’ve racked up some mileage (and the occasional fiasco), realizes that the process requires other people and a sense of common purpose. Dictators can’t get there alone; at least not very often. The success of any one program, that sense of accomplishment or opportunity realized, only lasts for so long. Inevitably after the final presentation, the last delivery or the accolades of your peers—the next project comes in and when it does, we begin it all over again; a chance to rise to the occasion or miss the mark. That sobering reality is enough to humble any outsized ego.

If consulting is a relationship business, creative collaboration is an intimate act—and as with any intimate relationship, proximity offers us a front row seat to the best and worst of one another. Reflecting on what constitutes a good design collaboration I find myself, not surprisingly, relying on the same set of principles I use in my assessment of any interpersonal relationship. We expect the people in our lives to meet certain prerequisites: fair hygiene, decent manners—but what differentiates our most successful relationships goes beyond this basic set of factors to more abstract qualities like personality, judgment and dependability. I’m not proposing any of this is new, what I am proposing is that if you want to elevate your design results, enrich your process and maybe win a few awards along the way—get a lot smarter about assessing character. If you find yourself doing work you’re not happy with or don’t believe in, maybe you should look in the mirror and ask yourself who you’re spending time with?

POST SCRIPT

In the course of writing this piece, I stumbled across Dieter Rams’ recent comments regarding Apple’s design culture in The Telegraph. Rams’ comments hit home because the Entrepreneur-Designer collaboration he singles out as conducive to great work, is in essence the binary code behind the type of collaboration that is essential to good design: Passionate egos working together to achieve their best and deliver something truly ‘good.’ For those of us who don’t work at Apple and still strive to help organizations harness the true power of design, my advice is roll up your sleeves, work hard and get ready to rumble. Just remember it’s not personal—it’s about doing what it takes to move the needle in earnest.