I was listening to NPR and they had another story about crowd sourcing and a gym shoe company in Seattle that was using these communities to develop surface design on standardized gym shoes. This got me thinking about the role of people in designing products and services directly vs. trained designers facilitating observations and discussions with users to gain insights in both articulated and unarticulated needs.
However, the deep spread of the internet has allowed people to directly interact with companies to provide feedback and help design existing products and services. Focusing communities of interest around their knowledge and expertise and iterating variations with standardized components (like surface design on t-shirts and gym shoes) and having online voting or based on purchasing behaviors, have the “better” strains rise to the top is an intriguing trend:
Threadless, a Chicago-based T-shirt maker whose design process consists entirely of an online contest is a good example of this trend.
DaWanda’s Style Lab section, consumers can create products with their own individual style and have them made to order. (from www.springwise.com)
Crowd sourcing does need to be managed, and is not as ad-hoc as it may sound. Companies manage these communities for maximum impact of user-centered innovation. There are more sophisticated strains of focused crowd sourcing around more complex opportunities:
RedesignMe is a great Dutch website that is now engaging with product manufacturers to establish “RDM Challenges,” through which a new product concept is presented and the site’s 1,000 or so active members are asked to react to it. In exchange, they are rewarded with RDMs—RedesignMe’s online currency, which is convertible into products in the online RDM Shop such as mp3-players, game consoles and gift cards. (from www.springwise.com)
Elements, an eatery being planned to open next year in Washington. Crafted by a “beta community” of some 400 participants, Elements will serve raw and organic locally grown vegetarian food in an environmentally sustainable way. (from www.springwise.com)
What does this mean for designers? Precedent had positioned the designer as the arbiter of function and form. Rehabilitated or new products were completed by designers and brought to market. Crowd sourcing is in certain ways disintermediating the role of designer by going direct to customers to have them create new or revised design strains.
An interesting company that is taking crowd sourcing to another level is Kluster. They have created Private Klusters designed to enable collaborative brainstorming on myriad different questions by allowing invited participants to share their opinions on a relevant, customized set of criteria. (from www.springwise.com)
Spot.us a nonprofit that lets any individual or journalist post an idea for an untold story in the local community. Professional journalists then write pitches based on those ideas and place them in the site’s wiki, where members of the community can view them and vote—via micro-pledge—on the stories that are most important to them. (from www.springwise.com).
Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using the wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas.
Designers have embraced ethnographic and observational research to create new objective skills to experience what is and look for pattern and opportunity. With crowd sourcing, the role of the designer will need to be delineated as a type of reasoned broker to sort and prioritize a community’s ideas.
Are the aggregated power of crowds a wise resource for companies? For simple solutions, creating different variations can provide needed diversity for products where customers want many alternatives. For more complex problems and ideas where there are many variables, I believe that this model can easily fall apart. There are too many levels and ways to interpret and approach something to bring desired value.
I have not really heard the design community address the effect and challenges of crowd sourcing. When Larry Keeley edited a Society of Typographic journal named “People, Not Markets”, he emphasized that designers need to address the real needs of people not the marketing needs of companies.
Twenty years later, we are moving in the right direction. The question is in what direction?
As reported by Kiplinger.com [UPDATE - Here's a NYTimes article as the Kiplinger article is offline] and many other sources, Target has settled with NFB on the class-action lawsuit that has started a shift in the thinking with regards to web accessibility. This settlement will put a lot of pressure on e-tailers throughout the United States and while that seems like a good thing, we are not satisfied with the likely result. 508 compliance must evolve, the blind and visually impaired deserve better than digital hand-rails and ramps. You’ve heard our rants before. Just like Oscar Pistorius used technology to turn his disability into an advantage, we believe the man / machine dyad can be optimized for anyone. Here’s a question to Target and the other e-Tailers out there: If product color descriptions and product images (i.e. a photo illustrating the cut, shape, fit, and color of a pair of pants) aren’t helpful to the blind, what good does it do to make sure they can access them?
Second life has been setting the pace for virtual world development since 2003. We’ve been playing (er.. experiencing) since 2006. We even own land by the virtual sea, but the concept of a second or alternate world has always troubled us. Reality is already pretty complex.
Augmented Reality (AR) on the other hand, is exciting because we see a digitally enhanced reality as not only possible, but the key to supercharging the man / machine dyad. Imagine a world where digital daemon’s travel with us as friends, servants and guardians (I need to lay off the children’s literature). You don’t have to imagine too hard, the folks at Georgia Tech are already working on realizing part of this vision. The video above shows how digital can be superimposed over reality in a hyper-realistic manner. The last minute of video above is the most exciting, but heck, the whole thing is only 3 minutes long… Enjoy! (Thanks Stephanie)
You know we have to have this!!! Tangram is a puzzle game for the iPhone and at the low price of $2.99 you can’t beat it. Now we just need to find an Anagram application, buy them both drinks and lock them in a hotel room.
Nate Burgos sent me a link about a new institute that is being created between Stanford University and the Hasso-Plattner-Institute to investigate design thinking. They defined it as a methodology that “melds an end-user focus with multidisciplinary collaboration and iterative improvement to produce products, services or experiences.” Their theme is – innovation – which is no surprise.
This got me to think about how this term has fluctuated since I heard it twenty years ago. My approach to the topic was around several attributes:
Wicked Problems
A Focus on Customers/Users
Finding Alternatives
Ideation and Prototyping
Qualitative Performance
The question is how is design thinking different from other types of thinking? If we take a Western European approach to thought, then critical thinking models revolve around observation, asking questions, research, making new connections and creating a model that integrates new insights.
If you agree with this foundation, then there would be little differentiation between design thinking and other forms of thinking. Can non-designers do design thinking? What is the role of the designer if design thinking is practiced by a wide variety of disciplines and professions?
What has remained constant about design thinking is linked to an improved future. Victor Margolin, in his book The Politics of the Artificial stated “Design is continuously inventing its subject matter, so it is not limited by outworn categories of products. The world expects new things from designers, that is the nature of design”
I used to have conversations with fairly progressive designers twenty years ago about design thinking and that design was as much about frameworks, strategies and approaches as about media artifacts. At the time, they were not ready to embrace this idea and only wanted cursory approaches that could add more legitimacy to the making. Contemporary designers have finally embraced in enough of a critical mass that design is as much about thinking as making.
A few years ago John Thackara proposed to the London Design Council the Project Red Initiative which would have the UK design community address specific social, political and economic issues facing the United Kingdom. The backlash from the design community that the initiative was not in the bounds of design.
The good news is that design thinking, design methods, and design management are all coalescing to create new opportunities for designers to collaborate effectively with other professions around wider areas of interest that are not discipline specific.
Designers have an ability to interact with the the unknown, and the shifting relationships between the meaning of things. This new type of designer is linking design (as a plan) to outcomes that are not necessarily objects. It is here that methodology can help and this is where design thinking comes into play.
First, if you don’t have a podcast (free) subscription to the video blog “Advanced Beauty“, get one right now!!! They are releasing 18 gorgeous digital renditions one at a time from various artists including our dreamboat Robert Hodgin. They are on the seventh video and so far all of the videos are great but Robert’s melts our head. Sure we might be biased, so check them out for yourselves and bask in their digital beauty.
The word is out! We’ve started talking about access for all, how the government has failed to make the grade, and how we think digital is the great equalizer. Last Tuesday we presented to the masses (ok small masses) and had a blast. We met a ton of really exciting people who share our passion and are looking for a place to share thoughts. So now we’re on a mission. We’ve started the first in a series of steps towards a community of interest. Our first page includes a reprint of our accessibility manifesto, some useful links and an email address. Please contact us to share your hopes, thoughts, concerns, and questions. We will be working to grow the discussion with you.
We’re almost a decade past the web’s initial foray into accessibility and the US government’s attempts at legislating accessibility standards, and web accessibility still sucks. Current standards and guidelines don’t go far enough. (Sure, some come close, but we’re nowhere near where we need to be.)
Rumors and ignorance still dominate how people approach accessibility. Often people assume that accessibility is somehow not worth the effort—that accessibility costs too much in terms of time or money; that accessibility translates to spartan, utilitarian, even ugly design; or that accessibility is something that can be considered as an afterthought. Sometimes people even assume that accessibility only means passing some automated test. None of these beliefs are accurate. In reality, the opposite is true.
We’re here to change the situation. At Tanagram we are committed to accessibility in every aspect of our work. We are convinced that the internet can truly be the great equalizer. We are committed to providing rich, egalitarian experiences for all users, including people with visual impairments and members of the Blind and Deaf communities. To reflect this attitude, we make accessibility part of our entire process.
We research our work’s cultural and functional implications for various differently-abled communities.
Our IA and UX approach takes into account different affordances and the needs of user groups.
Design especially addresses the way we communicate visual information, including for low-vision and colorblind users, while maintaining high artistic standards.
Development assures that our designs are implemented in semantically rich HTML and carefully-constructed CSS. When our work calls for the use of JavaScript, Flash, and other “rich media” environments, we approach those technologies with accessibility as a core principle.
No one deserves or should have to make do with a substandard online experience. Accessibility isn’t just about helping people different from us. It enhances all of our online experiences and has benefits beyond doing the right thing, including improved usability and more reliable SEO. Good things happen when we begin a project with an accessibility-oriented mindset.
The little “508” badge at the bottom left of our site only signifies our commitment to accessibility. To get a better taste of where we want to take accessibility, fire up a text-only browser, JAWS, or your favorite assistive technology. We think you’ll like what you experience.
Tanagram attended an interesting AIGA Student Chapter meeting called SPARK at the Illinois Institute of Art in Schaumburg. The event was held at the Prairie Center for the Arts and about 75 people attended the meeting.
It was a mixture of alumni, students and faculty who came to listen to Rubbish Films and Tanagram Partners. The event was a mixture of a social, a bazaar and a presentation. There was a DJ with a G4 laptop “spinning” an auditory web of music to set the tone while everyone was hobnobbing.
Rubbish Film is a collective of five students from Columbia College, University of Iowa and Illinois Institute of Art who have a passion for film making and more important, story telling. They are a clique bound together by a clear sense of purpose using black and white 8mm film, guerilla-like filming tactics and a compelling series of techniques.
You could not escape their sense of enthusiasm and idealism that comes with being 20ish, but they also exhibited a sense of drive and saavy that one does not associate with this generation. Their film “Eyelids” is an engaging story about a boy who projects himself into the mind of a girl and sees the world through her eyes over time. They have marketed the film themselves and wound up at Cannes Film Festival in the short independent film category. They are now a distributed collective and collaborate on other films as well as doing music videos.
The theme for the meeting was “motivate” and Rubbish Films definitely motivated everyone in the room of what can be accomplished with little resources and alot of drive. I felt like an old college professor as Tanagram is essentially Rubbish Films 25 years later – more polished and tempered, but just as committed in doing good work.
After a raffle and a few words, it was Tanagram’s turn. Within a fairly large auditorium, I asked everyone to move to the front so I did not need to use a microphone. Most complied, but as human nature would have it, several only moved one row.
Tanagram is a hybrid company working on fairly wicked problems. I eased into the issue with a traditional design audience by discussing what objects can and can’t do, recognizing human behavior, and then defining design excellence. This tactic seemed to work and by the time we showed three examples, the audience was ready. Overall, the questions were thoughtful and most students were amazed at the diversity of thinking and skills that go into our work.
Going to student events is a hit-or-miss proposition. This time it was a hit.
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