Five Lessons from Google SPAN 2015
Last Thursday (11th November 2015) I was lucky enough to be invited to Google Design’s Span conference in London, a single day of talks and workshops entering its second year (and first year in London) focussed on the intersection between technology and design, and the people that use the results in their work. Here are a few brain pickings from the day.
Writing is a lot like Design
Google Venture’s many articles about their design process have helped shape the approach to modern product design for technology startups and entrepreneurs looking to turn their ideas into reality. This approach of talking out publicly about their work and pulling back the curtain is uncommon within the circle of digital design consultancy that I am a part of (whether for reasons of competitive advantage or secretive clients). Google Ventures partner and first designer, Braden Kowitz, likens the approach to writing to that of designing a product: “You spend a lot of time working on it and making it something you love, but as soon as you take it to other people they tell you what’s terrible about it.”
It’s fair to say that Braden’s viewpoint on writing is similar to one of the most important points of the Design Sprint and one of the major talking points of the panel on Design for New Products: that the only way you can really gauge the effectiveness of a product or design is to take it to users and test it. It’s one thing to be able to craft a product framework that makes for a great presentation slide, or interaction that animates nicely, or article that hits all your favourite points, but until you take it to the people that will have to use or read it it’s as good as that first draft you keep to yourself.
Motion design will mature in the coming year
Over the last three year I’ve worked in and helped define some of the language that my studio uses around the experience of animating and building interactive interfaces and products — a craft that’s termed Motion Design. I had originally expected it to be a larger talking point of the day (Google being one of the few technology companies I can think of that have released a formal set of motion guidelines) but was surprised how little it factored in to many of the discussion around building apps, products and services. (that said, there were some wonderfully animated examples of the Google icon set used on the conference graphics and projections)
I asked about the viewpoints of the speakers on the design tools panel (Chris Conover, Parteek Saran, Koen Bok, Justin Belcher and Pieter Omvlee) on this subject and received this bit of wisdom from Framer.js founder Koen: What we’re currently experiencing in terms of interest and execution of motion in interfaces, ‘transitional design’ and interactive animation is probably the spike of interest that will with time stabilise in to a more mature understanding of how this skill set applies to product design: indeed, we’re still trying to figure out the vocabulary, best practise, tooling and perspectives of this that will lead to building better projects. Some parts of what we’re doing now will change and become more refined (not every element needs to spring like a jack in the box) and some parts will become the foundations of what we build upon as a discipline.
Start designing for VR now, because it’s coming to consumers very soon
In a room made up of more than 100 of London’s top designers and creatives, only 2 people put their hand up when asked if they were currently working on any VR related projects. We are the people that will be defining the way this technology is used, and to a degree help shape the nature of its success or failure. Products like Gear VR and Oculus Rift are entering prime time by the end of 2016, and if we can’t come up with compelling experiences and useful applications of this technology we’ll watch it die a prolonged death to cheap tech demos and photo panoramas. Now is the time to make the mistakes and experimentation, on a receptive market of early adopters and developers.
Designing better tooling, a common language of interactions and a unified way to browse and consume VR experiences is well within the wheel house of any competent design studio looking to stake a claim on this new platform, and currently it appears that only a few top-line studios are devoting the resources to developing and talking publicly about what they do.
So much of good design is about process
One of the lines of thought that extended through the whole day was the idea that good design is enabled by having good process. In an afternoon panel on designing for new product, all of the speakers emphasised the importance of this point. Being able to effectively work together and communicate so often depends on a solid understanding from everyone involved of what they have to do at a given point in a project. As put succinctly by Hannah Donovan, “Process is critical. You can have the best team of people fall apart with bad process”
And it’s not just about being better at designing products. Luna Maurer’s talk about Moniker studio’s Conditional Design and gaming heavily focussed on the importance of having a rigidly defined method and process that drives each piece, to the extent of defining the rules and limitations of each person involved. This methodology of extreme limitation is what enables the creativity within the work: the freedom of the individual players to interpret the rules are what lead to results beyond what a single creator could do alone.
Design at its best combines the strengths of people and technology
The overarching theme of SPAN was how design and technology combine and build a better experience for people. Whether it’s experimental Italian interactive sculpture, building virtual worlds and the rules for interacting within them, trying to build the tools and platforms that will enable designers to create the next generation of products or the cultural effects of our work on the world around us. I look forward to seeing the video of each of the talks and workshops posted on Google Design’s youtube channel and to learning of how these topics and threads of conversation develop within the industry over the course of the next year.
