TSW #5: November 2018
Richard Turley, DesignYourLife Podcast, The Vinyl Factory, The Fearless Podcasts, Frame-Storming, Joseph Pine’s ‘Experience Economy’, OCBC Bank UX Redesign, Andy Rementer’s Summer of Love, The Sounds in My Head
Richard Turley Logoblahhhhhz
A weekly magazine is a hungry animal and we fed it with whatever scraps of ideas we had around.
I don’t really talk to them about WHERE they’re pulling inspiration from — I don’t care where it comes from. I care far more about what that inspiration means to them and how it might impact whatever work we’re doing.
It’s certainly different from when I started out. There was so much less design when I started out. And there certainly wasn’t anything like the conversation around logos and design. Thinking back — my memory is that I bought record covers, books, magazines, saw ads in those magazines, on TV; interacted with my inspiration at first hand and in full context.
Now I guess you are more likely to first see your new favorite aesthetic as part of a library of clipped references such as you might find on Pinterest, Instagram or Arena. I know people are critical of those sites and the mass effect of everyone taking influences from the same set of references but I don’t know if the net effect of those sites on broader cultural practice is so much different than pre-internet.
Humans like to copy. We’re sheep. We like to be part of a gang, to belong. Aesthetic themes and approaches have been circulated and replicated through the ages regardless of the presence of online mood boards.
I find it far more interesting, dare I say it — original — in this day and age to be honest to the fact that anyone involved in any creative practice is knitting together other peoples ideas, influences to create their own outcomes. The idea of the artist as auteur, the virtuoso, is so rarely applicable and yet so needfully desired. I prefer the view that we’re a bunch of murderous thieves, eating our own, with whatever tools we have at our disposal. We’re products of an Internet-fed culture that pulverises every idea into a dozens of smaller pieces, the pieces mingling with others and reforming into “new” ideas which are in turn smashed and so the cycle continues, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly… An ever evolving sequence of fragmentation and consolidation.
The true cultural capitalist (✊) is more a curator of those fragments than a creator of them — someone who can distill, refine, refresh and contextualise their meaning into a commoditized form (whether a fashion line, branding system, Instagram feed..).
An age of appropriation, grandfathered by Duchamp. Virgil altering “The Meaning” of a shoe, or Vetements + DHL/Tommy/Reebok — of high/low or old/new, or of a Kanye co-sign on what is ostensibly a Gap sweatshirt selling for $800, all of them bootleggers — once considered parasitic to brands and institutions — holding more cultural capital than the brands and institutions they’ve ripped off. Cannibals.
The pulverizing of one idea, absorbed, and spat out as a new outcome. The layering of meaning, the detournement effect mainstreamed, with brands paying $$$ for traction in whichever key social influencer demographic will offer the best stat for their quarterly internal innovation keynote presentation.
I mean.. Logos as simple signifiers of status, of tribal affiliation.. has been forever thus. But in a world of endless scroll, and of increased cultural visual sophistication, of personal brand awareness, of image overload.. the easily recognisable icon has a cut through — recognisable and understandable on even the briefest of glimpses through a feed or a a quarter inch icon on your phone screen.
The irony now is that those simple icons are gaining in complexity as our collective journey through this deep aesthetic seam continues; currently we’re at the point of stacking and juxtaposition of logos upon logos, brands upon brands. Sometime soon we’ll be bored of logos and move on. You’re seeing it a bit in Raf Simons using imagery like everyone else is using logos.
But I don’t know if in my lifetime the logo has ever gone away as a form (or will ever go away). Maybe they’re a bit bigger now, but the logo is ever pervasive. We tattoo ourselves in symbols that project a sense of what we want others to believe we are. We’re a society that needs the protection of symbols (cars, clothes, vacation destination, job titles, the homes we live in and the objects we select to decorate those home with) and the validation we believe they reward us with. All bought on credit. Mass debt-fueled consumerism as religion blah blah Reagan, Thatcher, blah blah.
So the logo as clothing adornment is a shortcut, a self-selected tiny billboard that positions you inside the demographic of your choosing. And as such the logo as graphic statement has crept from the breast to the back piece, down the sleeves.Every inch covered in a semiotic mess of messaging and signs.
Design Your Life Podcasts
The Vinyl Factory — If You Believe in the Purity & Sanctity of Sound
The Fearless Podcasts from The LookingGlass
In Praise of Frame-Storming
“Frame-Storming”–Using question-generation techniques to help in “framing” the challenge at hand.
A term coined by Stanford University professor Tina Seelig, who maintains that frame-storming works because, as she puts it, “Questions are the frames into which the answers fall.”
When participants are generating questions, they tend to dig into a problem and challenge assumptions. For example, they may inquire about why the problem exists, why it’s even considered a problem (maybe it really isn’t one), whether there’s a bigger problem behind that problem, and so on. The process gives people permission to ask fundamental questions that often don’t get asked; not just “how can we do it better?” but also “why are we doing this in the first place?”
While brainstorms are typically dominated by a few “big idea” people, questioning exercises seem to have more across-the-board participation–perhaps because questions can be easier to think of and are judged less harshly than ideas.
Revisiting an HBR Classic — Welcome to the Experience Economy
Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore introduced the customer experience concept was back in 1998 and it has stood the test of time…
Economists have typically lumped experiences in with services, but experiences are a distinct economic offering, as different from services as services are from goods. Today we can identify and describe this fourth economic offering because consumers unquestionably desire experiences, and more and more businesses are responding by explicitly designing and promoting them.
An experience is not an amorphous construct; it is as real an offering as any service, good, or commodity. In today’s service economy, many companies simply wrap experiences around their traditional offerings to sell them better. To realize the full benefit of staging experiences, however, businesses must deliberately design engaging experiences that command a fee.
An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event. Commodities are fungible, goods tangible, services intangible, and experiences memorable.
While prior economic offerings — commodities, goods, and services — are external to the buyer, experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level. Thus, no two people can have the same experience, because each experience derives from the interaction between the staged event (like a theatrical play) and the individual’s state of mind.
The five key experience-design principles of memorable experiences:
1. Theme the experience
2. Harmonize impressions with positive cues
3. Eliminate negative cues
4. Mix in memorabilia
5. Engage all five senses
OCBC Bank UX Redesign — Great General Assembly Project Case Study
WeTransfer Presents: Andy Rementer’s Summer of Love
“Growing up as a Catholic kid on Long Island in the 1960s, there had been no liberation of any sort. People came out of the depression and experienced World War II. They wanted stability, stability, stability, and with that came a lot of conformity. Nobody was supposed to question that.”
“But then one summer, my cousin came over for Thanksgiving. From one year to the next, he’d gone from decently clothed to long hair and a fringe coat. And it was as if somebody opened the window in that old 1950s house. It was like — what is that?”
“I think many of the things that interest us today got their start in the 60s. Certainly the lives that we live would’ve been very different, had these events not taken place. There was the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the natural foods movement. And the idea that you need to be present and active in your government to affect change took shape at that time.” — Colleen Terry, co-curator of the wildly popular exhibition The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion and Rock & Roll
“Today’s youth does want a transformed society, but I’m not getting the sense that they’re considering major, alternative ways of living.”
