W+K @ SXSWi part one: “Pretty Ugly” – design’s perspective
Wieden + Kennedy London Head of Design Craft Guy Featherstone writes:
48 hours after six days at SXSW and finally my brain is stabilising, I can now reflect on what was a whirlwind of interesting, inspiring, noisy, pretty, ugly seminars and presentations.
Having only come to this event for the first time this year, and from a design position, the majority of conversations/debates and talks that I was primarily attracted to, were coming from areas of design development, tech innovation, entrepreneurship and culture.
Many of the seminars and panels I attended were positively informative, sharing of new ideas and future ambitions, combined with innovative technologies with thinking and theories for tomorrow as well as today. These ideas were, mostly, pretty engaging and sometimes delightful, though mostly presented in an ugly way. I don’t necessarily mean painful KeyNote slide transitions, poor Powerpoint compositions or even atrocious typography; I mean the story telling. As you’d expect, the majority of sessions introduced you to innovative product development and scientific creations, combined with interesting theories about future technologies, human behaviour and the relevance of engagement. Much of this was highly inspiring, though a consistent thread which I felt was often lightly skipped over, or missed entirely when presenting these stories, was the process. How you get to ideas, the findings, the failings, the learnings, the all-important prototyping stories, these nuggets are for me the richest, most powerful and inspiring values when telling a story about creations.
Three pretty examples that stood out for me were:
A fully integrated, well-informed product design session chaired by the infamous Tony Fadell (from Nest) and Husain Rahman (from Jawbone) with questions from Wired’s Scott Diadich, ‘Breaking the mold of meaningful design’. This was an interesting seminar that covered many topics stemming from the function and the implementation of form, the values of simplicity, purity, art and accessibility. Fadell talked of ‘design architecture touching every part within the process’, the importance of design that challenges both software and hardware development, ‘breaking the mold’ by challenging the traditional rules of design.
Once again, I only wish that Fadell and Rahman had exposed the audience to more stories behind the process, the problems that themselves and their teams faced when developing the Nest thermostat and the UP wristband. #designtech
A session I was super-excited about attending was ‘Leap Motion and The Disappearing User Interface’, developed by David Holz and Michael Buckwald. From the moment I saw the Air Harp video that did the rounds recently, I’ve been keen to learn more about the potential of this tech and also have a play with it myself. Yes, the ability to control our digital environments the same way we control our real environments is upon us. The guys discussed many things centred around the future potential of Leap Motion, and the biggest thing holding back computers and technology being how we use them. The film below shows David Holz demonstrating some super-quick 3D modelling with real actions. No gestures, no sign language needed; just pure intuition: a playful, very human, cool-looking tool. I can't wait to see what developers now do with this piece of kit. Watch out #leapmotion
Last of the pretty:
The most prolific case of copyright infringement ever, Kim Dotcom spoke via a Skype panel hosted by Wired’s contributing editor Charles Graber. The Megaupload founder Skyped into a theatre hall (surprisingly only half-full) of people from his New Zealand abode last Tuesday afternoon. Naturally, it wasn’t design that attracted me to this epic moment but rather the politics, innovation and curiosity of what projects and ventures Kim might now be pursuing. He talked at length about his case, the FBI and his extradition back home to the United States. This was combined with his views on privacy, piracy and the grey area that is the future of digital. His face was projected onto the wall above the stage within the auditorium like a comedy sketch from the 1980s. Kim had considered every detail of his image. He was beautifully art directed, dressed entirely in black, against a black back drop, occasionally wiping his brow with a black hand towel. He talked with humility, eloquence and the occasional burst of random humour about his arrest last January and the seizure of all his assets, including his many cars, along with the priceless vanity licence plates that read MAFIA, HACKER, GUILTY, etc. A super-smart guy with a great sense of humour that will no doubt have a film scripted about him very soon. #skypekim
(Please excuse my rather loud snigger at the front end of this video).
Some ugly:
An area I found to be unconsidered on many levels was designing and development with little or no measure of sustainability. This should be a fundamental design value when creating ideas and products for tomorrow, the future and beyond. We’re all living in a noisy time, a disruptive time, a time of daily deaths, a time when we should all be ever more responsible about what it is we do, what it is we
create, and how reinforced the longevity of it is. If we continue to ignore this value within the process of design and innovation, we are only contributing to an already polluted visual world with negative environmental effects.
If it’s not simple, benefiting our lives and generally adding strength and value, then it’s pointless. If it’s complicated, slow, non-intuitive and lazy in its design values, once again it’s going to be messy and noisy. All ideas and creations should be relevant, not cool, in order to transcend time and be
positively effective.
Another ugly would be the glorious WWW. I was hoping to hear someone people talk about this but unfortunately it was never raised in any of the sessions I attended.
We have to simplify and craft with a more purist approach; this medium, this hub, this world, is messy and grotesquely ugly.
I reach out to you: let's all try and lift this messy nonsense, cleanse and eradicate the global epidemic that is the skeuomorphic disease. This, combined with other poor design qualities, is becoming a visual pollutant to this environment. No more, to those glossy, sticky, wet-looking buttons, those torn edges on digital calendars. We should re-educate, reduce and craft a simpler way of presenting things like interfaces, buttons and actions on-screen. Together let’s create more harmony, more happiness and general enjoyment for our eyes.
Last of the uglies would have to be 6th Avenue, Austin TX any time after 2am during SXSW 2013. Words can’t describe some of the sights you see.
Now that my ugly rant is done I’d like to conclude.
My cherry-popping SXSW 2013 experience was mostly pretty. Lots of very interesting theory patterns, movements and technologies to inform betterness, all topped off with some enormous Texas blue sky when exiting the conference halls each day.
🙂
#hatemyemoticon
– Guy
