June 12, 2006, The Mandalay Bay hotel, Las Vegas and I am at the How Design conference. For the next 3 days I will attend a whirlwind of various design seminars, talk to people at the VFS tradeshow booth and also find the time to gamble some money away, and of course take in the crazy over-the-topness that is Vegas!

The conference was interesting and eye-opening. Graphic designers and interactive designers seem to be living in two parallel universes and it is time that someone opened a door and stepped to the other side. How Design conference is the Mecca of graphic design conventions. Print design was celebrated, paper was fetishised. Imagine a magazine that displays dripping wet luscious lipsticked lips that invite you to touch them, and when you do…hmm… the paper has been designed to actually have the sensory feeling of touching …lips! A bit creepy if you ask me. The world of digital design and interactive media seemed a bit foreign to most people there and the topic was really a part of the agenda at How Design. Not that there is anything wrong with that. The conference itself was just like most other conferences. Filled with people who were being paid by their employers to be there. Some were interested in being there; some were just there for the ride and the boatload of free paper samples.

Here are a few things I got from the conference. Some gleaned from the result of the “teachings” at the seminar and others just came from me glazing over from time to time.

1. The world of design is going through an evolution. For the first time, it seems to be OK to talk about Design in context to business. Even now design is often mistaken for something that makes other things ‘pretty’. Allegedly, BusinessWeek struggled with what to call their “design” section because early testing showed that if a section was named “Design” business owners assumed it meant something like Interior Design or Architecture and won’t click on it! They settled on calling it Innovation & Design. Moira Cullen, Design Director at Coca Cola contends that design lived under the pseudonym Technology in the 90’s and now lives disguised as the buzz-word Innovation. And as if to prove Moira’s point, going back to the BusinessWeek example, the URL for the Innovation & Design section is http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/ (where did the word design go?).
2. Branding and consistency may have a seemingly simple relationship from the outside (i.e. keep your brand consistent) but it is one that is highly complex and requires further exploration. Starbucks’s global creative director Stanley Hainsworth,  uses 5 mantras and one of them is to make sure everything is “hand touched”. They want to make sure that every marketing piece does not just rely on PhotoShop and computer graphics to create textures but they actually add little human touches such as smudges and paper tears to make that piece have the “Starbucks fee’. The color palette and the ad campaigns can be varied and diverse in their look, but that is one thing each of them must share.
3. I asked a question at the end of one of the sessions “What is the role of Interactive Design in your studio.” I got an almost defensive answer, “We know it’s out there, but if someone wants that, we just outsource it.” Interesting especially because this was shortly after listening to a previous session about cross-media campaigns and building natural tie-ins that create product interest by using the web to build the hype. Will print shops suffer or value from having the ability to think outside their typesetting press?

There was more that I doodled and puzzled over, but I won’t bore you with the details (for now). Bottom-line, I came back to Vancouver as an ‘inspired fighter’. I will share what I know and in the process break down a few barriers. Some mine and some that are held in place by others.

Welcome to Web 2.0.

Much hyped, equally maligned. Web 2.0 is celebrated at events, taught in classes and even predicted to have the same horrible end that dot com’s had back in the day.

So what the heck is Web 2.0 and what’s all the fuss about? I give you this link to go do your homework about Web 2.0 . Long and short of it, Web 2.0 gets a lot of buzz in terms of the technologies and programmatic functionality that is now possible to deploy on the web. You have programmers and designers collaborating and making new businesses everyday of products that only they themselves will ever find a use for. At its worst, Web 2.0 is a narcissistic, self-congratulatory, self-referential and gimmicky me-too’s that have made their first attempt at selling a product for a niche market. Themselves.

At its best, however the evolution of the Web and its potential is only now beginning to become clearer to all that work for it (?), and those that have used it ever since they care to remember.

To me Web 2.0 is about doing what we never thought we would do on the web. Share.

Yah, you heard me. Share.

That’s the big word of the moment, and that is what at its core, Web 2.0 helps us do.

Web 2.0. Sharing. You can use words like ‘platform’ and ‘web application’ and ‘Ajax’ and ‘desktop functionality’ but really in essence the most amazing thing about the web today is the concept of sharing is becoming increasingly OK. We are slowly coming out of our cocoons, testing the waters and sharing out things that we know, and things that we love or hate.

(Caution: Words are used in the following part of the article to weave a tangled web of links!)

We rant and we celebrate. We collaborate like never before. We share things illegally, or legally. We share things we were too shy to share before and we share things that we just couldn’t share as easily before. We still spend thousands of dollars for things that we are told not to share and some of us go ahead and share those as well. We share out seemingly useless things, and then someone goes out and makes something out of that pile of information. We find many things by sharing, as we lose things in an increasingly big messy pile of unsorted information. Then we go invent folksonomies to find those things. We hold a finger up at old ways of categorizing things (Dewey Decimal system be damned) and instead we put several tags to describe one thing. Much like how our brain thinks of things.

People are finding that micro-communities are more meaningful to them than the large ‘one-stop-shop‘ portals. They are even buying and selling things without the aide of mega-fee sites such as eBay.

We are living in a brave new world, but this onslaught of power hasn’t done much to ease our worries or workload. In fact, we seem ready to trade bits of our privacy at times if someone can make sense of our crazy digital world. And sometimes we just give away pieces of information about ourselves unknowingly. And sometimes we share out more than we had ever bargained for.

You call it a Platform; I call it Collective Wisdom. You call it Web 2.0. I call it Sharing.

What if it were magic?
Example 1: If my phone were magic, it would know who I want to talk to. Solution today: Voice activated dialing.

Example 2: If my in-flight experience were magic, I would have privacy so the person next to me doesn’t see that I drool when I nap. Oh by the way, I’d like those seats to be more comfortable. Solution today: For the select few not-in-the-cattle-class

Another way to look at this is to look at the user’s end-goal first and then design the experience around that. Goal-directed design as Alan Cooper calls it or User-centered design for the rest of us.

What will be the user’s goal when they use this product?

Example: Goal: Skip that annoying Celine Dion song playing on my car radio without taking my hands off the steering wheel! Well, for now, we look at steering wheel controls as a quick innovation. Next, talking to your car.

Example 2: Goal: I want to not have to wait forever to get some ketchup on to my fries (let’s not judge our culinary habits in this article). Heinz’s solution: the upside down ketchup bottle that keeps the ketchup close to where it comes out from and eliminates the wait time. Too bad the design is a bit flawed and the ketchup actually spurts out fast, but in a direction completely unanticipated! By the way, you also pay more for this high-tech bottle than the regular bottle of ketchup.

These innovations are baby steps, but they are new ways to think up solutions to old problems.

So the idea of design brainstorming is simple. Let’s get our minds thinking beyond what exists today and find opportunities for improving the user experience in ways that haven’t been thought of before. Some solutions may require the use of complex technology, some not. We are not concerned with technology, budgets and other constraints when we brainstorm. Brainstorming is opening our mind to the possibilities. We will have plenty of time to “get real” and make a design that fits within the project’s constraints. But we want to find that ‘innovation mojo’ that will help us create distinctive, more useful design.

More on brainstorming coming soon, for now, I am late for a brainstorming meeting. Need to grab my post-it notes, crayons, flip chart paper, markers, moldable colored clay and fashion magazines and school glue-stick.

I was delivering my user experience lecture at VFS the other day, and I did something I haven’t done EVER in the years of my teaching at that school. I totally ad-libbed. Like went off for an hour about innovation. Totally, like, whatever. Umm, hello is this the valley-girl innovation hot-line? I digress….

We talked a lot about 3 geeky things that are not even all that new, but have the promise of having some exciting implementations in the future. Our discussion centered around devices that can talk to each other, communicate seamlessly and create some amazing experiences for humans in the process:

• Global Positioning System (GPS). Imagine the possibilities. Your cell phone can show you your jogging path from satellite imagery made possible by Google Earth. While you are there why not do a quick satellite fly-through over that new house-listing your real-estate agent just beamed to you. Look to see if there are enough parks around the house to take Sparky for a walk? Once you’ve decided it’s worth taking a trip to the other end of town to see this place, your car’s (soon to be standard) OnStar system can not only help you find the least crowded route, inform you of cheap(?) gas prices along the way, but also add technologies such as being able to possibly read you your new emails while you drive?
• Voice over IP (VoIP). You now have the capability of placing phone calls using the packet system of IP networks. Voice calls using the internet or even your private office network. By the way your device, will not only allow you to place long distance phone calls at a fraction of the price your phone company charges you today, but heck, you should be able to download music using that same device, and the same network. How’s your VoIP doing? Mine is just fine, thank you. Combine the power of VoIP, the pervasive possibilities of Broadband Over Power Lines (BPL) and the next generation of IP and you are now looking at Uncle Hick living on a farm in Middle America being able to, well, do whatever Uncle Hick would do with broadband.
• Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID). Much hyped, and being tested and actively used by tiny companies such as IBM, Wal-Mart and the Gap. Imagine Gap puts a RFID chip that could cost less than a nickel to produce into each of its loose fit khakis. Joe Blow, an inventory clerk at the Gap store in Idaho receives the shipment of these pants. He doesn’t need to even open the boxes to add this new inventory into the system. The RFID chip informed the store computer (and that of the head office) exactly how many pieces have been received. The store computer can physically track each pair of the khakis. This means that the store shelves will always have the appropriate amount of inventory and if you can’t find that hard-to-find size of waist 30” and length 40”, the employee will be able to find it for you thanks to the ever watchful computer system that can track down that elusive pair of pants that was mistakenly placed under the boot cut jeans pile.

  Just remember to have your ever-happy-to-help Gap employee take out that RFID chip—after all you wouldn’t want your khakis reporting back to the Gap about all those visits you made to your neighborhood McDonalds last month, now would you?

So what are we going to do with these new technologies? What lies ahead? And are we designers ready to take on the enormous responsibility of making these technologies useful? Will we utilize these technologies to their fullest capacity, all the while, remembering the all important ease of use we want to provide our users?

Will we make brilliantly simple interfaces such as that of OnStar? Or will be make cumbersome complex-guised-as-simple interfaces (why should it take someone 20 minutes to tune in to a radio station on their car stereo?)

Oh my gawd, I so get belly-button shivers just thinking about the possibilities of all this….like….totally…!