Time Is All Relative

Designers tend to bill by the hour, which is why they describe a generally drawn out process by which they arrive at their conclusions. This stems from the fact that they feel they have to "show their work" in order to generate value. Yet as many designers can attest, the big idea is often generated within 30 minutes of hearing the problem. Their accumulated experience allows them to understand what they need to do in an instant. But you don't want to call the client 30 minutes after a meeting and say, that will be one million dollars please. I mean you didn't do anything! It didn't take any time! Except that it did. And in the end your time isn't what they're paying for, the time they're paying for is their own.

First off there's the Paula Scher quote "it took 30 minutes and 30 years. Designers who have dedicated time to the profession can work quickly, but that by no means infers that the idea didn't take time to percolate. More important is the fact that the client is really paying for their time.

They are investing in their brand and their voice. When done right this can be something that holds incredible value for a long time. Hence they aren't paying you for your 30 minutes, they're paying for the years of value their brand gives them. At this point what would a rival big box retailer pay to achieve the brand value of Target? This value exists on a smaller scale as well.

Designers don't need to be afraid to charge good money for their service. Clients are getting something significant in return. Are there sometimes more important things for some businesses to spend their money on? Yes. Do designers feel as though they are in competition with those things? Yes they do. This is why designers need to stand strong in the storm of questions around their value and work with clients to help them gauge how important their brand truly is. If it makes a a big enough difference, a client won't care if the idea came to you after weeks of research or like a lightning bolt while you were on the john. Time is a valuable commodity and the more longevity their brand has the better the deal looks to them all the time.

Design Jobs

There isn't much to say that hasn't already been said about the importance of Steve Jobs. He (along with an army of talent at Apple) has quite simply changed the way we interact with the world, what personal computing actually means and how we entertain and educate ourselves. Not bad for only 56 years of life.

Jobs had a particularly distinct impact on the lives of designers. He created a revolution in design. As with all revolutions there are losers (typesetters, production artists...) and there are those that benefit. The Macintosh democratized the wold of design and while many professionals bemoan those effects, we are all the better for it. Every designer born before 1980 remembers their first experience with a Mac like it was the Kennedy assassination.

Designers' relationship to Jobs was diehard not just because we used his product every day, but because he was the living embodiment of the idea that good design driving good business. Apple has been the shining beacon on the hill. Without Steve Jobs the light is inescapably dimmer.

Cult Of Personality

 

Designers live in fear of the committee. When working through design problems committees are often where good ideas go to die. A huge problem with groups of people needing to sign off on ideas is the fact that once an idea gets run through a bunch of people's checklist all of the things that make something unique get stripped away. Any corners get rounded and anything that yells gets hushed. In the end the design is faceless and blends into the background.

Creative endeavors that are revered often have the stamp of an individual. Great companies are often remembered for the personalities of their leaders. Apple, Google, GE, Facebook, IBM, Coca Cola, Ford... the list goes on but all of these brands at some point were led by individuals with hugely distinct styles of leadership and public perception.

Yet even at companies large and small there needs to be "buy-in" in middle management. Hence committees are formed. It is a management problem and a designers bain. But the idea of personality can help focus committees and also help generate better designs. It is sometimes not enough to have a targeted creative brief. Creative briefs no matter how targeted can be solved in a variety of ways. Perhaps along with the companies rationale the question of what kind of personality this committee or company should have needs to be asked.

You don't even have to talk in specific traits. You can speak in generalities. Are they Elvis people or Beatles people? Are they conservative or progressive? Are they Joe Friday or Monk? These things help to define the voice they want to use and are more relevant to attitudes than color and form. The right personality is the essence of a brand. And a committee doesn't have to stand in the way of that fact.

Design Snobbery: If You're Going to Blow, Might As Well be a Blowhard

A little while back over at Design Observer, Adrian Shaughnessy posted a tidbit about the riots in London. It was soon clear he touched off a nerve as 95 comments came rolling through ranging from "great article" to one commenter calling Mr. Shaughnessy a dick.

The thrust of the article puts part of the blame for the riots at the feet of designers. More specifically he addresses designers involvement in a culture of consumerism. This consumerism creates desires that some cannot meet and Shaughnessy suggests when the right spark comes along it releases a pent up frustration in the havenots to loot and destroy storefronts. Here's Shaughnessy:

The principal target was a highly successful chain of shops called JD Sports. It sells fashionable street wear. Other popular targets included mobile phone shops, electrical goods stores, and outlets of leading UK fashion brands.

All these shops spend huge amounts of money on branding, on store layout, on window displays, and slick advertising. Their ads leap at us from newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and the Internet. Celebrities endorse their products. They are little shrines of desire.

Despite one or two gleefully publicised cases, the majority of the rioters came from poor homes in the least desirable, least well-resourced areas of England’s major cities. They come from places with low achievement rates in education, and where employment prospects are low.

These young people are not poor in the sense in which we understand poverty in the undeveloped world. They have Blackberrys (the encrypted Blackberry messaging system was used extensively to coordinate attacks), fashionable jeans, and cool footwear: but they are poor enough to have a sense of being excluded from the great orgy of consumer acquisitiveness that is flaunted in front of them daily.

Specifically, they are excluded from the world of desire and consumption created by the brand owners, advertising agencies, art directors, graphic designers, photographers, product designers, retail designers, architects, stylists, retouchers, and copywriters.

I can see how something like this can provoke the idea that this is all patently ridiculous. Shuaghnessy does himself no favors by being overly myopic in his description of the targets. Perhaps JD Sports were targeted using smartphones, but rioters were burning cars and destroying mom and pop stores all over the city. Private property, businesses, lamp posts... it didn't matter.

Additionally it's hard to reconcile the notion that people running around with Blackberries and $100 Nikes are so upset over the fact that they can't have Mercedes and Louis Vuitton handbags that they decide to steal more $100 Nikes. I can't have Louis Vuitton luggage either. I won't even get into the armchair psychology he gets into in terms of the level of the rioters' education or manner of upbringing.

All of that said, I don't want to let designers off the hook for the role they play in consumerism. Nor do I want to downplay how consumerism and the economic realities that result from it don't have ramifications (sometimes riotous!) Designers love to talk about the "power of design" yet shy away from the idea that they would be partially responsible for something that sounds as diabolical as consumerism. We don't want our work to be labeled as "slick advertising." That makes us all sound like shysters trying to dupe someone out of a buck.

Yet you can't have your cake and eat it too. Design works. Design is good business and indeed design generates desire. Truly good design also creates beauty. In the world of branding it creates a rewarding experience. In the world of products it can create simplicity. When done correctly no wonder design creates desire. It's almost the whole point. Massimo Vignelli describes design as getting rid of "vulgarity." Design replaces those things that degrade our visual environment and improves them.

The moral question designers need to deal with are how to balance making a living (as Madonna says, we are living in a material word) with perhaps turning down work for folks that want to use design to exploit, mislead or generally inflict more vulgarity on the world. I'm not going to say the folks at Landor were amoral when they created a beautiful identity for BP that suggested BP was a shiny happy eco-friendly company. Besides, I'm sure they sleep well on their mattress full of $100 bills.

When thinking about design and consumerism, we have to remember that design doesn't create haves and havenots. Economics, public policy and political battles create them. Your moral duty as a designer is to decide who you serve and what ends do they serve. That's all you can take responsibility for, not criminal behavior of others*.

*None of this is to say that that the politics and decisions made by those in power don't deserve some sort of reaction It is above my pay grade, and out of my sphere of knowledge to know anything about politics in the UK.

From Here To There

Our daily commutes see us Homo Sapiens in many different environments expressing many behaviors. We can be seen as the solitary sort, mindlessly careening along at 70 miles per hour. We can be the begrudging social animal stuck in traffic with our ever-more irritated fellow man. Or we can be the herd animal rattling to and fro in a crowded bus. Given the variety and frequency of the human commute it is curious how little people take into account how design (graphic, architectural, industrial and political) plays a role in the ways we get from A to B.

“Transportation” in and of itself isn’t a terribly charged word. But when the word “public” is put in front of it, it becomes a phrase wrought with political battles as well as deign and economic impact. “Public transportation” has come to be defined by the modes of transportation – bus, train, subway, trolley – rather than simply moving people from place to place. By breaking it up into parts it has obscured the bigger picture. We talk about transportation in terms of trees, not in terms of the forrest.

America in many ways defines itself as a nation of the automobile. This is partly cultural. The freedom to move, the open road and whatnot are American bastions. But eventually the idea of the car became literally synonymous with America as made clear in the addage “What’s good for GM (General Motors) is good for America.”

Yet, America didn’t start out as car country. The Model T didn’t start production until 1908. Boston opened the first subway a decade earlier in 1897. Electric trolley cars came a bit before. But the largest transformative mode of transportation – the railroad – predates them all.

All of these have incredible influence on the shapes of our lives. They work to define the expansion of a nation and the difference between a city like New York and a city like Louisville. They are trees that define the forrest.



Like any forest, some trees are bigger than others. Some get more water and sun. Currently the sun shines brightest on the automobile. But in the world of transportation what gets the most resources is not a result of natural selection, but a conscious choice by planners, politicians, business men, architects  and designers.

Had America been pouring money into infrastructure like light rail and high speed trains we would likely be zipping around in those. But America has the interstate highway, by far the most expansive and effective system of roads in the world. Highways changed the way cities were laid out. With railroads towns developed wherever there was a stop. Without them there is no boom in westward expansion. Highways allowed cities to expand along exits. Highways allowed for suburbs, and now ex-burbs. Call it sprawl or call it expansion, investing in highways and roads made these things possible.

And there are consequences. Tailpipes, long-distance commutes, massive infrastructure, noise, oil dependence are all coming together and forcing us to make decisions and perhaps realize that the definition of America is not necessarily cars, and that the dominance of the car is not some free market, darwinian (small ‘d’) function or a natural right.

Money is a “limited” resource. Investing in one form of transport can mean letting others wither on the vine. See the incredibly fast extinction of trolleys and electric cable cars as evidence. When mass transit suffers cuts in service, like when most public services are eliminated, it effects the poor and the elderly most obviously. It also amplifies the reliance on the car which simply makes it simpler to develop land further and further out of the city core. Additionally as time goes on and services erode there is a perception that the service is insufficient (correct) and hence a waste of money (not so much).

There seems to be for many Americans a tiny libertarian sitting on their shoulder saying “if the riders aren’t willing to pay for it, transit is not worth having.” It’s almost a moral tenet. Some of them say it as they drive alone in their SUV that’s guzzling government subsidized gasoline, hurtling down a subsidized road that creates environmental externalities that are quite literally killing people. This is what we’ve been designing our lives and our communities around.

Midwestern cities face a particular conundrum in the face of all this. Long the little brother of the coasts, they are suffering in comparison to the rise of the South and Southwest. Population shrinkage, loss of their manufacturing advantage overseas, and recently a housing bubble have thrown all the ways in which Midwestern cities have developed into a rather harsh light.

Overeagerness involving highways and roads did little to help this. Many cities blighted their waterfronts, divided their cities – which destroyed neighborhoods – and developed endless repetitive infrastructure which they continue to pay for.

Many of the issues seem straight forward but ignite a tinderbox of anger when trying to deal with them. Aaron Wrenn of the Urbanophile blog says it best, “Suburban sprawl has become culturally identified with the postwar ‘American Dream.’ Indicting the system that produces sprawl is often seen an indictment of our very way of life.”

Reinvigorating these cities requires that they take steps to creating livable, vibrant neighborhoods and corridors. They need to create ways in which there are shorter (both time and distance) commutes, and an economy that creates businesses for these people to commute to.

Transit, hand-in-hand with land use planning are keys to this development. A 2009 study shows an increase in property value in areas surrounding transit nodes and an increase in the number of jobs (notable given the current employment climate). Transit along with zoning that allows for more density attracts development and increases the connectivity of neighborhoods. It isn’t an accident that very dense places are the economic engines of most every nation. Anecdotal evidence from places like Portland, Oregon show that smart planning and investing in transit can result in both economic gain and dramatically help the brand of a city, particularly a mid-size city.

So why does this discussion result in headaches and angry family members around the dinner table. The simple reason is change is painful and we avoid it, sometimes violently. However, some blame lies at the feet of the designer. Designers, advertisers and architects helped to generate the idea that freedom and cars are one and the same. Designers, architects and advertisers need to work harder to help people understand that freedom doesn’t equal automobile, freedom equals autonomy. Autonomy requires a variety of transit options.

Frankly it’s a hard sell when bus routes are being eliminated in most communities, investment in transit is trumpeted as a spending boondoggle and the wealthy in many communities  work to maintain property values rather than actual value.

Yet the success of the Los Angeles Metro in marketing it’s wares has been eye opening. It shows that when designers and advertisers put muscle into something they can move the needle. It will take designers and ad men and architects trumpeting the idea that mass transit isn’t some social engineering project but a necessity for a city to survive.

It takes designers to create usable maps that don’t intimidate new riders of transit. It takes architects working with developers to create taller more dense buildings around transit nodes. It takes industrial designers to make buses and rail cars that are comfortable and have aesthetic appeal. It happened for the car. In some ways the car changed the way we design, but mostly we designed things for the car.

Imagine a world where there is no car. Don’t imagine it to try and fulfill a tree-hugging dream of a no car utopia. Simply try to imagine what a world looks like without a car. How are cities changed? How do we move resources, both human and otherwise from place to place. Where do we live. How do we live.

It’s time designers of all ilks think about how that world could be and not how it has been. It’s time to realize how important their influence is. It’s time to sit back and dream a sustainable American dream.