I believe everybody who consider themselves as a creative has got already MakeDay in their professional or personal live. You know the feeling – you want to do something but it shouldn’t take long, it shouldn’t cost that much and it has to prove the concept or idea you aiming for. Also you don’t make it only for yourself – that will be silly and no fun. Most importantly the challenge will be gone – so you take your idea and talk to your colleagues, get the idea spread it.

#RGAMakeDay

We can see these phenomenas of MakeDays growing around at 99%, Google, Ideo, Frog Design and many others inventors companies and studios. What is actually interesting is not taking office “productive time off” but it’s bringing the benefit of open collaboration, and the power of open leadership within a small teams and short time.
This always show hidden qualities where some individuals enable potential of under-discovered passion that can be used in many different ways.

When the company leaders in head of Russel Davis announced the #RGAMakeDay entire company get exited and start thinking about the concepts or projects which they want to introduce to the world – how can we do this and how we can bring this to the life in a day, how about if we try this, oh it wouldn’t work – amazing consistence of all professional passioned about their own little “baby” projects start rumbling arround. As you can imagine there was a real competition, oh yeah in deed and many people and their teams were locked in small meeting rooms over a whole day to achieve their goals. How they did it you’ll see on the end. I’ll try to supply the list of the links if they are available online.

the team

Luckily enough this year my team was stuffed by geeks who pushed my daily imagination in to many different direction and this get decided that even on a MakeDay we will get together again and show our colleagues what they couldn’t see anywhere else only in R/GA.

I knew that Ant (Anthony Baker – Solution Architect) was crazy about W8, METRO style and all connecting services with other plaforms – don’t ask – sometime he can have a monologue about dynamic libraries for an hour and doesn’t really care if anyone understand. But on the other had he is the guy who make things happen – oh yeah he does. If you are UX guy and you want your “stuff” work you better get him on the board.

Danny (Danny Lee – Software Engineer) he is always in the code – literally  he is the guy who always read between the lines. He never says no – always suggesting solutions improving UX and SEO forward. Luckily enough sometime he get me understand a bit of code – in a pieces – so I’m not getting greedy that fast.

And finally Mr. “NO” (Sebastien Jouhans – Sr. Flash Developer) well I believe if there is any piece of code written in artificial language this French guru is probably the one who will understand that. He is the guy who make a Camera talk to you – wired isn’t it.

So we have team, we also choose the technology, collect all the guidelines, frameworks  from all major platforms in to one research knowledge. All gadgets showing right values – what we actually missing now, is how do we tide this up in to a something which is actually useful.

I don’t want you to believe that I came up with entire solution or concept even sometimes I have my moments – we all did and that’s what I love on every single project with these guys we challenge each other. We all sat down and bring all the puzzles on the table and make it work for one single purpose – serve us to make a better and more efficient work.

R/GA Locator

If you are geek and you want to know which W8 library, METRO  & MSQL or what Open framework we lined to please jump straight away to blogs of my colleagues and get yourself wild with future development. I’ll be focusing more on the concept, user cases we covered and W8 Framework we used for our build.

Challenge

Every growing company in our industry experience expanding communication patterns and difficulties to keep focused on work without any distraction. Many people primary PM – project managers in fact running around and  looking for someone in particular time and place. For your meeting, sign the contract, show another idea, department meeting or just your regular daily Scrum – you’ve heard that “where is James, have anyone seen James”.

Particular challenge was eliminate any physical action like swipe, or check in or other techniques. Bring all collected information to a source without real effort or act of collecting it. On daily bases we overwhelmed by tuns of interaction – and bring another one will harm the process and whole idea to create unique knowledge “where the people are?”.

Other challenge was present full integration with existing framework and services show the capability of cross-platform sharing and communication. Be able to scale this system for all R/GA offices. Show the real power of integrating platform as a global challenge.

Solution

Bothered by the people running around the office to looking for those who matter at that time – we came up with the idea of R/GA Locator – simple colleague finder within all R/GA offices.

The tool or platform (however you want to call it) capable to capture your face while you entering the office and automatically to sign you in. As a immediate respond you receiving all notification of your day or other information which matter to you (flexible to the user settings) you can see the upcoming meeting, your holidays, holidays of your peers or just simple feeds of the news from the company or industry – what ever you prefer. All tailored with global and local information for you.  Local weather, transportation update as well as a mail and calendar.

No more rumbling around to find your colleague because by checking your diary you know he is in the office and he is already on the meeting you are just late for. Your smart-phone, your laptop even your touch screen all devices and all platforms connected through one simple solution.

User Scenario

You coming to the office – while you passing entrance desk the screen welcome you and show you information related to your current working day. You’ve noticed that colleague of your who supposed to be on the meeting with you has got holiday and he is not checked in – so you wouldn’t expect him to be at present. On the other hand your other colleague is checked in you see he is in different office – so it’s better to chase him up – system generates SMS message which is sent to a specific mobile number – and your colleague is on the way.
Finally you are late ad you changing the time of your meeting – other colleagues receive notification but also massage when you reach the office that meeting can start in about 10 minutes.
All time based event can be organized by the user, as a creator you giving a privilege to see you calendar by others.

Metro

Let me just quickly mention METRO style from first UX observation. While ago I worked with amazing MSDN team using Sitecore framework. That time I have great teacher .NET Solution Architect who was opened to share with me all MS UX resource – a bit geeky but it was quite engaging. This time I had a get lucky again – before we start Antony shared his resources and videos. Those make my life significantly easier.  I’m not “MS fun” but I’ll gladly accept any challenge for W8 and same team.

Hungry for a result! – well we didn’t won, let’s say we didn’t have this sparkle on the top, but even so we receive the most generous feedback wort of any victory – from people who lead their industry and who really matter.

#RGAMakeDay

… was great & I believe it gave us all better understanding what we are capable of – not only as a team but as a entire company. The family spirit of R/GA London is flowing around and you better watch out, because there are many “bad asses” and Im sure we’ll hear from them soon.

Personally in this 2 solid days I learned more that I’ve learn  from anyone at any commercial pitch project – how bizarre. If you like to know more drop me a line bellow and we can discuss your current challenges. Do you like the idea? – well then, ask boss and if s/he is wise enough you might experienced same vibe as we all do at R/GA!

Reference

1. Steve Kaneko on unification and Metro
2. Building “Windows 8″
3. Windows Phone 7 Design Resources – UI Guide and Design Templates
4. Windows Phone Templates V3.0

Thanks again all it was remarkable experience

To make it even easier this will be simple list. To make it complete please feel free to add the book you’ve read and you think it might fit in to our UX Repository.

Usability and User Experience Related Books Repository

User Experience

1. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug – this book is almost classic and shouldn’t be missed at any UX library. I personally recommend Steve’s workshop – which give you more flavour of actual testing and usability.
2. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville (http://searchpatterns.org/) – noone should miss this one either. Solid, short, but very well written book and website which support all techniques about search capability.
3. The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garret.
4. About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design & About Face 3.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert M. Reimann – is mainly received as a bridge between strategy and design – early days I found it very use full to understand all principles in Ix Design.
5. The inmates are running the asylum by Alan Cooper
6. Site Seeing: A visual approach to web usability by Luke Wroblewski – Luke’s approach is minimalistic, but very well written and very condensed in terms of useful information.
7. Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction by Helen Sharp
8. Measuring The User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert
9. Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfacesby Carolyn Snyder
10. Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies) by Mike Kuniavsky – Don’t miss this book if you ever want to research for UCD.
11. The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin

Design

1. Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen -
2. Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman
3. Designing Gestural Interfaces & Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer – Dans books compiling technology methodology and design based approach. If you are designer from the bottom of your hearth – you should start right here.
4. Web Forms Design – Filling in the blanks. Wroblewski, Luke: Rosenfeld Media 2008.
5. Institutionalization of Usability” written by Eric Schaffer
6. Web ReDesign: Workflow that Works by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler
7. Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web by Christina Wodtke
8. Design Research: Methods and Perspectives by Laurel, Brenda Laurel
9. Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design and Conduct Effective Tests by Jeffrey Rubin
10. Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
11. The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience by Douglas K. van Duyne, James A. Landay, Jason I. Hong
12. Designing object-oriented user interfaces by Dave Collins
13. Designing interactions by Bill Moggridge
14. Web ReDesign: Workflow that Works by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler.
15. Thoughtful interaction design: A design perspective on information technology by LÖWGREN, Jonas; STOLTERMAN, Erik. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.
16. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

Communication

Before …

This year’s conference was accompanied by amazing weather, which changed from  the usual rain and foggy to real weather exception. Even those who arrived from Italy, Spain, U.S. and even Australia can fully enjoy the beauty and picturesque corners of the Bloomsbury & Russell Square. Home atmosphere was given not only by beautiful weather, but also by international festival hosted in nearest Russel Square Garden give win to the event.

The garden in front of  the University was full of students staring at Chinese characters and preparing for upcoming tests. Other participants, lying around who enjoying last minute on the grass was suddenly disrupted by call “Look look” where one of the participant noticed one of the key presenter Mr. Erik Spiekermann, passing by. Almost entire park as one man rise and began to follow him into the lecture hall. That was clear sign that London TYPO can begin.

I am afraid we will not have enough space to go into depth of each talk separately, but I will try to cover at least what deserves your attention from my personal perspective.

The first day

Daniel Herigstad

The first lecture set the bar very high. Not only from speaker perspective but also as a presentation itself. Daniel Herigstad introduced his projects where he faced with space and its perception and not only for the computer but also for the television and games. Developing  digital space adjusting perception of the observer’s position. This topic follow and extend some of my thoughts from workshop, I recently had a chance to present at  the Web Expo conference in Prague this autumn.

Observer’s position is clearly changing – and we as designers should be more aware of how we structure the information and how do we transform it into a “comprehensive” form. How the viewers will perceive it and digested. Daniel also pointed out to reality where immediate integration of internet and data into a film is necessary part of today acknowledgement. He showed us on the example of movie scenes where they use GPS to mark the location where particular scene was shooted and googled biographical data of the current actor. Another interesting feature was the continuity and distribution of individual scenes where the viewer can interact with the context of the scene.

For me the most interesting part was when Daniel introduced new principles of navigation for game consoles we experienced in the last decade. See the navigation using perspective, observers not only offers the opportunity to completely focus on the appropriate part, but distribute sequentially information in individual sections was just talking from my mind. Spatial perception is particularly important for middle and older generation, which, according to tests, he acknowledges as much resemblance to reality.

(Reference:http://typolondon.com/blog/)

a single visual style of the BBC

Another lecture, no doubt worth a look (and I hope that will soon be published by the online version) is a single handed lecture on visual style of the BBC. Personally, I believe that such a demonstration is not only worth a ticket for £ 400, but also for such an extraordinary effort to make the typeface right in digital space. Many of you have probably seen seen in the Creative Review, Eye, or other information channels, the BBC brought together (back-up) its visual appearance. Neville Brody is the author, whose name itself indicates the quality of good design, but especially sophistication and precision as the code itself for all language versions.

(Reference: http://typolondon.com/blog)

It was really absorbed in sixty minutes – admiring a unique online “Brand Experience”, and especially scalability and modularity of whole ecosystem. The development of the product and language versions can be seen on bbc.co.uk/gel.

Jonathan Ellery, is one of the designer whose work I am personally admire. He proved again (as many times before) that it is possible to find a balance between design and art, and with the face where both world treat you identically. Followed by other lecturers more or less presenting how important it is to be a good designer and have a strong vision.

(Reference: http://typolondon.com/blog/)

The next day

The second day showed a number of great lectures we heard before obviously from different range of design or typography – everybody wait silently for main “design superstar” – Neville Brody. Before we start another dedicate paragraph about mr Brody let’s briefly look at at project THINK introduced by US based designer Susan Rodrigues de Tembleque.

“Dream Project”

Susan pointed out into two milestones that occurred in her professional career.
The first milestone was set when she start the practice by realization that in addition to design or presenting the solutions we as designer need to offer (the user  / observer), a different experiences, and encourages them to “think about” it. Which gave me personally small satisfaction where realising that back to 2004 I was right a make a one step more …
The one was about her last “Dream Project”, a project where she has complete freedom, sufficient funds and also unlimited possibilities in the implementation – the question was – what you could as a designer do?

Follow by her dream she encourage the audience – whatever you do small or big project, always think about who the user, and not him who pays. This “golden” rule applies to publications, presentations, video, navigation, or even an ordinary website.

(Reference: thinkexhibit)

The star

The hall faded and on the stage enter Neville Brody. From previous presentations I’ve had the chance to see, it was immediately clear that from now on everything will be only “extraordinary”. Neville shoed us a several projects where he pointed again on FUSE history and upcoming issue.

Readability

Not only for fonts on the screen, but generally for poster and ideas. Readability in the cooperation and general communication. Horizon student work, which in many ways surpasses the work of all major professional designers presented recently.

Again, he proved that his lectures are not only inspiring, but also opening new horizons by establishing thinking processes that rarely applied in the everyday world.
(Reference: http://typolondon.com/blog/)

Third day

The final day started with a wonderful lecture by Jeff Fullknera. Even I’m not a game player I enjoyed this the rain of UX features  in gaming world. The reality of the scanned area – active players involved in the process and physical sensors – well … simply amazing!

I would like to mention another interesting speakers among them were such – Morag Mzerscough, Jonathan Barnbrook, and Monotype but there is no space. Let me on the end talk a bit about  amazing work on font I personally admire  (http://font.ubuntu.com/ which you can download for free)

ubuntu

Bruno Magg and his team proved that – not only a unique project, but also team and the place play key role to bring something extraordinary.
(Reference: http://typolondon.com/blog/2011/10/bruno-maag-collaborating-types/)

The TYPO Conference ended with dignity of embossed designer Chip Kidd. One of the best speakers, classic designer and typographer, who is an inspiration to others, once again proved that the design itself is a never-ending challenge of creativity and humility that most of us have the honor to share.

“Design is a sharing”

Entering the door of ICA I realised  all the seats were taken with a great variety of people from different fields of the digital industry: marketing managers, designers, developers, UX people and even beginners. To cover everything would probably take a much longer article so I’ll only highlight parts which I personally found interesting and relevant for the audience I’m talking to.

Share different stories

The talk was designed as a one long presentation where we were allowed to stop and ask questions. This gave us an opportunity to share different stories from different fields but it also brought more to the presentation itself. Steve is a great speaker, which makes a big difference when you’re learning about the process of others.

Bright Idea

Here Steve talked about how you must start by presenting the website you want to test as soon as you have something to show (this actually refers TDT – test driven development). The main focus was on execution, which is really important for the observer to grasp the granularity of the task and level of the engagement.
Also communication is one of the key elements where the leader should always facilitate an open conversation on the topic -to make the user focus on the required task.

An interesting note was the idea that developers like to complicate things – and it’s very true. They like all these buttons and menus and cross-linking. The entire complexity of the solution represents they skill-set to which they are truly proud of. The best developers come up with the solution where the user doesn’t have to think about and application, the developer just makes it for them (sign up with Open ID as a example) and it should simplify their life.

Equipment

Then we moved to technical equipment where Steve described what works well and doesn’t cost that much. Also he introduced a couple of Internet services which we can use on our quick projects. We covered in-house testing as well as remote testing, hiring participants and finding the right target audience for your project.
There was actually one challenge which I personally came up in my practice and it was hard to keep the participants in focus where we did the testing remotely. It was really hard to make the observer / participant focus on the task as well as manage all distraction on leader or participant side. We gathered enough practical examples of how to succeed.

One, Two and Three

The following section was about applying the user testing internally: set up the date when your company has decided on a testing date and all the projects you’re working on go through the testing sessions One, Two and Three which follows “Brief over the lunch” where you as a leader facilitate conversation about what happens in the morning. What are the problems and how do you categorize them for another iteration or sprints? What is the challenge with these tasks or bugz and how to manage them and finally which one to fix first? These are the things you need to cover.

“is not good enough to do the test”

After the questionnaire we talked about when to start and why. The biggest challenge for any team I see from my perspective is timing – “is not good enough to do the test” we hear all the time. You can test when ever what ever you have a more you test more you get, and even more you might find that some part of your solution don’t work properly and you can fix it before it’s late.

Test what ever is available to you. Test old versions of the website and you’ll understand what the main issue was on the website and why the client wanted to fix them. Test competitors website – to understand what they do wrong and what you should avoid in your version / build.

Test with a two groups – we discussed that always new participants are better because they don’t have a background understanding of the application. On the other hand you have someone who works in the company and can see the benefits straightway.

After each session with these three participants, I mentioned at the beginning of the article, write down the 3 keys things you can fix. You’ll end up with nine key issues of your build / apps and what you need to fix. The problem we all deal with is money or will the client to do these amendments before launch.

Least you can do

Tweaks – don’t forget if there is time and anticipate the client agreeing or disagreeing with the tweaks, which can be part of your service / delivery. In that case you have a room to go and test / change / tweak parts you were aware of.

Practical example testing

And finally we get the real testing. We crate a test groups where each of us has a site we would like to test. I chose my personal website. Please see video below.

The task was

You are an existing customer of three.co.uk. You own blackberry almost 18 months contract and which almost finish and you decide to switch to an iPhone.  As a happy customer you don’t really often go to provider website to check the services so you act almost as a new customer.

You task is a find an iPhone and compare with blackberry and make a decision to move. The video from the session is placed bellow.

Etre – Workshop with Steve Krug from givision on Vimeo

Entering the room with over 20 professionals enhanced by morning coffee is in many ways inspiring. It’s always better to start slow – after a short introduction we’ll step into the first part of our day marathon.

…becoming a UX Designer

Before we dived in to a design and designing itself we talked about UX and what the UX meant. Most of us practice UX design on a daily basis but some of us don’t really understand what counts as a UX methodology or the UX process.

Short revising of the naming convention helps us all to a unified level of understanding what is UX and how we’ll use it today. This actually helped me at many previous workshops – defining the terms at the beginning. Stabilizing the environment and same level of agreement on the discussed theme.

What / How / Why – Simon Sinek who inspired many of my previous talks gets a mention again for changing the strategy and the way of thinking from what we want it be to why we want it ,and lastly how we can present this to our clients.

Following by the basic rules: Reach / Engage / Educate / Interact – about user flow which never changes and engaging relationships between happy customers and satisfied designers.

Design

Then we move to the academic part – What is design and how is it changing in the digital environment? One of the main questions for my talk at Web Expo.
What drives us in finding new possible spaces and solutions. Obviously starting from a clean sheet of paper is the hardest challenge but it gives you more freedom to think what you want to do. It opens other spaces and it forces us to think and be original. Have a strong concept and a strong story rather than picking up something that already exists and where you rely on existing gestures and functionality and you just changing just the order. I mean to have a certain framework is FINE but don’t limit your self or experience to be driven by technology. There is a huge opportunity for all us to direct our project the way we want it. Maybe people still don’t understand that designing the space is a part of their culture. The problem I see is – that we still don’t understand the digital space as a blank sheet of paper. In this workshop I’ll try to move away from traditional principles of the build and introduce new techniques where all parties can collaborate.

What is UX Design

What is a unique word which represents User Experience.

Communicate / Diplomacy / Users… / Experience / Money / Collaboration / Time / Stereotyping / Focus  / Stakeholders / Awareness / Discovery

Ondrej on his blog presents and article “who is UX Designer” or “who is Interaction Designer” – co-je-ux-design. The article opens different perspectives on the position of the designer as well as on the environment where the designer acts. The discussion was really interesting.

Normal Day of UX Designer

Each days starts with the research and education materials relevant to the project you’re working on. For me, my day starts always with the Scrum. Whatever team you’re working on, big or small, the scrum is definitely something which helps you to fully understand the team and each member’s responsibility –  and essentially being a better designer – this way your decisions become more accurate. You’re not making assumptions in your designing.

Czech Web scene

The main difference between UK and European design is that design is more general. Look at the all the French, Italian or even Czech websites that all have same kind of manuscript – and simply the same style. Whether you’re looking at a bank or dentist’s website there are many elements that are identical – London sites don’t have that.

When design is more general, it has more freedom in the sense that there is collaboration between the client and the studio – and the idea is more open. The time for the execution is appropriate to expectation, and I think – it definitely has something to do with trust.

The people hiring you, trust you to bring the solution alive.

I was told that most of the clients come to London because they think they can get what they call “the best of design” – but if it’s true or not it’s up to them – I don’t see it this way. I’ll try to break this boundaries today and move understanding of digital space into a real practice.
With this mindset I tried to convince all teams / groups to act as a professional when delivering the solution by not convincing but educating the client in the way how the media works.

Work Flow

By doing so we changed our work flows and the way we worked before. We’re not selling now, we’re  creating the solution. The mind set is not to convince clients but educate them about possibility and to understand the implementation and real outcome.
Teams are divided into  4 small groups where each member brings their skill set to the solution from their expertise . Developers – for data structure, technology, implementation and integration with other channels, Designers – brand research and visual mutation, also competitors review, UX Designers – personas, holistic understanding and phases for the implementation and finally Storytellers – the entire position of Digital Czech TV today & tomorrow.

Mental Stagnation

I’ve tried to pursue the idea and execution. Open the mind to all participants don’t realise on conventional models of work – waterfall or agile. Changing the working model is challenging itself, but it’s worthy to try to work with new team members and rely on their opinion.
Luckily enough, teams gets their initiative and start to collaborate almost immediately. In about an hour we had a pretty solid concept which we started to execute.

Designing the Czech heritage

The choice fall to Czech TV. Let’s see how we take the lead on this on following article. You can see already there was a great vibe and brilliant atmosphere not only within the groups but in entire team.

Podcasts

• The Boagworld Show
• uie-brain-sparks
• Adaptive Path Podcast
• Typeradio Podcast

Research

• Designing the right team for ux
• Ux project documentation answering why what and how
• Lean startups and user experience design
• Winning a user experience debate

Books

• Storytelling for User Experience - Worthy of money and time you’ll spend on reading.
• Design is the Problem
• Mental Models - and the book I like the most because it helps me so many times as a reference

Participants

Denisa Lorencova, Jakub Perch, Jakub Spanihel, Jan Hromek, Jan Martinek, Jan Miklas, Jan Rezac, Jan Sotornik, Josef Nevoral, Jozef Ockay, Klara Mikulcova, Lukas Plihal, Michal Sanger, Ondra Kovac, Pavel Dohnal, Pavel Macek, Petr Hrich, Vladimir Kriska, Zdenek Zenger

flickr image reference 

HELLO

Hello!  As you can judge from my name I’m a Czech citizen currently living abroad. I originally came to the UK for 3 months and have been here for over 7 years. Recently joined R/GA and realized it was one of the best professional decisions I‘ve ever made – and shortly I’ll tell you why.

I’m sure you’re all tweeting, or mailing or basically working hard on your mobile devices. Well – if you do so, as I speak please tweet some question we can answer on the end if we have a time. And also if you want to follow the talk grab the link bellow -

bit.ly/Design_as_Storytelling_EN

bit.ly/Design_as_Storytelling_CZ

You know it …

You know how it is – your grand father is an engineer, your father is an engineer, even your brother is an engineer so everybody automatically expects you to become one of them, and they were kind of right. Before I became real engineer, I realized that my real passion was’t really to convince the user to use the design I’d designed but to find the solution the user desire and then start designing. I want some real feedback, some interaction, communicate with the people. During my studies at technical university as a Product Designer I also signed up for another college – Faculty of Fine Arts – Graphics Design and Visual Communication.

Suddenly everything made sense. Within the following two years I started researching for MA describing problematic implementations of typefaces within web browser called – digital typography and I become a

Developer, designer of sort and finally Ux Designer – where more than 60% of my time I spend on research, I studied user behaviours and I do interaction design. Balancing between these two core disciplines gave me enough confidence to make a right decision in real UX process.

I believe design is sharing

Today Talk

will be about creativity and how creativity is changing in the digital environment. Also about design as a discipline – where the industry completely changed. Digital branding challenging market place, about different environment as well as about the designers how did they change or even further how they should change to fulfill clients expectation. Finally about our process – how did we change and how do we work and why we work this way. True and false of collaborative work in international environment.

CREATIVITY

Because sharing is about the ideas lets talk about these at first.

Moleskin

“Who knows what this is” – yes this is a moleskin notebook – pretty much the most expensive sketch book on the earth. I’m sure, you carry one of these around yourself and if not I hope you’ll get one soon – because those back icons help me design the world as I knew it.

Iconic reminiscence

What do we keep in these notebooks? Iconic reminders of all your ideas – where some of them never see the “light of the day”. I’m sure we all have similar things in it, some drawings, schedules, notes. There are still some empty pages to. Those waiting to be filled up, with new ideas or just another piece of inspirations – flight ticket, bill from the coffee bar in the corner or some page from your magazine you still reading in paper form to reminding you the layout you find inspirational.

Blank sheet of paper 

What drives us in finding new possible spaces and solutions. Obviously starting from a blank sheet of paper is the hardest challenge but it gives you more freedom to think what you want to do. It opens other spaces and it forces us to think and be original. Have a strong concept and a strong story rather than picking up something that already exists. Where you need to rely on existing gestures and functionality, where we just changing the order of the elements.
I mean to have a certain framework is FINE but don’t limit your self or experience to be driven mainly by the technology. There is a huge opportunity for all us to direct our projects the way we want it. Maybe people still don’t understand that designing the space is a part of their culture.

Challenge

The problem I see is - that we don’t understand the digital space as a blank sheet of paper. Be capable to design without limitation – respect the environment and expected behaviour. Build our solution not only for use but for education and engagement of human kind.

It’s always finding right solution ..

Finding right Solution.

Looking for the right solution I realised that designers and especially digital designers needs to go beyond the traditional model of research and methodology. As most of you even I have been in the situation where I have been asked to fix something on existing project. So what would you do is quick wireframe and probably some mind map or user journey to ensure you are on the right direction. But the problem is in the integration and understanding where this functionality can be reuse and why.

Never settle for the first solution

Believe me or don’t – I don’t like to complicate things, but to understand the problem you design for – you need to fully analyse the market place, client position and also understand the target audience. Then the complexity of your problem becomes simpler – because you don’t make assumptions in your thinking process anymore but you rely on the facts.

Workshop

One of the most expressive methods I is when starting a project. And I mean any project – first we call in developers, Ix Designers, Visual Designers and Copywriters for a workshop. Within a day or two (depending on the project) we gather enough material to understand the robustness of the project, effort, problematic places and technical challenges we need to deal with, as well as the possibility to grow and even more gaps in the market.

Those aspect guide us to re-brief and come with unique solution.

The team is your solution

if you are in the right team the solution is right in from to you. All of your colleagues, challenging each other and opening the rooms for new possibilities. Especially copywriters – in all our projects the copywriter play a major role from the beginning.

The reason for that is simple: brands nowadays are not longer about polished design and smooth interaction – it’s about the story. Overall story is tied with the expression of the brand making it more reachable, more engaging, more interactive, more accessible.

Scale it down

Even when you gather all the data and you get to the end, you need to be prepared to scale down – and this is the hard part especially for designers and their pride. Developers and their standard and mainly client and their own investment – scale it down.

Do you remember the workshop I mentioned recently. This give us enough understanding what we can scale down and why. It also give us confidence to make these decision on the go, because entire team already agreed on the structure and possible scalability.

We also know what is crucial for the launch and what can be done afterwards. All parts of the team are already comfortable if some part of the experience will suddenly drop off – because we all know whole picture.

Digital Designer

As a digital designer are we really prepared to take this place?

Translating brands

into digital form is not about relying on the same principles as print. In 2003 Filip Blazek published an interview with Martin Frederikson in TYPO magazine. The article was about designing bitmap typefaces – more importantly the interview was about “respecting the environment which we design for” it’s all coming back to me again. Respect the digital environment – and gesture for each different solution.

Nowadays designers don’t rely on traditional measurement when they designing the brand. They design transition, animation, and stories about how the brand will not just look but how it feels.

It’s not final stage

We need to understand that designing is not final stage. I don’t mean just flexible layout now, I’m talking about minimum size of the button for the touch, scroll bar (if need it) with appropriate size to hold it with the finger, but even more.

• Where and how the design / brand will be / could be receive.
• How many possible form of transition it can be to create from brand experience solid brand memory.
• How to transform temporary movements to a successful behaviours.

Design techniques change ..

The power of successful solutions is in the flexibility of decision making, but it’s also about the respect of the knowledge of other colleagues based on the ownership. All members of the team are part of decision making – we all participating.

Structure

Structure is slowly changing – in the beginning of the 20th century we decided to use folder structure to understand where data was saved. Nowadays you can see many digital repositories without this level of structure – using key-words or even – trigger words to find what we looking for.

Navigation

And finally navigation is changing – the methodology behind how we search or how we build websites is changing. In the 90’s it was all about navigation and content, 2000 was pretty much about sense of content and then menus (do you remember the blog) and now it’s all based on relevance – how you design something which doesn’t have navigation.

Lauren Cramer in April 2010 talked about designing without the navigation. And I thought it’s quite interesting idea – let’s try some time. One our latest project allow me to test this proposed idea a surprisingly this works and not just on small scale of the project but even on bigger one – and if I mean bigger we talk about 1500 unique pages

So we talk about the creativity in general how this affects us as designers and developers we also touch on a little design education and look at the freedom of designing.

Design as Discipline

and how the traditional design changed?

Center of Design Community

London is definitely a unique place. The creative spirit of London is not in the National Portrait Gallery or V&A but in the many different styles and variety of opportunities. Coming to London you realize it kind of makes sense because it’s a place where the center of design community is. Good quality of creative spirit especially in design.

General Design

Look at the all the French, Italian or even Czech websites that all have same kind of manuscript – and simply the same style. Whether you’re looking at a banks or dentist website there are many elements identical – London doesn’t have that. Design is more general, has more freedom in sense of collaboration between the client and the studio – and the idea is more open. The time for the execution is appropriate to expectation, and I think – it definitely has something to do with trust.

The people hiring you, trust you to bring the solution live.

I was told that most of the clients come to London because they think they can get what they call “the best of design” – but if it’s true or not it’s up to them – I don’t see it this way.

Research

Research plays a key role – I have never seen spent that much time on research in general. I mean development and design research are standard in our field UX / IxD research. Copy & planning are involved in the early stages what’s really makes a difference.

Design Events

And also you have all these events where the curatives share their inputs – Design, Typography, Interaction Design, Agile Development process, etc. Events and lectures are all around you. In a months time you can find yourself pretty busy if you really want to reach all of them. You suddenly realize that you’re meeting up with almost the same people as yourself.

Opportunities

This provides opportunities for conversation and collaboration. I’m not sure you have the same things here in Prague. Every week we have someone who talk about new practices in Agile Dev and another week we have UPA – who share their methodology and strategy with their peers Design talks mostly about typography and design industry eye magazine or St Bride foundation.

The Collaboration

and sharing the ideas or even link over a beer or to has more impact that posting the links on the twitter. People know each other and ask you for the recommendations about touch screens because they know you worked on touch screens the entire last year. To be part of it has some benefits – Not only from the membership or entrance fee you need to pay when you arrive, but from the reference you are part of the group passionate, educated, lecturing about a specific topic.

For example UPA repository helped me many times especially with the research for kiosk touch screens and their positioning. What I’m actually trying to say is that the sharing is not only suck someone blogs but become part of something more bigger more important, more personal.

Think-Digital

I’ve been living in London long enough to tell that London “thinks digitally” and I hope other cities can experience this as well and I dont meen just public transportation now London’s tube or projects like chromaroma which most of you probably know, but it’s in the way how the design in general is executed and spared.

The British way of designing is more general in the way they think about the concept. The clients don’t worry about particular typefaces upfront but about the idea and long term solution. Another difference I see in styling, and in many cases European design is made up of the British way of designing, we see the design at the end not as a first things and this I see as a main difference.

Defining the Brand

Brand is no longer defined by vector shape. Designing the brand these days affects how we receive the brand, for example how sound affects or generating the logotype, how the animation explains the story of the brand or even how it is perceived in Digital TV. It’s suddenly all pixel bases and no one know how to transfer it from the printed brand guideline. So if there is a desire from the client we make a logo which moves and sounds – but not only for their website but also for the all kind of mobile phones or even TV screens.

First Place

The first place where the user sees the brand is probably on their portable device or even in TV. This is the place you have to make it right first, no one cares about the business card anymore.

Emotional Brand

Than you begin designing the shape which affects how the brand is used. This happens rarely, but some times you can see that there are some brands who change their logotypes based on user behaviours. This is a clear indication that there are massive opportunities for all digital agencies to react and push their brands to came up with more emotion and sensible solutions for brand expression. (more at – http://emotionalbranding.com/)

User Generated Brand

You can end up with co-creation of the logotype where the user designs small elements and you animate them in the way their are shaped. Immediately you have a brand which your audience designed and participated in creating and they feel more engaged and more involved in the process. (more at – books.google.com/ - User Generated Branding: Integrating User Generated Content Into Brand … By Ulrike Arnhold)

Industry

We are living in the most revolutionary age.

The Book

Two of my colleagues wrote a book in 2009 called – OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED AND WHAT SHOULD I DO? I’m sure you’ve read it and if not please do so I’ll supply the link on the end of the presentation.

This book has 150.000 collies sell by tweet – you can tweet it and download it. (http://www.paywithatweet.com/)

Christian & Leif have done extraordinary work where they unified the digital environment and the possibilities of the change in horizont of 2-5 years. We’re currently experiencing a time of change – a change during which a whole generation is evolving; this generation is growing up with an entirely new media behavior. It can’t imagine a world without new media. Now, also, the marketing industry must adapt, since you can hardly reach this generation using means and methods from the past.

Please let me borrow only one paragraph from this book

Quotation 

So as I see it. It’s really is up to you and not up to your bosses to decide which direction you should go.

• Educate your colleagues
• Educate your bosses
• Educate your clients
• Educate clients Users

Fast

It took us 40 years to make a radio available to everyone.
It took us a decade to introduce the telephone to over 10 million people…
YouTube reached 10m accounts within 5 years and
G+ achieved this 20m in two weeks.

Brand

How about the brand? Obviously this is another question where we need to be really sensitive. Most of brands realize that their position is not only in manufacturing goods but also to take care of your audience and communicate properly to every single person.

Communication is no longer one to one but one to many.

Campaign

… and the campaign. All studios do the digital based campaigns over and over again and they could continue until the client realizes it’s not enough. We think campaign is part of something bigger that only sends the message to the audience “we have a new product”

We incorporate campaigns in to a model where we specify what is the outcome from the campaign apart from the marketing revenue. Do we educate users about the possibilities of the product, is there emotional engagement, where are we reaching the user and what type of response do we expect? All these aspects apply to our expectations about a campaign.

Creating a Memory

It’s not about a single moment of selling something, but from the single experience that creates a solid memory of a story we just took you through. Using the same techniques as we did before, now with differentiation of a story tied together with design and technology.

Beyond the Campaign / Brand

We must look beyond the campaign. User buy what we’re selling, but what is the benefit? how do we know that the user is successfully enjoying product, sharing their experience with their peers and creating awareness through word of mouth. This also brings more people to the site / campaign but no fo reason to by but for reason to compare and share their experiences.

The user becomes the advert itself.

And I think this is the way how I see the brands an their growth - let’s go to something more practical and look at the brands over a last 50 years or so.

Linear Integration

The linear integration refer to model where the company build the the brand around the product. To get more from the market the company create another product, which increase revenue. The problem of this solution is – it’s not scalable enough. Also more product on the market means more confusion for the potential buyer and more-over consumer don’t build the loyalty to the brand.

Role of Agency

the role of the agency in this model is simple to deliver campaigns to the consumers, but in many sense this in end to end solution. This doesn’t allow the agency and also even client to grow in terms of relationship. Obviously you can bring more work by bringing new product, but challenge will be grow to integrate product and convince client to believe new marketing message.

Functional

The functional integration rely on the brand experience and loyalty. The client represented by the product introducing services around the product. Campaign and local support even another product supporting main product.

Other Perspective of the Brand

Visual design becomes more than just semantics when put in the context of executing a project. When all departments falling into the trap of losing focus on the user experience as we put our heads down and grind away the story holds the ground.

Questions like “Do we really need copy here?” and “Why can’t these just be icons?” are testaments to designers falling into the trap of potentially sacrificing a strong user experience for purely aesthetic purposes. The same thing happens for developers and UX folks who take shortcuts/sacrifices to make their slice of the process a bit easier.

Ultimately, we’re all visual designers in the sense that we’re creating visual/tactile user experiences. We need to ensure that the user experience is our priority, and that our individual skills (graphic design, programming, UI design, et all) reinforce that experience.

Design Process

The Final section is Design process – are we prepared to take a lead and start the designing in a digital environment. I’m sure we are, but my question is will users be?

What is UX

Before we dive in to a design process, lets talk a bit about UX itself. It’s a fairly new discipline and everyone describes it in a different way. At one of the UPA events in London I asked my colleagues what does UX mean to them and to make it even simpler I streamed this into single words – so here they are.

All of these themes have something in common. No matter what type project you are on, no even matter what type of client you have, no matter how much research you need to do …
no money … (obviously in czech environment it can be money)
diplomacy … (certainly)
Collaboration (even closer)

Communication

I’m glad you say that because communication is a real challenge and key factor not only international teams but  but also for local one. We all need to know where and what to communicate. We always have to keep diving deeper and deeper.

Dave – (one of my colleague) uses the terminology Paddling, Swimming, Diving where Paddling – is mostly talking about the concept, “hypothetically”  Swimming – is in many respects talking about “how we can make this work” and finally Diving – where we talk about “why we are doing this, this way and not another way”.

Deliverable

We divide our deliver-ables into two main categories – Hard & Soft. Those where the project cannot live without and those which make a difference and secure the client in terms of his spending.

In to the Hard category we count:

• Sketching
• Wire frames
• User journeys
• Flows
• Site maps
• Logic diagrams
• Module specs
• Prototyping
• Dev documentation

And also the elements that provide context and insights:

• Use cases
• User stories
• User research
• Content audits
• Competitor benchmarking
• Personas
• User testing

This differentiation gives Ix Designers full understanding of deliverable but also the process we need to go through. This is closely tied up with development design and copy department.

Effective process

Three pilot disciplines where the fourth one overarching and ensuring we are heading in the right direction. Between UX and Dev. we primarily discuss functionality and dependency on data. Design and Dev. discussing mainly pixel perfect layout, data optimization and loading process etc. and finally between design and UX we discuss layout, visual hierarchy, and data flow this all together is over seem by copywriter – to understand which type of copy we need but also understand the story we’re aiming to deliver.

The Team

Teams it self plays key role to deliver the project. Each team is structured by the client needs. The core of the team is always PM – project manager who hold all the contact control the budget and keep everybody happy.

4

Around the PM is already presented 4 leader from 4 different departments. Dev, Visual, IxD/UX and Copy all on the same level. These people as a one – drive the show. What ever happened these four solve it and make a decision. Time effective and engaging collaboration where everyone has part of the ownership and responsibility to be part of any decision made on time when required.

Scrum 

No matter if you work on Agile or waterfall – scrum / stand up is our daily routine ensuring that everyone is on same page. If you have a time and would like to discuss this further stop me afterwards and we can dive in to it.

Fly

We went through Creativity and challenge of blank sheet of paper, we talked about the brand and campaigns how they are integrated in our system and how we and a designer can take a benefit of it. We also open the door of Design and industry which pretty much changing on daily bases and we need to reflect that.

We all have a possibility to be a “design heros” and deliver outstanding experiences. Only think I can wish you a fly …

Reference

1. amazon-silk / introducing-amazon-silk
2. london buses flowprint
3. movingbrands.com
4. ohmygodwhathappened.com
5. typo.cz
6. uie.com

How to become an UX Designer

In the morning I would like to focus primary on theory and get participants on same level of thinking before we really start. Introducing each other, your work so we all know what you are good at. As a following part we’ll talk about real meaning and interpretation of UX (for this part please read following article I’ll explain later why).

Day of UX is a compilation of most of my and my colleagues days combine in to pros and cons – what to do and what not to do in Research, Self Education, Management, Development. I’ll also talk about the scrum meetings and how they are efficient to us and how they might be efficient to you even you are not building under the Agile Software development.

In “Czech UX” section I’ll focus on web scene and how to profile yourself, how to build a community and get a benefit for professional life. I might browse around idea of talking about current / future education if we have a time enough. Mental stagnation in applying new principles in real education process.

2nd Part

2nd PART – is design to teach practical skills to present work in front of the stake-holders. We’ll choose one Czech based website which we analyse, and create pilot design case study.

This obviously include couple of steps such as research methodology, visual, development, client, planning, strategy, Position, Grow, Social integration, Solution which will end up in case study deck allowing you to sell the work …

Depend on time we might work on presentation skills which will be definitely differentiate from skills “talking on the public”.

Addons

If we don’t have a computers we’ll sketch, if we do well – we’ll do it properly. I’ve already prepare the templates which allow us to be more efficient in the time and space (will share shortly). Those you have a PC please make sure you have at least CS4.

Thanks

If you have any question join the conversation or shoot at @givision

Last week I lectured at PHIL MUNI where I presented design process and focus on real design interaction. Topics covered design process and the benefit in real environment.

design process …

What is Design - in last couple of years we have seen many description about design implementation in our world. The era of the real design changes begun. We have been also reading about successful and unsuccessful design – especially regarding the technology and implementation.  Many book described design process and effective way to “Make Ideas Happen”. Apart from all these general things I tried to describe how important is collecting necessary information about design before you start your process. Techniques and principles how to stay motivated and be focused to the one project on time. Where is the real benefit and “Design Value”. Is the requirements, technology or even objectives from our clients. I showed the technique which all student can use immediately and it called - Critique of Dialectical Reason as well as more closest - Search for a Method.

Real value of all design is the user and user needs.

Simple model of explaining things was presented on Iceberg you can see below. Clients knowledge about any real project is the part you can see in general observation. This knowledge is shareable and concrete.  Secound level is obviously behaviour and utilization. This level is mostly about execution. How we make the things happen.  And third was about logic and planning.

the Model

What – How – Why in one of my previous post I have pointed to TED lecture of Mr Simon Sinek who re-introduce idea from reverse circle strategy. Don’t start with What but with Why. I’m going to take a liberty of this result and introduce model for resigner. All this work even more closer when you introduce main element and it’s designer itself. Designer with full amount of information become information architect who’s control all process and guide client from the beginning to the end of the project. If the designer fully understands Why he building a web site, sketching a new car or designing new wheel s/he can be more efficient and more close to the client expectation. S/he is also more prepare to solve all how following his concept or initial idea. Have a room for exploration and experiments before s/he make final execution. Finally the designer can solve What because s/he know all necessary information they needs to know.

Generation Why

With this assumption I start introducing new model for design process in big team. How to explore and get research done, which technique to use and how to organize data before we execute right idea. Why we use wire frames and where they help us to save time. How we talk and how we manage our professional expectation and even more  how we collaborate. All these beneficial techniques make our process more legible and efficient.

.. evaluation

How and why we chose right target audience and how we set up the conversation. Now we actually starting dialogue not between us and client but between us and user. We know what they need and why they use this product. We know what type of features and benefits user gets once we implemented our solution.

It’s a simple “We make our user love just what they do”

Workshop

Workshop was real fun! Students has a one simple task “present one of their project from their portfolio”. Some of them say nothing serious, but as we find out later some of them has a real problem to articulate they own project. In extension to that – I created another task where another student has to continue to present other students design.

That present their capability and their own understanding design principles as well as how they listen and observe design ideas between the words. I wouldn’t say it was brilliant but some of them ware better defender than presenter. It was really obvious that main emphasis was focused on practical education rather than theoretical background knowledge – which help them to be better negotiator in terms of their design.

Nevertheless main purpose these exercise was to show how easy can presentation of their own design project end up with failure because they can not articulate design and design principles. As Mr Gerry Leonidas from University of Reading once said in the interview – hat  biggest problem of actual designers is the advocacy of real value of design discipline.

As far as I can see all these students has a enormous potential – they really do. Now it’s about the leaders give them right amount of the information before they leave the school and become designers for real.

References

1. Interface-Design-Evaluation-Interactive-Technologies
2. committees commit designers design
3. how to speak every internal clients language
4. www.aiga.org/
5. http://kottke.org

Additional Links

1. http://www.industrialdesignserved.com/
2. http://www.core77.com/

Books

1. ** Tak nám prý forma sleduje funkci - Jan Michl (online version) & (print version)
2. ** Design: aktualita, nebo věčnost? (Print)
3. ** Kapitoly z dějin designu - Zdeno Kolesár (Print)
4. Smysl modernosti (Print)
5. Objectified [DVD] [2009]
6. Designing Design
7. Storytelling: Branding in Practice - Klaus Fog
8. Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value

The photos from the lecture and the workshop are on flickr @vsup. Good luck with the education and design experiments.
Hopefully see you around at some design workshop.

Last week I lectured at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Zlin where I presented design process and focus on real design interaction. Topics covered design process and the benefit in real environment.

design process …

What is Design - in last couple of years we have seen many description about design implementation in our world. The era of the real design changes begun. We have been also reading about successful and unsuccessful design – especially regarding the technology and implementation.  Many book described design process and effective way to “Make Ideas Happen”. Apart from all these general things I tried to describe how important is collecting necessary information about design before you start your process. Techniques and principles how to stay motivated and be focused to the one project on time. Where is the real benefit and “Design Value”. Is the requirements, technology or even objectives from our clients. I showed the technique which all student can use immediately and it called - Critique of Dialectical Reason as well as more closest - Search for a Method.

Real value of all design is the user and user needs.

Simple model of explaining things was presented on Iceberg you can see below. Clients knowledge about any real project is the part you can see in general observation. This knowledge is shareable and concrete.  Secound level is obviously behaviour and utilization. This level is mostly about execution. How we make the things happen.  And third was about logic and planning.

the Model

What – How – Why in one of my previous post I have pointed to TED lecture of Mr Simon Sinek who re-introduce idea from reverse circle strategy. Don’t start with What but with Why. I’m going to take a liberty of this result and introduce model for resigner. All this work even more closer when you introduce main element and it’s designer itself. Designer with full amount of information become information architect who’s control all process and guide client from the beginning to the end of the project. If the designer fully understands Why he building a web site, sketching a new car or designing new wheel s/he can be more efficient and more close to the client expectation. S/he is also more prepare to solve all how following his concept or initial idea. Have a room for exploration and experiments before s/he make final execution. Finally the designer can solve What because s/he know all necessary information they needs to know.

Generation Why

With this assumption I start introducing new model for design process in big team. How to explore and get research done, which technique to use and how to organize data before we execute right idea. Why we use wire frames and where they help us to save time. How we talk and how we manage our professional expectation and even more  how we collaborate. All these beneficial techniques make our process more legible and efficient.

.. evaluation

How and why we chose right target audience and how we set up the conversation. Now we actually starting dialogue not between us and client but between us and user. We know what they need and why they use this product. We know what type of features and benefits user gets once we implemented our solution.

It’s a simple “We make our user love just what they do”

Workshop

Workshop was real fun! Students has a one simple task “present one of their project from their portfolio”. Some of them say nothing serious, but as we find out later some of them has a real problem to articulate they own project. In extension to that – I created another task where another student has to continue to present other students design.

That present their capability and their own understanding design principles as well as how they listen and observe design ideas between the words. I wouldn’t say it was brilliant but some of them ware better defender than presenter. It was really obvious that main emphasis was focused on practical education rather than theoretical background knowledge – which help them to be better negotiator in terms of their design.

Nevertheless main purpose these exercise was to show how easy can presentation of their own design project end up with failure because they can not articulate design and design principles. As Mr Gerry Leonidas from University of Reading once said in the interview – hat  biggest problem of actual designers is the advocacy of real value of design discipline.

As far as I can see all these students has a enormous potential – they really do. Now it’s about the leaders give them right amount of the information before they leave the school and become designers for real.

References

1. Interface-Design-Evaluation-Interactive-Technologies
2. committees commit designers design
3. how to speak every internal clients language
4. www.aiga.org/
5. http://kottke.org

Additional Links

1. http://www.industrialdesignserved.com/
2. http://www.core77.com/

Books

1. ** Tak nám prý forma sleduje funkci - Jan Michl (online version) & (print version)
2. ** Design: aktualita, nebo věčnost? (Print)
3. ** Kapitoly z dějin designu - Zdeno Kolesár (Print)
4. Smysl modernosti (Print)
5. Objectified [DVD] [2009]
6. Designing Design
7. Storytelling: Branding in Practice - Klaus Fog
8. Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value

The photos from the lecture and the workshop are on flickr @vsup. Good luck with the education and design experiments.
Hopefully see you around at some design workshop.

Subscript

Creative Circumstances

Thank you having me here. As mentioned on the beginning, I’m a designer – things I do is design. I’m offering creative solution for the clients of R/GA where I’m working as a Senior Interaction & User Experience Designer. The lecture I prepared today is all about design, but not only design itself, it’s more about creativity and how is creativity perceiving and become part of our daily live.

On the beginning let me ask you a question. ”Who is designer or have a creative occupation?
…  or different, who is in the position where you’ve got the power to decide where or how certain project could go?”

習う より 慣れろ – (narauyori narero) is one of the wise Japanese quotes which we can translate “practice make perfect” or even in Czech language “Opakování matka moudrosti”. As same as you even I passed many schools and educational institution. Not only in position of student but also as an External Lecturer as well as Teacher. All these institution ware almost same. Product Design, Graphic Design or even HCI and Ix Design ware same in terms of university rules – so what was different for me? It was the approach and attitude in the process of communication with students on the projects we have.

As a one from the small group of students I had a chance to graduate within the International  inter-ship at École de Superiour de Art et de Design in France small town Ville de Reims. Internationl envirenment and absolutely different approach in theory and work disgorge my merit of the design discipline which I build so far at Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. More over I have been able to start properly my dissertation, which no one found intensive on the beginning but on the end get me National price for the Design.

Before we step ahead let me ask you another question. “What did you take away from the university”

Structure /  Rules / or Creativity?

Ken Robinson in one of his speech at TED in Oxford exactly  said “School kill creativity”. Well maybe he is right and some of these issues could be solved in the process of self development, but let me disagree here a little bit. It’s not the schools or university which kill our creativity. It’s the media itself. Our mentality and perception is violated on daily bases. This affect not only our main thinking but also our decision making process  and even more our mental habits.

How many time you find your self in the position when the creativity thinking was over and you grab the source of the huge inspiration namely “The Internet”. We forgot immediately all basic principles and guidance which lead any great  designer and project forward – from the beginning to the end.

As for example the Structure  – I don’t want persuade anyone, that design is a pure construction, but all of us should agree that design as a discipline is based on certain structure. And we don’t have to go that far to find out that this is true. Many recent designer still taking and advantage of pure essence of design structure made by Jan Tschichold – Die Neue Typografische, Ladislav Sutnar – Visual Communication or even younger generation such as Wim Crouwel and Nevile Brody.

… and it was namely Jan Tschichold who bring me in 1995 in to the design supported by rules and structure. Structure where we fairly easy find the rhythm which sometime get lost in our recent designs. … and finally Creativity - which is so vehemently promoted in the media but not very well received bu the audience for who is targeted. Creativity, which become 80% compilation of designs principles already applied.

What really moving us forward?

Flexibility / Opportunity / Courage?

The process I’m using now is different from all my colleague in Czech Republic. Generating final idea is mostly discontinuous process. Things I figured out I write down – simply as a note or even sketch, which I leave for a while. This gap gave a huge opportunity to evaluate process as well as technical understanding of how this things can happen in real world. Many times I have heard especially in Czech environment “If I have a flexible Client I can do a great design” well great design is not about the client.
Good Design - is about designer. How s/he understand basic principles of creation. Know clients needs and more over know clients environment – where the client act and how the user receive clients service. Know very well the market for who he designing.
Super design - it’s part of contribution within the team of people- professionals, who prove, share and extend primary idea. They are not afraid to experiment at the expense of their profession and all of them are able to deliver unique solution independent to modern trends.

This and many other factors brings an opportunity for open conversation between client and designer but moreover between designer and end user. This type of implementation is one of the most exiting occurrences in designer lives. This by itself gives opportunity not only for designer but for whole team working on more sophisticated and complex projects / solutions.

How does it works?

Concept / Consultation / Communication

To have an Idea its easy – to advocate that’s right Idea it’s even harder. Long since France I have been promoted consultation of primary idea case study and research with the clients. Unfortunately some of them took that as a surfing on the net for their money. The term like Site Audit or Site Case Study was early birth so it’s no wonder, that this effective methodology of managing process for web creation – was never really implemented in Czech web design field (in my practice 2000 – 2004). Same as many of you I have to develop 2-3 version of the website which going to be build – because client wasn’t really sure.

You have to establish regular intervals for projecting and consultation in the project. This will stabilize the work flow and open more room for experiments and communication. All collaborators get deep understanding whole realization. You also get more time for Case Study, UI Study, Brand Direction and over all more time for Development a Analytic. With this you creating  never ending dialogue of professionals where the client is one part of the team, who only reviewed the process this type of collaboration.

Now arising the question if there is somewhere this type of the client?
I believe so, ad if not I’m sure that we can guide any client to understand the live circle and get the benefit of it. I personally have a opportunity implement part of my project circle in real practice in Czech. Especially subdivision Silicon Graphics and some small architectural studios like  – these actually listen …

80% of deign is design advocating and articulating right idea - We communicate main idea, we communicate inspiration and execution of our solution. To find the right solution is not copy semantic of Amazon or use open source engine for your eShop. In our case it’s more about find the right way of communication. Interlayer which exist between designer and client moreover between designer and user. Once you start this dialogue right, it become continuing experience …

Waht do you really need for this?

You have to create your own rules

Rules - which help you to start this kind of conversation and help you out to keep this conversation active enough to see everyone we engaged. This type of focus give you enough room for your creative part.

Creativity without the media - After my France international inter ship i take an advantage with my sketch book a tried to develop my own methodology based on actual knowledge. I tried different technique and principle in different types of media but always I end up with – moeskin.  In last 5 years I have build my own system where I’m working without the media. I design things from my mind – what was staid there have a reason to be rise again. This approach give me more flexibility and chance to evaluate my process. Paper however it sound orthodox is more efficient in terms of generating idea and keep me updated during the active projects.

Don’t forget to Evaluate - every single project has some start and end. It’s really important to find the time to talk about the project on the end. Find what you have done and what can be done better way. Some of your colleagues might have an idea which they didn’t share because they didn’t have an opportunity – or simply you have been so busy to listen properly. This evaluation process give you better understanding of all our work you produce, open room for your colleagues be part of the project circle and make a decision which affect their live. All these information will lead you in time when you’ll force to make quick a precise decision – which obviously make you a better designer.

So what do you need exactly?

Listen and observe

In the time of digital age is really simple to follow someone – do you agree! We have co many opportunities Information gates, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Flicker or even Poscast and mainly Video channels like YouTube and Vimeo. In last  couple of years peoples stories and experiences ware shrink from days and hours work in to a few minutes of podcast or video and even further from these few minutes in to a few secound which we call twittering.

designboom: rupprecht geiger at gwangju art biennale 2010 http://bit.ly/c4dFh5

We stop listening. Time of our interaction from 2000 was decrease almost 7 time. We are actually able to receive more information in shortest time. Opposite side of this is we start to loosing power of long memory.

Sketch

Do you remember the sign I show on the beginning?

Listen, listen intently and choose carefully who you listen. We have to become as a never-ending photographer of peoples moments, which tell us stories about people behaviour and even more about our habits which guide us across all disciplines peoples live. Attentive observe how fast we changing our habits depend on the technology – all this moments of observing make us better designers for the future.

Sketch - and if it’s possible save it – create your own sketch book full of the moments and memories which inspire you. Soon or later all this memories will change to the experience which you can use for any possible design project. Sketsch not because is faster or easier, sketch for opportunity to compare, for chance to see things from the births perspective. Sketch for ability to see how your solution can be flexible and how this can grow in the future.

If you are designer sketch – because this will take you to the top of what you do …

What / How / Why?

… well O.K. sketch but what? how and why? Simon Sinek in one of his lecture at TED presents model What / How / Why. Let me use these words as a base idea focused to design process

1 / What

Well we usually know what we doing right. Logo, banner or even  web site.

2 / How

Obviously we also know how the what make it happen.

3 / Why

But why we do it it’s not so obvious isn’t it?

If the designer has enough material to articulate his design proposal s/he is getting in to a position where s/he become Information  Architect, who create and control whole process. … but even now we still missing something right?

You

You are the missing element. You own all necessary information that are necessary for making ideas happen – including your creative potential  you collect across several years of experience and this is right balance to delivery any possible design. Most of us read article before the millennium how the year 10 will look like – we are here and my advice is “future is not behind the door – future start tomorrow”.

Please use all these knowledge, no for your profit but for better future for all of us.

Thank you

twitter: @givision

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