Main contents
Archive for the 'Architecture' Category
October 6th, 2008
It is all starting to get a bit trippy. Delving into the world of experiential and sensory design at its most experimental is, frankly, a bit like taking drugs. In a range of projects that slip elusively through the spheres of art, design and education, we have such things as ‘distorted lamp posts’ writhing around and illuminating trees when people pass by, an ‘orchestra’ modelled on the human brain, aromas scientifically composed for a museum exhibition and a game of armflapping with chickens.
What links these projects with arguably more ‘corporate’ experiential design work – such as Imagination’s exhibition stand for Ford Europe which allows users to generate content via a ‘visual jockey’ system and project it on to a huge LED screen – is a desire to draw in the audience, often making people participants in their environment. Not surprisingly, technology frequently has a big role to play, but, thanks to an array of available sensors and wireless communications systems, it can often be rendered largely invisible, rather than intrusive.
Across museums, retail, public buildings and art installations, experience, feedback and interaction have become watchwords. ‘It’s getting easier to sell these kinds of ideas, as there’s a greater understanding of this mixed discipline,’ says Jason Bruges, founder of interactive environments and installations consultancy Jason Bruges Studio. The group is behind the tree installations at Normand Park in Fulham, London, which use light columns each bespoke-designed for its host tree. As people move past the trees, LEDs are triggered causing light to ‘grow’ up the trunk and into the canopy. Because the colour and speed of this ‘growth’ are dependent on the location and proximity of the movement, the person becomes an interactive element in the display.
Even more intriguing is a forthcoming sonic/musical work from sound designer and composer Nick Ryan, visual artist Jane Grant and composer and physicist John Matthias. The Fragmented Orchestra is modelled on the firing of the brain’s neurons and will connect 24 public sites across the UK – including a football stadium, cathedral, dairy farm, school playground, motorway crash barrier and a field – to form a ‘tiny networked cortex’. Human and environmental sounds gathered from the sites will be relayed to 24 speakers at a primary installation at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool from December. The designers say the Fragmented Orchestra will adapt, evolve and trigger site-specific sounds at Fact whenever a ‘neuron’ fires.
The combined sound of the installation is in turn fed back to the individual sites and the project’s website. The results are hard to anticipate but, once again, the installation, people and environments become interactive, all feeding back to one another.
Experiential design is clearly important to museums keen to get the highest levels of engagement from audiences, and exhibition designers can provide immersive, sensory environments to achieve this. But there’s one sense that is seldom on the design brief, and that’s the sense of smell. Not so for Berlin-based smell artist/scientist Sissel Tolaas, who has spent almost 20 years investigating the properties of smell as language and communication.
For the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Fashion V Sport exhibition, which opened in August, Tolaas’ IFF research lab in Berlin has sampled and recreated the smells of human bodies undergoing sports activity, using different aromas to connect the different sections of the show. Triggering these smells, visitors will have a sensory experience which tells them that the human body is in the exhibition space.
Other museum installations are experiential without necessarily being sensory. Berlin-based Art&Com’s recent designs for the BMW Museum in Munich include the mesmerising Kinetic Sculpture, in which 714 digitally controlled metal spheres configure to form shapes, patterns and three-dimensional car outlines, seemingly floating in the air and synchronised with text and audio quotes from BMW senior staff. According to consultancy creative director Joachim Sauter, the installation illustrates, ‘the waves of thought and disorganisation’ of the design process.
Less cerebral, but equally involving, is Ico Design Consultancy’s Chicken Run game, designed for the V&A’s Village Fete, which took place in July. Players have to flap their arms to make their chickens ‘flap to freedom’. Video camera motion tracking, modified motorised chickens and radio control circuits were invisibly built into the game stall. When the amount of movement hits a predetermined threshold a radio signal instructs the chicken’s motor to start: more flapping equals more motoring.
‘The V&A wanted something with physical interaction and a lot of people thought this was quite magical, because you can’t see how it works; it’s all wireless and concealed,’ explains Ico creative director Benjamin Tomlinson.
In many ways, here lies the key to effective experiential and interactive design: the technology must not get in the way. Much of the delight and success of Nintendo’s Wii game controller – and its myriad modified uses – is that it is free and physical, not wired and restrictive. As wireless communications become omnipresent and hardware continues to shrink, we can expect more and more environments to come alive around us, seamlessly responding and reacting to input from their users.
This article was written for Design Week, 18 September 2008.
Posted in Architecture, Branding, Design, Exhibition, Interaction, Sonic | No Comments »
October 6th, 2008
Let’s face it, you don’t go into the arts to make money. Hanging around with musicians and artists – even supposedly ‘successful’ ones – can tell you that pretty quickly. Yet cultural activity is seen as necessary to society’s wellbeing, creativity a lifeblood of pride and human spirit. And it’s often public places of art and education – galleries and museums – that provide outlet for and access to this activity, even if there’s no big bucks in it.
One method of delivering these amenities in a fairly high-impact manner – maximising space, facilities and branding – has been the mixed-use development. Across the country, a range of mixed-use sites combine different aspects of cultural activity, often (but not always) as a component of commercial and residential complexes, or as part of a larger urban redevelopment. There is the Barbican and the South Bank Centre in London, for example, or the Lowry in Salford Quays and the Bluecoat in Liverpool. But how do these venues work and what is the rationale for developers in placing cultural amenities in their schemes?
One of the latest mixed-use developments is Kings Place, an arts, leisure, office and events space located in the heart of London’s King’s Cross, an area undergoing one of the highest-profile urban redevelopment schemes in Europe. Opening this month, the purpose-built Dixon Jones-designed building is already headquarters to two orchestras – the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the London Sinfonietta. It boasts a 420-seat main recital space and a second space for smaller performances, rehearsals and education. There are two main galleries – Pangolin London, the first London base for Gloucestershire sculpture foundry Pangolin Editions, and Kings Place Gallery. Both will run a programme of temporary art shows, changing every two to three months, while the building’s main public spaces will also be used to showcase visual arts work.
Pangolin is a commercial tenant of developers Parabola Land, as are Guardian News & Media, Network Rail and footwear company Wolverine, which between them lease all but one of the seven storeys of office space. The final floor looks set to be snapped up by a computer company and all food and drink is run under commercial contract by Green & Fortune.
So far, so commercial. But arguably the most interesting aspect of Kings Place is its musical ambitions. Both orchestras have been given tenancy for a ‘peppercorn rent’, effectively for free. As Parabola director and mastermind behind the venue Peter Millican says, ‘you don’t make any money out of doing music’. Sadly, the same could be said of most theatre and exhibitions. So why, then, do commercial developers bother building in performance spaces, studios and galleries at all?
Partly, the answer is that local councils can use commercial developments as a vehicle for improving cultural amenities in an area. Without commercial money, large-scale development is unlikely to happen, explains Gail Lord, president of destination consultancy Lord Cultural Resources (LCR). ‘Councils generally want to improve humanities services because they can improve the quality of life. They’re a form of tourism, they benefit local merchants and residents and provide education and general wellbeing. But councils lack the money and resources to do this on their own.’
Councils do have at least one resource to hand and that is their control over land and what is built on it. And developers desperately need land. In cities especially, space is at a premium, so securing planning permission on a key site is crucial; adding a few cultural jewels to a commercial or residential proposition can ease the process. ‘Developers usually use cultural elements to get planning gains – quicker planning permission, higher densities and so on. For councils, planning permission is one of the most important tools at their disposal,’ adds Lord.
Mark Sullivan, director of destination planning group Locum Consulting says sometimes developers are simply looking for a more ‘unique and differentiated’ design. ‘Cultural amenities can be more effective in generating a sense of place, helping to get people and tenants in,’ he explains.
But that’s not the whole story. Councils, developers and investors alike, may all have an interest in the long-term regeneration of urban districts, many of which are now located in brownfield sites, ‘contaminated’ with the remnants of industrial activity and not immediately appealing to residents and businesses. Cultural venues can act as a catalyst in regenerating these areas, drawing in people and investment and allowing other developments to grow around them. The Barbican, the Lowry, West Bromwich’s Public Gallery, to name just a few, were all developed as part of urban regeneration programmes. The Barbican Estate, although contentious at the time, was planned in the 1950s to provide housing and a world-class arts centre in an attempt to rebuild the East End of London following heavy bombing in the Second World War.
Another example is Salford Quays, previously a desperately run-down dockland area of Greater Manchester that has been developed using private money into a zone of waterside housing and cultural activity, home to the Lowry arts centre and Imperial War Museum North. LCR advised on the development of the mixed-use Lowry centre, but Gail Lord says that it wasn’t until the other elements of the district were developed that the whole thing came together. ‘The plan was to put the culture in first, then you get the BBC in the north and the condominiums and so on. With nothing there, it’s risky for developers to raise capital. It was the foresight of Salford Council to do this and to see that it could happen. The council, not a property developer, directed this,’ she says.
In the case of Kings Place, it was Millican’s desire to provide a non-publicly funded arts venue as part of a mixed-use space that led to arts facilities that ‘go way beyond’ what Islington council would have stipulated for cultural elements. And Parabola’s formation of the Kings Place Music Foundation to manage the music space and run a community outreach programme also go beyond what you might expect from a property developer.
According to Lord, cultural organisations are a valuable component in this type of mixed-use building. ‘Museums and galleries should recognise the great value they bring to these developments and show more leadership,’ says Lord. ‘They’re stable; they don’t come and go like retailers and they bring a lot of economic benefits, as well as the cultural ones. The cultural partner should be a lead partner, not just an element that gets moved around.’
Millican acknowledges that the council would always require something that benefits the community, if not necessarily on the scale of the music foundation. ‘If we’d only proposed offices, the council would have asked for something else, like social housing perhaps. They wanted to bring something to the community, which I want too. Buildings should be made to work for society, but it wouldn’t be possible to do the arts stuff without the commercial tenants,’ he says.
Thinking along similar lines, The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea was proposed in 1935 by the socialist ninth Earl De La Warr to be ‘a building of world renown that will [create] a new model of cultural provision which is going to lead to the growth, prosperity and the greater culture of our town’. Its current deputy director, Emma Morris, confirms that the commercial elements which are owned and run by the venue – the shop and café/bar – are a critical part the business plan if they are to earn enough revenue to fund the music, exhibition and performance programme. Unlike Kings Place, where much of the building is purely commercial, the pavillion is entirely self-sufficient.
This is one of the reasons behind the rationale for mixed-use developments: commercial revenues are maximised (one café serves gallery, exhibition and auditorium visitors alike) and can subsidise arts programmes, while cultural events can attract people and further investment to the area, in turn increasing visitors. There are programming benefits too, especially if different programming heads work together as part of a venue-wide team. ‘Although we have individual directors, we try to present an integrated programme where there is a connection between different areas, but if there’s not an obvious link we don’t push it,’ explains Morris.
The De La Warr Pavilion’s forthcoming Michael Nyman exhibition illustrates how you can leverage a multi-space venue. Nyman’s audio-visual work will be shown in the gallery spaces and a related piano season in the auditorium will feature some acts suggested by Nyman, including live performances by the composer himself.
At Liverpool’s Bluecoat contemporary arts centre the focus is on artist development rather audience development, says chief executive Alastair Upton. All of the Bluecoat’s facilities – studios, artists’ shops, offices and exhibition spaces – are given over to various stages of artistic output. ‘It’s the creative process from one end to the other, including retail. We take an economic position and so can see very clearly the connections between the creative process and the economic results. I don’t know of anywhere else that does it from top to bottom like this. Here, the whole thing is integral,’ he says.
A seemingly clear benefit of housing different cultural organisations under one roof – and perhaps one brand – is that visitors will ‘cross-pollinate’ between the different areas. But in reality this is hard to achieve. Upton says that cross-promoting the Bluecoat’s different activities – dance, music, painting, or whatever – remains difficult, even though they present interconnected programmes where possible, such as this summer’s Arabic Arts Festival. ‘The contemporary arts audience tends to have minority interests and it’s very hard to move them into other areas,’ he explains.
According to Lord, this is a near-universal difficulty, but it’s also one of the key objectives of a multifarious arts centre. ‘There is cross-pollination, but there are very few examples of it working really well because it’s really complex and hard to get right,’ she says. ‘But that certainly doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.’
This article was written for Museums Journal, October 2008.
Posted in Architecture, Branding, Design, Exhibition, Museums | No Comments »
August 18th, 2008
The phrase ‘to have lost one’s way’ is often applied to people who have become anxious, confused and vulnerable. Although meant metaphorically, it’s no coincidence that to literally lose one’s way – to become disoriented – also causes tension to rise very quickly. In public spaces, such as hospitals, car parks and stations, this is the last thing users want, yet poorly designed wayfinding systems often compromise safety and may even increase the risks of criminal behaviour.
Blind alleys, dead ends, poor sight lines and disappearing trails all leave people floundering. As the Home Office’s guide to designing out crime says, good street lighting and wayfinding measures, clear sight lines and a minimum of secluded or isolated areas go a long way towards making people and places less vulnerable.
‘In designing spaces we want people to feel safer and be safer, and wayfinding is important in this,’ says Jake Desyllas, director of wayfinding and pedestrian movement specialist Intelligent Space. ‘By moving people around in a certain way, you can increase the number of people who are viewing a space, as well as the potential for people to enter it at any given moment. Even if no one is actually coming in through a doorway, the fact that they might makes a space feel safer than, say, an alleyway which nobody can suddenly enter.’
The need for a calm, safe flow of people is especially important in environments where tension may already be high, such as hospitals. At Birmingham Heartlands Hospital, for example, the Accident & Emergency department suffered a rise in crime five years ago, especially in violence towards staff. An analysis by Intelligent Space found that incidents were talking place in the treatment rooms – the worst possible place – largely because people entered through the wrong entrance and were then drawn by natural light and activity into a medical-looking area. Poor wayfinding and signage also led to rising stress levels, increasing the likelihood of aggression. Intelligent Space created a new wayfinding system and resited the reception area so that it provides greater ‘natural surveillance’ by staff; the number of incidents subsequently fell by around 80 per cent.
Car parks are another trouble spot, with poor sight lines and lack of natural surveillance ratcheting up the risks of crime, according to design management consultant Raymond Turner. ‘They bend back on themselves and you end up in a space where nobody can see you and then a crime can happen,’ he says. ‘People need to be able to orient themselves where they feel others can see them. Ideally, you can always see a point of entry and a point of exit. Women report that they don’t want to be in a place that’s poorly lit, with poor signage.’
People with impaired memory are also vulnerable to losing their track, even on home ground. For the Design Business Association’s Inclusive Design Awards, wayfinding consultancy FW Design researched the needs of dementia sufferers and found that colour, iconic landmarks and repetition were all tools used to help this group of people navigate and orientate. The consultancy shows how its wayfinding and signage system for Romford town centre – which already uses a linear map to pictorially describe routes at regular intervals – could be extended for dementia sufferers to include a portable, task-focused navigational tool that works alongside the permanent wayfinding structures. These landmark cards work like stepping stones that can be compiled for any number of common journeys, by assembling specific cards in the right order.
Designing a space – or a wayfinding and signage system – that regulates the flow of people and minimises the risks of them becoming lost and confused can improve perceived safety, as well as reduce susceptibility to actual crime. Much of this is about creating spaces with natural wayfinding, rather than planting heaps of sign-based information everywhere. Desyllas describes effective spaces as having ‘casual surveillance’ and a ‘permeability’ of routes. Turner concurs, saying ‘Every sign you hang up condemns the building – it’s a crutch for a sick building that isn’t speaking clearly enough.’ He believes that architects need to work closely with wayfinding specialists to anticipate how people will use a space, if they are to reduce the likelihood of confusion and the number of trouble-spot locations. ‘Despite what they might say, architects are often not aware of how people actually use a space, and a failure of designers to put themselves in the shoes of inexperienced users can lead to lots of problems,’ he says.
Perhaps the key challenge lies in striking a balance between controlling people flow through layout, wayfinding and signage, giving them the freedom to move naturally in a pleasing environment and discouraging antisocial behaviour at the same time. Good examples of this are few and far between, says Marcus Wilcocks, a research fellow at the Design Against Crime Research Centre at Central St Martins College of Art and Design. ‘Concrete barriers or endless fencing may offer move-along-please aesthetics but rarely instil a greater sense of on-street security. I suggest we get back to designingin adjectives – not just specifications – when designing out crime from urban routes. Beauty, creativity and the resulting variation of form, material and colour are not utopian ideals, but necessities for human well-being, which can help us understand and move through city streets safely.’
This article was written for Design Week, 6 August 2008.
Posted in Architecture, Design | No Comments »
May 15th, 2008
Public signs which react to their users – providing just the information they need, exactly when they need it – are an appealing idea, especially to interaction designers. And with embedded communication technologies such as radio frequency tagging and wireless, mobile internet connections, the emergence of fully interactive signage becomes eminently possible.
At least, it does in theory. In reality, the cost of building interaction into signs is often thought to outweigh the benefits for organisations or their users. ‘Interactive signage can be very expensive,’ says Ico Design Consultancy creative director Benjamin Tomlinson. ‘The technology is there to create them, but the cost and complexity of rollout quite often directs [a project]. It’s not a case of what’s possible, but a question of initial investment. Will the extra interaction be worth the investment?’
In many commercial situations the answer would be no. But experimental research underway at the Design Museum in London aims to put interactivity and dynamic content into what the museum’s strategic consultant Daniel Charny is calling ‘explorative signage’ – part sign, part interactive wall. ‘It’s part of a process of making the museum’s collections more accessible through signage. Although it works like an interactive kiosk, it will be in the foyer so people will see it as they come in or sit in the café, so it’s signage,’ says Charny.
This explorative signage is pioneering something of a technical first too, marrying traditional screen-printed graphics with special conductive ink technology to create active ‘buttons’ on the surface of the foyer wall. Graphic designer Lea Jagendorf’s visual scheme will be brought to electrical, interactive life under a system designed by interaction consultancy Osmotronic. When users touch the buttons they will trigger media content that will be projected onto the wall.
‘It works on two levels: it’s passive for people looking on, but it’s being controlled by people touching the wall. And while it’s interactive, it doesn’t look digital because it’s a projection rather than screen,’ explains Charny.
The system will first be used to offer visitors access to objects from the Design Museum’s collections that aren’t currently on display in the building. These digital assets include video and photographic material, as well as detailed written information. But the system could function as an information point too.
‘As it’s in the foyer they need it to be flexible, so it can be unobtrusive if other events are taking place. So we’ve designed a minimal grid of buttons, each around 5cm across, “soft-labelled” at any given moment by the projector to show what they do,’ explains Osmotronic director Matthew Falla. ‘When you’re looking at an object, pressing a button might bring up more info about the design, its client, processes or materials and so on.’
At around 4m2, it’s perhaps the scale of the projection that allows it to be considered signage, but what’s especially valuable about this approach to wall space is that the content is dynamic, rather than static. Media can come to the fore or recede, as required by the user or the venue. Along with collections content, the Design Museum wall could also provide visitor information, introductory material for groups about to view an exhibition, or even media for private functions or events.
In a project for Manchester Art Gallery, signage design consultancy Holmes Wood also employed technology to create large-scale, dynamically changing signs suspended in the building’s main atrium. ‘They can be used for daily events and promotion and then used in the evenings for corporate events, with the addition of sound. We designed the software as a bespoke solution, with templates and grids that allow it to be updated and completely managed in-house by the gallery,’ says consultancy director Alexandra Wood.
A similar system was built for auction house Christie’s by Land Design Studio and digital consultancy Clay Interactive. Using high-quality projectors and screens, wall sections at Christie’s King Street showroom in London become embedded, ‘invisible’ media spaces, playing out content on items up for auction, or information about what’s taking place in the venue and so on. According to Land Design Studio creative director Peter Higgins, using media in this way allows it to become part of the physical space, just as static informational signage does. ‘It’s about how to nurture spaces, how it becomes media as architecture,’ he says.
Although not interactive from a user’s point of view, the Christie’s and Manchester Art Gallery projects show how, as at the Design Museum, dynamic media, architecture and signage can start to become one and the same. ‘The architecture, hardware and software development are all happening together with the client’s content. It’s incredibly important that these are in parallel,’ adds Higgins.
The Design Museum’s interactive signage will trial throughout the summer, after which it may be extended further into the museum and its interactivity thrown open to include content generated by users of the museum’s website. ‘It’s really a first experiment at this stage, but it could be used throughout the museum as a new type of signage exhibit,’ says Charny.
This article was written for Design Week, 8 May 2008.
Posted in Architecture, Design, Exhibition, Interaction, Interiors | No Comments »
February 11th, 2008
In any traditional model of working life we’re likely to spend up to a third of our waking hours in an office. Yet a British Council for Offices survey this year finds that more than 40 per cent of us are dissatisfied with our workplaces. It’s a problem that can have unwanted effects on any business, from lowered morale or creativity to higher staff turnover and absenteeism. Creating an effective and comfortable working environment is therefore an investment rather than a cost. But with mobile technologies and a shifting work-life balance breaking up the traditional working model in any case, how should we begin to conceive and design the workplace of the future?
Just before Christmas a multidisciplinary team of designers, architects, engineers and universities presented the first results from a forward-looking piece of research into how technology might begin to answer this question. The study, called Building Awareness for Enhanced Workplace Performance, or BOP, received £1m of funding from the Government’s Technology Strategy Board, a £1bn-plus fund to promote technology and innovation in business.
In an attempt to get a better understanding of the conditions of a workplace, BOP uses pervasive computing, where devices are embedded into ordinary activities without users even necessarily knowing they are there. Built into the fabric of the building, these wireless network devices monitor the state of individual rooms, gathering information on temperature, noise, air pressure, humidity, light and even human presence. According to Duncan Wilson, a futurist at engineering firm and BOP partner Arup, there are commercial benefits to be gained from applying pervasive computing technologies to the design of working environments. ‘The wireless sensor network offers the potential to understand which factors affect work performance and how people feel about and interact with the building,’ he says.
Installed at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Arup in London, the sensors provide a continuous reading of environmental conditions, which are then fed back to workers via a live ticker tape designed by interaction consultancy Artificial Tourism. This information is then connected with how people in the office are actually feeling through interactive installations designed by Maoworks. The consultancy developed a number of user feedback devices, including a simple Yes/No floor-mat onto which users step to register their response to workplace-related questions shown on an adjacent screen.
Stuart Jones, a designer and senior research fellow in Interaction Design at CSM, believes that this type of information can help to create better working environments. ‘This kind of tool would support those organisations that do want to change, because it gives you the means to understand what’s going on. Then you can start to change whatever will be beneficial,’ he claims.
Perhaps our offices need this kind of scrutiny. Unlike most other areas of business, a building’s performance is seldom monitored from the user’s point of view, says Wilson. ‘In the sector of building design there’s a huge void between feedback from the consumer and how the product [office] is performing. This is not the case in other industries such as automotive and retail.’
BOP organisers claim the research is the first of its type in the world. Its approach to understanding how spaces function and people relate to them may inform the design of more adaptable workplaces in the future, suitable for mobile workers and fluid roles. According to Frank Duffy, founder of office design consultancy DEGW, this is exactly what’s required. ‘We need buildings that can learn, with the capacity to accommodate change. It is better to do this with interior design than with architecture, which is fixed in a 50-year time scale. We need more choice, more complexity and more diversity,’ he says.
This article was written for Design Week, 3 January 2008.
Posted in Architecture, Design, Interiors | No Comments »
February 11th, 2008
‘Live and breathe the brand,’ is the familiar cry of marketing directors, design consultancies and brand custodians far and wide. Advising their clients on how to stay on-message, branding rulebooks will often cover every facet of the face that a company presents to its customers, but some businesses are also ‘branding’ the very spaces that their staff work in day in, day out.
Taking a business’ brand values into a three-dimensional environment is arguably fraught with design dangers: imagine the ad agency desperately exaggerating positive attributes, such as ‘creativity’ or ‘irreverence’, with ‘crazy’ cushions on the floor, a ten-pin bowling lane and inflatable toys in the break-out room. Hip play den and effective work space are maybe not the same thing, so should a company’s branding be brought into its office space at all?
According to Household director Michelle Du-Prât, branding the workplace is the ‘future of internal communications’, integral to the way a business communicates its values to staff.
‘Companies need to live the kind of business they want to be and [designers] can give them the tools and spaces to achieve this. It’s not just about saying here’s your new office design in corporate colours, but about considering staff behaviour in the space,’ she says.
Household has been working with Virgin Media, the entertainment and communications company formed after the acquisition of Virgin Mobile by NTL Telewest last year, on a refurbishment of around 900 buildings across the country. Starting with locations ‘crying out for a morale boost’, the Virgin Media call centre in Wythenshawe is one of the first sites to receive the facelift, says Virgin Media creative director Adrian Spooner.
‘This isn’t classic corporate branding. We could have put big logos everywhere, painted all the walls bright red and reminded everyone where they’re working around every corner,’ he says. ‘But it’s not just a veneer; there’s a reason why all the design components are there. It’s about making people feel at home and about allowing them to be themselves; each site can decide which of the different design components they want to use in the space.’
Under the scheme, Virgin’s playful attributes are becoming part of the work environment, with office design motifs such as a flock wallpaper, wall silhouettes and chalkboards sitting alongside ‘dating car park spaces’, extending what Spooner calls ‘classic Virgin humour’ into areas outside the building’s four walls.
For Virgin it makes sense to lean more overtly on a humorous and light-hearted approach to the office in order to draw out similar behaviour from staff (living and breathing the brand again). But designers all seem to agree that it’s about changing behaviour, not colour schemes. As Duncan Mackay, director of brand design at Gensler, says: ‘There’s a misconception about what’s involved. It’s not just sticking a huge logo behind the reception desk. Every successful brand understands its brand values and needs to get its customers to understand these values, which means workers should too. The workplace is an opportunity for a physical representation of this, but it’s a working environment and people still have to work there.’
Gensler’s own research finds that just 4% of managers believe that their company brand is the main reason behind the design of their office. But does this really matter? Naturally, workplace design consultancies holler a resounding ‘yes’, but even an independent report from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment recommends that workplaces have an ‘expression’ which ‘influences the way inhabitants think about the organisation’; in other words, making the most of the brand.
Environment branding needn’t be based on humour - it must match the company’s attributes. Elmwood has worked with the Met Office to show staff how the organisation’s weather forecasts and research have a chain of influence in everyday life and how the different departments are interdependent. Mini-stories showing these sequences of influence are displayed along the main ‘street’ in the Met Office’s purpose-built headquarters in Exeter.
Gensler worked with the London Stock Exchange as part of a wider rebranding exercise aiming to imbue the business with a 21st century style. ‘Their office was an opportunity to express how they’re going forward and there are more and more subtle ways of saying something about your business. So instead of printing ‘global company’ everywhere, graphic squares on the doors reference the office’s Paternoster Square location, forming a map of the world when the doors are closed. Map references then designate the room locations as a system of wayfinding,’ explains Mackay.
Similarly, BDG Workfutures’ design for Network Rail’s head office is intended to create a culture of communication, not only between internal departments, but also between Network Rail and the many external companies it works with, says BDG joint managing director Phil Hutchinson. ‘You can apply as much colour, graphics and so on as you like, but if you’re not creating the right spaces you’re not going to foster communication between staff, which was the aim,’ he says. ‘It’s not often that brand is mentioned as a major part of a brief, but it’s always relevant.’
This article was written for Design Week, 21 January 2008.
Posted in Architecture, Branding, Design, Interiors | No Comments »
July 30th, 2007
‘A salesman is somebody way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoe shine,’ delcares Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s elegy to the expiring art of the travelling peddler. Loman cuts a fairly desperate figure, clinging to the idea that he is a face-to-face businessman and, poignantly, the notion that it’s the best thing he can possibly be. Almost 60 years since Miller’s play, a career in selling is still more likely to be seen as venerable and lucrative in the States, while over here the very word is tarnished with a grubby image and its practitioners occasionally viewed as something of an underclass.
Whichever way you cut it, selling can be tough. As a design consultancy or architectural practice, how much product sales material – printed or otherwise – do you immediately dismiss and discard? Or as a product supplier, how many sales leads turn to cold trails following an unreceptive snub? It’s no surprise given the sheer volume of commercial messages we’re bombarded with every day, that most sales advances are seen as nuisance intrusions. And yet, the whole system is symbiotic and everyone’s in it. Selling a concept, a process, a scheme, a team, a product or a service; whatever stage you’re at, you are flogging something to somebody to get a project completed and a pay cheque in the bank. What, then, is the art of selling?
With the power to strike fear into the heart of even the most seasoned of hawks, cold calling is synonymous with the sales trade, but it is almost universally seen as a desperate and unproductive route to cracking a deal. ‘Cold calling is very difficult and there’s no point in us doing telesales,’ says James Mair, managing director of contract furniture and lighting company Viaduct. ‘We have to pre-promote ourselves before we call and then it’s no skin off our nose if people say we’re selling rubbish that they don’t want. That way we don’t waste anyone’s time.’ This is perhaps an unrealistically philosophical response to the old cold-shoulder, but it illustrates the need to pick your targets well and not flog the dead horse, as Mair adds: ‘Doing the hard sell won’t work. We’re trying to persuade people that what we’re offering will fit their scheme, which is one person’s opinion against another. If you try to hard sell that then the client will just dig their toes in.’
For product suppliers and manufacturers at least, it seems a degree of wastage in the sales process may be inevitable. Gianni Botsford, founder of Gianni Botsford Architects, says that around 80 per cent of the catalogues received at his practice go ‘straight in the bin’. Sales calls, meanwhile, are screened. So what does get through? ‘In the first instance I ask whether I am ever going to like [the product] and if not, it goes. Then I think you slowly get to know who you want to work with,’ says Botsford. And, as always, achieving a degree of stand-out amongst the noise is helpful. ‘There is a lighting company in the Middle East which has been sending me interesting little fliers and leaflets for a while, but no calls. Then, about a year later, they called to say they’re going to be in the country and would I like to meet, so I’ve agreed,’ adds Botsford. Building these kinds of relationships is hard, but probably essentially. ‘Sometimes we hit lucky [with a call], but mostly it involves nurturing. This is a pretty personal business,’ adds Mair.
But are there perception barriers to break down before these relationships can form? Designers are not necessarily accommodating and receptive when it comes to sales calls. ‘It’s much better with suppliers if you call them. You’re on guard the moment they cold call you, because you think they might not believe in [what they’re selling],’ says Yasser Al-Saheal, director of architectural practice SLAM. The group has recently been selling its own product concept for a £53,000 pre-fabricated house. Having done the door to door pitch routine, would Al-Saheal want prospective investors to think he didn’t believe in the future house concept? ‘I hadn’t really thought of it like that, but no, I wouldn’t want people to think I didn’t believe in it at all,’ he says. And therein lies the rub.
Preconceptions seem to suggest that as a professional salesman you’re more untrustworthy than if you’re doing a sales pitch as an add-on to a broader creative endeavour. Or, as Laurie Chetwood, director of architectural practice Chetwoods, puts it: ‘There’s an intellectual snobbery in architecture and design’. But while there are certainly differences between the two camps, are they as distinct as people may like to believe?
Gill Parker is joint managing director of workplace design consultancy BDGworkfutures and previously worked in senior management at contract furniture group Herman Miller. Parker believes that everyone is continually selling, even though the approach taken maybe depend on the form of the product or service. ‘People don’t like to think of themselves as salesmen, but we’re all doing it at different times of the day – presenting, projecting, negotiating. It’s only when you put a label on it that people get stage fright. If you mention sales in a design environment people start to recoil, but it’s inherent in every business,’ she says.
The keys to success appear to be passion and enthusiasm and, crucially, an ability to communicate them. Unlike product suppliers, designers often find themselves in the position of having to sell a rather abstract set of ideas and abilities. The belief, from some quarters, is that any verve they display in a presentation will stem from an ingenuous excitement about their creative inspiration. But, of course, they may just be good salesmen. Conversely, there are poor salesmen who may well believe wholeheartedly in what they’re doing, but can’t convey it.
‘Architects are never trained as salespeople and I’m always amazed that clients are happy that we’re at the forefront of selling what might be multimillion pound projects,’ says Chetwood. ‘People who sell Hoovers are trained, but a mistake by architects can cost hundreds of thousands. Yet often clients don’t take much notice of who they send to sell a project.’
What designers repeatedly pick up here, is that academic training almost never provides a component on how to sell design ideas. ‘In architecture academia there’s no training. No one ever asks how you might have landed the project you’re proposing or how you’re going to sell it. And when it comes to figures, costs and finances, we’re not necessarily any good at it,’ says Al-Saheal. But not everyone is so doubting of designers’ abilities. Peter Lintott, director of sales for workspace furniture group Ahrend, believes that designers make very good salespeople indeed. ‘Often specifiers and clients are relieved when they get to talk to a designer because they are one step removed [from selling] and can focus on what the clients want to talk about. I think the salesman’s role is becoming more of a facilitator, bringing things together,’ he says.
Selling design is an ongoing process of convincing clients that each change and development to their project is creatively correct, as well as worth the financial and time investment. But it’s at the early pitch stage that the difficulty of selling abstract ideas is most acute. ‘When selling a product, you can see and touch it and know exactly what you’re getting. With a creative design you’re really selling an understanding of a process, taking the client on a journey and trying to build up a level of confidence. This can be especially hard if you don’t even have a brief,’ says Parker.
Botsford concurs: ‘More and more, people want to see the finished product first. It’s happening that unless clients like the building first they won’t choose you. So we have to bring the design process earlier and earlier. Really to sell a blank page and the whole collaborative process is the ideal, although it’s getting harder and harder. It’s amazing how important it is for architects to be able to do this.’
Mair agrees that being on the specifier side does not necessarily make life easier when it comes to plying your wares. ‘I worked as a rouge architect myself, having not done the seven years, and the one thing that pissed me off was that you’re always only as good as your last project. Then you’re drumming up business from scratch every time until you’re really established. I was more interested in doing something [with Viaduct] that is hopefully snowballing, with a range of good products that we’re building on.’
What’s clear, is that in some capacity or other, practically everyone has to sell. But the way the word is defined and the approaches taken can really affect people’s reactions and language used. For example, designers are ‘awarded contracts’, while suppliers typically ‘make a sale’. But as Dieneke Ferguson, chief executive of designer-maker support organisation Hidden Art says, ‘there are many different ways of selling and routes to market’.
But aside from the cold call or unsolicited advance, in essence everyone is pretty much left with the same tools: a belief in your product and an ability to communicate and connect with others. Crack that and you can probably the drop shoeshine. Maybe spare a thought when the dirty boot’s on the other foot though.
This article was written for FX, August 2007.
Posted in Architecture, Design, Interiors | No Comments »