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Archive for February 2008
February 13th, 2008
Old people are younger than they used to be. It’s oxymoronic of course, but this little aphorism sums up how a generational shift has formed a 50-plus demographic with a much keener sense of design and aspiration than the one before it. Today’s older people are astute, discerning and demanding consumers of products and services, with huge combined purchasing power.
Although it’s not news that populations are ageing and the 50+ have money to spend, domestic appliances manufacturers have been slow, or unwilling, to take older consumers’ needs into account when designing mainstream products. Instead, this group is often tackled separately, if at all, through specialist, targeted products often tightly focused on specific disabilities. To convince manufacturers of the great commercial opportunities of more inclusive design, a symposium at this year’s Domotechnica - the household appliance trade fair - will focus two days of debate on the 50-plus market.
‘We’re not talking about producing products for handicapped or very elderly people specifically, but better design for everybody,’ says Martina Koepp, managing director of the German Society for Gerontological Technology and a speaker at Symposium 50+. ‘Manufacturer interest in inclusive design is rising - and it has to. This is a very interesting group; they’ve consumed their whole life, have high buying power, a high share of real estate and a willingness to invest in the quality of their environment and products.’
As we age our faculties deteriorate. But unlike previous older generations who, recalling a time before the welfare state, were often happy with any help or attention they received, today’s 50-plus consumer is accustomed to great choice and is unlikely to buy products focused on age or ability. ‘Older people don’t want to be targeted or stigmatised; they want to be part of a continuum,’ says Rama Gheerawo, a research fellow at the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre, home of inclusive design at the Royal College of Art. ‘We design with aspirations in mind as much as disabilities and we talk about a multigenerational approach, especially in the household, where there may be up to four generations.’
HHRC graduates worked with BT to develop a concept telephone that connects the ‘digitally excluded’ (typically older people) to broadband, without a computer. The TwoTone Phone acts as a normal cordless phone on one side and a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone on the other. The VoIP mode has no screen, but six large buttons on which users can write the names of their contacts. These buttons turn orange if the person is online and available and flash if they call. The phone also connects to a television to allow video calls via the TV screen.
‘Mostly, inclusive design ideas come from research rather than commercial projects, but it is becoming of greater interest to commercial parties and is creeping into design briefs slowly, especially from Japan,’ says Mike Woods, creative director at product design consultancy Tangerine and host of an inclusive design workshop at the Nikkei Design Innovation Forum in Japan last year. Andy Davey, founder of TKO Design, also cites Japan: ‘It is at the centre of usability issues due to the substantial ageing population. Olympus, for instance, is always trying to create imaging products such as digital cameras that are less complex.’
But attention also needs to be turned to more quotidian domestic appliances, says Alison Wright, managing director of Easy Living Home, a consultancy specialising in inclusive design for the home. She believes there’s still a long way to go before domestic products start to meet inclusive design principles. ‘Very few manufacturers consider an inclusive design process and very few even realise it’s an ageing market,’ she says. Even those products that do address universal issues often do so coincidentally, as a result of ‘funky’ or aspirational designs, adds Wright.
Zanussi and Siemens, for example, have each developed a fridge in which all the drawers slide out, allowing access to the very back of the shelf. ‘This is useful to everyone, but one wheelchair user was especially delighted because he couldn’t normally bend any lower to see inside,’ says Wright. And a Siemens worktop hob aligns the plates side by side rather than in a square, so users need not lean across steaming pans or bend under an extractor to reach to the back. ‘But even here they’ve missed the final five per cent because the hob controls are low contrast and hard to read,’ observes Wright.
Screen displays are a black spot for many people. Poor contrast, small type and narrow angles of view all blight easy use, especially for those with poor sight. Woods recalls the long-standing joke that nobody can ever successfully programme a video recorder: complex menus, tiny buttons and a requirement to get down on your hands and knees do not make for a user-friendly experience. Tangerine designed the Sky+ set-top box, which saw off all such problems with its one button record. Although a high-tech gadget, Sky+ is easier for everyone, but it’s especially beneficial to older people living alone who are unable to programme a VCR, notes Woods.
‘There’s nothing special about these well-designed products. They’re good for handicapped people, good for children, good for everybody,’ says Koepp.
This article was written for Design Week, 13 February 2008.
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February 11th, 2008
Municipal museums of local history are, from childhood memory at least, oddly eclectic places. Clifton Park Museum in Rotherham in the mid-1980s seemed an unfathomable platter of paintings, porcelain and furniture all presided over by an imposing taxidermy lion. Although objects in this strange menagerie appeared, through ten-year-old eyes, to be connected by little other than their bygone nature, was the museum really a random assortment of objects or had I just missed the story?
This recollection perhaps captures some of the challenges peculiar to local museums: how to make coherent and relevant exhibitions from often very disparate stories and objects, potentially collected across huge spans of history. What stories to tell and how to tell them. Given the chance to launch or redevelop a local history museum, curators, designers and local authorities are re-approaching these questions as they attempt to build engaging and locally relevant spaces that are suitable for contemporary audiences.
The Lightbox arts centre and museum opened in Woking earlier this year under a scheme which presents only those stories that are unique to the town. ‘Very early on we knew we didn’t want it to be chronological, but thematic,’ says Lightbox director Marilyn Scott. ‘Basically, not much happened here for a long time, so it didn’t make sense to force the displays to follow a timeline. So we gave the designers, Real Studios, lots of pretty raw material and they had to make sense of it. It was important that we started with these stories so that the content is strong and locally relevant. And it was a way of editing: if the same things happened elsewhere, they’re not in here.’
Like Woking, every town and region has its own peculiarities and narratives. But in their museums it is often the major – and national – historical themes that are represented. Some believe this has led to repetition – the same stories told in the same order, and with similar exhibition designs countrywide. Imagine the timeline winding from early land formation through the historical peaks of Romans, Tudors, Victorians, World War II and so on, where the town is merely a local case study of the broader picture.
‘I think that most local authority museums are driven by their collections, not what’s of interest to the user,’ says Alex Sydney, former deputy head of Libraries, Arts & Heritage at Brent Council - where he worked on the redevelopment of Brent Museum - and now head of Projects & Performance, East Territory at English Heritage. ‘If the Romans happened to be in your town, which they were in many, there will be some archaeological relics so they’re going to be in the museum. The same for the Tudors, and so on. And then you’ve already fixed your stories before you’ve even decided what it is you want to say.’
This highlights a tussle that can develop between curatorial and educational objectives. Galleries are often the result of the curator’s wish to get everything on display, presented with the academic historian’s objective and chronological mapping of events. But does this put the shackles on what can be told? ‘Generally collections are pulled together over years from all sorts of different sources. So you might have a dentist’s chair, a three-piece suite and so on. How on earth do you pull this together into stories? I don’t think you should try to weave narrative around objects that don’t have a story or personality,’ says Alistair McCaw, director of Real Studios.
Graham Black, an interpretation consultant and academic at Nottingham Trent University’s Centre for Museum and Heritage Management, also believes that museums can move beyond conventional notions of the collection in order to revitalise displays and audience engagement. ‘It’s not always about collections of 3D objects. There are other ways of telling stories. Museums can bring emotion, but historians are usually attempting to be objective and authoritative,’ he says.
It turns out that Clifton Park Museum underwent its own £3m redevelopment programme a couple of years ago, rethinking the approach to object displays and local relevance. While running this project Steve Blackbourn, principal officer for museums, galleries and heritage at Rotherham Council, also found some divergence between the education team and the curators. ‘We attempted to create “running themes” throughout the displays, but this takes great skill to achieve and requires staff to have a detailed knowledge of their audiences and the ability to think laterally. This isn’t always easy as curators don’t necessarily have the skills or personalities to achieve it,’ he claims.
And it’s the designers who sometimes bridge this space between curator and audience development staff, helping to translate collection material into stories in a 3-dimensional space, adds Blackbourn. But this can bring its own problems. There are a relatively small number of design consultancies able to carry out exhibition design and construction, a combined service often sought by local authorities wanting to control costs and accountability. In many cases, this has led to the same stories being presented by the same sets of designers.
‘I do think local museums rely too much on a narrow range of design ideas - death by graphic panel – and could be more imaginative and creative. We need to try and move away from “book on wall” approaches,’ says Maurice Davies, deputy director of the Museums Association. Hedley Swain, head of museum policy at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, agrees that there is a need for more risk-taking designs in the sector. ‘Local authorities tend to go for the big, established design consultancies, where you get a safer output. But maybe we should be going to young or small creative businesses for something more radical,’ he says. ‘At the moment there’s a tension between using lots of similar designs, which can slightly sanitise a space, and the loss of something more unusual. The places we really remember are ones like Sir John Soane’s Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum.’
Perhaps the onus is on museum staff, rather than design consultancies, to ensure that designs are distinctive and relevant. ‘I very strongly think that museum personnel have to do more to establish what kind of visitor experience they want and then lead designers. There’s no doubt that design can become shop-fitting and I don’t think museum people know enough to brief designers,’ says Black. Blackbourn also feels that museum directors need to take more control: ‘If you want something unique to your local area, [as a museum director] you have to lead it – not your curators or designers, or you’ll end up with a house style.’
But a number of people believe that the local history museum sector is changing more broadly anyway, in ways that could well lead to greater individuality. Shaking off their inheritance as Victorian institutions of middle class taste, local museums are being revitalised by the influence of multicultural populations and a focus on collaboration with community groups. When Brent Museum in North London was redeveloped and relocated to Willesden Green Library in 2006, the challenge was to become relevant to a population that has changed dramatically over the past 50 years due to immigration.
The use of personal stories and community contributions are central to Brent Museum’s permanent exhibition, giving around 300 contributors ‘a sense of ownership’ of the museum, according to Sydney. But also significant at Brent is the way it tackles the contentious and disparaging aspects of its recent history. The exhibition’s thematic approach, also designed by Real Studios, demanded some coverage of the borough’s sometime notoriety as a centre of gun crime, for example. The political and curatorial dilemmas stemming from this subject are very much the lot of any local museum wishing to tackle serious community issues.
‘It’s a very sensitive issue and we had to work closely with the council on presenting it. Also, gun crime is about real people, not objects. The objects are only there if they relate to real people. I’m sure this is outside most curators’ comfort zones, but if you’re working in a community you’ll be working with issues not familiar to you. And if local history museums are to evolve and continue to be relevant to people they need to tackle these issues,’ says Sydney.
Both Cardiff and Leeds are currently developing new city museums with design consultancy Redman Design. When Leeds opens next summer, a whole floor will be dedicated to the story of the city. Involving the community in its creation is a major objective, says John Roles, head of museums and galleries for Leeds Council. ‘We are trying to involve local people and not just in a tokenistic way. There is generally much more community involvement now [by local museums]. It represents a change in attitude – less about experts telling you things,’ says Roles.
Ideas about the museum’s role and position in the community are very much on the agenda too. The 2010 General Conference of the International Council of Museums is titled Museums and Harmonious Society. ‘It’s a time when serious money is going into museums of local, regional and national identity,’ says Black. ‘And what’s happening at the local level is potentially the most exciting, as it’s where all the different voices of a community can come together.’
This article was written for Museums Journal, February 2008.
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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.
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February 11th, 2008
Anyone familiar with the world of typographic design will know that it’s an art form for the obsessive. And the obsession lies, along with the devil, deeply in the detail. Tuning and balancing each element of each character in a set – their ascenders and descenders, shoulders and spines – is not for the faint-hearted. Add to the bargain the likely demand for multiple language support and the task of creating a harmonious set of letterforms is, to the outsider at least, somewhat daunting.
It’s a frustration, then, that despite the sterling efforts of type designers to control every detail of a font set, proliferating publishing platforms still lack a standard system to determine how characters will be displayed on screen. PCs, Macs, web browsers, PDAs, mobile phones – the list goes on – all carry type that publishers need to be reproduced to the highest possible standard of legibility and design. But huge variations in font size, reading environments and users mean that achieving top quality and consistency across platforms can be a challenge. To make matters more complicated, the way that a character’s original outline shape is converted into pixels for display on a screen is determined by software called a rasterizer – and, you guessed it, different systems use different rasterisers.
‘There isn’t a single decent, proper display standard that takes advantage of all the good technologies which are emerging, and the majority of fonts are not designed to be optimum on all platforms. This means that you end up with a narrower set of available fonts at the highest quality,’ explains Bruno Maag, director of type design studio Dalton Maag.
When it comes to displaying fonts on a screen, the art (and difficulties) lie in the process of hinting: a set of instructions from the designer which tell a font how to behave at various sizes. If a system can’t read these instructions, then it might ‘auto-hint’ the letters. But with the devil in the detail, this doesn’t necessarily lead to optimal legibility. ‘Auto-hinting takes care of the worst case of display problems, but for high quality publishing fonts need to be hinted by hand for all the display types they’ll be used on, which can be costly,’ explains Maag.
Research Studios designer Luke Prowse, designer of The Times newspaper’s headline font Times Modern, believes that the degree of control over type is set by the commitment of the client. ‘Specific use requires specific modification of the base brand style. But like anything, it depends on timeframes, cost and how responsible the client is. The Guardian is an example where the type family works across all the paper’s requirements - headlines, body text, race results and so on.’
Towards the end of last year, the picture arguably became even more complicated with the US launch of the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle eBook readers. Using ‘electronic paper’ and a display technology developed by eInk, these handheld screens claim to deliver an experience akin to reading from paper, coupled with the benefits of digital storage. eInk itself is tiny black and white ink particles, charged negatively and positively and embedded in the screen ‘paper’. An electric current then causes black or white particles to rise to the top and display on screen as characters. Although purportedly more pleasant to read, eInk particles still function as pixels, meaning the letterforms are determined by a particular rasterizer.
But with newspapers including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal already delivering eBook editions alongside newsprint and online versions, it’s clear that publishers should consider the complexities of porting typography across platforms. And it’s not just publishers: BMW wanted to take its Dalton Maag-designed typeface into the car’s interior screens, but found that the Freetype rasterizer it uses cannot read the hinting instructions without an extra licence from Apple, which has patented certain processes. Complexities and proprietary squabbles abound.
So what to do? Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Monotype Imaging, sounds a final word of caution when it comes to the myriad platforms. Type designers, he says, should focus on the requirements of the typeface, rather than its display process. ‘If you design for a particular technology, the technology will change and your design will have problems in the future. The best thing you can do is create the best design for the [client’s] application and then the technology will make it perform.’
This article was written for Design Week, 7 February 2008.
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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 »