Main contents
Archive for October 2008
October 27th, 2008
Ask a designer what pays their rent and they’ll probably say ‘creativity’. An ability to come at problems from unusual angles - to ‘think outside the box’ as management speak would have it - is bread and butter for a good design consultancy. Yet, for all the mould-breaking work produced each year, there are also vast quantities of material - all designed by somebody, somewhere - which fall squarely into the generic styles and conventions of a genre. When did you last see an application form that could be described as beautiful? And how many university prospectuses have you seen all featuring photographs of happy, smiling students?
Often the formats of a particular subject matter are there for a reason. Instructions and information, for example, need to be clear and legible, not buried in giddy graphics. But sometimes there are opportunities to shunt the category away from its conventions, not necessarily to perform a design revolution, but to reframe and rethink how something works.
‘We always think through a project very carefully, so we don’t use any superfluous elements,’ says Ewan Robertson, one half of graphic design duo Oscar & Ewan. ‘If the standard is flawed and can be improved, we try to push it. Where the standard works, we keep it.’
Robertson’s branding work for Dalston art gallery Terrace Studios provides a good example of subtle reinvention. The gallery’s exhibition proposal document - essentially an application form for people to propose future shows - is treated as a typographic showpiece, its bold letters printed on a transparent sheet overlaying the form’s pastel yellow paper stock. As forms go, it is wonderfully elegant. ‘They could have just stuck the logo at the top and done the rest in-house, but this looks more professional and has impact,’ says Robertson.
Returning to the college prospectus, Manchester consultancy Love’s designs for three University of the Arts London institutions move wilfully away from the norm. Dispensing with the ‘mandatory’ smiling students and smug quotes, Wimbledon College of Art, Chelsea College of Art and Design and Camberwell College of Arts instead offer printed portfolios of their students’ work. In the world of prospectuses, the booklets certainly stand out. ‘Format is part of the big idea and re-addressing the format in the case of the prospectuses came from the idea of ‘revealing’ or ‘exposing’ the true colours of the colleges and getting rid of the glossy, clichéd prospectus cover, both literally and in approach to the books as a whole - content and design,’ explains Love designer Gré Hale.
Similarly, a project by arts group Metal that engaged secondary school students in the regeneration of their towns - in Harwich, Harlow and Southend-on-Sea - required a report on their findings to be delivered to key stakeholders. Leeds consultancy Thompson Brand Partners designed a series of ‘guidebooks’ that present the students’ findings in vibrant ‘wipe clean’ coloured vinyl. ‘Often the physical output from this type of project just doesn’t reflect the ambition and fulfilment of the work, so by taking a different approach it becomes a source of pride to the students. It works well on the stakeholder and funding front too, in a way that an A4 printed report just wouldn’t,’ says Thompson partner Phil Dean.
A new view on an old print format might come as much from the way the content is generated as from a graphic designer’s input. The Urban Cookbook, for example, is a new, hybrid title from author, film director and culture vulture King Adz. He has scoured the streets of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities to concoct a series of street food recipes, all presented among snapshots of the cities’ movers and shakers in urban culture. The book lies somewhere between recipe guide, art showcase, travel chronicle and interview collection.
Designed in-house by its publisher, Thames & Hudson, The Urban Cookbook presented something of a challenge to designer Sam Clark. ‘It took an awfully long time to organise it into a cohesive book,’ he says. ‘There are about four elements in there, and it’s hard to get a handle on it - is it a cookbook, a street book, an art book? The result is quite a complex structure, although it looks simple.’
Clark notes that most cookbooks present their recipes as paragraphs of text, but was aware that this might appear daunting to the type of reader likely to pick up The Urban Cookbook. So the recipes are organised instead into a series of very simple, short bullet-point instructions, with text hand-tracked throughout to give the title a distinctive feel. ‘I wanted to get away from it being a cookbook or a street book. It’s “its own thing”,’ says Clark.
Breaking the rules can have many benefits, from commercial stand-out among competitors to simply looking at a subject with fresh eyes. ‘Deciding to break the format of the norm isn’t something that just happens, it relies on a core thought,’ says Hale. ‘It’s about being inspired to look at an object differently as a whole.’
This article was written for Design Week, 23 October 2008.
Posted in Design, Print | No Comments »
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 »
October 6th, 2008
It is hard to imagine that big business has not already harnessed every possible resource in the appliance of brand management. But, says music producer and performer Martyn Ware, we have seen almost nothing of the opportunities that lie in the careful and controlled use of sound. An evangelist of the hugely affecting properties of sound in all its forms and combinations, Ware is aware that sound can - and should - be approached as a design process, just like graphics and user interfaces. Yet, of all the companies listed in the Fortune 100, ‘only about five are taking this seriously’, he estimates.
Ware’s experience in sound and electronic music runs deep. Originating in pop music (he is a founder member of The Human League and Heaven 17), his career now spans composition, production, multi-disciplinary collaboration, as well as the creation and curatorship of the experimental Future of Sound events. He also recently led a project to create a sensory space for children with special needs at Three Ways School in Bath. Meanwhile, Illustrious Company, the venture Ware set up with electro-pop peer Vince Clarke in 2001, continues to explore and push the possibilities of 3D ’soundscaping’, where sound becomes disconcertingly untethered from the point of source speakers that are generating it.
A further venture, SonicID, lies well inside the world of design. Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of sonic branding is the sound ident itself; think of Intel’s irritatingly catchy ‘bong-bing bong-bing’ motif. But Ware quickly expands, talking about a suite of sounds like that could represent an organisation in any number of environments. Special compositions might play out on telephone ‘hold’ music or in reception areas; another piece might introduce company speakers at live events, while a website may demand a cluster of music and effects. Just as a company follows visual communication rules laid down by graphic designers in a tome of brand guidelines, so they might also manage all the sonic elements of their communication.
Ware describes the process of creating these elements in terms indistinguishable from a graphic design exercise: mood boards, selection routes, iterative refinements, and so on. Composing, or designing, sound in this way is like any other design process and - just like any other design process - the results are better when there is ‘buy-in’ at the top level of the client’s management. ‘Unfortunately, sound is used in a haphazard manner by most businesses and not many take it seriously,’ he says. ‘Also, they don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it, so we do the same as other designers and create mood boards of positive and negative attributes, and from there we start with maybe a handful of basic, sketchy compositions.’
Music and sounds for events, websites, advertisements and the like is arguably the obvious stuff, albeit much overlooked. But again Ware extrapolates further. In the coming years, he says, we will see more research into the sounds of products themselves, the click of a lipstick case or the closing of a car door, for example. This is not music, but sound as a component of experience and therefore of great interest to brand builders.
And it’s the experiential possibilities of sound that occupy much of Ware’s attention. Later this year, London’s Leicester Square will host the latest of Ware’s 3D soundscapes in a project called Soundlife London. Co-created with local community groups, associations and schools, material gathered by hand-held field recorders will be composed and organised spatially by Ware. In this way, sounds relating to, say, a church to the south-east of Leicester Square will appear to emanate from that direction when triggered by the installation.
And an even more wholly immersive experience is planned for London’s BFI Imax theatre next April, when a non-stop, 24-hour stream of performances and compositions will position sounds at various heights, as well as laterally and fore and aft of the audience. Ware plans to collaborate with ’smell artist’ Sissel Tolaas, as well as present some pieces in darkness. ‘What I’m detecting is a desire for large-scale, communal public experiences, evidenced by the explosion in gatherings for live events like festivals,’ he says. ‘It’s a relief to move away from screens. For me, it’s all moving towards a totally immersive experience. People pay good money for these experiences.’
This article was written for Design Week, 18 September 2008.
Posted in Branding, Design, Exhibition, Interaction, Sonic | No Comments »
October 6th, 2008
B&Q churns more than 10 000 SKUs a year. That’s stock keeping units, for those unfamiliar with shop speak. At Tesco they deal with no fewer than 13 000 individual product lines every year. And in a retail world where brand consistency and design clarity are vital, keeping tabs on that lot is no small task. Enter the in-house head of design – the pivotal figure who corrals a company’s numerous design projects and products into something coherent, connected and comprehensible, something the customers can understand.
Of course, it’s not just retailers that need to ensure their design output is always on message. Any large organisation - an airline, bank, public transport operator or global charity, to name just a few - has multiple customer touch points, perhaps overseen by different departments which may or may not be talking effectively to each other. In businesses like these design overview is a valuable investment, helping a company to innovate and respond while also remaining efficient. And the person who holds that position can be a rather powerful design buyer.
‘Tesco used to have an in-house design head, but there was a big gap before I joined and, in the meantime, categories started to fragment,’ says the supermarket’s head of design Alyson Jakes. Previous incumbent Jeremy Lindley left to take up the role of category development director at drinks giant Diageo two years ago and, according to Jakes, even though the supermarket continued to work with design consultancies, consistency started to deteriorate without an internal hand on the tiller.
B&Q packaging design and guidelines manager Jonathan Couper paints a similar picture. ‘Historically, the business has been driven in all aspects by the commercial teams, so design was guided by individual [product] categories. Some category teams did this very well, others less so. But this is a fairly disparate approach,’ he says. To combat this, B&Q management - along with marketing and customer proposition director Jo Kenrick - has set up a team that will police the messy and the random, instead sending out a coherent message across all products and communications. For example, there were previously ‘ten to 15′ different typefaces in use by the company, but now there will be just one.
Like many large businesses, both Tesco and B&Q operate a roster of trusted design consultancies. So why not use one of these groups to act as brand guardian, especially when an external group usually creates the company’s brand identity in the first place? B&Q, for example, recently worked on its brand ‘personality’ with Interbrand. ‘You’ve got to be inside the company to create the degree of change at the speed we need to do it,’ says Couper. ‘A consultancy could do what we’re doing, but not at that speed, and it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. You can’t afford to do that as a retailer.’
Although efficiency and cost savings may be one reason for employing an in-house head of design, it need not be at the expense of high-quality design. An in-house chief can champion design internally in a way that no external group could really hope to manage, despite the sterling efforts of many. They can also make the case for the rostered consultancies and demonstrate how good design management is a bottom-line investment for the business. ‘I show how there is a triangle of benefits from design - aesthetics, function and cost - but design still has to be fought for on a day-to-day basis,’ explains Transport for London head of design Innes Ferguson. ‘It’s used as a business tool in this organisation, not as an optional extra, and you need a good, strong internal team to make sure the quality is right and - in our case - that the taxpayers are getting what they pay for.’
According to Ferguson, an in-house design position might cost about £30 000 a year, but that same person can provide TfL with about £150 000 of work. ‘An outside consultancy could do it, but it wouldn’t provide value for money. And there isn’t a group in the country which could do everything that we need,’ he adds.
In many cases, an in-house design chief reports up to the company’s marketing director, and in smaller business it’s often the marketing team that manages design appointments and projects directly, with no design head intermediary. But according to Couper, having a position between the nitty-gritty of design’s detail and the macro view of a company’s marketing strategy is a great benefit. ‘A marketing director can’t focus on that level of detail, but they do have the overview on the direction of the business and we can ensure that the design fits with that.’
Jakes concurs. ‘I’m the eyes for the marketing director,’ she says. ‘A head of design has really close contact with the customer on the shop floor, which a marketing director can’t. It might be quite hard to sustain this role in a smaller company, but for a bigger business you really need to make sure consistency is there day to day, no matter how good your brand guidelines are.’
This article was written for Design Week, 17 September 2008.
Posted in Branding, Design, Packaging, Product, Retail | No Comments »