Launching last Friday and running over the next seven weeks, Digital Eskimo will feature in Object Gallery’s exciting new STATE. RESPOND exhibition.

Along with four other NSW-based designers we’ve been invited to respond to a statement addressing the challenges of sustainability in design. These responses have been translated into physical installations that are displayed within the gallery space.

We chose to use this opportunity to introduce our upcoming Change Agents project which is a collaboration with the Creative Industries Innovation Centre (CIIC) at UTS. The project’s ambitious aim is to co-create an open source resource which will aid the design industry as it responds to the rapidly approaching low carbon economy.

We’ve included several participatory design methods in the exhibit to expose elements of our Considered Design methodology, while collecting input from the design community that will help shape the strategic direction of the project.

You can check out STATE. RESPOND from 6 February – 28 March at Object Gallery, which can be found at 417 Bourke St in Surry Hills.

View Indesign Magazine launch party photos or visit our Flickr page for more shots of opening night.

Related posts:

1. Agents of change on Radio National
2. Agents of Change at the State of Design festival
3. Exploring sustainable design at GreenUps

Penny Hagen and Michelle Gilmore* are presenting excerpts from a recent article they wrote for Johnny Holland at UX Australia this week on the effectiveness and value that ‘User Stories’ bring to the design process. It’s a method we’ve borrowed from the agile development world and combined with our human centred design methods to create an effective way to document services (such as websites) which helps ensure that the people using them and their needs remain at the centre of the process.

From the article:

Collaborative design methods play a key role in aligning team members towards a shared and strategic project vision. In this article we describe how user stories stimulate and facilitate discussion and decision making with clients in the development of a User Experience Strategy. In our context (the development of online projects) the User Experience Strategy becomes an ‘in principle agreement’ on the shape of the project (what), its purpose (why), and provides potential implementation strategies (how). It takes into account all perspectives (e.g business, technical, marketing, brand) but privileges the intended user experience.

Read the full article on Johnny Holland

* Penny worked with Digital Eskimo from 2006 through to 2009, Michelle from 2007-2009.

Related Links

• UX Australia
• Penny’s website

Related posts:

1. Sharing through artifacts: client-user centred design
2. Iterative Design & Development
3. The Power of Storyboarding

We couldn’t help but notice the above poster, which was provocatively posted at our local café, The Wall recently.

An anonymous individual had obviously become annoyed at the growing awareness in the design community of its wider responsibility in the world and the exciting discussions that are now taking place regarding the power of design to help mankind in its hour of need. We’ve responded to the poster with our own asking people to visit this blog and begin a conversation (we’re also interested in hosting a round-table discussion in our studio, btw – more on that later).

My contention is that the underlying principles of Design – Design Thinking – can and will play a major role in the shape of the world.

Critical to the discourse is to understand what we mean by Design and what is important about it.

Some see Design as something subordinated to serve the dominant economic paradigm, rather than to challenge and improve it.  Just look around you: much of what you see is designed to support a system of mass consumption and constant desire. The result: inefficient systems, human suffering, environmental degradation and lots and lots of advertisements trying to sell us stuff we don’t need.

Perhaps our friend who wrote the note thinks of Design in this way. Or perhaps he or she thinks of it only as the creation of form and meaning (communication design, in other words, which encompasses a number of fields, including graphic design, information design, etc.).

Some understand that it’s also about function, but even that can be too narrow.

When people do think of functional design they often think it’s all about products. Again, while partially true (there’s no doubt products play a massive role in how our world is shaped), this is only a subset of functional design. Systems design (and its sub-disciplines, such as service design, urban design, and architecture – houses are in essence systems, after all) plays an even greater role in shaping how we interact with each other and the planet.

Broader again is not to think of Design as a set of disciplines at all, but to think of it as a process or a way of thinking. A good definition by Charles Burnette states that Design is:

“… a process of creative and critical thinking that allows information and ideas to be organized, decisions to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge to be gained.”

So it’s a way of thinking, apart from the dominant paradigm (in business at least) which is “judgment thinking”, as Edward De Bono calls it. This is really where the essence of Design resides. We began designing when the first ape picked up the first bone and decided to use it as a tool. The act of designing our tools and thus shaping our world has been with us since we first became self aware; it is an ancient practice, and as Kenya Hara says in his (fantastic!) book Designing Design:

“If design is the transforming of the world based on understanding, which forms our environment, the beginning of human wisdom may have been the beginning of design.”

Design is a thing, but it’s also a verb; it exists as a process, which in itself is made of a number of methods. When practised well, Design is inherently inclusive, a critical component of any approach intended to create sustainable social change. Design is not the sole domain of some wise and all knowing Design Guild (though of course you learn as a Designer to do it intuitively and with professional consistency); it’s a technique and an attitude as much as anything – and anyone can learn and use it to great effect.

So in a nutshell Design Thinking is:

• Collaborative, especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement
• Abductive, inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems
• Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk
• Personal, considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved
• Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages
• Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions.

The definition above is courtesy of Victor Lombardi, a visiting professor at the Pratt Institute, a leading design school in the United States. As Dan Saffer states in his blog, these individual approaches are not exclusive to Design thinkers – they are often found in part in many disciplines. The unique thing is the way Design Thinking combines them all to provide a potent tool for positive societal change.

So when our anonymous friend who has a passion for homeless issues says “Go work in a soup kitchen”, I think he should actually be saying “Hey, spend your time on a worthwhile cause, design out homelessness and fuck pretentions as you do it”.

Related posts:

1. Design Thinking – Next Big Thing

We attended a lively and interesting Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA) talk featuring lawyer Chris Finn of Finn Roache last night.

The talk touched on that ugly elephant in the design studio, free/spec pitching in the context of the global recession – loosely defined as the act of doing significant free work (strategy, ideation or actual design) to win a tender or proposal process. It was refreshing to hear outright condemnation of this terrible business practice from the floor, although Chris’ legal “solution” worried me.

But first I’ll explain the beauty pageant thing.

There are many reasons why asking for and doing free pitch work is a Very Bad Idea. I know it feels like we’re getting great value when we get things for free. But free and value are rarely bedfellows.

Sure, I can understand the temptation to ask for free ideas and designs. As a client it seems like a great way to filter the creative agencies from the lambs, to mix my metaphors a tad. It also feels like a great big free idea haul, and you’ll certainly get a wad of random ideas that may or may not be useful in the project. But to then choose an agency based on those ideas is akin to choosing the person you will marry at a beauty pageant; it might start so but it ain’t going to end pretty.

Frankly, the agencies simply won’t have had the time to immerse, research, understand context and deliver a proper response to a brief in the day or so they can give to a free pitch. Unless they are desperate or mad or both, they’ll commit only enough time for a superficial response.

An agency’s portfolio should give a client all the examples needed to decide if they cut the mustard strategically and creatively. Almost as importantly their approach and process should feel right for the client and the project. That’s it. Oh, and their proximity to good cafes and Surry Hills,of course.

Another thing to consider: Clients, being ethical people, will want to throw out and forget all the losing ideas and designs. In reality, though, this is hard to do; a clever idea has a way of weaseling its way back from obscurity. Like it or not, it’s very hard not to bring those other ideas to the table when the project commences. We all know that’s unfair, even unethical – but it happens. So paying for pitch work is a great way to avoid putting people in this difficult ethical position. I would like to see companies proudly stating they don’t ask for free pitch work for ethical reasons alone and making this a part of their sustainability reporting.

And it’s also bad for the project …Really bad, because as i mentioned earlier the design team has not had time to understand the client’s project (not to mention their business!) and therefore they cannot possibly have an idea that has the necessary contextual understanding, strategic insight or empathy behind it. It’s the opposite of the design approach we take here at Digital Eskimo, which we call Considered Design. Free pitch work is Ill-Considered Design. And who wants that?

“That’s OK, we’ll just toss that idea out and start again once we’ve chosen the agency” is often the response to this point. That makes perfect sense, actually – and I think this happens sometimes. But then why put all those people through hours of free work to just toss even the winning idea out and start again? Politics and people being what they are, though, there’s a good chance that someone – quite likely a few of the decision makers – are in love with that beauty pageant winner and have a vested interest in keeping that idea and design alive.

I can’t think of a better way to stifle creativity and innovation!

OK, so there’s also a swag of really obvious reasons why it’s a bad idea for the agencies themselves but I wont go into it here. It’s a sign of desperation and I reckon it’s a pretty laughable scenario to profess to be proud of your work if you so readily give it away for free. Nuff said.

Like I said earlier, there are much better alternative methods for agency selection that benefit everyone – especially the client, who in the end just wants a great relationship with a top agency and the best result for their project.

Let’s just get off the cat walk

Finally, while I applaud Mr Finn for his position on free pitching generally, I disagree with his view that free pitching is going to happen anyway, so agencies should accept it and protect their free work with a legal letter or such (he’s drafting one for AGDA at the moment). Sort of like a pre-nup before the beauty pageant.

While I know he and AGDA mean well, I think this is another Bad Idea. First, this just perpetuates the idea of Free Pitching with clients. Every request for a free pitch should be dealt with by every agency the same way. ADGA could perhaps spend our membership fees preparing a very clear, well communicated explanation that agencies can send on to clients. Then I’d suggest the agency head explains in a meeting why the approach should be altered and why the agencies who do offer to do work for you are not following our industry guidelines on this (and who knows what other evil things they do, right?).

Suggest a credentials presentation approach, rather than this crazy, good-for-nothing free pitch thing. Or if they really really want to do the pageant, then ask them nicely to pay for it – it will be money well spent. It’s amazing how much better the pitches are when they’ve been done by senior staff during work hours rather than late at night after the paying work is done. Having said that, it’s still a beauty pageant; the hair and makeup is just a bit more tasteful.

And let’s face it: Legal letters are only useful if you can back it up with legal action. Now as I (perhaps rudely!) stated on the night – the only people to win out of this approach are the lawyers. Chris argues this is how they do it in the legal profession, and contracts from law firms work rather well, I imagine – who wants to get in a legal tussle with a law firm? Anyone? No, thought not.

However. most design agencies are simply not going to have the capacity (or headspace!) to go after (possibly difficult to prove) copyright infringement from free pitch work. It just won’t happen, and people on the client side aren’t stupid – they know that. So why treat them like idiots? That’s no way to start a relationship.

I call on AGDA to scrap the legal letter and stand firm with a formal policy and strong recommendation that free pitching breaks our code of practice. While we can’t legally stop our members donning the leotards, applying the thick gloss lippy, shaving the three day growth and strutting their stuff on the cat walk, we can perhaps make it uncool to do so. And no designer wants to be uncool, right?

No related posts.

Last week was the 20th anniversary for the Ozchi conference, the leading forum for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in Australia and New Zealand.

I had the pleasure of presenting a paper co-authored with John MacFarlane, a producer at Digital Eskimo, Reflections on the role of Seeding in Social Design (pdf). In it we discuss the way in which social technologies, dependent on participation for success, bring into focus the dynamic and critical relationship between design and use. In social technologies the user literally determines the design, we (designers) only provide the platform. This is an interesting landscape for designers as our role starts to extend beyond constructing and making, to taking responsibility for facilitating and enabling participation. Designing and implementing social technologies successfully means also developing strategies for engagement.

At Digital Eskimo we are responding to this in a range of ways, including developing a range of codesign activities and applying participatory methods that attempt to facilitate the engagement of communities around a project or campaign. We refer to these as “seeding activities” and the paper presented some of our recent learnings, reflections and approaches.

There were a lot of great speakers at the conference, some of the highlights included Gary Marsdens (author of the excellent Mobile Interaction Design book) keynote on doing HCI in South Africa, or rather failing to do HCI. He generously presented on his mistakes and learnings, and provided an insight into some of the issues he encountered when applying traditional HCI assumptions and methods into this particular context. Gary discussed Mxit, the massively successful Mobile Instant Messenger, and presented some of his own innovative work, BigBoard, which uses Bluetooth to create a free community sharing tool.

Other highlights included the Indigenous Led Digital Enterprise panel, where Vicus Steffensen, from Traditional Knowledge Revival Pathways and Troy Mallie from Cultural Systems Solutions (two different technology approaches to knowledge and land management for Indigenous communities) presented alongside Pasty Cameron (Telling Places in Country, Tasmania) and Yvonne Cadet-James (Gugu-Baden Cultural History, Townsville). Yolande Strengers also presented her excellent research into water usage, and how our social norms require us to wash and bath much more frequently that we really need to.

Related posts:

1. Reflections on the role of seeding in Social Design

 … the convergence of social action and technology
Last week I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the Making Links conference in Melbourne. A big thanks to the organisers and the great attendees who all represent organisations and activists doing excellent work for social change. My presentation, ‘Reaching out or Moving closer: connecting with your community’, focused on participation and engagement (See it here on slideshare). In particular ways that people can approach social technologies to initiate and foster relationships with their community.  I focused on how we can use these tools to develop an ecology appropriate to our stakeholders motivations and interests, rather than focusing on the one stop shop idea of traditional websites.

This way of thinking can often be a challenge for organisations who are uncomfortable about giving up the control of their brand or message. However relinquishing control of those things (to some degree and in new ways) are inevitably part of embracing social technologies, and working more collaboratively with our stakeholders and ‘users’. As Aradhana Goel from IDEO puts it, we should be thinking about enhancing our brand through participation (pdf).

For those that were interested in some of the other sources that I quoted around using social media and social change,  I have uploaded the presentation to slideshare and added some links.  Thanks to all for the great feedback.

Whilst at the conference I had the pleasure of seeing a number of  great projects, some of the highlights included the Freedom Centre who have been using msn and other private forms of online communication work support young people on gender and sexuality issues.  Info Exchange  do a wide range of work making ICT available to organisations and indivuals (including setting up free access via satellite in East Timor). Reps from Mission Australia, Barnadoes, Youth of the Streets and the Vodafone Foundation presented their fantastic work ‘Young People Connected’ giving street kids and disadvantaged youths mobile phones, the presentation of which brought more than a tear to the eye. Awesome work thanks guys.

Related posts:

1. Making Local Links

Last week I attended Sustainable Innovation at the Base of the Pyramid conference in Helsinki on the ways in which innovation and business can help the billions of people who are living in poverty. The model is known as the the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) approach which relies on entrepreneurial activity to create value and ultimately well-being through product and service (co)creation and provision instead of the old development aid or charity models.

The stand out speaker for me was Simona Rocchi, Director of Sustainable Design at Philips who described the ethos and methods behind the design of the Chulha smokeless stove, co-created in India with local communities and NGOs. It was inspiring to see design (and in particular a similar approach to design that we practice at Digital Eskimo) given centre stage of a conference on sustainable solutions (design rarely rates a mention in my experience).

The award winning stove exemplifies the potential of co-designing in context with all stakeholders and also represents an innovative model of IP ownership (Philips is sharing it with the community) as well as the many benefits that can flow to corporations that participate in society in this way.

View Simona’s presentation.

When I talk of design i’m usually referring to more than just graphic design … more

… which is after all just one of the design disciplines. I’m referring to the broader design of systems; the processes involved, their functionality, how they interact with people and other systems and yes, how they look and feel. Another inspiring speaker showed what can be done when you get the business design just right.

Tim Vang, Co-founder and Development Director of MyC4 gave a passionate talk about his business, which links investors with African businesses via an e-bay like bidding system. Investors offer money at an interest rate and African businesses (who normally fall between the cracks of micro and macro financing options) then effectively buy from the investors who offer the best terms.

This is a for-profit business model; investors are not donating to charity and MyC4 take a small percentage fee. On the ground partners vet applicants in a similar way to a bank approving a loan request so as you can imagine there is a lot more to the design of this business than the website itself. At the time of publishing they had over 4 Million Euro invested by 8,003 people. Amazingly they had only 10 defaulted loans and were paying an average 12.8 % interest which is more than i get from my bank.

On another note one of the biggest issues raised at the conference (but certainly not solved!) was the competing demands of a massive population moving closer to our consumer-based lifestyles. Providing for the needs of the BOP could very well accelerate global warming and other environmental issues plunging us all into a worse state than we are already in. It’s a thorny one of course because the developed world has benefitted from this lifestyle and the lifestyle and well-being gains to be had already and it’s inequitable to suggest that others shouldn’t have their needs met through commerce.

This is one of the great challenges of our age as we work towards a sustainable world and one Digital Eskimo will play a role in in the coming years.

No related posts.

Above is a fantastic piece of political art created by a friend of ours. It’s brilliant – I think it’s strength is in its simplicity of message, and the way in which it still manages to summarise so much of what’s wrong with the Olympics themselves as a force for change in the world as well as the Chinese Government and it’s use of extreme force at Tienanmen in particular but since and before of course.

One of the events that forged Digital Eskimo into being was the Sydney Olympics. I’d just returned from a few years working and living in London and the sheer hypocrisy of the PR and media supported spin regarding Australia as a reconciled and fair country was staggering (especially given the severe lurch to the right under the Howard Government of the proceeding years). Practically no dissent was getting into the mainstream and so we were inspired to create a satirical spoof site of the Sydney 2000 site, we dubbed Shame 2000.

We received a bit of press and attention (including from the IOC’s legal attack dogs – a cheeky exchange is archived on the site for those interested) and all this resulted in a serious amount of traffic and i think some good exposure to the issues that were not being discussed, or as we put it the “Events that Matter.”

Not much seems to have changed as Chairman Rudd and others remain silent on the big issues as the spectacle unfolds. What better way to say to China and the world, if you play our game we don’t mind what happens off the field?

UPDATE: Another nice piece of artwork on the topic .. Do-It-Yourself Tienanmen Square Memorial Kit from artists Wei Lai and my wonderful friend Deborah Kelly.

No related posts.

We are happy to see a definite theme emerging this year as design, technology and sustainability gets picked up (finally) as part of the bigger picture across the board. Digital Eskimo has quite a few opportunities lined up already to share and engage in our design and sustainability conversations (and hopefully actions).

First up is the greening of CHI 2008 where I have been invited to be part of the panel Beyond the hype: Sustainability & HCI in April. The growing interest in sustainability at CHI, and as part of conferencing in general is exciting, and I hope to participate in this one remotely and save some air miles.

Closer to home …

May brings us the Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability Workshop at Pervasive 2008 here in Sydney 19-22 May. Duncan and myself both hope to attend this local one. Our submission, “Understanding Motivation and Enabling Action Towards Change” focused on how Considered Design enables us to both understand what motivates people make change, as well as design technology to support that.

We will be spending the air miles (offset of course) to attend Ezio Manzini’s (a true leader in the field) Changing the Change conference in Torino, later in year. The conference focuses on the role and potential of design research in the transition towards sustainability – we hope this marks a major step in the re-defining of designers as facilitators of significant, positive change.

No related posts.

Some of our clients need to source images for their websites and communications activities, but don’t have the budget to spend on commercial stock image libraries. Thankfully, there are a number of resources on the web that provide good quality imagery for next to nothing.

We’ve posted previously about using photos from Flickr (and some of the gotchas to look out for) – but there are some other sites worth mentioning also.

iStockphoto is a community site where photographers can upload their photos and illustrations for purchase by other community members for very low cost – between USD$1-$15. If you’re using images on the web you can often get away with using the smaller sizes to keep costs down, though for print purposes you may need to spend more.

The photos are pretty good, though recently have leaned towards more corporate orientation (this might be a result of the site recently being purchased by Getty Images).

Another great site is stock.xchng (as in “exchange”). Similarly to iStockphoto, stock.xchng is a community driven site where users upload photos – however, all photos are free.

Let us know in the comments if you know of any other good sites for finding low-cost images.

No related posts.