A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Sebastien and Eva from Troika, the studio behind the Cloud and All The Time In The World installations at new Terminal 5 at Heathrow. So, if you were one of the hundreds stuck at Terminal 5 when it opened, at least you had something decent to marvel at.

Troika are unusual in their combination of disciplines, I feel. It’s not so often that graphic and motion graphic design and this kind of interactive installation work come together – architecture is the more usual bedfellow.

I found it very interesting to hear them talk about the development of their creative palette and language of the objects they create as well as how some of the seemingly tiny technical issues can end up defining a massive part of the work.

You can have a listen to the interview on Core77.

My latest Core77 Broadcast interview with Jason Bruges from Jason Bruges Studio is now online.

In a slightly echoing room in Jason’s studio, accompanied by the usual sirens and car alarms of London’s Shoreditch, he talks about his roots in architecture, the journey to interactive surfaces, sustainability and his thoughts about giving this emerging area a proper name.

Hope you enjoy it.

The next one, coming soon, is with Troika.

[tags]Core77, Jason Bruges[/tags]

If there was ever a clear example of the generation gap between those who have been steeped in digital culture from the start and those who have had to adopt it later in life, the current debate between 37signals and Don Norman is it.

I took note of the original article in Wired on 37signals and I know that Don Norman had weighed in with accusations of arrogance, because he was already quoted in the article. Experientia’s post alerted me to the fact that it’s still going on, and on.

I interviewed Jason Fried back in 2005 and didn’t find 37signals arrogant at all.

What’s weird is that I think Norman and 37signals are actually talking about the same stuff, and even sharing the same opinions in general, they just have different ways of expressing them, and neither side seems to understand the other. Personally, I find Norman’s views on simplicity versus complexity erratic and he too often equates simplicity with minimalism – he rants about it pretty frequently in the Design of Everyday Things and uses the minimalist failures as critiques of simplicity.

Normal mainly took exception to David Heinemeier Hansson saying, “I’m not designing… for other people.” The gist behind this is that they do what Apple does, create things that work for them and hope that other people like them (as they apprently do). But Norman suggests to 37signals how they should really work:

The solution is to decide which customers represent your core audience, and then to observe them at work, the better to understand their true needs. (Not by asking them, not by questionnaires, not by focus groups). Rapid iterations of prototype and evaluation is the key. The iterative design method of rapid prototyping, test, and iteration (all done within the span of a day or so) is well defined in the Human-Computer Interaction community.

That makes me suspect that Norman hasn’t really got a grip on what 37signals do – as a quick look at the (now free) Getting Real book would show. Here’s what they say in the “Rinse and Repeat” chapter:

Instead of banking on getting everything right upfront, the iterative process lets you continue to make informed decisions as you go along. Plus, you’ll get an active app up and running quicker since you’re not striving for perfection right out the gate. The result is real feedback and real guidance on what requires your attention.

37signals strive to avoid feature bloat. There’s a reason that word processing apps like Writeroom and Mellel are increasingly popular. They’re simple and clean. I have great respect for Norman, but sometimes he seems to voice opinions that really reenforce my feeling that HCI is a terrible methodology to study interaction design. It also feels like he’s stuck between two worlds, the old consultant model and the current world of flux.

Jason Fried makes a salient point in their well-written response, comparing what they do to being chefs:

And if enough customers tell us our food is too salty or too hot, we may adjust the salt and the heat. But if some customers tell us to add bananas to our lasagna, we’re not going to make them happy at the expense of ruining the dish for everyone else. That doesn’t make us selfish. We’re just looking out for the greater good.

I think that makes sense, especially in an environment where products can and should be niche, and can and should be changed and tweaked. It’s very different from the product-based world that Norman hails from.

*Photo credit: mcdemoura

[tags]HCI, 37signals, simplicity, Norman[/tags]

My interview with Hector Serrano is now available on the Core77 Broadcasts page.

My thanks to Hector for an entertaining chat about his playful and insightful approach to design.

(Oh, and that story about that 40 year-old cloud of plastic floating off of the coast of Hawaii is explained on the Greenpeace site.)

[tags]hector serrano, sustainability[/tags]

Continuing the From The Archives series, here is an interview I did a while ago with one of the IKEA designers, Monika Mulder. Monika was really interesting to chat to about the IKEA process and culture, especially as many of these items are in either my or friends’ houses. She also talked about design in terms of constraints of both price and packaging guiding design (IKEA try very hard not to “transport air”, for example), which are even more pertinent these days.

Dialogue with IKEA’s Monika Mulder

Monika Mulder

From humble beginnings in Sweden, IKEA has grown to become part of the fabric of global culture. Pioneering flat-packed self-assembly furniture and bold design, they brought style to the people at prices they could afford. As a designer for IKEA, Dutch-born Monika Mulder works on everything from children’s toys to furniture. She is graudate from the Eindhoven Design Academy and after an internship in 1996 was asked to join IKEA in 1998. Here, she speaks about the philosophy behind IKEA, designing within constraints and the cost of transporting air.

(Interview continues after the jump)…

AP: You have a job that I imagine many designers would be pretty envious of. IKEA has a strong philosophy behind it, how does that translate into your design process?

MM: Well, the most basic thing is that IKEA designs for many people. They want to have a wide range of products with good quality, function and shape for a price that many people can afford. That’s the most basic philosophy and how that influences my work is that most of the time we start by designing a price. So when I get a brief, I already know from the beginning which price level it will have to end on. In order to get low prices we designers travel to the factory to look at the production and design products that suit it, to use materials that are from that region or to see what the possibilities are. You often understand production better when you are there and you can come up with good ideas.

AP: Do you find it a pleasant challenge to work to quite tight constraints, whether that is price or this season’s range, or is that frustrating sometimes?

The Sandvita flowerpot

MM: When it comes to designing new articles it is good to have some borders and frames otherwise you can do anything and it’s too big to come to good ideas. These boundaries help me to focus and to be creative, because if you have to do a flower pot with the idea that we are not allowed to transport air – that is a sort of taboo at IKEA, because transporting air costs money – I have to come up with a concept where I can do something with the inside of the pot. So maybe I design something in three sizes that stack into each other, or maybe I design a little decorative item that will be used as a filler in transport. Or, for example, the Vållö watering can – I would never have thought of that shape if it were not for being forced to make it affordable in transport.

Vållö is an example of an item that I came up with out of my own initiative, because we weren’t asked for a watering can. The PS collection was being designed and prototypes were being made and there was so much furniture. The PS collection stands for Post Scriptum. It’s where we show what IKEA can stand for, where we show products with an edge, with more design value, with a twist or something extra. They work according to a theme, and this theme was “In and Out”like a green room.

I felt they needed something else other than furniture and, as we were talking about the garden, I was thinking about flowers and plants and I asked them why they didn’t have a watering can. So they said, “Well, do one”. Then it struck me that when you have a watering can with a spout and a handle you can only fit three in a box and it is really inefficient with transport. So I had the idea to make them stackable and that was the starting point – I knew it had to be conical in shape.

What was important to me was that, yes you can make a can stackable and that is really good for IKEA because it can be made for a low price and it is good for the customer because they can buy it cheap, but then when the customer has the can at home, it’s not interesting for them that it is stackable. They shouldn’t look at the can and think, “Oh, it has that ugly shape because it has to be stackable.”

So, I went to the workshop with a big block of foam with the intention to make the shape nice, and I worked for a long time with it – I think I made five different models – until I was satisfied. The production has sort of steered the shape, in terms of how the handle is shaped to release from the mould. That’s why the pipe is a u-shape, but while I was working on it I thought, “This is great,” because it was necessary but at the same time I thought, “Yeah, this is good because you can see the water running out”.

The famous Vållö watering can

AP: So sometimes the briefs are quite specific, but do you have more abstract requests?

MM: Yes, one example is a lamp that is still in the range called Skugga. They just said, “We want a lamp with the theme ‘happy’”. It’s like a little box coming from the wall and you can put slides in the front window.

The Skugga lamp

AP: Which is a better way to work for you?

MM: Assignments differ a lot and if I only had the kind of assignments that were very specific then it wouldn’t be so fun. I even came with a sketch once that changed the whole business plan, because they wanted something with the theme “space” and I came with a little drinking mug for babies that looked like a penguin [called Mumsa]. They liked it so much that they changed the whole feeding range to from space to water animals.

Mumsa

AP: One of the things about IKEA, and perhaps that comes from necessity, is that a lot of the style comes from bold shapes or uses of colour that people might not normally do…

MM: Yes, that’s true. They have this basic range but they are really daring with trying new things, because instead of competing by having the same article, they would rather have their own identity. Sometimes I have been really surprised that they took some sketch and went on with it. For example, I made a double bed that has armrests like in the back seat of a car; in the middle you have this thing that you can fold down. It is a cool idea that I sketched on the back of a presentation paper, but somebody discovered it and said, “That’s what we want!” I find it really fun that they dare to stick out. It’s not selling as much as the rest, but it draws attention and that’s what makes the customers come back because they find IKEA surprising and with a lot of choice – that they buy the basic bed after all, that’s another thing. The customer wants to have the choice but in the end they will buy safe.

AP: Many companies spend a great deal of time and money designing packaging for their products in order to entice people to buy them. Clearly IKEA doesn’t do that, because the packaging is quite basic or things are unwrapped, but it is still incredibly successful. Do you think that is because the idea of having the store on display means that the store is effectively the packaging?

MM: Yes, that is exactly it. Because the store shows the product so that you can see the possibility of what it can be. The customer decides there whether he wants the product, not when he is standing in front of the shelf in the warehouse. It is not the packaging in the end that is making the difference whether they buy the product or not.

The reason why [IKEA] has such a strong [business and style] plan is to coordinate, the carpets have to go together with the sofas style-wise and the glasses have to fit together with the kitchen. For the customers we have to be very clear, because an object makes a much better impact if it goes together in a whole, otherwise it just disappears. If you have one item in just a single style it becomes a mess. If you look into the store it is very co-ordinated.

AP: Have you ever designed something and been really surprised that it has been successful or the other way around, when you though it was going to be great and it hasn’t sold?

MM: Yes it happened many times. A good example of something that sold a lot surprisingly is a textile that I did for bedcovers called Brunkrisla. It was just a seasonal textile but it has been in the range for three years now and they don’t dare to take it away because it is such a big seller.

Brunkrisla

The child’s egg seat [Lömsk] too. It is pretty expensive because it is such a big plastic product with a lot of safety in it and a weight in the bottom and there is the hood too. So, it is like 69 Euros and honestly I didn’t think it would sell that much because I didn’t think parents would buy such expensive things for their children but it sells like crazy.

Lömsk

I think that the good thing about that one is that the children are sort of convincing their parents because, when they enter the store and they see that thing, they just run to it and want to sit in it. They understand it right away and they swivel and they close and open the hood. So the parents are so happy for the child and they want it. The child is doing the selling by playing.

AP: What kind of things inspire you, what influences your design?

MM: I look, of course, at everything around me. I also work a lot with people’s needs. If have to do storage, I really think of what people want to store and how their houses look. I try to think clever and about what is good for a customer to have. When it comes to style, it is a mix of my own tastes and what I feel I am longing for. You know after this period when everything was really straight and white, already in 1999 I started to long for patterns and colours and now you see it everywhere. So there are these natural trends and cycles that I think every designer has built-in.

UPDATE: The Story of Sävö

Sävö

There is a story that Monika told me that never made it into the printed interview because we didn’t have space, but it is a great example of embracing the happy accident in design.

I had asked her about any disasters and she mentioned a wicker garden chair, Sävö, that she had designed. When she got to the factory in China to look at the prototype it was clear that it was way too big. What had looked good on paper was enormous in real-life. She asked them to send it to IKEA in Sweden in any case, rather nervous about what everyone would say.

When the package turned up it seemed strangely small. In order to save on shipping costs the factory had sent a half-size version. As it happened, everyone loved it and it went into production at that size.

This article originally appeared Desktop Issue 198, October 2004. ©2004 Niche Media Pty. Ltd. & Andy Polaine. It is not covered by Playpen’s general Creative Commons licence.

I have been promising that I would like to upload all of the articles I have written over the years so that they might be of use for people rather than them languishing on my hard drive, but I’ve been a bit slack at actually doing so because converting them to decent HTML and fixing it all up takes a bit of time.

But Regine’s post on Visualizing: tracing an aesthetics of data inspired me to find the article on Jonathan Harris that I wrote a while back in 2004.

So, the plan from here on in is to upload one article from the archives per week (which would mean about two year’s worth of posts!).

Man of the Hour – Jonathan Harris

If recent world events have taught us anything about the media it must surely be that it is relentless organism. We have seen live videophone feeds from the frontline in Iraq, the explosion of blogging and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feeds and recently mobile phone camera images on the front pages of newspapers. Use any RSS news reader and you will see stories being updated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With all this information flying around the Web, how can we make sense of it all and what would an hourly snapshot look like? That is exactly the question Jonathan Harris set out to answer with his 10×10 project. In an ironic twist the site held the number one slot on Blogdex for several days as news of its representation of news spread around the Web.

(Article continues…)

Originally from Vermont in the United States, Harris had a traditional Beaux-Arts training before studying computer science at Princeton University. As is often the case with those that have studied both the arts and computing, Harris developed an eye for how their intersection might shed light on the chaos of life. At Princeton he developed a program called Extra!Extra!that gathered similar news stories from over 75 sources around the world, so that you could read multiple accounts of the same story and glean a more balanced perspective. “It was a lot like Google News, one year before Google News,” he says. “In some ways, 10×10 was a natural extension of Extra!Extra!, but more about images and less about media bias.”

Throughout Harris’s earlier work, there is a strong emphasis on information design, from posters on world debt and health to re-interpreting cartography, many of which formed part of his work at the Princeton International Networks Archive.

“I’ve always found hidden patterns fascinating,” he explains. “As a little kid, I had this wonderful book called Trouble For Trumpets, by Peter Cross. It was filled with vastly intricate illustrations of this fictitious world, inhabited by a race of fuzzy orange creatures called Trumpets. Hiding in the pictures were a series of objects – faces gnarled into tree bark, banjos inside daffodils, mollusks in the moon. I would spend hours on end with this book, always convinced there were more hidden patterns to discover. Fast forward fifteen years to the present day, and I’m confronted with a whole new set of tools to escalate pattern finding to a global, real-time, hugely meaningful level.

“The Web has allowed us to look at humanity holistically, more or less, drawing conclusions about what matters in a given moment. A dataset like the Web is massively daunting, but if you can find meaningful niches to examine, it’s also massively inspiring. I’m intrigued by the idea of a collective unconscious, influencing us all in the same way, causing us to make the same choices as others, without knowing it.”

10×10 is, as most great ideas are, relatively simple in conception. It consists of a ten by ten grid of images, with an associated list of 100 words. The data is collected from several news sources (Reuters, the BBC and The New York Times) every hour. Harris’s code analyses the data and works out which are the most important words and pictures of the hour. Although Harris says that it “runs with no human intervention and makes no comment on news media bias”, the choice of (albeit well-respected) news sources does pass comment on the focus of the Western media because it quite clearly shows what news is decreed as important by those institutions. Harris plans to do a similar version including non-Western media or blog feeds in the future.

“It’s an ambitious idea and a controversial statement to claim to encapsulate an hour on planet earth,” he admits.“I expected to field a lot of heavy criticism. I was shocked and amazed by the overwhelmingly positive response. Within two days of its launch, over 90,000 unique visitors had seen 10×10, it was one of the top ten links on the entire web for several days, and I started receiving hundreds of emails a day from people all over the world, some of which were surprisingly emotional, as people were truly moved by what they saw in the grid.

Harris describes November 11th, the day Yasser Arafat died, as crystallizing 10×10′s true nature for him when almost the entire grid was filled with pictures of the Palestinian leader.He feels it is a little like being a reclusive photographer on a rooftop, snapping away at the hustle and bustle below, detached from the emotion of it all. “ When there’s a 9/11, or an Arafat death, 10×10 is there to record our reaction,” he says.

For something that has had such a wide resonance with the online community, Harris is not terribly inspired by the Web. “[Inspiration] usually comes from observing normal people in the world, and then thinking about how their experiences could be quantified and revealed, sometimes using the Web as a data source. My next project will be about Internet porn. It’s the most popular part of the Web, and one of the least often analysed.”

Another project, WordCount is an interactive visualization of the 88,000 most frequently used English words ranked and scaled in one long sentence (“Andy” is 3,352^nd beating “Desktop” at 5,459^th). Of course “the” is at the number one slot, but perhaps more revealing is QueryCount, which maps the most commonly searched for words within WordCount.

“I noticed that when people used WordCount, they rarely searched for common words like ‘the’,” explains Harris. “By being so common, such words render themselves uninteresting. People tended to search instead, first for their name, and then for sexual words. I was curious to see whether this tendency was only shared by my ribald friends, or whether it applied to all users of WordCount. To answer this question, I created QueryCount, [which] has now logged hundreds of thousands of WordCount queries, and the top 30 or so words read like the public television censorship list.” No prizes for guessing which word beginning with ‘F’ is at the number one spot (oddly enough “celebration” is the least searched for word).

We can expect to see more of Harris’s work as he is currently on a residency at Fabrica in Italy, Benetton’s Research and Development Communication Centre (Update: Of course he’s no longer there – AP). Several other projects can be found at Number 27 as well as at his production company’s site, Flaming Toast (Update: Flaming Toast was subsumed by Number 27 since this article was written – AP). As if that wasn’t enough, he is also co-founder of a designer breath mint company called Oral Fixation Mints, which incidentally, has a beautiful website, just in case all that bad news leaves a nasty taste in your mouth.

This article was originally published in Desktop Magazine, January Issue, 2005. There are also several other posts on Playpen about Jonathan’s Harris more recent works that you might be interested in.

©2004 Andy Polaine & Niche Media Pty. Ltd. This article is not covered by Playpen’s general Creative Commons Licence.

[tags]writing, archives, interviews, articles, work, jonathan harris, desktop[/tags]

I promised to put online the chat I had with magneticNorth’s Creative Director, Brendan Dawes, from when we were at Flash On the Beach 07.

I’ve been a bit tardy with it because I’ve been really busy, but finally you can enjoy our ramblings. You can listen to the Fireside Chat with Brendan Dawes in the player below or download it directly here.

Download audio file (brendandawesapolainechat.mp3)

The book of Brendan’s that we mentioned, Analogue In, Digital Out is highly recommended.

Following on from my last post about Hereafter, my podcast interview with Matt Clark from United Visual Artists is now online at Core77.

We chat about a range of UVA’s work, process and interactivity. Matt gives some great insights into working across disciplines and the exciting and emerging field of interactive installations much more tightly integrated into architecture rather than being a last-minute add-on, as well as using their skills and techniques to create stunning visuals for video. My thanks to Matt for his time – have a listen and let me know what you think.

In another interview I’m re-publishing online, I talk with Ben Reason from service design agency, Live|Work. He explains exactly what service design is, its roots in product and interactive design and the difference between service designers and consultants, as well as the important role it has to play in a sustainable future.

Live|Work at your service

As designers we are often brought in at the last point in the process for any new product development. Our job has usually been perceived as ‘making it look good’. That traditional role undervalues our skills enormously, because the design of a product, service or communication tends to be the first point of contact for a user. If that point of communication fails, the rest of the offering is useless regardless of the level of technological innovation or service. London-based, Live|Work plan to turn that relationship around. They lay claim to being the the first service innovation and design company in the world and to the term ‘service design’ a field whose origins are in product design and interaction design.

Most of us have had the experience of buying a nice, shiny new mobile phone with promises of greatness from the network only to find that when something goes wrong we’re put on hold for 45 minutes before being put through to somone with slightly less knowledge that a lobotomised monkey. As we move into a world (in the developed world at least) that is based in a knowledge economy as well as the need to deal with sustainability, products no longer compete on price or build quality, but on service and green credentials, and that’s where the growing area of service design comes into its own.

Live|Work was founded by the three partners, Chris Downs, Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason in 2001, and has now grown to fifteen people with offices in the UK, USA and Norway. Service design is an exciting emerging discipline because it resonates with the changes that the digital economy has wrought in terms of our experience and relationships to companies, products and even governments and the environment.

“We were unsatisfied with the internet consultancies and the fact that we would often be brought in too late on a project to affect the real issues of design – the overall value and desirability of the proposition as there was a Web assumption built in,” explains Reason. “We also felt we had been designing services either for big companies that didn’t know how to translate their business to the Web or for dotcom companies that needed everything – brand, communications, user experience – as well as a site.”

During our conversation Reason and I discussed the notion of the ‘networked mind’, people who had either grown up, or worked for a long time, with networked media and services. When you are used to thinking this way as a designer, you start looking at everything in the world with those eyes.

“We all started working with the Web and didn’t get indoctrinated by other media – you know how weird it is when a brilliant print designer can’t design a web site. The guys at the Royal College of Art felt that they were different to previous years as they were more network minded and open to mess, change, collaboration and the fact that you cannot control the media as the user is part of it – it doesn’t exist until they access it. There is a ‘launch and learn’ philosophy as opposed to the old product paradigm. This feeds directly into service thinking as services are never finished and delivered – they are accessed. In a way we bring some online processes to the off-line world.”

It turns out that this way of network thinking is invaluable for service design because taking into account all the parts of the experience and service is at the core of the process. “Chris and Lavrans as trained product guys who grew up with the web thought a lot about what that meant and had twigged to the word service at the RCA with a ‘the product is dead’ kind of statement,” says Reason.

“I was doing a Masters in responsibility and business looking at the social and ecological challenges to business and was inspired by [the book] Natural Capitalism which has a chapter called Service, Muda & Flow and describes the potential for services to create ecological efficiencies through better use of resources and better value provision to users. These two things gave us the pragmatic – this is what we do, and the value set – this is why we do it.”

The notion of ‘touchpoints’ – all the moments that a customer or user comes in contact with the service or brand – is well-known in marketing. The aim, usually, is to ensure the brand offering is consistent at every touchpoint. Part of the challenge is identifying all the touchpoints and the emotional relationships customers have with them. It is a realm that has often been the province of corporate consultants, who tend to be more focused on selling more ‘stuff’ to ‘consumers’ – in essence a mindset that is about profits not people. Of course management consultants offer change for their clients in other ways, but frequently this is about applying their particular methodology to every situation.

The skill a designer brings to a the process, particularly from product and interaction design backgrounds, is putting oneself into the minds and shoes of the person using what they are creating and re-thinking each situation in terms of its own uniqueness. It’s a bottom-up as opposed to a top-down approach, wholly appropriate for the contemporary world where companies are having to engage in a public conversation about their services, thanks to the blogosphere and a more knowledgeable consumer base.

“What we do that is different to the consultants is use design methods,” says Reason. By using insights as inspiration rather than factual market data, they look forward to new possibilities rather than simply looking back at past results. “We test experiences through prototype staging of services on a quick and fast basis and we specify services in blueprints that work from a user experience point of view, maintaining a user centred approach throughout. We do now work with analysts who can back up a design with a business case, as that is essential.”

The user-centred approach is gaining more and more value, according to Reason, with a lot of the conversation even at government levels being about delivery more than the brand. Or perhaps rather that delivery is the brand. “Design is relevant to service now because technologies affect the way they are delivered. Even the most human services, such as teaching, are now intermixed with technical elements such as interactive whiteboards, digital curricula,” he says. “We see network technologies doing to services what mechanical production did to products in the early 20th Century – and the response to that was the Bauhaus and US industrial design.”

Some areas are obvious, such as those with technological delivery platforms like the mobile phone company example. Many contemporary brands and products areallservice. When you sign up for a new mobile phone account the point of brand difference is not the phone – all telcos carry pretty much the same range – it is ultimately the service. Everything from how easy it is to talk to the people in the shop or on the phone, how easy it is to set up and change details online, how you are billed, and so forth. We might think we are buying a new product, but really we are buying a service.

Service Design is not limited to these kinds of industries, however, although it is the most obvious area. In fact Live|Work have just been working with a nail manufacturer to help them with innovation, proving that even non-technical industries are open to working in this way. Another past project was with the ONE North East Regional Development Agency in the UK. ONE provide services for people in rural communities, particularly the elderly. They were struggling with this and their public transport bill was the highest in the country.

Rather than recommending reduces services and redundancies (which might have been the traditional consultancy route), Live|Work tackled it as a service design problem taking in account a broader view. They moved up to Northumberland for a month and hung out with all the different people involved in the service, from healthcare representatives to the council chief executive to the private car owners who might have spare capacity.

This then allowed them to re-think transport as a ‘mobility market’ in its own right. Rather than simply put on new services that would be costly, they looked at spare capacity on community transport, from buses through to private vehicles, that were not being used all the time. The role of the new enterprise then becomes to ‘broker’ mobility by matching people with seats and working out a travelcard payment system. They reduced the costs of running the buses by half.

An important and urgent aspect to all of this is sustainability. It has been encouraging to see the tipping point of concern about climate change and sustainability that has happened in the last ten months or so. It is becoming the number one issue for companies and (most) governments worldwide, having moved on from being the province of green campaigners. Suddenly there has been an economic realisation that climate change will cost a lot of money if we don’t do anything about it and, crucially for all areas of design, that an increasingly important points of difference for brands are their sustainability and green credentials. ‘Greed is good’ is transforming into ‘green is good’.

Dealing with sustainability is all about thinking about the complete system, whether it is a cradle-to-cradle approach in product design, or open forums for customer peer support rather than call-centres that can’t grow any bigger. Part of the way of thinking is moving away from the notion of individual ownership, something that the ‘Web 2.0′ and open-source sharing cultures have shown the power of.

Live|Work applied this process to perhaps their most well-know project in the UK when they partnered with Streetcar. Streetcar is a pay-as-you-go car service, which challenges the idea of car ownership. Most of us don’t need a car all the time, but we do need one occasionally. If you think of cars as a service, there is massive spare capacity when all our cars are in car parks whilst we work or stay at home and the result is an enormous waste of resources.

Streetcar works by having VW Golfs parked in locations throughout the city (London, Brighton and Southampton so far), which you can hire for as little as an hour, sometimes less. You sign up for an account and receive a smart card that allows you to unlock the car, then put in a pin number and your usage is billed to your account.

When Live|Work first met Streetcar they already had the car club in place, but still had some way to go. For example, customers were still being signed up on the street, which is expensive and doesn’t make the process self-running. “We worked on all touchpoints from the call centre to print to software to web and worked on core processes such as joining and booking,” explains Reason.

Even the most functional elements, such as the in-car technology, were brought into line with the design and are pleasurable parts of the experience. The cars even have a place you can plug-in your iPod and a fuel card to use in garages that then gets added to your bill so you don’t even need to be carrying any money. “We did a full service usability audit and they have implemented all of the recommendations. On top of that Streetcar is making money and growing fast and is well researched – each Streetcar car takes six private cars off the road so there is a clear eco benefit,” he says.

This is only the beginning of what may well become the most essential design discipline of the current century bringing together, as it does, many other disciplines to serve a greater goal. From private energy generation markets (i.e., selling the power from your home wind turbine back to the grid) through to transport, manufacturing, interpersonal and visual communications, understanding that these things are interdependent and how to make them work is the biggest design brief of all.

This article first appeared in the January 2006 Issue of Desktop Magazine – it is not covered by Playpen’s Creative Commons licence, but Copyright 2006 Andy Polaine & Niche Media Pty. Ltd.

My first Core77 Broadcast with Nik Roope about Hulger has just gone online.

It should become one of a series of podcasts for Core77 and I’m really pleased because it’s one of my regular reads. Core77 started out (and still bills itself) as the “industrial design supersite”, though their remit has become somewhat wider, which I think is great personally.

So I thought I’d start with Hulger because it is product design, but with a very different philosophy to most gadgets.

I’ve known Nik for around 15 years. We were both members of Antirom and also used to do an interactive performance together with Joe Stephenson. Over the years we have had some really interesting conversations about emerging technologies and cultures and I’ve watched Hulger go from an amusing idea to being on its way towards being a design icon.

The interview also brings this philosophy to bear on his main job as one of the co-founders and creative directors of digital agency, Poke and it’s interesting to hear about how those two sides influence each other.

You can listen to the broadcast on the Core77 site and there is also a version on iTunes.

Let me know what you think and also who you would like to hear interviewed in the future.