Method.com

About 11 months ago, I joined Method, a brand experience firm with a strong focus on design and technology that has built an excellent reputation over the last 10 years of delivering sometimes beautiful, sometimes innovative print, web, and other interactive projects for a wide-ranging client base. As I mentioned a few posts back, Method has launched our new website:

www.method.com

Check it out, and tell us what you think!

Design and the Elastic Mind

NOTE: In a few days, I'll announce the launch of our new www.method.com website. As part of the modern condition (and an up-to-date approach to extending our brand), we've got a corporate blog. Some of my thinking will be shifted there. I'll try to cross-post when appropriate. The following post is appropriate.

On Saturday, I took a trip up to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The purpose of my visit was primarily to see the "Colour Chart" exhibit, although I also went with every intention of spending a good bit of time in the "Design and the Elastic Mind Exhibit." Both exhibits were entirely worthwhile, so if you are in New York before May 12th, check them out. But what was remarkable, particularly in comparison to the extremely accessible Color Chart exhibit, was how complete the enthrallment of the capacity crowd streaming through the Design exhibit.

After taking an hour to wander through the exhibit, I took another 45 minutes to simply people watch, to observe how the Saturday afternoon tourist crowd engaged with the various pieces in the show. It was an amazing spectacle, as young and old, bearded and bespectacled, distinctly European and distinctly New Jersey-an were all poring over the tiny and numerous explanations of each installation, leaning over exhibit tables and pressing their faces up against cases to get closer looks at objects, and touching things that they were instructed clearly not to touch. Why? Not because the design objects were immediately and obviously cool. Many of them, in fact, were not obviously cool. They were not shiny metal things, but rather, took a bit of study and consideration to appreciate the value of the object itself..

What quickly became clear was that so much of the crowd was completely taken by the explanations of the design objects -- engaged with the thinking and leaps of imagination that informed the design, as documented in the attached descriptions, or as intuited by the curious museum-goers. As much as the objects themselves, people found delight in unraveling or having explained the smarts that went into making them. The product of design wasn't the only cool thing. Design was the cool thing, too.

So what? Well, working in a design firm, I think that one of the unique challenges we face is to find ways to engage the audiences of our design more deeply in our process. For both the consumers of the experiences we build and for our clients, part of the value that we can add (and part of the delight that we can stimulate) is by helping our audiences appreciate the thinking behind our design. This may be by actually including them in our process, or it might be by designing products and experiences that, in addition to being elegant and valuable, are themselves articulate about the analysis or inspiration or intuition from which they sprung.

The UX Fund: Quantifying the Value of User Experience

The ROI case for why a company should invest in design, particularly user-centric design, beyond simply market research, is often hard to make in terms of hard, bottom-line numbers. Often, the business sponsors or owners of projects either just believe in or don't believe in the importance of investing in design as a fundamental part of the development of products, services, and interfaces with customers. With this context, PG at work sends around a very interesting experiment in trying to quantify the value of user experience-focused design, by the design firm Teehan + Lax.

In brief:

The UX Fund was created to test our belief that companies who deliver a great user experience will see it reflected in their stock price. On November 1, 2006 we invested $50,000 in 10 companies we felt:
1. Demonstrated care in the design of their products and Web site
2. Has a history of innovation
3. Inspired loyalty in their customer base
4. Doing business with them was a positive experience

Obviously, this financial portfolio-based approach to trying to value a nebulous variable has precedents and is subject to many, many caveats. That said, the overall performance of the portfolio was compelling (certainly from an investment point of view), although Teehan+Lax' commentary indicates a certain definite caution in extrapolating too far.

One major observation that jumps out is how much more strongly those companies performed that have product design, user experience, or brand experience as central to their value (Apple, EA, Nike, Yahoo) when compared to those businesses (Target, Progressive, JetBlue) where design and brand may be important, but at the end of the day, there is a core business (retail, insurance, an airline) that has to be run, with management and competitive stresses that far exceed the influence of design.

Another factor may be the cycle-time for bringing design ideas to market, which is (or should be) much shorter for software, internet, and even consumer goods products, when compared to service industries and industries with deep investments in physical capital which are less subject to change.

Green Monsters

Flipping through a magazine the other evening, I stopped on a two page advertising spread by Chevron entitled "Chevron Presents: Energyville." Billed as an "energy game," Chevron asks "This is your city. How will you power it? How do we meet growing global demand? What new kinds of fuels and power sources should we develop? And how do we safeguard the environment at the same time?" The reader is then directed to play the game, hosted at the website www.willyoujoin.com.

Now, it is easy to be dismissive of the efforts of massive energy companies to engage in fundamentally changing the dynamics of our energy economy. Their generally upbeat and eco-friendly advertising campaigns, which cheerily suggest that we've got a problem, but, hey, together we can fix it are a little to, well, cheery and upbeat. And I have no illusions that the extremely rich and extremely powerful people who run these companies are concerned as much about tackling global sustainability problems as they are about finding new markets in which to create better margins (after all, when they send the lucky one percent into space after we've despoiled this lovely planet, no doubt the heads of oil companies and their antecedents will be first in line at the launching pad).

But it can't be denied that each and every energy company, whether on the exploration/ production-side or the delivery-side, has a distinct strategic interest in understanding the dynamics of energy in coming years, influencing the market to align with the investments in technology that they are making, and innovating more efficient (and, consequently more eco-friendly, one would hope) solutions to our collective energy needs. Nor can it be denied that the actors most readily positioned to dramatically influence our energy economies are the energy companies themselves. And outside a small coterie of academics and advocacy groups, no one has been forced to think quite so deeply as the energy companies.

Which all sounds like a resounding defense of the Goliaths! Not meant to be. But what has caught my interest is the effort made, in advertising and public relations, at least, by energy companies to engage the public in a dialogue about our energy future. And with the resources available to them, energy companies have been able to provide slicker tools to help the conversation move forward, and often are doing quite a good job at putting out worthwhile information and analyses. Take the aforementioned game at www.willyoujoinus.com, BP's Carbon Footprint Calculator or Statistical Review of World Energy site, or ConEd's more humble, but useful campaign to educate consumers on household energy conservation tips.

Are my fundamental concerns about energy consumption allayed? No. Do I think that these resources are actually useful in furthering questions about looming energy problems into our consumer consciousness? Yes.

The New, New Thing by Michael Lewis

I am a fan of Michael Lewis the writer, from Liar's Poker and Moneyball and the occasional essay. I am a fan because stylistically, he is a simple, direct writer, observant and funny. But I am more a fan because thematically, Lewis engages topics like work, business culture, and sports, the substance of both life and dreams for so many people, myself included, and renders them with clarity, honesty, intelligence, and humor. Writing about work and business culture, Lewis treats it not just as a diminishing, soul-crushing exercise foisted upon us, but as occupation, something we do, and some of us, some times, with tenacity, zeal, and inspiration. He conveys jobs and entire industries truly as livelihoods, pulsing, consuming, informed by both biography and history. But with perspective throughout, chronicling his subject's mania with an offset balance of dry humor and an eye for the absurd.

That said, The New New Thing was an entertaining read, brisk, but not particularly insightful. Ostensibly chronicling the culture of entrepreneurship that drove the growth of Silicon Valley from the late 1970s through to the end of the 1990s, The New New Thing is basically a character study of Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape adorned with some half-drawn conclusions about character of entrepreneurship that was the spirit of the times. Jim Clark, as portrayed by Lewis, is an immensely interesting personality, and as much as business in the Valley is driven by cults of personality, I suppose it makes sense to latch on to that as anything else. It is disappointing, however that Lewis is not able to draw much by way of insight into what makes Silicon valley tick as a hot-bed of innovation, beyond a few obvious sentiments like technology is a young man's game, timing is everything, and California is a place where you can re-invent yourself.

I will transcribe one passage that I find modestly interesting:

[B]ack in 1921 [Thorstein] Veblen had predicted that engineers would one day rule in the U.S. economy. He argued that since the economy was premised on technology and the engineers were the only ones who actually understood how the technology worked, they would inevitably use their superior knowledge to seize power from the financiers and captains of industry who wound up on top at the end of the first round of the Industrial Revolution. After all, the engineers only needed to refuse to fix anything, and modern industry would grind to a halt. Veblen rejoiced at this prospect. He didn’t much care for financiers and captains. He thought they were parasites.
When I told Clark about Veblen, he did a good imitation of a man who was bored out of his skull. When he didn’t ant to seem too interested, he pretended he wasn’t paying attention. Now, his head splitting, he was particularly keen on the idea of the engineer grabbing power from the financier. “That’s happening right now,” he said. “Right here. In the Valley. The power is shifting to the engineers, who create the companies.”
That, Clark thought, was only as it should be.

Certainly a nice sentiment. Truer than before. yes. True, absolutely? Not yet. Thoughts?