Please contact me if you have any questions.

Notes and references from the talk. Comments [in brackets] were planned but not made in the presentation. These links have been checked, but I can’t guarantee that they will continue to be correct.

Introduction

Founder of the AIGA Experience Design group in London and actively involved in the US group. Events are monthly. Please join us if you are in London.

Why is imagery important?

Humans are visual creatures and can take in some kinds of information better as pictures than words. We are good at seeing differences, and seeing patterns.

Images cross culture and language better than words, though images don’t always mean the same in each culture.

Our ability to transmit images has improved exponentially over the last century, from photography to the television, the fax to the Web.

Business and often government are more focused on image, not just because images are easier to communicate but because business are less innovative, and governments have fewer substantive policies.

With the development of the Web it is easier than ever to use images for communication.

I won’t discuss the construction and characteristics of images as I don’t have time, and students at the University will have discussed these issues one their courses.

Imagery in the networked age

But we are still focused on text

The Web has been and is the focused of our access to the network. The constraints of the personal computer-based Web browser, and of bandwidth, have lead us to use text over image.

Image: print newspaper TheGuardianPaper.jpg

Image: online equivalent TheGuardianOnline.jpg

Image: EMOL (El Mercurio Online) ElMercurioHomePage.jpg

For some good reasons

The push to the Web has for good reasons been focused more on practical activities such as data retrieval and commerce, hence more focused on text than image.

Image: Thomson Financial Web-based interface to market information, designed by Edwards Churcher (London) thomson_01.gif [Product documented at SurfaceMap site.]

Leading to a focus on imagery appropriate to the medium

Where imagery is used it is often iconographic or abstract illustration.

Image: Opening screen for MSN I, the first version of the Microsoft Network which was launched with Microsoft Windows 95, and was designed by Studio Archetype in San Francisco, CA MSN.jpg

Image: 5k.org competition to create online art pieces that are under 5k in size. See 82 and 83. 5kGalleryIris1.jpg and 5kGalleryIris2.jpg

Image: Web site for the Progress Educational Trust charity (UK) ProgressHomePageImage.jpg

Image: use of illustration in Slate magazine SlateIllustration.jpg

Image: use of cartoon images in Egg financial services Web site EggBankingCartoon.jpg

Image: Boo.com launch home page using flat, 60s imagery Boo_launch_homepage.jpg

Image: Wired News use of icons

Or only possible in it

The Web best supports time-based imagery (video), interactive imagery (maps, diagrams, etc), and information visualisation.

Image: BMW Films showcases short films commissioned by BMW from leading creatives BMW_FilmsHome.jpg

Image: The Microsoft Timeline showing the history of computing and of Microsoft TheMicrosoftTimeline.jpg

Image: TextArc used to visualise the text of The Communist Manifesto TextArcCommManifesto.jpg

And also allows for images to be distributed

See Showstudio, which is a platform for distributing work that could be creating using analogue tools (photography, film) and for digital and networked creativity (documentary of fashion shows using cellphone cameras).

Image: Showstudio ShowStudioSelection.jpg

But developments will allow new possibilities

As we move away from the networked personal computer to networked environments and more flexible displays the use of rich imagery will be more viable.

Image: Prada store, New York where radio-tagged cloth place in a booth present themselves on a digital mannequin IDEO_PradaCloset.jpg

Image: Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment, New York Penn2.jpg and Penn1.jpg
(200-foot long by 40-foot high media wall for the main concourse – a dynamic display of information including train schedules, news, financial data, weather and advertising).

And to create desire

[We will also need to learn to use rich imagery to produce networked products and services that are pleasurable and desirable, as well as useful and usable.]

And facilitate understanding

This will include information visualisation and information mapping.

Image: MIT Media Lab research Ben Fry’s project on Genomic Cartography haplotypes-final-13.jpg

Image: AT&T Information Visualization Research Group, Florham Park, NJ Swift 3D AT&T_SWIFT-3D.tif

Image: Walrus – Gallery: Visualization & Navigation Round-Trip Time Measurements (Showing timings for Internet ‘pings’, with 63,631 nodes and 63,630 links. A description of this data is available.) lar-gr-l-1.png and a-root-rtt-05-key.png

Image: the Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg (MWMW) The Shape of Song visualizing repetition in music, in this case Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’ like_a_prayer.gif

Image: A visualisation of the NSFNET element of the Internet 1457.cox.lg.gif (Undertaken by Donna Cox and Robert Patterson of the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in 1992.)

The impact of new technologies on visual communication.

More personalised and individualised

As our ‘voyages through information’ are more personalised and individualised we experience a less homogenous visual culture. This is true with the Web and also with television.

Image: TiVo screen TiVoScreenshotWithRemote.GIF

We are image generators

We are becoming more involved in image generation, using digital cameras and cellphone cameras, and we are more interested in sharing these images.

Image: picture sharing with a cellphone VodafoneLive.jpg

Image: photography sharing site such as Apple’s Mac.com Chile2003PhotoSharing.jpg

Reverse impact on print

Imagery has to an extent adopted the aesthetics of operating systems and the Web, particularly interface elements, pixelation, the use of flat colour, complex layouts, and blurring.

Image: adverts for BMW and Unisys UnisysAdUsingMenuElements.jpg and BMW_AdUsingScreenElements.jpg.

It has also experimented with the nature of computing.

Image: Peter Saville waste painting from Showstudio PeterSavilleWastePainting.jpg
(“[F]eeding digital images through an infinite number of Photoshop filters to create new compositions of colour, shape and light; images disintegrate into fragments of its past life just as the images we see everyday in print melt into a blur of memory”)

[There are no established models for communicating organisational images (or brands) online and for this and other reasons we are less exposed to corporate messages.]

Impact of technologies on creativeness or their effectiveness in overuse

As musician David Byrne has noted, restrictions “can even be a spur to creativity”, and Charles Eames argued that “design depends largely on constraints”. Technology doesn’t restrict creativity, it is a given within which it works.

Image: David Byrne DavidByrne.jpg

Image: Charles Eames CharlesAndRayEames.jpg

It is important that designers understand how a technology works, and how people use a technology. It is also important that they understand how to work with engineers, and what are the manufacturing, distribution, support and maintenance aspects of a technology.

Image: MIT Media Lab professor John Maeda and independent digital artist Josh Davis joshdavis.jpg and JohnMaeda.gif

Image: Shiseido image gamekurulayered.tif
(Created for the Japanese beauty and fashion company Shiseido and based on the game of strategy and vertigo. “When a path travelled through interactive space is not in a planned horizontal or vertical motion, there can be a sense of thrill similar to riding a rollercoaster”, writes Maeda.)

Image: Danny Brown Flowers on play/create DannyBrownFlowers.jpg

To the extent that designers focus on technology they may be considered to be artists [as in the case of Danny Brown] rather than designers. Or they may not be very good designers: not good at understanding and working with constraints, or at accommodating human needs and requirements.

The importance of the idea

Increasingly, user-centred design has become ‘following-the-user’ design. While design should be human-centred this does not mean that you can create a good design simply by asking people what they want or iteratively modifying existing products based on (usability) testing.

Image: IDEO conducting user-based research in a lab IDEOVideoObservation2.jpg

We need to know when to innovate and when to iteratively improve. But we must trust our skill and experience and not assume that people always know what is best for them.

Quotes: Lord Reith [the most important director of the British Broadcasting Corporation], who when asked whether he was going to give the people what they wanted, replied: “No. Something better than that”. (Cited in the Guardian, May 28, 2000.)

Designers and social activism

[We have observed that images may tend to be used to sell products while not really innovating in their design or character, or to sell products which appear to have little use, or perhaps to be harmful. Many designers have reacted against this.]

What are designers’ responsibilities to their clients and the people who use their products?

The design process mediates between client objectives, user needs and desires, technology possibility, and project and environmental constraints.

Image: from the Adbusters magazine revival of the First Things First manifesto AdbustersFtF_Promo1.jpg AdbustersFtF_Promo2.jpg AdbustersFtF_Promo4.jpg AdbustersFtF_Promo3.jpg

The design challenge is to be innovative solving problem while mediating these fixed points. To ignore or subvert the client undermines trust and patronises users. If you ignore users you won’t produce anything useful. [Failing to understand technology means yours solution may not be as innovative as it could be, or may not work at all.]

Image: FirstThingsFirstLogo.jpg

The most useful contribution designers can make to the world is to be good designers, who are well informed, able to collaborate and communicate, and engage with their fellow citizens.

Social engineering

Should designers seek to satisfy people’s needs and desires, or to change them?

In recent years the debate about the role of people in the design process has moved away from unequivocal satisfaction of their needs and desires towards questioning their legitimacy.

This has arisen from a greater concern with sustainability and the environment, and perceptions of safety and risk. People are now considered unworthy if they eat the wrong food, smoke, drive an off-road car in the city, or travel on low cost airlines.

Image: McDonald’s McNifia Chile mcnifica_chile.jpg

Image: Lucky Strike cigarette box LuckyStrikeAd.jpg (designed by Raymond Loewy)

Image: Ford Escape sports utility vehicle FordEscapeInTown.jpg

Image: low cost airline easyJet aeroplane Easyjet.jpg

Questions

Questions asked after my talk and during the final panel, with my answers, can be made available on request.