The Digital Design Imperative

When President John F Kennedy so famously uttered the words “ask not what the design industry can do for you, ask what you can do for the design industry”, how could he have known they would be even more relevant today. Or was that Neville Brody?

I’ve always been of the opinion that if bad Photoshopping and typography doesn’t make your blood boil then you shouldn’t be a designer. If you can sit on the tube opposite an ad featuring poorly-kerned letters or view a Frankenstein comp of a ‘lead character when young’ movie prop photo and still not twitch, you are creatively dead inside.

Slink away now if you’re unmoved by either example, or hang around and get motivated.

The role of designer has changed beyond all recognition since leaving college (it’s moved fast, I’m not THAT old). What’s graphic design then? Well it used to be relatively easy to define when ‘digital’ wasn’t in play. Brand design, brochures, editorial layouts, posters, flyers and packaging for starters.

That list still exists but most brochures are now interactive, from PDF’s to iBooks with websites either replicating or delivering the same. Great editorial layouts are still essential within tablet magazines and ebooks as the eye is arrested by the skilful juxtaposition of stunning images and intelligent typography. Posters work on various levels, from the 48-sheet variety now on many digital Jumbotrons and underground screens, to our ever-increasing screen sizes offering the scale previously reserved for printed posters. Flyers (unless from the local pizza deliver business) are emails, Facebook posts or Tweets. We’re a long way from losing packaging from our high streets and out of town stores, but the online marketplace offers many more virtually packaged download opportunities.

So, who cares? Things change, technology advances and forces us to move with it. That’s one take, leading to the sloppy Photoshop, branding and layouts that make me want to punch inanimate objects (or designers). This attitude can be brought on by creatives who don’t live and breathe design and clients who believe our computers do all the work for us.

Snap out of it and appreciate the incredible opportunities to not only design great visual experiences, but now bring them to life as incredible user experiences. The graphic design label got scrapped, welcome to the wonderful new world of design where the brief to create postage stamps became the task to build iconic icons or miniaturised album covers and book jackets, where the fight to be seen and remembered provides the ultimate pixel-pushing challenge.

Wearable technology and Smart TV will provide your new playgrounds so start thinking about future opportunities to make a design difference.

Knock down the mental barriers and apply great design thinking to everything you do. Don’t assign different standards to different work or clients – we live in a world where a local butcher can have as much global visibility as Wallmart. The world’s eyes are on your kerning, your cut-outs and your colour palette.

Originally published in Computer Arts magazine in 2013. Hasn't aged a bit!

Future Narrative: No Joking Matter

The book is dead, long live the book! The film is dead, long live the film! Attention span is dead, long live social! I could go on, but no genre would be dead and no new platform is without its merits.

I watched the movie ‘Joker’ at the cinema last month. Yes, the cinema. Another one of those outdated platforms that apparently no one considers any more. The two dimensional film, shown in a darkened room with zero distraction or interaction was a masterpiece of storytelling. I respected the creative content – written and directed by Todd Phillips, memorably performed by the film’s sole lead – Joaquin Phoenix, and there was no denying the impact of the powerful cinematography and the dark oppressive soundtrack. But I didn’t really enjoy it.

And that’s my choice, it’s everyone’s choice. I love the beauty of narrative, the long winding journey it can take each and every one of us on. No matter how a film, TV series, book or play is presented, they are open to personal interpretation and what you as an individual take away from them – like art, because that’s what they are. A living, breathing art form.

Some have said Joker is not a superhero movie. I beg to differ, because it features Batman’s nemesis – The Joker – and Batman himself, albeit in the pre-superhero guise of a young Bruce Wayne. Many have insisted the film is about mental health. Yes, it tackles this issue by default because the central character is deeply psychologically disturbed – but he’s hardly the poster boy for mental health awareness. Unless everyone currently jumping on this particular bandwagon is suggesting individuals with ‘issues’ end up like Arthur Fleck – a delusional gun-toting, knife-wielding homicidal maniac?

If cinema isn’t broken, how do we approach future narrative? In 2018 the global box office was worth over $40 Billion and has increased year-on-year for over a decade. It shows no signs of stalling, with ‘Avengers: Endgame’ taking $2.8 billion in cinemas – a new all-time high. Is ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ set to round off the decade with the highest earnings ever?

This leaves future platforms with a tough fight on their hands when trying to convince marketing teams to invest their money in untried and untested technology. When you include home entertainment revenue, the global film industry is worth an additional $100 billion, so audiences are spending a lot of money viewing content on other devices too.

This figure naturally features TV sets, smartphones and tablets. For future audiences this will undoubtedly include VR headsets, AR glasses and autonomous vehicles.

The thinking behind the latter is illustrated by Renault’s 2017 acquisition of a 40% stake in the Pedriel Group, the publishing house that produces the weekly business magazine ‘Challenges’. They clearly recognise the future potential for published content within self-driven mobility. If we’re not absorbing written or audio material, the car interior will offer a multitude of digital surfaces to begin, continue or conclude the narrative of film and TV viewing. Are you all ready to Netflix and chill as your car makes all the decisions for you?

However, future platforms aren’t simply there to provide the same type of material but on a different device. They will inevitably offer this, but where they excel is in adding value. In its simplest terms, a smartphone can provide second screen conversation – leveraged by shows such as BBC’s ‘The Apprentice’ or ITV’s ‘Love Island’ and ‘I’m A Celebrity’ across social channels to drive conversation and generate further awareness and reach.

Others championing new storytelling are Nesta with their ‘Alternarratives’ challenge and Ford’s Developer Programme, looking to innovate the future of the car with ‘Music That Moves You’ in partnership with Capitol Records – leading to some amazing potential for storytelling around music artists and genres.

Many Futurologists or Tech Pundits will talk the talk without ever having walked the walk. I have been fortunate to push boundaries my whole career and with some amazing clients including Warner Music Group, Disney, Apple, BBC, Scientific American, Smithsonian Enterprises, Renault, Pottermore, Guinness World Records and Mark Staufer’s ‘The Numinous Place’. Together we have explored some of the possibilities for future narrative. There are many more to come.

All new forms of digital and physical storytelling should be explored as we don’t yet know where they will lead us. The impact of horror in a VR headset. The ability to bring elements of a story to life seemingly in the world around us through AR. To use Artificial Intelligence to extend and personalise narrative. All have enormous potential for a diverse cross-section of audiences, but they don’t offer replacements, they provide depth, understanding and new creative challenges.

I’ve said many times before, if the opinion that all narrative evolves into something else held water, this would have left books, radio and theatre dead long ago. They’re far from that. In a world of digital depth and diversity – they’re actually flourishing because they bring the focus back to great storytelling.

Without that story and an engaging narrative we would live in a world of meaningless words swirling past us in a fleeting moment, we have Facebook for that.

Despite what you may have been told, the future of narrative isn’t about the technology that surrounds us, it is about the thing right at the centre of everything – the human. If you never lose that focus, you’ll never lose your audience.

In the Blink of an i

Life is full of moments: good, bad, happy, sad. Full of colour and breadth or detail and depth. We have a personal and unbreakable connection with a memory but we make our own judgement of an image. Thanks to the phone camera in our pockets, we are all photographers and this makes us individually responsible for capturing the most incredible moments.

I used to be a dedicated SLR photographer. Having pursued an education in photography (if not a career), I had progressed from several film-based SLR’s to the digital variety. I loved the feel of a full-sized camera, the perceived quality and the flexibility the lens selection and manual controls offered.

The reality was, my eldest daughter Olivia began life with a set of ‘perfect’ photos. I would painstakingly photoshop food from her face and unwanted toys, pieces of furniture or poorly shaped friends and family from my photos – just to aid composition!

By the time my other daughter Hattie arrived on the scene, I had ditched the cumbersome D-SLR and replaced the full digital darkroom with the iPhone in my pocket.

This was a revelation.

I moved from the selection of perfection, to a lifetime of moments. Rather than hoping to capture something whenever I had my camera, I would take 100 casual shots for one visual memory – and that is why I’ll never turn back.

I find being able to photograph the unexpected a far greater reward than a staged set piece. You know when a smile is real, because the rest of the face wasn’t expecting it.

That doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop being a ‘proper’ photographer at heart, or a designer. I love to create, so the moments I capture are the ones I’d like to see – and I have a critical eye. Most shots are edited in Snapseed or Black and many never reach a public audience.

It has never been easier to share great photography with the world. That doesn’t mean I haven’t got myself into trouble trying to do just this during my world travels. I was detained at gunpoint in Beirut for snapping architectural photos where I shouldn’t, I ventured into the most dangerous parts of Moscow to capture street lighting and walked back out – thanks to ignorance rather than travel awareness and I have taken risks for great automotive shots by hanging out of a few car windows, off-roading a Bentley GT and many more.

Smartphone technology moves on every year, but I still use an iPhone 7 Plus. The phone isn’t slow, the battery life is acceptable, and the camera is great. Do I need a new phone? No. Would I like one? I’m an Apple fan, so of course.

Will an iPhone 11 Pro make me a better photographer? Absolutely not. It will deliver greater detail and perform better under lower light conditions. But a phone doesn’t make a moment…

…we do.

You can find all my photo highlights on Instagram if you’d like to follow the journey.

Our Xtended Futures: The Reality of Reality

The future promises a world serviced by robots and AI personal assistants, self-driving cars and headsets offering virtual and augmented experiences as far as the eye can see. But who’s telling the story and does this narrative even begin to consider the greatest and most important hurdle in the quest for technological advancement – human beings?

No.

Actually, that’s probably not the level of detail you were looking for. I’ll provide a few examples.

I don’t wear glasses – except for reading (I’m wearing them right now) but I would prefer not to because when in face-to-face conversation, or simply enjoying the environment around me, I make a point of breaking down as many barriers as possible between reality and the virtual or augmented world.

This may seem at odds with the barriers I’ve pushed and the research I’ve carried out in both VR and AR (and ultimately XR) for the past 6 years but I never simply talk about technology for the sake of it. I always think about the consequence of its existence – not just the facts, but how and, most importantly, why it will feature in our lives.

Every second counts so we should make that precious time feel as comfortable as possible. To achieve this, the story behind why we need something or would wish to use it is every bit as essential as reliability, sustainability and security.

At their recent OC6 developer conference, FaceBook confirmed it was planning to build AR glasses and map the world. Even if the glasses are delivered in the sleekest designer frames, I still don’t wear glasses AND I have no wish to share my every move with FaceBook – including my every view!

Virtual Reality is another amazing creative platform with immense potential. Neither VR nor AR are new technologies. They have both been with us for decades in one form or another, but the platforms and devices are making the greatest impact in this current era of digital realities.

Of course, content is king and the quality and experience must be extraordinary in order to entice an audience back again and again or encourage others to make the effort to do so.

And therein lies another problem. We live in a society that is time-poor and effort-deficient. To convince consumers to adopt emerging technologies and then have brands (or Mark Zuckerberg) give the reasons we’ll use them in the future and how they believe they will fit into everyone’s lives takes a huge leap of faith and a great deal of inconvenience and discomfort.

I spent 48 hours in VR a couple of years ago and the combination of virtual and physical experiences was incredible for research, inspiration and visual reference. It was however extremely uncomfortable and I wouldn’t encourage anyone else to undertake this.

Of course, immersion for that length of time isn’t reflective of regular device usage and we intentionally took things to extremes. Dial this back and consider a real human in a real environment (shopping mall, expo, arcade, training room, school, etc) and you’ll still find a level of discomfort unacceptable to many – and an end result that isn’t great for your physical appearance.

And I refer to VR Hair. This is a very real thing – a direct result of a very virtual experience.

VR Hair is something I’ve spoken about to clients and audiences since 2016 and it still isn’t recognised as a potential roadblock to consumers. It’s not an issue for enterprise and training because that’s a closed environment. It is a very different matter for consumers.

I tested an incredible experience with Renault two years ago where I drove, then was driven by their autonomous SYMBIOZ electric concept car. When I transferred control to the car, I was handed an Oculus Rift headset featuring software developed by Ubisoft. The VR content displayed an identical vehicle interior, followed by scenes outside the windows that transformed from the existing road network to a future smart city, a dramatic eclipse, then the car dropped away as my viewpoint rose and I continued my journey in the sky – every bit the flying car of the future!

Holoride now offers a similar experience as part of its collaboration with various auto manufacturers – from Audi to Porsche to Ford. This combination of tech, platform and content illustrates the potential for in-car entertainment in our self-driven future to great effect.

However, at this point everyone emerges from the car with VR Hair. A genuine issue for anyone heading to a meeting, journeying to a night out, travelling to a shopping destination. Or anything that involves meeting other human beings upon exiting the vehicle.

When focusing purely on the technology already available to us or planned for production, the assumed development route is similar for both VR and AR:

Increasingly powerful headsets
Cutting the cord and delivering wireless free-roaming (6DoF) experiences
Familiar, user-friendly platforms
More impressive passive and interactive content

The story being told about our technological future includes greater duration and deeper immersion for VR experiences (as per Ready Player One) and the Augmented future paints a picture of a global audience wearing designer glasses, consuming vast quantities of information and targeted advertising material.

And then the reality of reality kicks in. If at any stage VR Hair is an issue (ie, you have hair and plan for anyone else to see it) or if you don’t wear glasses and have no wish to do so in the new Augmented era, then the predetermined technological roadmap falls over.

If you currently run any kind of experiential activity involving VR headsets – be that in-store or in-car – it is essential you offer an area for your participants to rearrange themselves and be pampered before sending them back into the ‘real’ world with the lasting memory of your brand. It should be about the content, not the inconvenience.

VR headsets will become lighter and thinner, but they’ll still need a big enough screen to offer wide field of vision – and until further notice, they’ll ruin your hair. AR glasses will become slimmer, lighter and (hopefully) cooler, but they’ll still be glasses until they evolve into contact lenses – and I’m not sticking them I’m my eyes either.

I would however implant the tech directly inside my head and beam the full visually immersive experience to my optic and auditory nerves. I spoke about ‘internalising’ tech at Futurefest in 2016 and it’s this bizarre time jump that delivers the progress everyone is talking about, without the physical or psychological barriers of VR and AR headsets.

Elon Musk’s recent startup, Neuralink is now hoping to develop the technology to make this happen – but it’s a huge step for most people to make when trusting technology inside the human body. This is akin to human evolution and not a comfortable conversation, but one that should be happening. Now.

In the same keynote, I also predicted Trump’s election win and Elon Musk as the future US President. There’s time for Elon’s campaign to kick off, but he still has work to do inventing the future and I intend to be there, telling the right story about the incredible potential for various realities, whist avoiding AR glasses and VR Hair along the way.