Matthew T Grant

Minh Nguyen, a Southern California-based web designer currently working for Sony Electronics, has been represented by our San Diego office for a little over a year.

Interestingly enough, his entrance into the Aquent world was fairly coincidental. “A friend of mine was looking for work and I told them about Aquent,” he tells me. “I was walking them through the application process by setting up a profile of my own. I didn’t think much about it but pretty soon someone from Aquent contacted me.”

Minh got into graphic design at an early age. As he puts it, “I owe it to my family. My grandfather taught me how to draw when I was 3. My mom taught me how to color inside the lines when I was 5. My dad taught me HTML and introduced me to Photoshop when I was 14.” He was doing web-design casually as a teenager, but by the time he got into college realized he had a passion for it.

Having a hard time getting a full-time design job after graduation, he started his own studio with some friends. Although the studio did fairly well – garnering clients from Jack in the Box to the Surf Rider Foundation – he decided that he was more interested in doing design work than running a business. He turned to Aquent to get back into design and eventually found a permanent position through us.

Since running one’s own studio is a choice that many designers make and even more consider, I asked Minh what he learned from his experience doing so. Here’s what he told me:

1. Don’t just take any job you get, do things for free, or do things on the cheap.

Not only does this lower the bar for other people working in the field, the sites usually aren’t that great, and the client will ultimately be dissatisfied.

I’m a latecomer and a slow learner.

My thoughts on design thinking began as a reaction to something written by Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path. Little did I know as I was penning my post entitled, “Thinking about ‘Design Thinking,'” that that self-same Dan Saffer had written a post with the exact same title almost exactly two years ago! That article includes a helpful stab at defining the characteristics of design thinking, “if there is such a thing,” as he wrote way back then.

One characteristic is “Ideation and Prototyping” – “The way we find … solutions is through brainstorming and then, importantly, building models to test the solutions out.” Actually making things to see if they work or solve the problem at hand is key to designing anything – hence his lament as he sees design schools move to an overly conceptual notion of design thinking, one that neglects craft and making and, ultimately, produces designers that can’t.

Oddly enough, I found Saffer’s earlier post in a rather roundabout fashion. The first event in this twisted chain came in the form of an email from David Armano, whom I had name-checked in my previous post. He pointed me to a post on his blog concerning the evolution of creativity in a decidedly inter-disciplinary and multi-dimensional direction. As an example of someone who embodies this emergent creativity, Armano referred to the site of one Zachary Jean Paradis, who graduated from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

What did I find on Mr. Paradis’ blog? You guessed it, a long, thoughtful essay on none other than “Design Thinking.” In fact, it was via this essay that I “discovered” Mr. Saffer’s earlier thoughts and my own intellectual tardiness.

Before I leave the topic of design thinking and return once again to more familiar ground, like Second Life, I will mention what I found most illuminating about Paradis’ perspective. First, he conceives of design thinking as an approach to “developing new offerings” which should not, to Mr. Saffer’s point, be equated with “professional design as it is taught.”

Secondly, because this approach is “purposeful,” he sees it as inherently integrative. He writes, “When developing some new offering with a team, members share the common goal of producing something contextually relevant.” The complexity of product/offering development, and the fact that the process must result in something that works in the world and meets definable needs of end-users/consumers, imposes the dual need for multiple disciplinary perspectives and their successful integration.

Finally, and as he says, “most importantly,” design thinking provides guidelines for collaborative work rather than prescribing a specific process for executing it. This kind of collaboration requires individuals who possess “a certain breadth and depth of knowledge of complementary disciplines,” precisely the new kind of “Creative” David Armano describes on his blog. Paradis ends his essay by insisting that, “… organizations must begin to recognize that moderately deep breadth is as important if not more so than deep specialization in addressing complex problems.”

To bring things more or less full circle, I think it bears stating that only by doing work on a series of increasingly complex and diverse projects, and not through schooling of any sort, can one acquire this “moderately deep breadth.”

Image Courtesy of dbostrom.

As if it weren’t strange enough that the mighty and mysterious Web would bombard my subconscious with secret messages about “design thinking” so as to get me to write about it, today Bernard is blogging about the design approach of BMW’s Chris Bangle and, guess what? Mr. Bernard is very taken with the fact that when designing cars, Bangle focuses on “the doing.” He writes, “His teams get outside to look at the car, they craft and sculpt designs with their hands. They are constantly on the lookout for new ways that they can make things, they spend as much time thinking about not the actual creation but the TOOLS they use to create with too.”

That is, a critical component of true “design thinking” as practiced by a successful designer like Bangle and admired by an evangelizing software designer like Bernard is “doing” – getting your hands dirty, working with tools, making things. But that was, like, exactly the point I was “making” in my initial post on “design thinking”!!!

Is the Web reading my mind?

More frighteningly, is the Web writing my mind?

I subscribe to the feed from Adaptive Path’s blog because, as they say here in Boston, the people who work there are “wicked smaht.” As a result, and thanks to the magic of RSS feedings, I spotted this impassioned plea from one of the Adaptive Pathers, Dan Saffer, for design schools to start teaching design again.

Saffer’s main complaint is that design schools have moved towards a curriculum centered around “design thinking” and away from a well-rounded, practical education focused on “thinking and making and doing.” In his view, the real work of design consists in the process of moving from concept to realization; stopping at the idea stage means you’ve only done the easy part. He writes, “Some notes on a whiteboard and a pretty concept movie or storyboard pales in comparison to the messy world of prototyping, development, and manufacturing,” and then puts a finer point on it by adding, “It’s harder to execute an idea than to have one…”

Having encountered this lament in one form or another many times – “No one understands good typography anymore;” “People try to design when they can’t even draw,” “They think the computer’s going to do it all for them,” etc. – that aspect of his argument wasn’t new. Rather, what drew my attention was the phrase “design thinking” and his characterization of it as “just thinking.”

Since I was pretty sure that it meant more than that, I did a little research and found a Business Week article from last October called, “The Talent Hunt,” which describes Mozilla turning to the folks at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka, the “D-School”) in search of a strategy for expanding the adoption of Firefox. In light of Saffer’s comments, I was struck by the following sentences: “Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers.” Likewise, in a lecture at MIT entitled “Innovation Through Design Thinking,” IDEO’s Tim Brown talks about the process they follow often involving “a hundred prototypes created quickly, both to test the design and to create stakeholders in the process.”

As I understand it, the “thought leaders” behind “design thinking” (you can find a good overview of them and their thoughts here on Luke Wroblewski’s site) advocate the application of design methods to problems of business strategy precisely because it places a heavy emphasis on prototyping and real-world pragmatics. If Saffer is correct that “design thinking” as taught in design schools is primarily about thinking, and not about making things and seeing if they work, then I would say the real problem is that they are not actually teaching “design thinking.”

But then again, I never attended design school. If you have, do you think that Saffer’s criticism rings true?

Image Courtesy of dsevilla.

My research on Amaznode (see this post) reminded me that there are a lot of folks out there working on innovative and practical ways to display complex sets of data and networks of information.

While I thought I was so special for stumbling across Amaznode at Adobe Labs, I soon discovered that someone had actually referenced it back in September in a comment on this post from David Armano’s blog. In the aforementioned post, Armano praises the Visual Thesaurus, which depicts relationships between words in the same way Amaznode depicts relationships between products on Amazon (except the Visual Thesaurus actually allows for much deeper exploration of the related words it displays).

The Visual Thesaurus is just one example of information design that shows up on the site Visual Complexity, the stated intention of which is “to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks.” This site is endlessly fascinating both due to the ingenious (and sometimes oddly beautiful) ways that people have devised to portray complex, densely interrelated systems, as well as due to the range of data, be it business-related (for example, what patterns might we discern by examining 10 million receipts from a large DIY store?) or just strange, that they have chosen to model.

As the serendipity of blogging and intellectual interest would have it, a colleague of mine brought The Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager to my attention yesterday. The NameVoyager shows the waxing and waning fortunes of baby names from the 1880s to the present. (It allows you to see, for example, that the name “Chester” peaked in popularity around 1910.) The creator of the NameVoyager is one Martin Wattenberg who has come up with a number of methods for graphing complex processes such as the editing history of Wikipedia pages, among other things. In fact, he has been so inventive that several samples of his work show up on the Visual Complexity website, which I didn’t even know existed two days ago!

Image Courtesy of michael.heiss.

“As a result of the growing popularity of consumer-generated pictures, videos and e-mail messages on Internet sites like YouTube and Myspace, advertisers are getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them,” according to this New York Times article which focuses on the emergence of Times Square as “a publishing platform.”

In brief, thanks to the ubiquity of digital cameras and the rise of user-generated and social networking sites, marketers are finding that “experiential marketing” (aka, “publicity stunts“), such as Charmin’s fancy public restrooms, are growing long legs on the Web. These restrooms alone, “[u]sed by thousands in Times Square [were] viewed by 7,400 Web users on one site alone.”

While this raises a lot of interesting questions about the meaning of “product placement” and whether or not advertisers should start courting, and compensating, particularly popular or prolific private citizens for featuring their products on Flickr and YouTube, I was particularly struck by the formulation “getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them.” Now it is certainly the case that YouTubers and Flickr-ers are, wittingly or un-, doing things that benefit advertisers and the brands they promote. But so is anyone wearing a t-shirt with a visible logo.

It is not the job of advertisers to wander around the city in sandwich boards; it is their job, however, to come up with novel ways of getting brand-specific messages out to the world. If they create a spectacle noteworthy enough to generate spontaneous buzz promoted by random individuals, then they have done exactly what they are supposed to do. In fact, by now, I’d be astonished if the folks who conceived of and executed these events weren’t planning on a significant “web” effect. In a sense, if no one had posted this stuff to the Web, then you could rightly accuse advertisers of shirking.

Or do I, and not the paper of record, misunderstand what advertisers are supposed to do?

Image Courtesy of funadium.

I was working my latest Ask the Expert column for the AMA and was surprised by the number of questions I got concerning certification specifically (“Can you recommend a marketable web certification?” “How do I become a Professional Certified Marketer?”) or credentials more broadly (“Is there a possibility a company won’t hire me (even if I have a Masters Degree) just because they do not think the University I went too meets the “top-of-the-line” criteria?”).

I understand that people are looking for something to give them an edge in a highly competitive market and that they may have time to devote to education and personal development, but the value of certification per se seems dubious to me, particularly in the interactive/marketing space.

While there are some certifications that I’m told are meaningful – Google Adwords Certification and Project Management Professional Certification being two examples – my basic assumption is that they are at best a useful addition to a record of proven experience as a practitioner in a particular discipline.

My thoughts on this subject were paraphrased by Dave Atkins on Twitter yesterday when he wrote, “Connections are more indicative of authority than credentials.” Some pointed out that connections may be more indicative of personality than authority, and I can see that, but the more important point to me was that authority does not come from credentials. Authority reflects a respected position within a community which is generally earned by demonstrated ability and measured by influence.

In other words, if you want to be a more attractive candidate for a marketing or interactive position, focus on establishing authority by earning the respect and recognition of your peers. Your authority and experience make your credentials meaningful, not the other way around.

Image Courtesy of jurvetson.

A friend of mine passed this link along to me. It is a video of a software demo at the TED Conference back in March. The speaker is Blaise Aguera y Arcas who was demoing two software packages – Seadragon, which is used to browse large amounts of visual data, and Photosynth, which organizes pictures into navigable, 3-D spaces.

This stuff really has to be seen to be believed. It represents the future of how we will interact with visual data and also highlights that we are already creating virtual models of the world we live in by uploading content to websites like Flickr. There is also a cool example of an explorable, high resolution advertisement for Honda. Imagine if a picture in a magazine contained the richness of data you could find on an entire website. Mind-boggling.

Microsoft acquired Seadragon back in February. Aguera y Arcas makes a funny comment about that when people start clapping at the amazing things he’s showing them. Have you ever attended a software demo where people burst into spontaneous applause?

Image Courtesy of Live Labs.

The concepts of time-shifting and place-shifting (originally called “space-shifting”) come from the realm of consumer electronics. The classic time-shifting device is TiVo, which allows you to “shift” the time of your favorite TV programs to a time of your choosing. On the place-shifting front, Sony, HAVA, and Sling Media, among others, have devices which allow you to change the “place” where you consume media by sending TV shows to your PC, for example. You could also think of the iPod/iPhone as doing the same thing with your music and videos.

At least one denizen of the interwebs, Nari Kannan, postulates that the ability to shift time and/or place is an essential element of technical innovation. He writes, “Placeshifting in the larger context with the widespread adoption of the Internet enabled Outsourcing and Offshoring! Work is not tethered to one location anymore.” We find the same idea, mutatis mutandi, expressed in this article on the future of electronic design, “The Internet dissolves international boundaries, creating a time- and place-shifting global village of design and engineering.”

Any work whose end-product is an electronic file (which could be a text document or a feature film) requires solely that collaborators be connected electronically, not spatial proximity. In fact, the only complication introduced by the fact that the end-product takes a more material form, a chair, for example, is that the collaborators must each on their end be connected to some physical transport system such as that run by FedEx or UPS.

Given the boundary-less world of cyber-enabled work, to what extent are we still bound by geography when it comes to landing gigs or hiring people, especially since anyone can post a resume or portfolio online or advertise a job opening and it can be found by anyone with access to the web from anywhere on Earth?

When it comes to actually getting hired or hiring I believe that the only thing making physical presence in a particular geographic location necessary is trust (or, more accurately, the lack thereof). As atavastic or primitive as it may be, the most basic form of trust still rests in seeing someone with our own eyes, shaking their hand, and sizing them up by talking to them, asking them questions, and gauging their responses.

Nevertheless, people nowadays will readily work with others they have never physically met. The trust encouraging them to do so is not primarily generated by marketing and faith in governmental regulation. It depends instead on the accumulated recommendations of total strangers (as can be found in seller ratings from Amazon to eBay), and the growing reach of influencers who essentially make a career out of being trusted (Brogan calls these folk “trust agents“).

The same technology that enables time- or place-shifted collaboration in myriad domains has also fostered the growth of globe-spanning trust networks. And that, in the end, may turn out to be its most revolutionary effect.

Image Courtesy of Kevin Krejci.