Noisy Decent Graphics

Design research urls #2

 

5. John Maeda released the third version of his Design in Tech report at SXSW. I’m a fan of this report, as someone needs to make the link between design, technology and business more explicit and easier to quantify. (GDS were mentioned last year.)

It’s the best report yet. Comprehensive with numbers and examples. It chimes with my view of the design industry and where it’s heading.

There's loads to write about this. It's worth downloading and reading all of it, but the headlines are: business is taking design, or rather “design thinking” seriously; McKinsey and IBM have made senior hires this year; design M&A is a thing; designers are in huge demand; Amazon, Google, and Facebook have grown their design teams by 65%; there’s a lack of design leaders; learn to understand code; learn to write; China obvs.

PDF of Design in Tech 2017

Slideshare of Design in Tech 2017

 

VentureBeat article on the report where I took the above picture from

 

6. Related, last week saw the release of the Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings. For Art and Design London's Royal College of Art came top and University of the Arts London was 6th. Another seven of the top ten were from the US. That feels unsustainable, especially as applications to design A-levels (and therefore degrees) are falling off a cliff in the UK. With Brexit, US visa bans, general protectionism and given the John Maeda report on design in China, what will these rankings be like in 10 years time?

 

Caution - there are lots of these rankings about. In this case the art and design list seems consistent with other rankings.

Disclosure - I'm a governor at UAL.

 

Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings

 

Design Week story on global university rankings

 

NSEAD report on the drop in GCSE art and design numbers 

 

7. Here's a good interview with Tracy Ma a designer on Bloomberg Businessweek.

 

8.  "There is a slow but steady leakage of marketing services away from agencies and toward either specialized firms or in-house operations" That's a comment from Bob Hoffman, ad industry veteran. There is now a regular drumbeat of these articles in the ad industry press.

 

See also Ben Evan's sarcastic comment a few newsletters ago, "Martin Sorrell is worried about Amazon's ad business (and also, one would hope, Amazon's threat to advertising use cases themselves)". 

 

Bob Hoffman The State of Agency World podcast

 

The CEO of the world's biggest ad company says Amazon is what keeps him up worrying at night

 

 

Design research urls #1

1. Abstract is the Netflix series on design everyone is watching. For decades designers have complained that there isn’t a series on TV about design. This is now nonsense, the web is full of video about design, high quality conference talks and the like. But of course what they really mean is a prime time BBC series about design, preferably just before Newsnight. (They mean Better By Design starring Seymour Powell from 2000, 17 years ago.)

What Netflix have done is make is compelling TV that's easy to access. It's good. I haven’t watched them all yet, and I’m particularly looking forward to the Es Devlin episode.

Abstract: The Art of Design

2. “Before last year, Amazon wasn’t really even in the film business. “We went from not existing theatrically to releasing 15 movies and having seven Oscar nominations,” says Jason Ropell, Amazon’s worldwide head of motion pictures."

How many other organisations could do that? Easy to say they’ve just thrown money at it, but I can’t imagine BP or Goldman Sachs obtaining seven Oscar nominations in that time.

Disrupting Hollywood: Amazon goes to the Oscars FT article (£)

3. IF is a design studio that helps people think about privacy and security. They do what all good design companies do these days and think via prototyping. This series about designing for new digital rights is particularly good.

Designing for new digital rights

Following on from that this meet up this is also a good idea, to talk about common design patterns and start building a community of designers around data permissions. A place for designers to learn and share. This is what the Design Council should be doing.

Design Patterns Meetup

4. “I have a different problem with Google, which is that they never finish the job. This is especially true in their software. Google Docs is a good example. Google Docs is a really brilliant concept; it’s really well done. For the first time, multiple people can work on the same doc at the same time. But I can never find a Google Doc.”

That's certainly true for me. Too short an article, but Don Norman on Apple etc is still interesting. Beware, it's one of those annoying web pages where everything moves around for five minutes before you can start reading.

Don Norman - What Apple, Google, And Tesla Get Wrong