At FOWD this Wednesday, keynote speaker Brendan Dawes speaker outlined interesting ways forward for creative designers. Ian Delaney was there to report.

Finding Your Creative Vein

Brendan Dawes, magneticNorth

Dawes' role model for the creative designer doesn't work for an agency or produce anything for the web. It's the mountain climber Reinhold Messner, the man who made the first solo ascent of Everest without oxygen. We often talk about taking risks and being on the edge, but a man who gets an idea in his head of what he wants to do and pursues it even though it might mean his death is hard to beat.

He then turned to the scene in the movie Shane where Jack Palance kills a farmer on the streets of the town. Showing an edited and the original version of the clip, he pointed out the silence and inaction that director George Stevens inserted into the scene. While strictly 'unnecessary' to the plot, the pause before the fatal gunshot makes the killing more deliberate, and thus more brutal and cold-blooded. It's this kind of small extra that perhaps no-one notices but nonetheless adds to the richness of the audience's experience that designers ought to be reaching for.

An example of this in web design is the mechanism for deleting items in Wordpress. When you press delete, the item is highlighted in red for a split-second before slowly fading away. The designers could have made the item disappear immediately, but chose to add the animation, which lends a richness to the experience. The same effect can be observed when items are added to a Ta-da list.

There is a bookshop in Southport that offers a real-world counterpart. When you buy a book, the owner takes it to a machine that reels out brown paper and string and he wraps it neatly into a tied parcel. What's the point? Because it makes buying a book more than just a consumerist exchange of cash - it's a rich interactive experience.

Drawing on his own experience, Dawes worked on a launch campaign for a new Diesel handbag. The idea behind the site he produced was to make the bag seem as exclusive as possible. He wanted to create the idea that users would have to sacrifice themselves in some way in order to gain access to the bag. His original idea involved Diesel removing the bags from retail, which didn't go down especially well with the client. Instead, he forced visitors to the site to invest time and effort to get information on the bag. They had to jump though hoops; click through multiple scenes in a virtual world before they could even see what the bag looked like. This is normally thought of as very poor practice, but because it fitted exactly with the idea of exclusivity, it worked very well with thousands of visitors making their pilgrimage to the final scene of seeing the bag in all its glory.

The Channel 4 TV show Deal or No Deal shows real genius when it comes to experiential detail. If you explain the format to someone who has never watched it, then it would sound mad. How can choosing from 22 boxes last an hour? And the boxes that contestants choose from contain nothing but a label on the inside of the lid. So why bother with the boxes at all? They may as well have pieces of card that they turned over. Dawes pointed out the ritual that comes with opening the boxes. The contestants press down their left arm to hold the box down, rip off the velcro tape with their right hand, then use both hands to open the lid. The boxes and the ritual create the suspenseful experience that has viewers hooked.

Dawes fell asleep on the train one day. Awaking, he saw a few pieces of litter on the seat opposite. Curious or bored, he picked up one of the pieces of paper. It was a receipt from Waterstones with the letters P.T.O. written on it in biro. On the reverse were the words 'Please take these swanes [sic]'. He looked again at the litter and realised it was two origami swans that someone had left as a gift. The letters P.T.O. were the real genius in this experience, he felt, the little extra that heightens the suspense and turned the event into a story.

Designers should try to turn things on their head, and in doing this constraints are often better than freedom. Designers often say that they want more freedom, but having to work within set boundaries often allows for more exciting opportunities for creativity. Dawes created McGoogle, a Google interpreter that replaces search results with pictures from the bottom of a McDonald's takeaway bag. He'd created it for fun, so there wasn't a point, strictly-speaking, but it appeared to amuse and interest people.

Dawes finished with a quotation from Edgar Allen Poe that he hoped designers would take to heart:

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Discover more about the future of web design at our event on Tuesday 24 April 2007 - Not Just Pretty 'Faces.