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Not Just Pretty Faces?

From rebellious teen to the hub of product creation and identity, the evolution of the digital designer has been shockingly swift and is not yet over. Last night's Dynamo London event explored possibilities for the future of their role. Ian Delaney reports.

From rebellious teen to the hub of product creation and identity, the evolution of the digital designer has been shockingly swift and is not yet over. Last night's Dynamo London event explored possibilities for the future of their role. Ian Delaney reports.

Opening the session, Malcolm Garrett of AIG gave a brief history of the evolution of the digital designer, with a run-down on his own career. He was a trained graphic designer who moved over to digital design in 1990 when his digital epiphany came with his discovery of Hypercard (a forerunner to the WWW and PowerPoint, developed by Apple). In the late eighties and early nineties, technology looked extremely dry and technical, and Garrett viewed this as an opportunity for a graphic designer to make a real difference.

At that time, working in digital was viewed as inferior to print work, though Garrett found the severe technical limitations of the form and rather rudimentary tools as exciting constraints that gave him the opportunity to challenge people's expectations. His first company was mainly involved in the design of interfaces and artwork for CD-ROMs, although they turned to this Internet within a year or two. This was an unusual move at the time: the Internet remained something of a 'no-man's land' for most design houses due to the low bandwidth available.

This sense in the mainstream of the Internet's inferiority and unworkability, gave rise to a new breed of designer. Designers who didn't care what the establishment thought and who were going to do it anyway. These people were - generally speaking - young, rebellious, entrepreneurial self-publicists, working outside the mainstream.

The Worms Turn

So digital designers have - historically - had a different genesis to those working in print, but coming back to some of the key questions of the night, Garrett was keen to point out that the skills needed in digital, interactive design were exactly the same as those needed in any other kind of design. The abilities to observe, to come up with and refine ideas and work within contraints are necessary whatever the medium.

However, the market has changed a great deal since those early days. The budgets that were historically allocated to conventional media are moving over to integrated campaigns, and that despised creature, the digital designer, is now becoming seen as at the forefront of the industry. Comment from the audience reinforced this view that business is indeed booming in the digital sector, though structural flaws in the role of designers often mean they have not yet reached their full potential, the remainder of the evening's discussion established.

Event chair Lynda Relph-Knight of DesignWeek agreed with the point that digital had come of age. Working in the design industry for twenty years, she has gone from a time when the digital desiger simply did not exist to a point where they appear to be leading the sector. Her publication runs a design competition across various disciplines each year. In recent years, it's been noticeable that some of the poorest entries come from the world of print media, while digital consistently exhibits flair and innovation.

Discussion followed on whether 'old school' print designers will be able to make the transition to digital. Historically, digital design has been viewed as having a high entry level because of the difficulty of the tools that were used. This is less the case now, said Garrett, and not being scared is the main route to success. If you can work with a flat plan in print, then you'll be able to work with a site map in digital media. Nonetheless, we've had 500 years to get print right, so it's not surprising if more traditional designers view interactive as something of a Wild West.

The second presentation came from Clive Grinyer, former director of design at Orange France Telecom, and now bearing general responsibility for user interfaces on Orange mobile phones. He expressed his delight with the Orange brand and loved the 'can-do' attitude that pervades the company. Through acquisition, they have moved beyond mobile phones to land lines and the Internet. They're developing rich web experiences that will replace shops. The world is their oyster when it comes to product and brand opportunities.

But what should they do?

What most people want from a phone is the ability to communicate. They want a bit to speak into and bit to hear through. But what Orange has historically tried to sell them is something like their fantastically fully featured and complex video phone. This mis-match doesn't work: they sold about three units [sic].

When Orange realised, around four years ago, that many times more text messages were sent from Nokia handsets than those from other manufacturers, it should have become apparent that a clear, usable user interface is key to encouraging usage. Instead, they introduced their own Windows Mobile smartphone, the SPV. When Grinyer first joined Orange, he was issued with this phone, and it took him two weeks to learn how to use the address book.

The SPV was designed to be a high ARPU (average revenue per user) handset. But because the interface was so challenging, usage was actually disappointingly low. The promises made by handset manufacturers are very high: 'email in the palm of your hand', yet the hollowness of this should be apparent to anyone who has tried to set up their email on a mobile phone. However, this is because the process is technology-led. A technology is invented that someone, somewhere decides will answer all customers' prayers. The key decisions in product development are made by marketers. And then at the end of the process, someone passes the product to the designers and they're given two weeks to produce a user interface for it.

The result of this is that the phones we've ended up with don't work. And sadly, Orange has only historically discovered this through the masses of user testing that has followed a product launch. The products don't work and customer uptake is very slow.

The Way Forward

But things can be different. This will depend on designers re-defining themselves. They shouldn't be thought of as experts at typography and colour schemes and so forth, even though they might be. They need to become known as the bearers of real customer insight, as the communicators of brand dna and the instigators of service revolution. Design and designers can be about far more than the visual; they should rather be representatives of the customer.

One issue is that designers have historically been very vertically orientated people. They need to take responsibility for the whole product production process. For too long, Grinyer concluded, they've been responsible for putting lipstick on a pig.

This need for designers to enter the board room brought up the example of Steve Jobs and the potentially disruptive effect of the forthcoming iPhone. Jobs has been a gift for Apple, in many respects, because he's a designer and he's on the board. His understanding of user experience thus permeates everything the company produces. Grinyer believes that numerically, the iPhone will only be a blip in the mobile phone industry, even if it's extremely successful. However, it is likely to force manufacturers to bring in competing innovations. Because the mobile phone industry is so vast, he explained, with production runs in the millions, the companies responsible tend to be extremely risk-averse. They will continue to do what they've always done until they're forced to act differently.

Levelling Design

Simon Crab of Lateral introduced the third presentation with some discussion of Web 2.0. He argued that one of the distinguishing features of this movement is the democratisation of the means of production - anybody can now have a web page, produce and publish multimedia, and introduce their own sense of design.

Historical precedents for this kind of movement might include the pamphleteers of the English Civil War, including groups such as the Levellers and the Ranters. For the first time, perhaps, access to the printing press was not restricted to gentlemen of means, but ordinary people with a point of view. A similar precedent might be found in the advertising of the Victorian era, which had no set design rules, but marked a period of extreme experimentation with fonts, colours and styles in order to catch as much attention as possible.

The modern-day, Web 2.0 equivalent of this might be ugly MySpace profiles. It may well be the case that there are more ugly MySpace profiles than tasteful ones, that there are more non-designers doing design than designers at this point. [Readers interested in this idea might appreciate this entry from ZeFrank's late, lamented vlog, The Show]. Comment from the audience drew attention to the fact that there are two sorts of design taking place on MySpace. There is the design of interactions and tools, as well as the personalisation of profile pages. The former might exhibit considerably more skill than is generally recognised, judging from the success of the network.

Approval of and interest in this non-design movement, in reality culture, might have precedents in the Mass Observation movement of the late 1930s or in the 7-Up series of television documentaries.

Crab felt that the future role of the designer might have more to do with delegation than actually working with the tools: knowing who to bring in and when.

Returning to the apparent chasm between the boardroom and the design department, discussion pointed to the unusual structure of the UK design industry. There are very few large agencies but a million start-ups. It's become commonplace for people to work three years for an agency and then leave to start their own. This means that designers are unlikely to have a central stake in the boards of major brands. However, there seemed to be widespread recognition that this ought to change. The skills that constitute the core of the profession: observation, modelling, communicating ideas are actually very much the core of creating successful products Designers have the power to become conductors of user experience and brand identity.