Design, Technology and Their Roles in Social Changes - 28 August 2006

Read this article in Chinese (translated and proofread by Haiying Ni, Xiaojia Wang and Christina Li)

Nico Macdonald is a London-based writer, consultant and event programmer, focused on design, technology and innovation. He is author of “What is Web Design?” (RotoVision, 2003) and has contributed to a number of other design titles. He writes for various publications including Blueprint, ACM interactions, the Guardian newspaper, BBC News Online, Creative Review, and Eye magazine.

Nico has programmed the AIGA Experience Design events in London for five years and has been involved in creating and hosting panels at many ACM SIGCHI conferences. Nico is on the advisory board of uiGarden.

As part of the uiGarden editing team, Christina Li interviewd Nico Macdonald on aspects of design, technology and society. Nico offered his insights from his own experience of working in political compaign and design consultancies.

Christina Li

Nico Macdonald

As a law student in the university, what gave you an interest in design and ending up with a devotion to communication, facilitation, research and consultancy around design and technology?

Well, the truth is, not very much. I had been interested in law because I was interested in the social aspects of the legal process, and being able to make differences to people’s lives. In reality, I discovered law was quite restricting in the scope it offered. So I ended up after my first year going to work in the United States in Washington DC for a small company publishing newsletters. They had just purchased an Apple Macintosh, which was then about a year old, and one of my jobs was to learn how to create and publish newsletters. I had an interest in design in general, and publication design in particular, and as a result, I decided to change career and get involved in what was then call desktop publishing. My interests in the social side of design is a legacy of the reason I was interested in law – being interested in how to improve peoples lives and make a difference – and I ended up being involved that through design and technology rather than law.

I have seen that you had worked for New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley [Wikipedia] on his re-election campaign prior to establishing Spy. From your political experience, what is your view of the role of design in implementing social policies and political challenges? Do you think design methods offer a new approach to social and political problems?

I had a number of experiences in my years after I left school which informed my views. One was working on the US senatorial election campaign. I think the interesting thing in the US was the degree to which there is a real connection between electors and the people they elect, which you can see in the television show The West Wing. I also worked in India for a development agency which exposed me to different ways in which people thought about how to bring people out of poverty. These included charity, enabling them to farm, developing industry, and ultimately in what’s called ‘consciousness raising’ to help people be politically empowered. Certainly in the UK there is a limited concept of what politics can mean, and thus in certain ways design thinking can inform social policy. But there’s a danger that it can go too far. People see problems that could be solved by design which weren’t created by the lack of design or the lack of design thinking. As a result, design is pushed forward to try and solve things which are beyond its capability. when these initiative fail, which they are likely to as they are not solving the problem in the right way, the people who are on the receiving end will think less of design, which I think is dangerous for designers.

On the other hand, I think “designerly” way of thinking about things are important and can inform British political life. One of the fundamental ideas that informs design is identifying the objectives of a project and the constraints upon it, and understanding the beneficiaries and the interests of the stakeholder. Political thinking in the United Kingdom doesn’t often get to the point where a clear the objective is establish and a rational way to address a problem or opportunity has been established. “Designerly” approaches extend to using visual tools to facilitate and mediate communication between different parties. The “designerly” concept prototyping is important, with its emphasis on creating easy to present mock-ups of the way something might work. So I think there’s a lot for design can contribute to political thinking, but I think we need to be realistic about the limits that exist there. For instance, Hilary Cottam, who leads the RED unit for the Design Council was interviewed, on the Today program [BBC Radio 4] recently along with Kate Hoey, an MP in London, about design thinking around the relationship of MPs to their constituents. It became pretty clear that either Cottam didn’t quite understand what the challenges were, or she overestimated the problems of lack of communication presented and perhaps underestimated the disillusionment of electors with the parliamentary representative system – or at least the way it’s currently manifested.

What do you think is the relationship between creativity and technology? Would technological development improve people’s creativity or would it hamper it?

My broad view is that creativity isn’t hampered or helped particularly by technology. On the one hand you could argue that having access to technology allow you to realize design concepts, design prototypes or design ideas more quickly, thus and increase ones’ creative output. On the other hand the degree to which one may rush to a solution because it’s easy to create needs to be borne in mind. I recently spoke at an event called newspaper design day, one of the presenters there who had worked at The Times newspaper for almost 40 years talked about the challenges of designing when they had hot metal type setting, very limited picture reproduction capabilities, very limited presses and also print trade unions that wouldn’t let designers have any involvements in the actual production of the page. So everything had to go through the composers on the printing shop floor. Yet some of the design work on The Times and The Sunday Times in the 60s & 70s was phenomenal, and as far as I can see was better than the design there today – where they have access to PostScript page makeup software, electronic photo libraries, and all the modern tools. So I’m not saying having constraints make design better or not having them make it worse. I don’t think there’s a direct relationship.

What factors do you think will shape innovation and new product design? What practical methods would you advocate to bring them to a real product design process?

At a formal level there are factors around new technologies which are being conceived and developed in research labs. Materials are very interesting, for instance those properties such as durability and tactility, but also materials that can display such as OLEDS [Organic light-emitting diodes (Wikipedia)], which are already in use, and also materials that support electrical conductivity. In the area of semi-conductors, there are products such as the memory chip Hewlett-Packard recently announced which is about the size of grain rice but which can store for a large amount of data. There are technologies in the area of transportation – such as hydrogen-based power storage –which can also be used in laptop computers and mobile devices. There are also innovations at a higher level, for instance in production processes. Clearly manufacturing has gone through many innovations in the last two decades in the information technology sector. Then there are innovations in a way which organizations work which perhaps have been less evident in the last 20 years. However, the dangers or the limits to innovation are considerable. These limits are imposed by a numbers of trends. One is the idea of sustainability, the idea that we are running out of natural resources, and we need to conserve them. In reality resources are human created, and we discover uses of things that never had a use, so anything can be a resource and there can’t be a limit to natural resources. This trend will tend to limit how much is produced, and the development of new of products that require a lot of resource inputs. Another limiting trend is concerned with the environment and about the CO2 emissions associated with energy production, transportation and manufacturing, which will tend to result in limiting development of and developments in these areas. There is a broader challenge to defend the idea that design and technology should be used to improve people’s lives in the radical ways. It is becoming accepted that people in developing countries, or even in the developed world, should constrain their standard of living to whatever level it is currently at – or even reduce it.

One practical that method that will shape innovation and new product design, and will be familiar to readers of the uiGarden, is the idea that we should put users in the centre of the picture. This is important because in any product development process there are, naturally, many different parties involved: people from marketing, product development, system development, engineering, research, and so on. Putting the user at the centre of the process helps to resolve the conflicts goals between the parties because it raises the bar to the level of real people whose lives will be improved by the final product. This is different from asking for special treatment on behalf of any particular party in the process. On the other hand I think one needs to be wary of reducing the user to a slightly infantile individual whose not considered to be very capable. We should think about people as being very capable, and who will learn to use challenging when they see how they might improve their lives. If we approach users in way we can be more inspired about designing for people as active shapers of their own lives, rather than passive slightly incompetent users of the things that we produce. More generally we should be celebrating the people who will use the things we design – and also people who create them. Too often they are denigrated for the supposedly bad effects of the things they create. This attitude has shaped the discussion of aircraft design, and will shape the discussion of the remarkable Airbus A380. We should celebrate engineers, designers and marketers and so on. Because their skill and insights and intelligence create wonderful new things.

What do you envision the relationship between design and technology in people’s life in the next ten, twenty, and thirty years?

It’s quite difficult to say much beyond ten years. But there is a very interesting trend which is probably quite positive for designers and technologists, which is that unlike 20 or thirty years ago, people are much more enthusiastic about technology than they were now – they are increasingly identifying themselves with their technologies. (I use the term technology broadly, as speech is a technology, pencils are technology.) The way people treat mobile phones in public, and the status they give these devices, would have been almost unimaginable twenty years ago. Technology will become more significant to people’s lives in shaping and presenting their identity. However, this isn’t necessarily a positive thing. Historically people’s identity has been made up of much more than technology they use. It has been made up of their social, cultural, political preferences and views, what they did for a living, and the contribution they made to society. It’s a pity that identity has been reduced to this lower level. Another trend is the increasing value of information technology in the domestic sphere. In this area, information technology here has the potential to make considerable transformation, in the way that, perhaps, electricity transformed the home in the first part of 20th century, and the automobile transformed public space from the 1940s to the 1980s. Everything from the kitchen to the living room to the way we read and consume information, from security and inter-personal communication to home monitoring and control could be transformed.

Like invisible computers?

The concept of the invisible computers is important, and has to an extent come to pass in many ways – for instance a mobile phone is an invisible computer. Personal video recorders such as the Sky+ box, TiVo, and so on, are invisible computers. Digital audio and radios are moving in that direction with features such as pause and record. It’s clear that technology is cheap enough, easy enough to use interoperable enough that we can really start doing interesting things, but those things aren’t really quite happening yet. There are around how we help people to understand the possibilities, how we support the configuration of technical devices in the home, how we design products and services, and platforms and environments, in ways that fit into people’s lives, and such that people find them useful, usable and desirable.

What are the possible challenges to the future of web design? How should designers meet those challenges?

I think there are challenges on a number of levels. One of the challenges is going beyond the web browser and also going beyond the personal computer. We have gone beyond the web browser to an extent with tools such as Yahoo! Widgets, and Apple’s Dashboard in MacOS X, and with services such as instant messaging clients. We have also started to go beyond the personal computer, with the web access on mobile devices, and on public displays, and on Tablet devices – but the scope has been limited. One of the challenges is how to create certain services and content delivery model which can be access across, and move between, platforms in a seamless way, so that, for instance, I can see a news headline on my mobile phone, read the story on my personal computer, and watch the video on my Internet Protocol (IP) television.

Another challenge is to better use the network space to support delivery of more targeted, appropriate and timely information and services to people. Two models are important here. One is geography and location, and we started to use this more effectively with mobiles phones ‘know’ their location, WiFi devices that can know at least which hotspot they are connected to, GPS-enabled devices such as the TomTom Navigator, and so on. From knowing locations one can then give people information which is appropriate to where they are, or perhaps their inferred activity, and you can thus reduce the amount of interaction needed for them to get that information. The second challenge is around profiling, and understanding enough about the user’s interests and their needs, and also inferring from their circle of connections, so you can start to personalize the kind of things that are delivered to them. This has started to happen at a low level with the weblogging phenomenon, and with services such as del.icio.us, and services which allow you to rate things – but again its very difficult to think of services I use which work in this way. There is a lower level challenge of improving interface design to the quality that we see in software applications. With the maturing of dynamic mark up languages and the possibilities around Ajax-based interfaces, we are getting to the point at which it’s possible to do those achieved this – though if I had the choice I would still prefer to use a well-designed software application than a web-based interface service.

How could the discipline of graphic design inform the rapid development of design for the web and interaction design in general? What can digital design learn from graphic design?

Again there are a number of levels of which this might work. One very pressing challenge is to take the learning about information design and visualization from graphic design and apply that to web-type interface design. I’m not saying that hasn’t happened but the web is still a very text based linear page like medium. The web is an environment which can support the delivery of information-rich interfaces or systems which also change over time and based on other factors. We can learn from people such as, Edward Tufte, who is not a designer but a design writer and researcher, and many other people about how to visualize those things more clearly. As the web becomes pervasive and we have higher resolution displays, there’s a lot that could be learned from editorial and graphic design about typography and page layout, although I don’t think the web should directly follow the page metaphor, about the use of imagery and dynamic text, and the use of color. Editorial design is a very mature medium, and way ahead of what’s going on with the web in many respects. Then I think there is a level at which graphic designers work with clients which is, or certainly has been, more mature than the way web designers work with clients where. They are more thoughtful about their clients’ needs, better at communicating with them, and use design tools to communicate effectively. They’re also able to broker relationships between clients and suppliers and other parties effectively. These are things which graphic and editorial designers had to learn because of the more competitive nature of the graphic design industry, in which you have to work harder to get clients to want to work with you, and to carry on working with you. There’s also an intellectual tradition in graphic design, and among people writing about graphic design, which we haven’t really emulated successfully in the world of web design. Design writers such as Rick Poynor, J. Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton, Michael Bierut, and Ken Garland have added a layer of thinking about graphic design which has only in part been seen with web and interactive design. Although the weblogging phenomenon has allowed for a thoughtful design thinking to emerge, there is a more reflective, more thoughtful and maybe more academic kind of thinking and writing needed around web design.

What insights can design really give to business strategy?

This relates to some of the questions about design and social policy. There’s a very interesting movement at present – centred around the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Bruce Nussbaum at Business Week magazine, and, and people such as Tim Brown of IDEO – which is pushing the idea that design can help us to both think about the design of services, which is a new phenomenon, and also inform business strategy, helping business in evaluating, for instance, decisions around business acquisition. There’s something to be said for the observation that design skills of visualising ideas, using scenarios, and facilitating communication between different stakeholders may be applicable more widely to business. Design has ways of enquiring about things, and trying to imagine how things might be. These approaches probably exist in many other disciplines, but to the extent they do they not being employed effectively enough in business. My concern about this design-led approach is that clearly business strategy has been informed for a century by people like E. W. Taylor, companies such as McKinsey, business managers, CEOs, and so on. One needs to be clear about what the kind of things that design can offer that are unique or are missing, and be clear that they not actually offered by other professions and just called something else. There is a danger that designers and design commentators don’t know enough about business and haven’t noticed that someone else does something similar.

What is really unique about design thinking and methods compared to management consultancy, for example, and other analytical approaches?

I’ll comment on management consulting in particular because I know a little more about that than I do about other analytical methods. Although I think designers should probably learn more about operations research [Wikipedia], which is now probably a 50 year old discipline and which certainly addresses some of these issues. What design has over management consulting is a more subtle method of enquiry. Management consulting focuses more on formal interviews, less on observation. Management consultants seem to employ less lateral thinking than designers in interpreting the outcomes of their research. As I noted before, design is very good at investigating ideas using visual tools and using other tools such as prototypes to test out ideas. Being able to ‘ideate’ (as they say in industry), prototype, and test are important skills, as is using testing and evaluation to really understand the impact of a solution on an organisation. Good designers are probably more aware of the social and socio-technical aspects of systems than management consultants who might tend to take a more top down approach, and believe you can impose a solution on people, or have a more technological approach around putting systems in place and that they believe will shape an organisation. An organisation such as Accenture might be an example of the latter. Designers are better at communicating overall, and management consultants tend to focus on long reports which themselves are not necessarily a good pieces of communication. In some senses, designers have a more ambitious agenda than management consultants. I’m thinking here of a documentary on television about McKinsey, which was hired to help a struggling Scandinavian newspaper publisher The story ended up at a board meeting with the McKinsey consultants saying the publisher had to make a lot of people redundant and cut costs. Now it might have been the right solution, but this was 1999, about the time that online publishing, new methods of production, new models of content and content delivery, were becoming interesting and viable. Some kind of solution around becoming a multiple media company and developing new revenue streams and business models would have been more appropriate than just the traditional slash and burn model. Perhaps designerly thinking would have at least helped investigate those possibilities.

As an advisor of uiGarden.net, is there anything you would like to say to uiGarden readers?

Yes, part of the reason why I am involved with uiGarden is that I’m aware that in the UK there is very little connection between people involved in design, human factors, or usability, with their peers in nearby countries such as France, Germany, and Spain, let alone China or people else where in Southeast Asia. I am very keen that connections are established and those that exist are strengthened. To an extent, we have to acknowledge a language problem, which is why I have more connections in North America than I do across the Channel. The ability to talk across languages and cultures is very important. I think Christina is doing a great job in this area!

I also note that Britain has a rather paranoid attitude towards progress in the developing world. I am keen that we take a more positive attitude towards these things, and take a view that the developments taking place in China at present (at least as we understand them) can only be a positive thing for both the Chinese and British peoples.

Christina Li is the founder and chief editor of uiGarden.net. She is also the project coordinator of Sino-European Systems Network, – an EU founded project promoting usability in China.

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