Matter/Anti-Matter

(Credit: SXSW)

Next weekend, just a couple of days after the dust of the primary campaigns will have settled, national media attention will return to Texas as Austin is turning into party central for the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW, March 7-16). SXSW Interactive, added in 1994 to the music festival, has evolved into one of the most influential tech conferences in the country and beyond. While somewhat geeky in its first years, SXSW Interactive is now considered a must-attend venue for big tech players (Google, Microsoft, Seagate, etc. all have a strong presence at the show), start-ups, creative agencies, software developers, futurists, designers, artists, media, and bloggers alike, all of whom are chasing the next big digital thing. A key contributing factor for SXSW's success may have been that the initially narrow meaning of "interactive" has expanded its relevance to more industries, media, and platforms over the past few years and now serves as the modus operandi of all business, no matter how creative or digital it is. With its more solid business underpinning, SXSW Interactive has overtaken both the Push conference in Minneapolis and Wired's Nextfest in terms of relevance and commercial success.

The Soul of the Machine

Yet despite its explosive growth (16,000 overall attendees are expected in Austin this year), "South By," as conference goers dub it, has done a good job evading all attempts to be easily categorized. The interactive part, in particular, has somehow managed to remain its cutting edge. It still offers a wildly eclectic bazaar of topics, trends, opinions, and applications, and one can truly say that all of the tech conferences out there it is the one best positioned to explore "the soul of the machine."

The organization is professional but there is still a lot of room for the unexpected, below-the-line, grassroots eccentricity that gives the conference its special flavor. A big part of this can be attributed to Austin, which has emerged as a thriving hub for creative people and embeds SXSW in the kind of community fabric that doesn't tolerate any over-spin or sell-out. The organizers have also made a point to add many community elements to the event: web 2.0 for web 2.0sters, if you will. For example, this year, they pioneered a "panel picker" that allowed users to vote on submitted panel proposals and essentially democratized the entire programming. I'm not entirely sure if this is the best application for the "wisdom of crowds" since there is a real danger that the panel selection turns into a popularity contest or an easy target for PR professionals and speaker bureaus. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and prefer conference programs to be curated by a curator, simply because it is otherwise daunting to ensure the right balance between diversity and cohesion. Anyway, it's too early to tell -- we'll see how it turns out.

In addition to the panel picker, SXSW has teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub for the conference. The application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

But not everything at SXSW will be user-driven. In fact, some of the program highlights were carefully chosen: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will give the keynote on March 9. Other keynotes include Frank Warren (March 10) and Jane McGonigal (March 11). Opening Remarks (March 8) will be delivered by Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, and Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, will be interviewed in a special session on March 11.

Searching for the Killer App

As eyeballs wander towards Austin, it will be interesting to see which digital innovations this year's conference will bring. Google's Dodgeball blew up at SXSW Interactive in 2006, and last year, a hitherto unknown service called Twitter enabled attendees to chat about panels in real-time and in public, and as instant as the format was its proliferation in the blogosphere: Twitter became the app de jour at SXSW and then, quickly, the rage of all digerati.

So who will be this year's Twitter? Practically speaking: Meebo. The instant messaging service is the official sponsor for live chat at SXSW 2008 and has stepped into Twitter's footsteps, which is kind of ironic. Meebo as Me-too. And philosophically speaking? Who knows. It seems safe to place a few bets on models around the new "Digital Green." The conference will be hosting five panels devoted exclusively to sustainability issues (five more than in previous years, if you're counting), among them "10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life" and "Green Software -- Really?" Another big topic will be how gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and contextual web will converge (yes, convergence is resilient!) in the "Age of Engage," including discussions on OpenID and hardware mash-ups ("the long tail of gadgets"). And then there are interesting sociological tangents such as "Sexual Privacy Online," "Self-Branding," or the existential question for the attention junkie: "Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?" The most exciting domain for disruptive innovation right now is probably news (which, as we know, is broken), and several panels will discuss the future of Internet radio, Internet TV, as well as crowdsourced, hyper-localized models of news production and aggregation.

Or maybe, after five days of "geekspasm" and partying, ReadWriteWeb's prediction may come to pass: "The killer app in Austin might just be beer."

Links

We will report from SXSW Interactive on this blog, but in the meantime here are a few helpful links to get you in the mood:

Official SXSW Festival Site: http://www.sxsw.com

Interactive SXSW Schedule/Calendar: http://sched.org/

Official SXSW Live Chat: http://www.meebo.com/sxsw

SXSW Insider Guide: http://sxsw.ning.com/

SXSW Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993?ref=s

Unofficial Weblog: http://sxswbaby.com

This last week at frog design we hosted a group of almost 40 global executive MBA's from IESE, the renowned business school in Barcelona. It was an intensive and stimulating day looking at issues of innovation - what methods are successful, what mindsets are required, and how do you bring insights from customers into the picture?

The participants were from all over the world, and many of them were working in countries other than where they grew up. Their industries ran the gamut from tech and software to oil and gas and mining, with everything in between, so it made for engaging and wide-ranging discussion.

One of the things that became clear was that companies of all sizes and types are struggling with many of the same issues around how to become more innovative and customer focused, and facing the same challenges of cultural change that are required to make address these issues most effectively. They are certainly difficult things to tackle - many a company can "luck out" with an innovation making it through the corporate bureaucracy, but it takes a cultural attitudinal shift to make this happen repeatedly if you are more used to step-wise product introductions.

Indeed, a Deloitte study from a couple of years ago revealed that executives resort to "back door" methods to foster innovations through the corporate pipeline almost 50% of the time. This type of "subterfuge" is necessary in a calcified environment, but by the same token there are often very logical reasons why that narrowing of corporate perspective has occurred, which cannot be rolled back overnight.

Thanks to IESE for collaborating with us, and thanks to my colleagues Ben Dempster (who ran and facilitated the event), Phillip Vasquez and Catherine Sun (who co-facilitated and helped with preparation).

The topic of sustainable or green design is of increasing urgency to companies involved in product development. Last year, it reached a tipping point in public interest and concern over global climate change, fueled by massive media interest.

Companies that fail to address it risk legislative punishment, as well as negative brand and sales consequences. But green also provides a huge market opportunity: recent surveys have indicated that key customer segments are willing to pay more for greener products.

Lots of companies at this year's Consumer Electronics Show were touting green design and environmental thinking, though as my colleague Adam Richardson observed, "in some cases, it seemed more sloganeering than anything very deep."

Not surprisingly, the backlash is rampant. Because green has become a forceful business imperative, it is getting harder these days to tell green design from "greenwashing" and to tell those who jump on the bandwagon from the ones driving it.

Consumers are harder to please too: increased demand for green products and services is contrasted by growing skepticism about moral free riders who take advantage of the public's goodwill for all things green.

Designers, and in particular industrial designers, who are uniquely positioned at the intersection of business, technology, and culture, may bring some clarity into the many shades of green. Since their work covers both the beginning and the end of the product development chain, they not only obtain privileged insights into user behavior, materials, and manufacturing, but they also possess a unique environmental responsibility, as well as the conceptual and practical power to actually make a difference.

As such interdisciplinary, enlightened vanguards of the new green conscience, they can drive an industrywide conversation and establish universal standards: "Sustainability promises to be one of the defining issues of our time, one with profound effects on our personal and professional lives," states the Web site of the Compostmodern conference on sustainable design. "For designers, it represents unique challenges as well as tremendous potential--nothing less than an opportunity to redesign how the world works."

Designers are hearing this call and beginning to institutionalize and externalize the knowledge that had previously been tacit and dispersed. Several leading design consultancies, including Design Continuum, Frog Design (full disclosure: my employer), Ideo, and Smart Design, have entered "The Designers Accord," an industrywide coalition to promote positive environmental and social impact.

The call to arms, which was first introduced in Frog's Design Mind magazine last summer, has since been endorsed by the influential design blog Core77, and it is growing as more firms pledge their involvement. In the coming months, the initiative will expand to include an open-source Web site in which member firms may share resources and ideas.

Cynics may say signing the agreement requires not much more than lip service, as most adopters will already practice many of the not-so-demanding principles outlined: "Undertake a program to educate your teams about designing sustainably; initiate a dialogue about environmental impact and sustainable alternatives with each and every client; measure the carbon, or greenhouse gas, footprint of your firm, and pledge to significantly reduce that footprint annually," and so on.

Fair enough, but that's not the point. What is more remarkable about the agreement is its open, "coopetitive" nature: for the first time, and disregarding their traditional competition, design firms (and also the two leading professional organizations, Industrial Designers Society of America and AIGA) commit to sharing their experience and pooling their resources for a greater cause.

That's a real paradigm shift, and it may indeed provide the lever that the Accord adopters are hoping for: "Our rationale is that, by collectively committing to having this conversation, our client base--the world's manufacturers, distributors, and services providers--will be compelled to evaluate sustainability as a key vector in decision making around the products and services they create for their base, the global consuming audience."

(Credit: Core 77)

Thousands of representatives from international corporations, design firms, government entities, and institutions of higher education, spanning more than 35 countries around the world, attended the CONNECTING'07 World Design Congress last week in San Francisco, the largest and arguably most influential gathering of industrial designers to date.

Did it live up to its promise? The short answer is: yes and no. There were early warning signs for the "no": The opening ceremony was a long-winded and largely self-congratulatory celebration of the two organizing bodies, ICSID and IDSA. In his opening keynote, ICSID president Peter Zech set the tone for what the conference turned out to be: a celebration of industrial design's accomplishments as well as an ambitious overview of the richness of what's out there right now -- but not so much a departure towards (or at least a vision of) a new and exciting future of industrial design. No wonder then that after showing a promotional video that featured the dolce vita in next year's World Design Capital Torino, everyone rushed to the buffet (piles of sushi! I wonder how consternated the Japanese attendees who had just gotten off the airplane must have been).

The opening night's impression remained throughout the conference. It soon became clear that the main problem of the Congress was that it had a motto ("Connecting"), albeit very broad, but it lacked an agenda or a distinct purpose. No new paradigm was born, no overarching theme emerged, and no new star rose. No battles were fought, no heated debates were held. The conference was primarily designed as a forum for designers to reassure each other of the value of design. As for the debatable value proposition of industrial design in the 21st century, a consensus appeared to have been reached even before the first panel began: Yes, designers are committed to beauty. Yes, they are committed to connecting commerce, technology, and culture, and they provide a holistic, systemic perspective. Yes, they are humanists and environmentalists, acknowledging and acting upon their ecological and ethical responsibilities. Yes, they are, as Peter Zech described it in his keynote, "The most influential creative discipline because we shape the things of the everyday world." But the vehemence with which all of this was proclaimed inadvertently revealed how insecure designers still feel about their tangible and yet so inexplicable profession.

Despite the harmonious and leveling mood, the conference was not devoid of many outstanding moments. Some of the old icons, in particular, demonstrated that they're still on top of their game. The Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa took the audience on a riveting journey through the "core of awareness," illuminating how the shapes of things live in us. He presented product designs that respect our pre-conceived notions of how objects have to look. He argued that good design "notices the unnoticeable," providing a-ha moments rather than wow effects. Furthermore, some of the popular advocates of "design thinking" such as Tim Brown from IDEO or Roger Martin from the Rotman School of Management, who had been instrumental in transcending the traditional boundaries of design by embracing its innovative potential for social and economic change, reinforced their compelling cases. The idea behind design thinking is simple: Design is not just design. It is a way of thinking that tackles a problem at the input and not just the output level. With the words of Tim Brown, design thinking examines the desirability of a product or service (human factors), its economic viability (business), and its feasibility (technology). And based on these insights, it then develops design solutions for increasingly interdependent (eco)-systems of producers and consumers. All design thinking presentations were eye-opening for those unfamiliar with the matter; however, who really is? Brown et al can consider it a huge accomplishment that, thanks to them, design thinking is not such a radical novelty anymore; it is a widely accepted concept that designers may in fact mistrust more than business people do, as frog design founder Hartmut Esslinger knowingly said in his speech.

Speaking of business: Where was it? The perspective of corporations, except for presentations by HP and Tesla Motors, was greatly missing from all of the plenary sessions and would have added a lot of value to the discussions. The same holds true for web 2.0 phenomena (ironically, the Web 2.0 summit took place at the same time only a few miles away), particularly the convergence of software and hardware, virtual and real, online and offline: what about virtual communities like Second Life, 3D printing, or virtual displays; what about web 2.0, social media, and amateur culture and their implications for industrial design? These issues did not get the level of attention they deserved. You could have forgotten in all the talks about eco-design that Al Gore had not only fostered the green movement but also invented the Internet. Fortunately, there were speakers like Bruce Sterling, the self-acclaimed "design visionary," who ruminated on his notion of "spimes" in the upcoming "Internet of things" -- new types of products that are defined as ideas or memes that can be tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of an object in an ever-connected world (simply put). Or forecaster Paul Saffo, who depicted the notion of "design after the information revolution." In general, the best plenary sessions were those that served as a homage to the future rather than a homage to someone's lifetime achievement. Product designer Richard Seymour, for instance, gave a fascinating update on the Virgin Galactic space tourism project. Alex Steffen from Worldchanging.com offered some practical advice for navigating the future markets of green innovation.

For the most part, though, a certain nostalgia clouded the program, and the key for designing the future seemed to lie in the past. Consequently, most of the attempts to make sense of the conference theme were actually proposing a "re-connecting" rather than a "connecting." The wonderfully witty Sir Ken Robinson urged the audience to re-connect the ecology of human resources with the ecology of nature. Janine Benyus, in her fascinating study of biomimicry, suggested we re-connect industrial design and engineering with nature, understanding and mimicking its far more sustainable shapes and processes. The main lesson to learn here is that nature does not produce any waste. While we almost always build top-down -- starting with the larger material from which we deduct the eventual object -- nature does it better: it builds bottom up and grows organically.

Nostalgia may have also been the reason for revisiting some of the big industrial design truisms. One of them is the importance of emotions. Laura Richardson's attempt to rationalize emotion by quantifying its impact ("emotion engine") was interesting and unique, but other presenters were simply stating the obvious (and long established) link between understanding people's emotional needs and the design brief. Left-brain vs. right-brain, analytical vs. emotional thinking, form follows emotion etc. -- the conference treated these topics like museum exhibits. But as far as emotions go and creativity, advertising has long been outperforming design: The Clio award commercials that were shown during session breaks were more "out of the box" than many of the products shown in the PowerPoint slides before and after.

A much discussed example of emotional design is the one hundred dollar laptop. For Yves Behar "design must create values and value." Behar demoed the device and showed how easy it is to record music or to connect with others in the same area that are online with their laptops as well. On the way out to the lobby I overheard a conversation: "That's exactly the problem. Hundreds of these laptops in the Bay Area. But no one in Africa will buy them." But maybe that's exactly not the problem. Maybe the point is that the developed world needs a product that makes it feel better about the developing world. I don't mean this in a cynical way at all. What if this laptop, rather than connecting kids in Africa, is our emotional connection to these kids? That may not be the product's original purpose but that doesn't make it less legitimate. Maybe, in times of human and natural disasters, stripping off the negative association from the word "feel good" is a brave act.

If you recognize anxious times, that is. The Congress panels did not articulate any fear of future technology or a sense of paranoia or angst (with the notable exception of Fiona Ruby's and Anthony Dunne's session on "designs for fragile personalities in anxious times"). While the catastrophic consequences of climate change were widely discussed and were mostly embraced with profound optimism, nano-technology or bio-genetics were simply left out of the equation. I found that surprising. If "the future doesn't need us" (Bill Joy), tomorrow's design will certainly not need designers. As design pretends to provide the accessories for the ongoing illusion of human mastery, it is in fact already in a constant state of emergency. Given the radical progress in advanced nano-technologies, design may be nothing but proof that "something can be done even when there is nothing that can be done" (Peter Sloterdiijk). "Design thinking" is nice but it will become meaningless if (when) artificial intelligence will start doing the thinking (and the design) for us. Already, the designer's responsibility is shifting from designing things and experiences to designing the conditions for design (and thinking), creating human links between bits, atoms, neurons, and genes. What if the designer's major task in the 21st century is to be the devil's advocate, providing a (false) sense of personal safety in times of genetic engineering, personalized machines, and a new singularity? What if it is time to start designing for a time after design?

Those and other potentially disturbing questions remained unaddressed at the World Design Congress. At the end, after three days of digesting the over-scheduled and vastly divergent CONNECTING program, it had become almost impossible to somehow connect all the disparate dots. The Congress had lost itself in a diversity of topics, perspectives, and disciplines that came at the expense of one strong message. CONNECTING'07 was a great experience and certainly connected designers from all over the world. But was that enough? I'm not sure. It celebrated the history of industrial design, but it may have squandered an historic opportunity to inspire and prepare thousands of designers for the future. In this regard, Sir Ken Robinson's words aptly summarized the conference's shortcoming without intending to: "We don't fail because we aim too high and fail. We fail because we aim too low and succeed."

San Francisco will host thousands of designers from around the world when CONNECTING'07, the Icsid/IDSA World Design Congress, comes to town October 17-20. As the largest and most influential gathering of industrial designers to date, CONNECTING'07 will fill three major Nob Hill sites with prominent speakers, exhibits, and events. Related activities will also spill into the surrounding city, with many of San Francisco's design studios, companies, museums, design schools and stores holding receptions, open houses and tours. Representatives from nearly 500 internationally renowned corporations, design firms, government entities, and higher education institutions, spanning more than 35 countries across the world have made arrangements to attend.

"Connecting" will serve as the Congress' overarching theme as well as its name. Participants will explore the implications of an ever more connected world, and the ways in which designers can positively influence connections between business, brands, services, technology, and populations. More than 220 speakers -- including designers, educators, business leaders, innovators, and scientists -- will take the stage over the course of three days. Among them will be Hartmut Esslinger (the founder of frog design), Paul Saffo, Naoto Fukasawa, Bruce Sterling, Yves Behar, and many other design luminaries. Two Design Galleries will show off some of the hottest new products, technologies, and techniques on the market, as well as winners of the 2007 International Design Excellence Awards co-sponsored by BusinessWeek and IDSA.

Review the entire three-day program