How would you like it?
Rained in, gloomy skies,
Bright yellow flames of the fireplace crackling,
Hand in hand with your mother,
Enjoying some intimate conversation?
How would you like it?
Still waters, peaceful surroundings,
Dim red ruby setting in the distance,
Hands in the cool lake waters,
Enjoying a moment of introspection?
How would you like it?
Tall weeds, harvest wheat,
Afternoon sun beating down on bare skin,
Stick of sugarcane in your hands,
Enjoying some earthly pleasures?
How would you like it?
Ripe grapes, wet feet,
A jolly gathering of best friend,
Fresh ruby wine on your lips,
Enjoying a merry evening?
How would you like it?
Stone gray, lifeless machines,
Black suits in an empty conference room,
Glass and steel surrounding,
Living out this mundane routine?
HYPOTHESIS: The advertising agency, the design studio and the strategic consultancy are colliding in clients and services offered. They are going after the same budgets and offering ‘innovative solutions’ as differentiators.
The ADVERTISING AGENCY
The advertising agency has a long history. Scenes from “Mad Men” (a more recent form) pop into our head of bureaucratic organizations charging clients through their noses for creative services. Agencies have traditionally focused on campaigns through television and print. Ad spending has seen a sea change with the advent of the internet and social networking. TV is becoming the second and third priority for advertisers. The audience is changing, and fewer people are watching programming the way it is broadcasted, using DVR and watching on your devices through services like Hulu. The audience is increasingly fragmented, and it is difficult to get the same number of eyeballs on traditional media as even five years ago.
Clients of large ad agencies are becoming tired of their lack of transparency and accountability, according to John Winsor (@jtwinsor), former executive director of strategy and product innovation at Crispin+Porter+Bogusky. $10,000 for every minute of a video that will go on You Tube is a joke. Costs are bloated because of agencies’ history and size: they have to support large staffs of artists, designers and copywriters, along with account executives, media planners and buyers, directors and partners. Such agencies are no longer agile, and their business model is broken.
“The big agency business has become a lifestyle”, says John Winsor. He recently left Crispin+Porter+Bogusky to co-found a new model of advertising agency called Victor & Spoils. In my discussions with him, it became clear that clients are are willing to experiment with smaller agencies such as V&S, (which offers more detailed and lower billing statements along with a host of measures to keep billing transparent). V&S employs five core people including strategists and creatives. “When working in a team of four to five people, you might get one amazing idea, three or four good ideas and three or four terrible ideas; Multiply that when you crowdsource (by a hundred) and you get a hundred great ideas, a few hundred good ideas and many terrible ideas”, says John about his inspiration for the model of curated crowd sourcing. “Our job is to curate (i.e. sort through and evaluate) those ideas to filter out those hundred great ideas”. V&S is still working out its business model, but it is keeping transparency at the core of it all. Clients are charged for the ideas that they use and not the ones that they don’t. Services are broken down into parts and offered to clients as pieces of a pie.
Is the crowd-sourcing model working for them? They seem to think so. So far, they have executed five projects helped by the crowd and the clients seem to be satisfied. Ask the creative community, and they are up in arms against the whole crowd-sourcing movement. As seen in the backlash against the recent Moleskine logo competition hosted on popular design website designboom.com, Moleskine seem to have alienated their core market with this move. Designers are worried about losing their jobs because increasingly clients are looking to the crowd for design solutions.
Another example of a small agency beating out larger agencies globally is AKQA. They are an advertising agency that was focused on digital media from their start. When digital media marketing came onto the radars of marketers, the space was highly fragmented, with small agencies trying to get a piece of the pie and large agencies scrambling to develop talent and skills required to advertise in the new environment. AKQA was agile enough to take advantage of fast- changing digital technologies and won many global pitches competing with several large and established agencies. They were a young team, who consumed the digital media themselves, were able to come up exciting new ideas to take advantage of the offerings of the new digital media space. Older ad agencies used existing strategies applied to traditional media into this new media space and were not able to excite clients. AKQA is now the largest independent digital advertising agency with offices all over the world.
The DESIGN STUDIO
Industrial design studios are increasingly looking at ad agencies and saying to themselves, “Why are we not going after those marketing budgets?” Design firms have traditionally milked product development and R&D budgets that are much smaller than marketing budgets. But what significant advantages could they offer over advertising agencies?
Design studios have typically differentiated themselves by their creative process and their focus on the user. Using research techniques and design thinking methodologies (read: multiple iterations), design firms have offered disruptive user-centered product or service-design strategies. In a gross generalization, the business aspect of designs are not given due consideration. A focus is laid on usability and aesthetics, which is what their strengths have been traditionally.
John Gleason (@johnmgleason1), past director of design partnerships for P&G is no stranger to hiring design firms for creative work. He has seen pitch presentations from over 600 design firms during his time there. “Everyone has the same pitch more or less: we have the best people, we have this amazing process, great projects and these awesome clients. We differ in the experience of working with us – give us a shot”. He says only 5 or 6 have actually stood out in his experience. They have been the ones who have been able to say no to projects and are able to clearly define their core competencies. An example is a firm (not named) whose core competency is to turn around failing brands. They have recognized that is what differentiates them from the rest and are able to use it to get projects that are in line with their competencies. And they turn down projects that they don’t have capabilities for whereas most design firms would scramble to hire talent to allow them to add those capabilities in the process diluting their focus.
The STRATEGIC CONSULTANCY
Strategic consultancies hardly overlap with creative services that are offered by ad agencies and design firms. James Chiang, consultant at Boston Consulting Group, told me that they compete with design firms on very few projects. Their work is mostly management consulting and strategy for growth— nowhere near a design firm’s comfort zone.
Analysis and quantification is extremely important to strategic consultancies. They analyze data heavily at every step in their process. Take for example a retail planogramming project that is given to both a strategic consultancy and a design studio. The strategic consultancy will start with gathering all data available on the existing models, analyze how people flow through, calculate footfall to dollars percentages and try to optimize the layout to get the most revenue out of the customer that comes in. The design studio will also analyze existing models, but they will talk to customers, worry about user experience and ease of finding groceries that you are looking for. This is the basic difference between the total left brained analytics of a strategic consultancy and right brained creative process of a design studio.
Their clients are C-level managers in large organizations. They cover many industries and many functions. Typical projects are growth related projects. Also, strategic consultants are placed within their client organizations for projects. This differs from an agency or a design studio who are hired as outside consultants. These boundaries are blurring though.
The REAL PICTURE
The diagram below is how the venn diagram finally ended up through the course of my research. All of the people that I interviewed in design and advertising agreed wholly with the hypothesis. The size of the circles is proportional to the fee that each of these service agencies commands from the services they offer. Ad agencies and design studios are overlapping more in offered services whereas from the client’s side, strategic consultancies reach a much wider audience.
Moving Up The SERVICE VALUE CHAIN
An interesting development in all these three service firms is a shifting mindset in the service value chain. Strategic consultancies have traditionally targeted budgets from C-level management, advertising agencies targeted their clients’ marketing budgets and design firms are left with product development and R&D budgets that are usually the lowest in the chain. Design firms are trying to move upstream in the corporate value chain by increasingly tackling strategic growth problems for companies – a field that was dominated by strategic consultancies so far. They are also going after budgets that are higher up in the chain.
Advertising agencies are also moving their services up and down the chain. There is an increasing need for integration of marketing and product development, so ad agencies are adding more tactical design capabilities to their teams and moving downstream (packaging design is a typical example).
There is also a need to align strategic objectives of companies with the brands of their products and hence they are also required to move upstream to align strategic goals. For strategic consulting companies that are typically focused on intangible strategic proposals, some are differentiating themselves based on execution of those strategies through tactical and tangible output.
An example of this shift is strategic design firm Jump Associates who identified this opportunity early and have literally jumped on it. They classify themselves as a hybrid between strategic consultancies and design studios. They have their own take on the creative process and have reinvented all the tools that design thinking affords for their own use. Udaya Patnaik, partner at Jump warns other design firms trying to get into the strategic side of design. “Stick to what you’re good at”, he says, “the issue with most design firms nowadays is that they don’t know what their core competency is – there’s a mismatch”. He also spoke about the tendency of design firms to obsess with “cool ideas”. They focus on framing the problem, asking the right questions and embedding themselves deep within the client organization to understand the inherent culture. They then apply their design toolkits to develop disruptive solutions to problems that might have not even been framed by traditional management consultancies.
There seem to be a few different factors that seem to be causing all this shift in the service industry. CEOs are increasingly realizing the advantages of having many different departments working together instead of in silos. Apple is a prime example of this – teams are organized by products and services and not by capability. This gives them the advantage of having a tight focus and alignment amongst the various teams. It is difficult to replicate this internally within larger organizations that have not had this in their culture. External consulting firms are increasingly being hired to align strategic objectives and tactical capabilities. This requires a thorough understanding of both the strategic and tactical aspects of the organization.
Another factor seems to stem from the recent economic crisis. Companies are increasingly seeking to cut costs and the easiest from their point of view is external service firms. Service firms offering the whole range of services are being retained, while the specialist firms are losing business. In the longer term, this could be advantageous to the company – fewer consultants to deal with, easier alignment of values and objectives and cheaper. But this isn’t good news for specialized service design firms, as they continue to move deeper and deeper into their niches.
Several opportunities arise from this development. I strongly believe that there is a gap in the intersection of advertising, design and strategic consulting that has yet to be filled. What kind of services this agency would offer is still hazy, but it would somehow integrate all three horizontals to provide value to clients who are seeking a more integrated approach towards marketing, business and innovation.
It has been my effort during my time in gradID, Art Center College of Design to research this hypothesis further in depth by talking to as many insiders as I can. It is also my constant endeavor to identify the creative service firm that fits in that intersection of advertising, design and strategic consulting. If you have any insights or would like to strike a conversation, I’m all ears! Email me at sidv at workisplayislife dot com, you can follow me on twitter or leave a comment below. Thanks for reading!
The story of Kickstarter as a disruptive business model. It disrupts the idea of raising capital from 3rd party. With kickstarter, if you have a project, you can get direct access to your customers without having to answer to manufacturers or venture capitalists.
The project is an experiment in gradID to create a new form of business case studies that is a lot more visual than typical case studies from the HBR.
My new portfolio is finally online! Thanks to Cargo Collective and the amazing platform they’ve built. I’m going to be sticking around them for a long time. You can access it from the portfolio link on the top-left of this page or click on the image below!
Below is an excerpt from Steve’s speech at the Stanford commencement in 2005. My decision to change my career after graduating from Manipal was because of these words.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
He was my hero and inspiration. It feels like a personal loss.
Formula E is the Graduate Industrial Department’s (gradID) annual summer event challenging its students to extract the most power from 16 feet of rubber band and go around three courses on the Art Center College of Design Hillside campus. This year was a record breaking race with all the records from past years having been broken and truly achieving innovative vehicles. This is an engineering based system design project – making several sub systems work together to achieve performance is one of the key learnings.
As team flying squirrel, Philip Keller and I at the very outset challenged the established gospel truths and decided to start ground-up. We made an early commitment to having 4 wheels instead of 3 that have been the norm for the past few years. The power produced by the rubber band is quite large, but useless if it cannot be transferred to the ground with very little loss. Traction was identified as the key criteria to make a successful car. Also, early on, we committed to Minimum Functional Prototypes – making a prototype as soon as a theory was developed with the least effort to demonstrate it rather than continue to theorize about it. In this effort, we went through 7 fully functional cars, with the 7th being the one that we raced on the final day. Using materials easily available and easiest to work with. We settled on plywood, tubes as material for the frame and zip-ties and string for fastening. No traditional bonding agents were used allowing us a turnaround time of about 90 mins from fully disassembled to fully assembled.
Here’s a video documenting our journey!
And here’s a breakdown of our material and design choices for the car:
- Body as suspension – This idea was tested out early in the term by using different materials such as plywood, plexiglas, sheet aluminum, MDF and masonite to achieve theeffect of suspension by using a flexible upper layer and a rigid lower layer. After the experiments, 1/8th” birch plywood was arrived at as the material for the body. Plywood had the right density to ensure light weight and leant itself to iteration.
- Fastening system- During the experiments for the body as suspension, we came across zip-ties as a fastening system. It could be used to laminate multiple pieces of plywood without a traditional bonding agent. After validating it’s rigidity with our second prototype, we settled on zip-ties as a preferred fastening system. It also created an interesting color dynamic from an aesthetic point of view.
- Frame material – As described earlier, plywood was decided on a body material to implement the suspension idea. Although, the whole body made of plywood was increasing the weight substantially and hence we decided to experiment with a space frame structure to reduce the weight, keeping the strength the same. Square cross section tubes were preferred because of easy fastening with slots in a laser cut plywood part. Round tubes would have been difficult to secure. The first experiments were with hollow aluminum square tubes. After some testing during the midterm prototype race, we discovered the force that was need to make them fail was quite low. To reinforce them, we sheathed a smaller tube inside to increase the thickness. This performed better although failed after a couple of test crashes. We tried brass tubes next, and although heavier, the strength advantage was hard to ignore.
- Tire material- Theoretically, we were of the opinion that a thin tire with only a single point contact with the ground would lead to loss of traction from the motor to the ground. Hence we required a wheel which a larger surface area in contact with the ground. Initial experiments were with silicon tubes, but we had issues with bonding them to the wheel material. We tried wide elastic bands mounted on laminated plywood wheels and faced similar problems. The challenge again was to affix the tire material to the wheel reliably. We then experimented with pipe insulating material – this came in a hollow circular cross section and easily mounted around the wheel. The adhesive that came on the foam was strong enough to use as adhesive on the wheel. This performed much better than our expectations and also added a component of suspension in the rear wheels which we were not able to achieve through the body. The major issues with this material were (i) wear after testing on the track was too much – we would have had to change it out very often to ensure optimum performance and (ii) since this was an extruded material, we needed to join the ends in order to make a circular tire which was proving to be a challenge. Finally, we found some RC in-wheels made of a similar foam material but were cast and they were circular with approximately the right diameter for our requirements. We settled on that material for our final tires.
- Motor- A key innovation was the two rear wheel direct drive system. A single tube and two wheels on the ground afforded us much more stability around turns than some of the other competing three wheeled racers. Aluminum was chosen as a material for good strength to weight ratio.
- Brake pads and brake disc- Silicone tube and bare aluminum were used as the materials for the first braking system. The silicone tube was tensioned around the aluminum drive shaft and when pulled, it provided a adequate braking system. Once the stronger motor was introduced, it was not able to hold the high initial torque of the rubber band, so we went back to the drawing board to figure out a better braking system. A scissor brake system was settled on as the optimum design in the space available. Materials that were tested as brake pads include foam, plywood, rubber, elastic band and pen grips. Pen grips were settled on due to easy affix-ability to the brake shoes. Elastic band wrapped around the aluminum tube was then used as the brake disc.
- Frame tensioning – The triangle shape of the frame was arrived on as the optimal arrangement of elements to provide best crash resistance. The force was more evenly divided around the body than with two linear elements running down the center of the frame. String was used inside the hollow tubes to add tension amongst the various elements of the frame and served to hold everything together.
Key Innovations
- Four wheel wide stance
- Single tube direct drive.
- One-way bearings as rear differential.
- No traditional bonding agent (only tensioned string and zip-ties).
- Tires as suspension.
In summation, having gone through 7 iterations team Flying Squirrel was awarded most experimental. This went along nicely with having placed in all three of the races
Drag race: 3rd Place
Hill Climb: 2nd Place
Figure 8: 1st Place
This report resulted in the development of the Action Office system by Herman Miller. It is still relevant and on sale today, 47 years after the report was published. Three major contributions of this system to the office space as we know it today are personal+accessible spaces, vertical storage and the felt pin up board. The cubical is a result of the first one and it has been bastardized to it’s current form over the years. The original proposal was to keep the angles of the walls at 120 degrees to encourage collaboration when needed. Here are some of the key insights that the research established. Most still relevant today:
- The quantity of information is overwhelming. There is duplication of effort both in creating and consuming it. Information is out of date very quickly. The consideration of flow of information is imperative in the design of the office.
- Information is power. Hierarchy of an organization determines where the most important information is held – at the top or distributed.
- The office is a mind oriented living space. The mind can focus on 7 units at a time plus minus 2.
- An office with no relevant visual display deprives the human performer of a spectacular recall tool – the human eye as a receptor for the mind. Exhausted display is invisible.
- Somewhat rare in offices now is the person who has only one job, one thing to do. Typically we have multi-responsibilities which have to be treated separately.
- Figuring out the right way to orient people talking to each other is important. Too close and it is uncomfortable and strained. Too far and they’re orally alienated.
- The seated working position is an unfortunate outcome of the office lifestyle. Working in a standing position improves productivity and energy within the individual and the space.
- Technology is best implemented in an office if it serves to improve communication systems. If it acts in a silo or overburdens people with information, it is not doing it’s job.
- Change cannot be pushed up from below. It has to be a practice and belief of leaders.
See the action office furniture system by Herman Miller here.
What are user interfaces? They serve as a medium of communication between man and machine, whether it is a set of levers on an engine lathe or a keyboard and a mouse to control a personal computer. In the interaction design industry, recently, the shift of focus is from GUIs to NUIs. GUIs are Graphical User Interfaces and have been the mainstay of personal computing for the past 15 years. NUIs are recent – Natural User Interfaces aim to eliminate the learning curve of a man-machine interface and translate natural body movements to actions in the machine.
Natural user interfaces have progressed to the extent of trapping neuron transmissions to control objects. How far will designers go to make interfaces natural? Does the power of thought count as an input device? At what point does the interface stop being a barrier and becomes ubiquitous? At what point does an interface stop being an interface and becomes a direct connection between man and machine.
NUIs are in their infancy of-course. One of the major drivers of this paradigm is the iPhone and its multitouch interface – never before has a device has successfully implemented a non-tactile interface with so much success. Other recent examples include the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation Move and Microsoft XBox Kinect. All these gaming systems aim to eliminate that one piece of hardware between the console and the player – the controller. It could be argued that the Wii and the Move still use controllers – true, but most of the input involves gestures on the player’s part. NUIs are hailed for the lack of a learning curve – learning the interface as such does not require practice or reading a manual.
The beauty of traditional tactile interfaces lay in their physical feedback. A beautiful circular metallic knob that controls volume – the smooth sensual movement as it snaps from volume level five to level six. Push buttons that feel like you were depressing your finger in a viscous gel. All this tactility and “fun” is lost in the transition from analog to digital control. There is a pattern in some of the nostalgia that is seen in some of the apps that are designed for the iPad – the shiny graphic buttons, sliders that resemble radio sets from the 60s for example. Designers are taking advantage of the nostalgic wave that is taking place now in a variety of fields – fashion, television, graphic design and product design.
Fashion is transient. This wave will crash, and then another will take its place. Kids these days don’t grow up using desktop telephones, so the rotary dial system would be completely unfamiliar if it was used on a mobile phone aimed at youth. The pretty sequences we see in movies like Minority Report and more recently Iron Man 2 inspire us to make some of it possible.
So what would interfaces of the future look like? Will we see them at all or will they be hidden from sight? Augmented Reality no doubt will play an important part in enriching daily experiences not too far in the future. NUIs would have evolved into being completely integrated into our daily personal computing devices. Will the concept of an interface exist at all? Humans would somehow directly interact with machines without the need for an intermediary.
The key to not taking the fun out of the experience is to find the right balance between tactility and naturality.
My Design Process:
Rework:
First Draft:
Industrial Downtown LA – unimaginative buildings from the hey days of mfg in USA, migrant workers in their thousands, heavy vehicles transporting goods and one building that stands out from the crowd – “American Apparel is an Industrial Revolution” (in Helvetica bold – a font they’ve made their own). And what a revolution it is!
Started in 2001 by Dov Charney, this business grew from modest nothings (selling basic tees on street corners) to 300 retail stores worldwide today. The characteristics of the founder are evident in the values of the factory and the brand today. Edgy, chaotic, bold and ever-changing, American Apparel is one of those businesses that have evolved into a living entity – one that is organically growing (out of control?).
Even though the numbers may show that American Apparel isn’t doing very well for itself (the company’s stock prices are rock bottom since early 2010), their employees definitely do not think so. Our tour guide – Alex spoke of the company with a glint in her eye – a sense of loyalty that comes only with happy employees. Their incentive based factory wages give their workers purpose in their efforts – allowing them to earn anywhere from $8 per hour to $30 per hour based on performance. A creative environment to work in, it seems as though their CEO Dov is one of those extremely hands on (pun intended, with all his sexual harassment cases) people who live the brand.
Lean manufacturing methods are employed on their factory floor, preventing overstock. Turnaround times for new designs are very short as well, sometimes even as short as 3 hours – from selection of fabric, design, cuts, sewing to a sample in Dov’s hands.
They take the “MFG in USA” tag very seriously! The factory is completely self sustained, everything from construction to graphics to IT services is done by employees in house. They do not rely on any external vendor for any of their business functions. This may turn out to be their achilles heel. The company is growing so fast and so quick that they are not able to maintain value for their shareholders. Their sales figures are falling, and so is the stock price. Where is the tipping point? And when will this giant living organism implode? Interesting questions that will only be answered by time.
Delicious Links- Photoelectric effect in art school. Hahahahaha! (at Annex Building - Art Center College Of Design) [pic] — http://t.co/t258nvdm
- Beautiful colors in the setting sky. (with Hugo at Home Oaktree) [pic] — http://t.co/DG0x9ETf
- Clear for iPhone (Coming Soon!) on Vimeo
- The New Web Typography
- “@fossfan: What is the definition of innovation? http://t.co/Z6sqFqDK” #innovation #lingo #strategy
- The Bay Lights
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- lightroomapps. - Products
- New Blog Post: How would you like it? - How would you like it? Rained in, gloomy skies, Bright yellow flames of the ... http://t.co/9Sswyvap
