Fossil fuel logic

5 years ago, the Design Council published the 'Design Index', a collection of stocks which, according to the Design Council, over-perform because the companies included have something to do with design. 

If this would work, it would be good advice for investors, and it would sure make a compelling case for design. However, as it turns out, it doesn't quite do that. 60% of the stocks contained in the 'Design Index' have either disappeared or underperformed. Of 61 stocks in total, 20 stocks disappeared by acquisition, merger, going bancrupt or being taken private, 17 stocks underperformed, and 24 stocks performed well.

Stocks included in the 'Design Index' are companies which either have been nominated by Design Council experts, or have been included in Design Council 'Millennium Products', or appeared in D&AD Awards, or appeared in an Interbrand brand value study.  

Corporations usually think they know which business they are in. Yet, managers - and designers, for that matter - often do not realize that what they assume to be knowledge is in fact an assumption, a system of beliefs rooted in history and habit. These belief systems produce symbols and ways of doing things (the size and location of one's office, the rituals involved in reaching a particular person etc.). More interestingly for innovation and design, these belief systems also influence the ways in which people in an organization go about to produce artifacts - products and services. 

In this short case study, mg strategy used design to find out how the future of mobile communications could look like. Imagine a large telecommunications company. This company became big, and global, by producing mobile phone handsets with economies of scale at the right time - when mobile communication was a rapidly expanding  market. Then the market environment starts to change, and the market starts to look strange for managers in this company. Questions are cropping up if the tried-and-tested business model built on economy of scale is still valid. How to figure out what the future might hold in store?  

Mobile phones are interesting devices: they connect by distancing. The sensation of the mobile phone is its ability to create a temporary spatial permanence between moving targets, to realize a paradox: flexible distances. No matter how quickly you are moving, the other is always there. Being reachable means being present in time, yet removed in space. Mobile phones are deeply personal devices which trigger different ways of dealing with the other. Some efforts go into the display of being reachable, other efforts into rituals of being unreachable. 

The problems the company had in dealing with a changing market environment for mobile communication presented a chance for in-house innovators. However, the design function - or rather the way how design was seen there - was part of the problem, not part of the solution. There, design was understood predominantly as a tangible "3D" task with the overall form factor being the focus of attention. It was about "look and feel", and this simply meant that it was all about shapes and colors. The screen and interface, at the time a small part of mobile phones, was considered a minor problem to be dealt with by programmers and graphic designers. The product 'mobile phone" was approached nearly as if it would be a car, with questions of shape and color being at the center of attention. This particular design mindset turned out to be out of tune with the market and contributing to the problems of the company. 

To open up the view for other ways of thinking about mobile phones, I designed three phone concepts in 2004, each representing another angle to think about mobile communication devices: One concept dealt with usage and consumption and focused attention on the afterlife of a phone - the dissolving phone. One concept dealt with user interaction and focused attention on the codes of use in communication devices - the touch-screen network phone. And another concept dealt with 'embodied' aspects of communication, focusing attention on the often overlooked, because problematic, man-machine relationships in communication - the dermal strata phone.

The 'dissolving phone' was a radical design concept to provoke a rethinking of how a mobile phone was supposed to be designed. It questioned the, at the time, taken for granted idea that a mobile phone, although it is a transient object of consumption, has to be designed and produced as if it would be somewhat 'eternal', if only for the time until the contract of the user with the network provider expired. In fact, a product had to represent - or suggest, by design - durability exactly because it is a transient object of consumption. Thus there was no room to consider the actual afterlife of the product and how the phone would disintegrate and decompose. While these thoughts would later become more prominent with 'cradle to cradle', they had been absent at the time, and so we conceived a phone which was designed to disintegrate beautifully, easily and quickly. Made in reinforced jelly, it simply dissolves when put into a glass of water with Alka Seltzer. 

The next concept, the touch-screen network 'connection phone', most accurately described the future of mobile phones in the medium term. While investigating the use of phones, I found that the tangible buttons on mobile phones are directly connected to the historic convention of telephone numbers. Numbers, then, could also be seen as standing in between people who want to connect. Without physical buttons, this phone would allow you to scroll through your network, graphically animated on the screen, with a swipe of your fingers and, by tap, connect you to a network node representing a person in your network. The number is, as an auxiliary information, still on display, but it is not the focus - the focus is on the network and the name. In 2004, this concept included predictions of elements of the iPhone and of Twitter.

The last, also radical, design concept, the 'dermal strata phone', was designed around the hand gesture people make with thumb and index finger when they mean "Let's call each other". Here, the telephone has disappeared as a tangible object. Instead, it is surgically embedded in your hand, just below the outermost skin. An miniaturized speaker is embedded in the thumb and a microphone in the index finger. The very casual relationship we have with electronic devices is here pushed to the next level. We carry and use our mobile phones most of the time close to our bodies. Here, electronics are not only always close to us, they are, in an uncanny way, part of us. As we increasingly see our bodies as instruments to be technically improved upon (just think of plastic surgery and piercing), this concept shows how easily electronics can become part of our bodies.

The answer to the question "which business are you in?" was simple: The company would see itself differently if it would assume to be in the business of communication, not in the business of producing phones. Although the slogan of the company reflected part of this, its mindset was focused on tangible phones and their form factor, not on communication in a wider sense and how it could be enabled by innovative products and services. 

Product-focused mindsets are dangerous - just think about typewriter companies. If they would have thought about themselves not as being in the business of typewriters, but as being in the business of information, they might have seen that computers will at some point in time become better tools of information. 

 

It is now 3 years since the logo for London 2012 was presented. In times of general logo tiredness and brand overload, it was one heftily discussed piece of graphic design. Less than two days after the logo was presented by British agency Wolff Olins, over 26,000 people had signed an online petition for it to be scrapped. Comments included: “cheap & tacky”, “complete and utter rubbish”, “awful, amateurish, jagged, like a badly done jigsaw”, "dreadful and embarassing", "load of old twaddle", "a shame", "looks like a broken swastika”, “looks like a toileting monkey", “horrendous, spiky and aggressive”, ”a comical sex act between The Simpsons” - more for instance here. 

Patrick Burgoyne, of the Creative Review, said those he had spoken to about the logo were “quite shocked and quite outraged”. Stephen Bayley, of the Design Museum, said it is a "puerile mess, an artistic flop and a commercial scandal". The Independent wrote that the logo “claimed a medal for being the most unpopular logo in British marketing history”. 

The logo animation on the official website of the 2012 Olympics triggered epileptic seizures and had to be removed from the site. According to the charity Epilepsy Action, it was a danger to anyone with photosensitive epilepsy.

The reasons why the public was so outraged are interesting to investigate. Aesthetic questions are always relative. Interesting for innovation is that there is a loosely defined space of expectations - what is understood to be suitable and adequate. This understanding is both culture- and time-specific. In the case of the 2012 logo, its intense colors and serrated shapes obviously defied what was understood as suitable for the Olympics. Things have cooled down since, so it can be assumed that what seemed spectacularly outrageous three years ago is seen less so today.

I lately experimented with the application of generative algorithms to type, resulting in some interesting letterforms:

 

Click here to download "Generative", one of the resulting fonts, as a True Type font file. The font is free to use under a Creative Commons Attribution License. To install the font in Windows, simply copy it to your Windows Font folder (WINDOWS/FONTS). To install the font on Mac OS, drag the file to the systems folder. The font - see a glyph example below- consists only of uppercase letters A to Z.

In November 2008, I invited a group of architects, town planners, designers and engineers from Germany, the UK, France, Brazil and Japan to collaborate for one week on the blueprint for a zero-carbon community in the desert. To enable a highly focused collaboration in a very short timeframe, I developed a "shared space" process, based on one expressive medium which has to be shared by the participants. The shared space is a shared image or model which can enable a shared understanding and create a frame of reference for the instant prototyping of complex design projects. In this instance, the shared space was the projected building site, printed out on a large canvas to be the common background for the architecture scale models.  

Within one very intensive week, we came up with an advanced concept for a zero-carbon, pedestrian-friendly environment. This "creative resort" or village was envisioned to provide an inspiring working and living space for creative people and locals.

The secret to success for creative workshops such as this is in the people and in the process. Good building designers mostly work alone or in small studios and therefore mostly don't have the capacity for more complex projects. Large architectural firms, on the other hand, are primarily focused on commercial aspects, a focus which tends to take attention away from design quality. "Starchitects", finally, are under pressure to replicate their own signature style in every project worldwide, an approach not adequate for designing a varied, inspiring and human-scale community.

The workshop participants here have been prize-winning international architects and designers with smaller practices who showed extraordinary attention to design quality in previous projects. The shared space was the process to create a shared understanding. It transforms the standard mode of creative competition into collaboration. The shared space focuses efforts on enhancing each others contribution through collaboration while maintaining everybody's individual approach. 

The output is a visionary blueprint for a community which, in the harsh environment of the desert of Qatar, works only on the sun and the sea, entirely eliminating the need for polluting energy sources such as oil and gas. The system, designed as a blueprint for desert climates with only saltwater access, is powered by a solar tower and produces its own drinking water, electricity, cooking gas and vegetables through an integrated system of wetlands, saltwater greenhouses, biodigesters and greywater channels. The system is scaleable for populations of up to several thousand. All technical conditions have been calculated to ensure that the system works. See a photo gallery of the design process here (click on the images to see a large version).


The sustainable energy concept: The community runs only on the sun and the sea

A selection of my previous writings on the history of culture, architecture and design:

From Signifier to Signified: Art Deco versus Functionalism

False Images: The Invention of Industrial Design

The Invention of Leisure: Hot Dogs, Dreamland and the Globe Tower

The Tower of Babel: Gustave Eiffel and the Creation of Modernity

Redesigning history: The Vienna Ringstrasse

In 1871, German immigrant Charles Feltman invents fast food by selling "Hot Dogs", sausages in a milk roll, from his vending cart in Coney Island, an area which at this time develops from "The Gut", a seedy area with cabarets, cheap hotels and brothels, into a family-friendly seaside spectacle and entertainment park. Coney island offered camel rides, merry-go-rounds, an electric shock for 5 cents, roller coasters and "The Flood", a scenic ride through disaster. 

The iPod is a textbook case for strategy. The strategic opportunity was presented by a flawed tactic of record companies and the failure of both record companies and the electronics industry to understand a new medium: the internet. Sony had the right foresight that both media and hardware will have to converge into one experience. It also acted on this foresight by acquiring media companies early on, but ultimately failed to pull its media and electronics assets together.  

The iPod took over the glory which until then Sony's Walkman held. It was Sony's engineering-driven culture under the visionary leadership of Akio Morita which made Sony the undisputed innovation leader in the seventies and eighties. He mobilized listening to music - the Walkman made it possible to get up from your chair and out of the room while listening to music. 

Apple added a crucial feature which would make the iPod the successor of the Walkman: It exploited the failure of the recording industry to provide a timely and consumer-friendly way of obtaining music. While the large recording studios, unable to come up with any new business idea, were wasting their time to track down and sue music downloaders, Apple offered both the hardware - iPod - and the software - iTunes - to make downloading and listening to music a hassle-free (and legal) experience. 

The strategic opportunity, exploited by Apple, was not only presented by the fixation of the recording industry on tangible recording media (first gramophone records, then tapes, then CDs), but also by the inability of the electronics industry to take on a problem the recording industry was unable to solve. 

The tactic of the gramophone industry, for most of the 20th century accustomed to to easy profit through tangible recording media, was to entrench and attack their own customers. After spectacular raids in the apartments of teenage music downloaders, the mere idea of Internet delivery as an alternative to tangible recording media was made a forbidden thought, effectively making it impossible for the recording industry to innovate and embrace the Internet as their next delivery channel. 

For electronics companies it looked too risky to take on the powerful recording industry. And for Sony electronics, the number one candidate to come up with a meaningful successor to its own Walkman, an iPod-like device would have felt like an attack on its own nest, because Sony had both: electronic devices to play music and content studios. Betting on convergence, Sony had acquired CBS records in 1987 (now Sony Music Entertainment), and Columbia Pictures in 1989 (now Sony Pictures Entertainment).

That sounded like a good idea in the late eighties: when you can offer both the content and the device, you couldn't go wrong, so the idea went. If there just wouldn't have been the Internet. That meant no walk to the record store, no shelves for records, no scratches in gramophone disks. (The Internet was around in the late eighties, but took off only after 1995.)

Apple was not an electronics company, it was not a recording company, but it was good in designing and matching hardware and software. After all, it was exactly this insistence on doing both the hardware and the matching software which made them the victims of Microsoft (which got big by taking a Graphical User Interface, earlier developed by Apple, and licensing it to Asian manufacturers). But that was during the last century.

The vision of Sony's previous CEO, Noboyuki Idei, was Sony as a convergence company. He rightly foresaw the importance of uniting content and delivery, hardware and software into one experience. During his reign, Idei fought against a company culture which was in the meanwhile petrified in the engineering mindset which had served the company well in its earlier years. Idei perhaps wanted Sony to become something around the lines what Apple is today. To that end, he even broke with an iron law of Japanese corporate culture and chose a Westerner as his successor.

Idei might have thought that choosing a new chief executive from a gramophone company would advance his idea of convergence. But this was the very same industry which, through its refusal to innovate, opened the strategic horizon for Apple. Howard Stringer, previously having worked 30 years at CBS, took over in 2005. Since then, Sony cut visionary developments. Sony cut jobs. Today, Sony is losing money. And while Sony was acquiring Ericsson in a bet for the mobile phone market - without much success - Apple worked on the iPhone, the product which was to redefine the mobile communications industry. 

Since 2005, Sony is worth a quarter less (-24%); Apple, on the other hand, is worth over five times more (+560%).

What are managers, what are they supposed to do, and how? We can find out a bit more when we look at the root of the word management. The English term "Management" is coming from old French "ménagement", meaning "conducting", "directing". The contemporary French "ménage" stands for Housekeeping. Management, then, is directing, and it has to do with good housekeeping. There are two word roots in Man-age-ment: "Man-" and "agere". The first, man-, comes from the Latin "manus", meaning "hand". This comes from Sanscrit "ma", there meaning "measure". "Manus" is the hand, our tool for gestures (orchestra conductors use their hands to direct their orchestra) and expression. The hand is used in fight, thus the Latin manus is often used as "bravery". In Latin, manus is also an artistic hand and as such can mean "the finishing touch". 

The Latin word manus is also the designation for a unit of war, a corps, and generally an organisational body or company. The meaning of manus contains another important insight here: The military corps is the "hand" which executes a military strategy, and similarly a company is understood as the "hand", the organ which executes a strategy and intent. The hand gestures and the hand makes. The latter is contained in "Manu facta" - the root of "manufacture". There is always the danger of overdoing, and so manufacta can be used as "overdone, artificial, fabricated" such as in "oratio manu facta" (oratio = speech) - an overdone, artificial speech.

The second root is the the Ancient Greek "agô"- to carry, convey, bring. In Medieval Latin, ago means "to set in motion, to drive". There it has a multitude of uses such as in se agere - "to set oneself in motion", or simply "to go". "Hoc agere" (hoc = this) then means "to attend to the matter at hand". The word agere converts some preceding nouns to action: It means "to express thanks" when attached to "gratias", when attached to "pacem" (pace = peace) it means "to keep the peace". Agere would also be "to deal with" and can also mean "to take a matter up publicly", "to incite to action", and "to be concerned".

Management combines manus, the directing gesture, with agere, setting into motion. In manus, there is both the meaning of leadership and bravery. In agere, there is the meaning of conveying, pointing at the vital need that managers must be communicators.  

The "Mozartkugel", a prototypical Austrian confectionery, is known for most as a souvenir after a vacation in Austria. The winning combination of an innovative, delicious product with a sticky name was not the work of a multinational branding firm, but of an ambitious confisier in the Habsburg empire. The product most people get in airport duty free shops these days is however neither original nor handmade, but an exemplar of mergers and acquisitions.
   
The "Real Mozartkugel" by "Mirabell" is a product in a portfolio including "Miracle Whip" and "Macaroni & Cheese", owned by Kraft foods, previously owned by Philip Morris, the cigarette company which changed its name to "Altria" and spun out Kraft to its own (Philip Morris a.k.a. Altria) shareholders after having merged it with Nabisco (makers of Oreo and Ritz cookies) and General Foods (of Jell-O fame, a company they acquired in 1926 when still operating as "Postum Cereal" before acquiring General Foods and its name in 1929). In 1993, Kraft-General Foods acquired Jacobs Suchard, itself a merger of German coffee company Jacobs with Interfood, which itself was a merger of Swiss chocolate manufactureres Tobler and Suchard.

But fortunately, and amazingly, there is still the original Mozartkugel, made just as it was made back then in 1890. The original has survived both the industrialization of sweets and the vicious acquisitions of the 20th century out of a simple reason - the creator, Paul Fuerst, cared more for making delicious sweets than for securing the names for his creations. Therefore there have been no mergers and acquisitions of this familiy-run Cafe-Konditorei, and the original Mozartkugel is still produced according to the original recipe. It is handmade from fresh ingredients, delicious, and perishable. It is a bit hard to get, unless you pass by in one of the 4 outlets of Confectionery Fuerst in the city of Salzburg, where it was originally invented in 1890 by Paul Fuerst, an accomplished confectioner in the Habsburg empire who learned his trade in Budapest, Paris and Nice.

Not original, but also good and handmade Mozartkugeln are available from three other confectioners in the area - Petrik and Engljaehringer in Salzburg and Dallmann in St. Gilgen.

If you don't happen to be in Salzburg but enjoy a bit of sweet geometry, have a look at this paper dealing with infinitely many infinitesimally small folds on the wrapping of a sphere: "Wrapping the Mozartkugel".

Copying is a learning route to innovation. When I published my first article dealing with the topic in 2001, this seemed to be a counterintuitive idea to most. In another article in 2005, I proposed a model of development phases after the imitation stage. And indeed we have now reached a live example of a transition to the next stage: Chinese copies do not any more compete by price alone, but start to compete by new features.

Let us look at an innovation. There is a "long nose" in which the innovation brews, but does not quite reach a critical mass. Bill Buxton states the example of the mouse:

"Think of the mouse. First built in around 1965 by William English and Doug Engelbart, by 1968 it was copied (with the originators' cooperation) for use in a music and animation system at the National Research Council of Canada. Around 1973, Xerox PARC adopted a version as the graphical input device for the Alto computer.In 1980, 3 Rivers Systems of Pittsburgh released their PERQ-1 workstation, which I believe to be the first commercially available computer that used a mouse. A year later came the Xerox Star 8010 workstation, and in January, 1984, the first Macintosh—the latter being the computer that brought the mouse to the attention of the general public. However it was not until 1995, with the release of Windows 95, that the mouse became ubiquitous."

So there is a potentially long time in which the next hit is, in some form, already around (but you likely don't know). Then the innovation reaches critical mass. And then follows the long tail.


What I call the "coathanger" model of innovation combines the long nose, the innovation peak, and the long tail

In the "long nose" there can be several attempts, sometimes in different markets. Here the innovation is in the waiting. The boost comes along in the form of a change in the market environment. This can be 1) an external economic factor, such as he oil crisis of the early seventies which boosted fuel-efficient Japanese cars. This can be 2) another, previous innovation which changed the playing field so that a follower innovation can take place, shown at the example of Windows 95. Or it can be 3) a latent demand condition - an innovation which taps into a latent demand. This is the route to innovation which does not intrinsically depend on external change or another innovation - it sees a latent opportunity and changes the market by itself. The iPhone is a single product which out-innovated the telecommunications electronics competition and is now the dominant design for others to follow.

Innovations change the market environment and make way for other innovations: Windows 95, for instance, changed the playing field for computers worldwide, but was itself a follower innovation emerging from the long tail of the Macintosh. The Macintosh served as an inspiration, and Microsoft changed a fundamental feature: It was made available without a the need for a corresponding piece of hardware. This difference proved crucial, as it allowed Asian manufacturers to mass-produce computers with a useful GUI by simply licensing Windows.

In the long tail, the innovation changes the playing field and results in a multitude of derived products and services. There are principally three routes: Enhancing, competing with related products, and copying.

For enhancement to work, there must an option provided by the innovator to enhance the original (for the iPhone this would be the "made for iPhone" tag or the iPhone apps): This works as long as the secondary producer agrees to the rules set out by the original producer/innovator. If this is not available, or it appears preferable to compete, there will be a competition with related products. These are the related products which have been inspired by the original innovation and need to offer alternatives to compete with the original product: Since the arrival of the iPhone, competing manufacturers came up with similar products such as the Sony Ericsson Ixperia, BlackBerry Storm or Samsung i900. The chance to achieve a follower innovation is only given when competing with related products, although to get there the related product will need to provide a fundamental advantage - a mere tweak of the original will not do. And then there are the copies: Despite being in theory illegal, they usually compete by much lower prices, or, as recent developments show, by new features.

For copies, the price route- think Rolex fakes - works as long as the market knowledge is underdeveloped and a clone is easier accepted. This route is still taken by many smaller producers in China who target developing countries where consumer knowledge is lower. The more interesting clones compete by features. There is an array of Chinese iPhone clones, some of which have features differing from the ones provided by the original: For instance, one has a dual SIM card slot, ideal for people who frequently travel and want to avoid roaming fees.

The iPhone clones' new features do not yet fundamentally improve on the original. Rather the opposite, they struggle with details. Remember, the iPhone was out-innovating the Nokias and Ericssons not because it provided even more additional features, but because it radically improved on user interaction by removing clutter. It is not only the hardware, it is the combination of hardware - also the original iPhone is assembled in China - and smart software which makes it such a pervasive product. Still the iPhone clones which compete by new features are creating new, sometimes local niche markets in the long tail.




iPhone clones: Meizu, iOrgane, CECT Dual Sim, HiPhone, SciPhone.

Architectural fantasies: Constructive variations on a cube, another result of my work on generative algorithms for design - click the thumbnails to see the large (1600x1600 pixel) images:

George Akerlof, Nobel prize laureate for Economics in 2001, found out something consumers are confronted with rather often: How do you know if product X is OK, or, as Akerlof puts it, not a “lemon”? Take, for instance, the purchase of a used car. The chap who wants to sell the used car most likely knows more about it – if it had a previous accident, for example. This is an "asymmetric" market situation which is solely based on information – the party which has more information can skew the information and thus the prospective sale for his advantage. But you as a prospective customer know that, therefore you are suspicious when you buy a used car. That again makes it more difficult to sell it.

When this kind of situations occurs, one way to go about is “market signalling” which was described by Joseph Stiglitz: you inform the market about your product. You can also try to elicit information from the seller and other sources to know more about your potential risk. When you check a used car, you open the hood and look for suspicious leaks; you open and shut the door and listen if it sounds right.

But do you know what is going on in the car engine? Or in your computer? Couldn’t there be malicious programs running which record everything you do just to send it to your competition? Isn’t there the danger of viruses, worms and Trojans everywhere?
We realize via our senses. But we think that they don’t help us in checking out the complex machinery and intricate systems we surrounded ourselves with, while our way of making sense is the same our ancestors, the cave people, used. This way of making sense is still working quite well with many products - things you can smell, chew, taste and touch, for instance. Such as cheese.

But we get cheese tightly wrapped with extruded and laminated plastics.

If we don’t want to become paranoid, we have to afford a minimum of trust in our transaction partners that what we want is what we get. In historical terms, it afforded much less trust to go to an old-style grocery than it does to go to a supermarket. Every supermarket visit is an act where we need to afford a great deal of trust into what we might get when we buy this particular toothpaste or that particular cheese.

The signaling of a product has undergone interesting semantic changes. Just a generation ago, there was a simple way to find out if a product such as cheese was OK or not - you took a sample and smelled and tasted it. Now you watch a TV ad and buy a branded, packed cheese, and only at home you will be able to taste it. You cannot compare different cheeses by what would make sense - its taste, but by a replacement signal: its brand and packaging.

So an important, and problematic, aspect of design is mediation - to mediate between what you as a consumer don’t know and what the seller wants to make known. These can be very different things, of course, and in that respect, design can also be an ideal device to cover up.

Passage from de_sign, lecture by Mario Gagliardi at London Business School, January 25th 2002, updated May 24th, 2009.

In the traditional brand development process, a brand needs to transport its own set of values. It is developed as a static sign to mark out and "brand" on paper, packaging, car hoods, computer cases etc. These brands are essentially sign stickers put on any medium, irrespective of the inherent qualities of a medium. That worked well enough as long as all media have been by definition static - catalogues, name cards, car hoods etc. While working well enough on static backgrounds, these brands appear superimposed on dynamic media. The standard brand development process remains little changed and is still essentially geared for static backgrounds, mostly paper. However, less and less information is actually consumed on paper - one of the reasons why even quality newspapers such as the New York Times are in trouble.

To create an identity which is not superimposed, but blended into the medium, I experimented with parallel development. The identity for Design Zone, a support framework for creatives in the Gulf region, was developed from the start across three identity devices in three different dimensions: A community application in 3D, a website in 2.5D and the logo in 2D with the added dimension of time. The advantages of the process is that three parallel developments interweave in time, and during the creative process ideas for one medium cross over into the other two developments. Thus the brand is not just stuck onto the surface, but driven by underlying visual narratives and interwoven into the dynamic media.

The first step is to explore underlying narratives which can drive the message from within the media which carry it. To visualize the meaning of Design Zone I started with the idea of an abstract "landscape of creativity" - a virtual space of imagination. Below the first rough concept renderings of this "imaginative space", colored in hues of turquoise:

The second development was the sign. It started out as a collection of different animated signs rather than a single logo, as the idea was to express the diversity of creative expression on the basis of Islamic art and decoration: geometry. From there the logo developed into a single sign which yet is many signs: Over time, driven by an algorithm, the sign takes on different shapes and colors. Here some of the the initial concept graphics:

Below the final design of the dynamically changing logo.


For the site, I wanted to suggest the mission of Design Zone as a catalyst for creativity through a visual narrative. The logo, representing the spirit of Design Zone, should appear as an actor with character. In the visual narrative, the logo helps to realize and bring forward creations. It does that by by bringing them out from the depths of imagination into reality, helping to make them into actual expressions. This narrative is told by making the logos accompany and slightly push information windows from the depths of the "imaginative space" into clear view - a narrative for the experience of consciousness in which we form imaginative artifacts from "blurry" sensory impressions.

The idea of an "imaginative space" also served as the basis for developing a creative community site. Below two screenshots showing one of the features, an embedded 3D creation application running in "the cloud", designed to be intuitive to use.

The primary advantage of this parallel design process is the transfer of design ideas between parallel developments. This favors the embedding of underlying metaphorical design ideas across all media used.