Engaging a design firm to work on a new project—a website, for example—is a little like embarking on a trip into the wild. In that scenario, would you plan for the best or the worst case scenario? Personally, when facing such a trip, I’d channel my inner Bear Grylls from “Man vs. Wild” and plan for the worst.

Imagine yourself transporting a very rare and fragile orchid on foot with the possibility of rain in the forecast. You’ve got a sturdy box that protects the plant and that’s easy to carry. Then it starts to rain, but you still have a mile to go. Rats! You forgot to bring an umbrella. You stop at the first store and buy one. Since you’ve already got… I don’t know… let’s say,  five umbrellas at home, all acquired in similar situations, you purchase the cheap one. Five blocks later and sure enough—the  umbrella does that inside-out thing. So you have to buy another umbrella, this time the top of the line. You can’t chance ruining that orchid.

In the end, your entire trip took you twice as long and cost twice as much because you did not plan for the worst case scenario.

Remember the old carpenter’s rule? Measure once, cut twice. Measure twice, cut once.

The investment in any project is precious. The entire team always hopes the project will go smoothly and be successful. At the same time, when you plan for the worst case scenario, you’ll probably end up somewhere closer to the best result.

We are building a lot at our house these days. Not anything large scale, just towers of blocks or LEGOs that our three-year-old daughter delights in crashing to earth. Sometimes it’s a well-placed ball toss that does the damage, sometimes it’s a full-on running smash through the structure. Always it’s followed by giddy laughter.

Once in a while, though, we focus on construction. When she wants to actually build upward, she gets disappointed when a structure inadvertently tumbles down. So I found myself trying to get her up to speed on the basic engineering tenets of structural integrity. Bear in mind that I went to art school, so this is not in my intellectual wheel house. But, she is only a toddler, so she believes me to be an authority on the matter.

“When you only have one pillar, it is very wobbly,” I explain. I stand up one block shaped like a thick, four-inch dowel on end and place a brick-shaped block on top. Not balanced precisely, it falls.

“When you have two, it is better, but still unsteady,” the lesson continues. Demonstrating, the brick piece falls sideways, off the two pillars.

“But three pillars are very steady, see?” I set up the pillars in a triangular configuration as you look down on them. The brick piece lies solidly on top.

She nods, grasping this concept.

I continue, “It’s like the tripod that we have for the camera.” For some reason, this tripod became a play-object for a few weeks in our house, so she knows what I am talking about. She would carry it around the house like a mini Ansel Adams, setting it up here and there, adjusting the leg lengths, and cranking the middle tube where the camera rests on up and down. You know, typical three-year-old fun.

She then knocked over the blocks and ran off to play with something else.

That’s when it hit me. In my role in Client Services at People Design, I am always looking at the experience our clients have when they engage us and, by extension, how our work impacts our client’s clients. Empathic Customer Experience Design is what we do, after all.

“Three pillars creating a solid base”  is a great analogy for the kinds of stories I share (with anyone who will listen) about the impressionistic experiences customers internalize from an interaction.

By my reckoning, you could say the three pillars for solid customer experiences are “good value,” “smart product,” and “rewarding service.” There are a number of customer-service models out there. This one makes sense to me and is pretty simple.

My broad definition of those terms…

Value: Cost relative to inherent worth

Product: The deliverable, artifact, or physical “thing”

Service: The feeling derived from the interaction

When all three are working together, you can feel pretty good about your client’s experience. Two, not so much. One is trouble.

Here’s what I mean (but I’m sure you can build your own equation scenarios)…

(Value + Product) – Service = The DMV. You’re number 86. Now serving 22.

(Product + Service) – Value = Beer at the ballpark. $8.50 for a cup of Miller Lite?

(Value + Service) – Product = Insert your most unappetizing fast food restaurant meal here. Mine involved “chicken.”

Worse yet…

Product – (Service + Value) = My recent cell phone experience.

(Empty Set) = The last minute flight I recently took on a small commuter plane.

So, we continue to do the right thing here—to shore up our pillars. Think about your company’s pillars—and what you can do to strengthen your base.

In the meantime, I will be making some stuff out of Play-Doh.

A pair of iPhone apps I’ve taken a liking to underscore the new reality: Design craft is no longer an activity reserved strictly for designers.

The first app, Anyone Can Swiss, created by Dirk + Weiss, has a simple premise: Helvetica posters are so formulaic, a computer can make them practically unassisted. I tested this theory recently when I heard about a local poster contest. I knocked out an entry using Anyone Can Swiss, submitted it, and actually made the cut to the finals. (Don’t get your hopes up, though; I didn’t win.)

The second app, Facemakr from Dadako Studios, features a kit of parts for building custom avatars. A couple weekends ago I got on a roll and attempted to “design” one for everyone here at People Design. The results, as you can see, were mixed.

Today’s graphic designer has bigger problems to solve than typesetting a Swissy poster or rendering a cool avatar. When technology frees up the time of skilled designers to work on stickier problems, design as a discipline is better served.

Nostalgia for the days when design craft was the solely the domain of professional designers isn’t unlike nostalgia for the days when booking airline tickets was solely the domain of travel agents. Putting user-friendly tools in the hands of the masses actually frees up the specialists to further hone their craft. And that way, everybody wins. Yay, progress!

Not this year, though. Nope, this year we were on the ball. Awesome right? Well, not exactly…

Since I started working as a designer, I can’t seem to watch movies the way I used to. Nowadays, I get hung up on the design of the titles, their chosen typeface, and any other graphics that pop up in the film. What’s a designer/movie buff to do?

Embrace it. So… Here’s my typographic view of this year’s Oscar landscape.

Up In The Air

Fantastic opening sequence. The aerial shots, the white frames that wipe them, and the contrasting type choices all work well together to give the audience a 1950s airliner vibe. Not too shabby at all.

Inglourious Basterds

Almost no consistency in the title art. But in true avant-garde fashion, the rules—including conventional spellings—are broken on purpose. Only a master of cultural collage can pull off a mishmash like this.

Avatar

Papyrus? Really? This font is usually reserved for cheap menus. All the movie posters were blue, so the title screen should be… wait, green?  Yes, green. And squished.

An Education

Straight away, I noticed an interstitial for BBC films. Then, amidst the fun and whimsically animated opening credits, what do I see? Gill Sans—the typeface of the BBC. I call that being font-whipped.

Up

The titles match the poster art! Is it my birthday? What’s more, the closing credits will melt in your mouth. They’re tastefully complimented by boy scout badges and polaroids that relate to each role.

The Hurt Locker

The film starts with a white typeface similar to Courier, and closes with a poster font, Bank Gothic.

True, not every movie calls for fancy title art. Simplicity works well, but only when you stick to your guns. I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I can’t help it. If the film is halfway decent, the supers should be too.

Oscar bold goes to… Up.

Several hours of research later–plus a couple more for this post–and I still haven’t found a simple answer.

At its most basic, augmented reality (or “AR”), involves adding a layer of virtual information over a view of the physical world, in real-time. A user can visit a website or run an application of some kind and then, using a web-enabled camera, view the immediate area through the device while the application adds context-specific information to the display. The theory behind this technology has been around since the 1970s, but it is with the explosion in numbers of camera-equipped mobile devices that the possibilities are really starting to be explored.

Current applications run from adding notes and tags to your surroundings…

to trying on clothing before you buy it from an online store…

to playing a multiplayer game while running through the middle of a city…

and even creating virtual 3-D paintings.

Augmented reality applications can be categorized into those which add information to an object, such as a business card, or products in a store…

and those which add information to a space, such as displaying the locations of active Twitter feeds.

And of course, there are already augmented reality Pokemon games.

For me, the most compelling of these applications are the ones which require that users be in–or at least have a view of–a specific location, and then enable users to add their own content to that location.

Most smart phones have built-in spatial awareness tools–GPS systems, accelerometers, and compasses–which allow these devices to know where they are and which direction they are facing. This makes it possible to display incredibly information-rich maps in real time, pulling in live information from a variety of sources.

There are a few projects which are starting to blur the boundaries further, with augmented reality extending into the real world. One has users using an iPhone app to play a flight simulation game using a real flying vehicle.

Others–many of which are still in the planning stages–propose using physical pieces such as pixels in hybrid physical/digital displays, both in 2-D and 3-D.

So… Augmented reality applications are all over the board. Hundreds have been produced, and more are being added every day. As of yet (in my non-expert opinion), there is nothing out there that is so engaging and useful that it could replace any of the purely virtual apps available for smart phones. However, once hurdles like bandwidth and low camera resolutions have been overcome, that will undoubtedly change.

He’s seen the band several times, and he was anxious for me to experience my first live show. I wasn’t as excited, but I agreed to go along. I don’t dislike Metallica, and even though I wouldn’t classify myself as a hardcore fan, I can always appreciate the craft of music–even if the genre isn’t totally my thing.

We settled into our seats next to another fan who could be classified as hardcore. He admitted that this was his 21st Metallica concert. Seriously? I’d guess he was in his early thirties, so I was surprised he could squeeze that many concerts into his relatively short lifetime. Then I marveled at his loyalty.

My thoughts were interrupted with a sound check that shook my pant legs. Impressive and frightening at the same time.

With the decibel level set to extreme, Metallica took the stage. They played lots of songs–a few that I recognized, many that I didn’t. Looking around the crowd, those of us who weren’t pumping our fists for the duration of the show were texting, updating Facebook status, or trying to capture the experience through photos or videos shot with our mobile phones. We were also outnumbered ten to one.

By this time I was over the initial shock of the volume, so I started thinking again. How do you generate so much loyalty that you can wrangle up 12,000 or so people into a single venue in any major city around the world and get them so energized that they’d stand in the same spot for two hours, pumping their fists to your music? I was impressed.

Michele turned off the audio in this clip for a couple reasons. First, she didn’t think her iPhone could properly process the volume. Second, the fans’ enthusiasm was more interesting than the music being played.

I guess I never really considered bands as brands until that moment. That’s probably a good thing for the many musicians out there. You might want to be noticed for your music first, right?

After the show, I talked with Chad about my musings and asked him what he admired most about Metallica. He went on to say that the band knows exactly who they are, that for years they rarely promoted themselves through the mainstream channels, but gained notoriety through their live shows. And they believed that if their fans were willing to pay to see them, then those fans deserved the band’s best effort every night. Their sound has evolved over the years, but Metallica’s core values are still the same: to rock louder, faster, and harder than everybody else.

Sounds like everything that a successful brand would do. Believe in the brand. Define a focused value proposition. Design for your customers and support them along the way. Reinvent yourself, while staying true to your original promise.

I started digging around to see if Metallica partnered with any design consultancies that we might know about. Several bands take pride in producing their own album covers or working with freelancers, so I wasn’t sure I’d find much. As it turns out, Metallica worked with the notable Turner Duckworth to revive their original logo and design their most recent album, Death Magnetic. More digging turned up a great interview with David Turner and Bruce Duckworth, in which the designers spoke about bands having a better understanding of branding than most companies–particularly Metallica, who has been successfully managing its brand over three decades. Reinventing themselves. Loving and believing in themselves. The whole bit. I felt validated.

I wonder if companies were to model themselves after successful bands, would they reconsider the way they think of themselves? Be more loyal to their customers? Love themselves more?

This was my first AIGA conference. My first professional conference of any kind, really. Even so, I couldn’t avoid making this sweeping generalization: No matter the sponsoring organization—TED, Gel, AIGA, you name it—conference attendees bring their own agendas to these experiences. You know how you can hold an idea in your head, open any book at random, and find something on that page which seems to speak to your idea? It’s kind of like that.

In the days leading up to Make/Think, I’d been thinking a lot about the power of social media, crowdsourcing, and what it all means to the work we do. I left Memphis with even more to think about.

In the affinity session “Facebook Design: An Inside Look,” Ben Blumenfeld, Communications Design Manager for Facebook outlined three principles that guide design decisions inside social networking’s pacesetter.
1)  Ship and iterate. Facebook doesn’t build wire frames. There’s no time. They don’t optimize for perfection; they optimize for feedback. They design new features and put them out there to let users react, then they iterate on them.
2) Be data-informed (not just data-driven). A simple change in the Facebook deactivation page helped retain more than 1 million accounts every year.
3) Use existing tools for huge impact (or create new ones). Blumenfeld talked about Oscar Morales and his wildly successful Facebook group, “1 Million Voices Against the FARC,” which tapped into Facebook’s power to build a worldwide protest against terrorism in Colombia. Inside Facebook, Blumenfeld’s team created a tool that allows them to share screen grabs of projects they’re working on. (Online tools you can use to do similar sharing include Skitch.com.)

The most enlightening moment during Blumenfeld’s Q&A: Danny DeVito’s Facebook fan page was the best example Blumenfeld could come up with when asked how designers might help clients use social media more effectively. It’s all about authenticity, and DeVito’s fan page reveals an authentic (sometimes even shirtless) glimpse into the daily life of the actor/director/producer.

Actively extending the community theme, I selected another affinity session titled “Wisdom of Communities.” This Liz Danzico-facilitated discussion featured a panel of individuals (Jim Coudal, Jane Mount, and Derek Powazek) dedicated to building/inspiring online communities. The conversation illuminated some important truths:
· Communities excel at sorting.
· Access what people know. Local knowledge is especially valuable.
· Treat people like experts and they’ll act like experts.
· People will vote on stuff they don’t necessarily want to buy.
· The community owns the community. You don’t own the community, even if you built it.
· You can’t “use” communities. You can only ask them for things, and they will either help you out or not.

The community theme carried into the general sessions as well, which on the afternoon of Day 2 opened with memorable performance by a musical community—the Colonial Middle School CAPA choir. My recording of this performance accidentally went off in my pocket during Marissa Mayer’s Q&A later that afternoon (sorry, Marissa). So in a fit of embarrassment, I accidentally deleted it. No harm done, however. It lives online here.

Mayer spoke about Google users as a community—a powerful community that the search giant leveraged to translate the Google interface into more than 125 languages (including Bork, Bork, Bork, the dialect spoken by the Swedish Chef).

Google’s reputation for continuously testing new features comes from a belief that Google users have preferences they either don’t or can’t articulate. So Google regularly makes subtle changes to their home page, like the shade of blue used for links or the size of the search box, then observes how the community responds. Mayer pins Google’s success largely on the company’s commitment to observing and responding to the crowd.

On another level, I also was struck by the power of the AIGA community, its established and rising stars, its mission, its future. I half expected to feel a little like an outsider, coming from a different discipline. (“Who let the writer in?”) That expectation was not met. Writers, designers, creative directors, strategists, managers: We are all makers and thinkers, working together to solve the same communications problems for our clients and improve the experiences of their customers.

In the weeks since the conference, I’ve been thinking about how different viewpoints can help shape our own. And I’ve set new goals to push myself as a designer.

Am I a Maker? Or a Thinker? Or both? Still thinking about that one, but in the meantime I made this chart depicting my impressions of the conference and the highlights of our three days in Memphis.