[soundmate-blog]

Designing for good: the D&AD White Pencil

We're big believers in the capacity of design to improve the world. Of course, all design should do this, from a coffee cup to a piece of architecture. But some designs are more virtuous than others.

The D&AD White Pencil award exists to honour the crème de la crème of virtuous design – designs submitted in response to a brief, that help make the world a better place. Appropriately enough, the awards are based around Peace One Day, the global peace day held every 21st September.

This year, the brief is to grow support for Peace One Day itself:

"Grow awareness of and engagement with, Peace Day, establishing September 21 as a global, self-sustaining, annual day of peace, when everyone can take action to end conflict in their own lives and in the lives of others."

Peace Day is about far more than just kind words: in 2007, its potential was proven when Peace One Day led a ceasefire in Afghanistan, and 4.5 million children were vaccinated against polio.

Anyone can enter the White Pencil. Winners will prove the value of their idea by acting on it: raising as much awareness as possible in the run up to and on 21st September, and explaining how they've done so. There are more details here.

Daljit Singh, head of Conran Singh, is a D&AD Ambassador, and has this to say:

"The White Pencil presents a unique opportunity engage the grey matter towards good, a chance to point our collective energy and skills to do something better for society."

Off you go!

[soundmate-blog]

Securing our Olympic legacy

The Legacy List is the charity looking after the cultural legacy of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and ensuring that the local community have a hand in what happens next.

We're proud to be working with The Legacy List on their communications plan, helping them to attract funding and engage the people who will ultimately determine the legacy of the Games: ordinary Londoners.

The Legacy List's website is now live. If you have a few minutes' downtime between beach volleyball games, check it out!

[soundmate-blog]

Our Contagious ideas

What would digital-infused luxury products look like? Following on from our Precious Pixels event, and from a series of thought pieces on our blog, Daljit Singh spoke to Contagious magazine about the possibilities.

See the piece here.

[soundmate-blog]

Precious Pixels, 19th July

We hosted a debate at The Conran Shop last week.

Precious Pixels set out to explore the use of digital technology in the luxury sector. The debate touched on a wide range of questions: how has digital been used in luxury so far? Are digital and luxury innately incompatible? What might digital-infused luxury products look like? Is digital better suited to the provision of service, rather than being part of products themselves?

The panel included five prominent figures from the luxury and digital sectors, and was chaired by Joe Ferry, the man behind Virgin Upper Class and guest experience designer at InterContinental Hotels. An invited audience of 45 contributed to the open discussion.

--

1. Are luxury and digital compatible?

Rory Sutherland, Chairman of the Ogilvy advertising group, started the debate with a thought-provoking observation:

It’s very hard to spend more than £40 on a bottle of gin, whereas you can easily spend hundreds or thousands on wine. Could digital simply be a gin, rather than a wine? 

In other words: is digital innately mass-market?

Rory also questioned probed the concept of ‘luxury’ itself. Luxury is meaningless – the product of post-rationalising expensive purchases, and Darwinian display. Furthermore, there is a good body of psychological research that suggests that expensive things are desirable because they are expensive, more than anything else. Branded painkillers are more efficacious than generics, because of their expected quality.

By this analysis, buying expensive things is innately pleasurable, whether or not they are any cop. “The consumer surplus creates no pleasure whatsoever,” as he put it. Perhaps the low price of digital products is all that prevents them from being seeing as ‘luxury’.

Charlie Leadbeater, a writer and thinker on business and innovation, stressed the importance of provenance in luxury. This is something that’s difficult to achieve with digital: it is inherently amaterial, created anywhere by anyone, which no trace of a human hand.

But Robert Norton, founder of the s[edition] digital arts publishing platform, disagreed. He cited the Exquisite Forest, a recent collaborative animation project in the mould of the surrealist Exquisite Corpse, as an example of a technologically-innovative idea with clear authorship. s[edition] itself is another example.

2. What opportunities are there, and what needs to happen?

Lynda Relph-Knight, Editor of Design Week, asked a simple question: what examples of good uses of digital in luxury exist?

There was a consensus that there were few, if any – with the possible exception of home entertainment. Rory brought up Apple’s Retina screen as an example of tech maturity – the screen can resolve better than the human eye, so where next? Maybe this is where luxury starts.

Nancy Tilbury, one of the founders of fashion technology company Studio_XO, emphasised the opportunity digital represents for the luxury industry. Digital can provide personal, intimate experiences – especially in fashion.

Daljit Singh, head of Conran Singh, expanded on this theme with a concrete example. He suggested the idea of a pixel ring – a piece of ordinary jewellery in which the diamond is replaced with a single pixel. This pixel could could encode the ‘intimate information’ Nancy mentioned – for example, by shining more brightly on your anniversary.

Both identified an obvious reason for why this hasn’t happened yet: the right people aren’t talking to each other. “We need Marc Jacobs to hire coders,” said Daljit.

The panelists also agreed that an important role for digital lies in service. Roger Mavity, CEO of Conran, observed that luxury is often distinguished most of all by service – he cited the example of buying an Hasselblad camera, where an appointment is made at your office to demo the product, and there is a 24-hour helpline. Everyone agreed that digital could be used to make service propositions better.

Benjamin Males, also of Studio_XO, made an apt point: our vision of luxury digital products is limited by digital as experienced today, where technological limitations – processor speeds, hard drive capacities, clumsy interfaces – get in the way. Content and software are, more and more, shining through, and the invisible interfaces and ubiquitous technology just around the corner are sure to usher in a new age of digital luxury.  Content and storytelling will come to the fore – much more familiar territory for luxury brands. Robert Norton brought up the joy of turning pages on an iPad for the first time – when it comes to these ‘sublime experiences’, we are really only just scratching the surface.

Suki Larson of Keep Agency, feeding back on the event, made a point which dovetails with this:

One aspect of the luxury industry that I have always liked historically is that it has not asked, "What does the consumer need?" and responded. It has been formed by individuals with an idea and a vision who put something out there and build a market around it.

In continuing this grand old tradition of luxury, digital designers may well surprise us all.

[soundmate-blog]

A little more luxury

As a backdrop to our digital luxury conservation, Terence Conran has pitched in on the true meaning of luxury, over on the main Conran blog. We totally agree – luxury should be more about sublime experience than sublime expense.

[soundmate-blog]

“What does this button do?”

If you have enough money, you can spend the hassle out of almost anything.

Luxury hotels are well-accustomed to dealing with the outlandish requests of their well-heeled guests; travel concierge outfits offer the super rich the simplicity of a life almost totally unplanned. Why hail cabs, reserve tables or book flights, when all of these things can be done for you?

Where the luxury experience falters is, oddly enough, at one’s own front door. Excepting the few who choose to engage full-time butlers, the super-rich experience a compromised luxury at home.

Luxury property developers have noted the shortfall and responded. The 86 apartments in One Hyde Park feature 24-hour concierge service from the adjacent Mandarin Oriental Hotel, part of a general trend towards offering hotel-style service to cater to every whim.

Nevertheless, there are limits to what such a concierge service can achieve. A five star hotel across the road can only do so much – and not every development has a five star hotel across the road.

Technology can pick up some of the slack, by obviating the need for hands-on service. The specification of new apartments and hotels with technology – security systems, media centres, lighting and air conditioning – is a booming industry, but often such specification is done badly.

High-end customers have the means and the desire for bespoke systems that allow them to control everything in their home effortlessly. Usually, however, they are sold bells and whistles instead. Luxury apartments feature televisions that pop up from the foot of the bed, or showers that can be turned on with a clap and a pirouette. Rarely do they feature simple, effortless interfaces.

Yet it is this effortlessness that luxury customers crave – a ‘life beautifully arranged’, as luxury phone and concierge company Vertu put it; an experience rather than a feature. Property developers can differentiate themselves by delivering that experience.

[soundmate-blog]

Luxury without ostrich leather

Luxury designers have been slow to embrace digital technology, and those at the very top have been slowest of all. Super-luxe brands revel in the mechanical and the material, in burnished dials and ostrich leather sleeves. Where does digital technology fit in?

Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s hard to see how Patek Phillipe could benefit from incorporating digital technology; their whole raison d’être is mechanical.

But what of, for example, luxury car makers? Digital technology, from the audiovisual system to climate control, is an integral part of what the modern buyer expects from a car. So far, luxury manufacturers have taken a timid approach: technology has been as pared-down as possible, and the focus has been allowing customers to plug in their gadgets (the ubiquitous iPod dock), and throwing in a high-end stereo.

There is potential for these manufacturers to do far more. Way back in 2001, BMW introduced iDrive, a unified control interface for controlling secondary vehicle functions – climate, stereo, navigation, and so on. The system garnered valid criticism for being unintuitive – it used a confusing joystick control system – but the concept was sound. Indeed, a bespoke central control system could be a point of differentiation, particularly at the exclusive end of the market.

The past few years have seen touchscreen interfaces come of age, and gestural and voice control will follow. These ‘translucent’ interfaces require little or no learning. They open the door for true creativity – for example, in automotive and household digital design, where hands-on interfaces have so far constrained possibilities.

For luxury designers, translucent interfaces promise high technology without confusion. Luxury customers demand a simple experience, and they are willing to pay for it. The marriage of money, technology and thoughtful design can push luxury forward.

It’s not all about ostrich leather.

[soundmate-blog]

Can money buy a better interface?

Designing by committee

Received wisdom dictates that, in the digital design world, iteration is king. Tech needs to be built, tested, torn apart, and built again, and it it this process of iteration that makes good interfaces.

The same holds true for most design, of course – except that tech naturally lends itself to crowdsourcing. When Facebook wanted to translate its interface into every language, it used a crowdsourced development process: users could submit translations for the 300,000 words which comprise the Facebook interface. These submissions were voted on, and translation was done by consensus, in the blink of an eye and at negligible expense.

Much more than other companies, software makers design by committee: user feedback is collected, collated, and used to improve the product. It’s tricky to do the same with a toaster.

This is a blessing and a curse. A software company knows better than any other what its customers want – or at least, what they think they want. As Henry Ford probably didn’t once say, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. In other words, crowdsourcing may actually limit the possibilities of software design, pushing designers to refine the old, rather than to invent the new.

On luxe

Most areas of design have a luxury end: Bentley cars, Bang & Olufsen speakers and Hublot watches. These manufacturers design to the highest standards, making products that are not just sold on their name, or the expense of their materials, but also the beauty and refinement of their design.

Luxury design takes time, money and expertise, and the iterative R&D that typifies designing for the mass market doesn’t take place. Perhaps because of this, such manufacturers design groundbreaking things. Why doesn’t the same apply to digital design?

For digital, too, there is room for a high end – and, as computers become embedded into just about everything, doing digital well becomes an imperative for luxury brands.

There are two roads to a great interface. One is the mass market: designs honed by the collaborative will of thousands or millions of users. The second is less travelled, but no less valuable: deep investment of time, money and expertise to create truly sublime digital experiences.

[soundmate-blog]

"Luxury must become interactive to survive"

The luxury sector treads carefully when it comes to technology. Luxury designers focus on materials – brushed aluminium and leather panels – and as such digital elements, inherently material-free, are seldom included.

Is this a missed opportunity? Can luxury products be infused with digital technology, to make them all the richer?

Our Executive Creative Director Daljit Singh thinks so. He just wrote a piece for Wired on the topic:

"Digital designers can create beautiful interactions, which take much crafting to produce – but they can't compete with a Rolex watch or a Cartier brooch in having "brand-plus-material" value. What if we could create products embodying a new type of value? Perhaps a ring with a single pixel instead of a diamond, or a watch with a black face that comes alive only to tell you to slow down and smell the coffee?"

You can read the full article here. We'll be sharing more of our thoughts on the possibilities for digital in luxury products over the next few days, so check back soon.

[soundmate-blog]

Top of the tree

Who controls the Internet?  The free-spirited idealists amongst us would be tempted to say 'no one', or perhaps 'everyone'. The pessimists would say the US government, the CIA, or Google.

ICANN, the semi-autonomous organisation created by the US government to manage the Internet's domain name system, is also a candidate. Whilst its role is on paper purely technical – determining the structure of web addresses such that the Internet can be reliably navigated – in practice, ICANN's decisions have big ramifications for countries, businesses and every Internet user.

Last year, it decided that generic top-level domains (gTLDs) – the .coms, .nets and so on that end all web addresses – would be opened up. So as well as owning apple.com, Apple Computer could own iphone.apple, or iphone.app. Similarly, New York web addresses might end .nyc, and Lady Gaga could move her web presence over to lady.gaga. The owner would then be able to manage domains under that gTLD – for example, if a grocery wanted healthy.apple, they would have to apply to Apple, who would not be obliged to comply.

Anyone was free to submit an application for any gTLD, but there was one hell of a catch: an $185,000 cheque had to accompany each application, and that cheque was non-refundable, whether the application was successful or not.

ICANN has just released the list of applicants. Needless to say, there was stiff competition for some – .shop and .book, for example. A host of companies, including Amazon and Google (though, interestingly, not Apple) are angling after .app.

All in all, Google has 101 applications, and Amazon 76. Other companies have refused to play ball: you will not be logging on to .coke any time soon, as Coca-Cola have chimed in with the UN and the IMF in decrying the expansion as unnecessary and undemocratic.

Coca-Cola: defenders of the free

1,930 applications were made, netting $350m for ICANN. The organisation runs on a not-for-profit basis, so it remains to be seen what will be done with this windfall. A lollipop for every Internet user?

The other question yet to be answered is how we will take to the new TLDs when they come into service. We're so used to appending .com to our web addresses (or, increasingly, to our browsers doing it for us) that they're almost as invisible as the redundant // at the start of every web address. Soon, we may be interacting with our computers by talking to them anyway. If all you need to do is say, "Go to Apple's web site", do you care what the web address is?

For now you probably should. The value of a TLD is as a rubber stamp of authenticity – whilst anyone could register iphoneofficialhelp.com, iphoneofficialhelp.apple must be vetted by Apple, if Apple own the TLD. This is of obvious benefit both to Apple and to consumers.

Similarly, newyorktravel.com could be registered by anyone, whereas the city will likely ensure newyorktravel.nyc is based in the city, and hold accurate information.

TLDs, then: a bit pricey, but probably also a bit useful.

[soundmate-blog]

Net-A-Rolex

Amongst the perky pink pages of yesterday’s FT was their Business of Luxury supplement, which contained an interesting article on digital uptake in the luxury sector.

The luxury sector has been slow to embrace the 0s and 1s. After all, who drops £1,000 on a clutch handbag online?

Well, perhaps more people than you think. A new study by Altagamma and McKinsey concludes that the luxury sector sold some €6.2bn of handbags and watches online in 2011, out of about €190bn in total sales.

OK, that doesn’t sound like much, but there’s more. €25bn in offline sales – 15% of the total – were “directly generated” by digital media, and €34bn were in some way influenced by online experience.

A typical example would be this: I want to buy a snakeskin handbag, but I don’t know which of the many high street snakeskin handbag retailers to visit. I search online to find out, and, because of their prominent online presence, end up heading to Selfridges.

Or, even worse for offline retailers: I find the same item on Net-A-Porter (which sold through some €7bn in 2010-11) for slightly cheaper, after checking it out in-store.

The report also provides some insight into how widely online consumers cast their nets. Fashion blogs and company websites figure in a typical trawl, which tends to cover four or more sources.

Customer loyalty tends to break down online, as alternatives are so readily available. This means there is an imperative to make things easy for customers.

“The findings suggest that luxury goods groups need to be far more integrated across online and offline platforms in order to reflect how the luxury consumer moves seamlessly between online and shopping in stores.”

Marco Mazzù, branding and marketing expert at McKinsey, put it bluntly:

“If you want to compete, you had better invest.”

Elsewhere in Business of luxury, incidentally, there came this sobering-if-not-surprising fact: over half of luxury sales in Europe last year were to mainland Chinese tourists. If you are a European-bound luxury retailer, and most of your customers live several thousand miles away, perhaps you should think about sprucing up that dowdy-looking website?

We’ll have more to say on the use of digital in the luxury sector very soon...

[soundmate-blog]

We're better when we're together

There is a lovely Ethiopian proverb that describes the process of collaboration:

“When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.”

Sadly, it isn’t always like this.

Those of us in the creative industries are often called upon to team up. When it works well, the results can be wonderful: the Google Art Project, say, or the Tate Movie.

More usually, however, collaboration is a bit like fruit tea: better in theory than practice.

Last night, we hotfooted over to the Barbican Centre to hear Unthinkable Consulting and a bunch of successful collaborators spill their secrets.

First up was Nikhil Shah of Mixcloud and Daniel Nathan from totallyradio, who brought together a bunch of industry stakeholders – and a wadge of grant cash – to form Radio Connected. Together, they tackled some of the big issues holding Internet radio back, such as standardised metadata and simplified rights management.

Nikhil and Daniel picked out two important things: that ‘true partnerships’ seldom work (one person needs to be in charge), and that you can never ask for too much funding.

Next up were Peter Higgin of Punchdrunk, the immersive theatre company, and Tod Machover, a avant garde composer working at MIT Media Lab. They made Sleep No More, an immersive theatre show in an abandoned hotel in New York, which involved such eye-catching elements as typewriters outputting messages from online participants.

The big challenge for Sleep No More was to keep these online participants engaged over several hours, and a deep marriage of tech and emotionally-involving theatre was crucial. The solution was perhaps unsurprising: talk a lot, respect the expertise of everyone involved, and don’t worry about stupid questions. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering!

The most interesting talk of the evening came from Anno Mitchell of digital design agency Friday. She was presented with the ultimate service design challenge: the funeral.

Funerals are events which most people only plan once or twice, and in an emotionally-fragile state. Digital elements have to be simple and informative – many people don’t know where to start, and are unlikely to be digital natives.

There was great scope for Co-operative Funeralcare – the client – to extend their reputation for great service by becoming the go-to online resource for anyone planning a funeral.

Anno talked about the importance of deep understanding of the client’s business, and the value of cartooning to visualise abstract digital ideas for people with little digital know-how.

Mutual respect was the subtext of all of the presentations – collaborations work if everyone believes that their collaborators are adding some kind of value. That comes from choosing the right collaborators. If you nail that, crackly Skype calls, budget constraints and hectic schedules can all be dealt with.

We left with the feeling that, with a bit of luck, we might lick that lion after all.

[soundmate-blog]

Share and share alike

You'd be hard pressed to call file storage and sharing sexy. Even amongst the most ardent technophiles, it doesn't really turn heads.

Those who fawn over the precise contours of the Facebook 'Like' button and the rollout of Tumblr's ad units aren't kept awake at night by cloud storage systems.

And yet, something is brewing in the tech industry. Of the Big Four tech companies – Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook – the first three have prominent cloud storage offers, whether for personal or enterprise use. Google have just revamped theirs with the launch of Google Drive, a non-too-subtle attempt to steal Dropbox's collaborative storage crown.

Now comes the news that Facebook is rolling out a file sharing system. They purchased drop.io in October 2010, so we saw it coming, but they've taken until now to implement sharing features.

Soon, Facebook users will be able to upload most types of file up to 25MB, for sharing with a Facebook group. Files will be accessible via a 'Files' tab.

It isn't a full cloud offering, yet – the rollout is for groups, and Facebook offer no user file management. Nevertheless, it's another move that expands Facebook's functionality.

File sharing is hugely attractive for all of these companies. It is negligibly cheap to offer small amounts of storage – and users will accept charges for large amounts. Those charges are a nice revenue stream in and of themselves, but the rewards could be way bigger.

For Facebook, obviating the email means less time spent on Gmail and more on Facebook. For Google and Apple, storage and file sharing platforms push users towards their productivity software – Google Docs and the Apple's various 'i' applications.

Amazon has its Kindle, and now its Kindle Fire. Increasingly, the retail giant's revenue comes from its publishing activities in books and music. Amazon is wrestling Apple for a bigger slice of the digital media pie, and whoever controls our personal files has a big advantage.

For all four, but particularly for Facebook and for Google, there is useful social and marketing data. They can track who shares what kind of file, when and with whom, and sell that information on.

Overall, more time spent on Facebook, Amazon, Apple or Google means more money, in one way or another. Being the place where we go to to get their files puts them at the centre of our digital lives. They are rightly falling over themselves to look after our files for us.

Sharing is caring, after all.

[soundmate-blog]

A search less obvious

We like the idea behind Million Short, a new search engine (how often do we say that these days?) which excludes up to a million top results.

On Million Short, you enter your search term, and then cream off some of the highly-ranked results that would otherwise dominate.

Why? Some sites – take about.com for instance – act as 'content farms', buoying themselves to the top of search results with back-links and text designed to fool search algorithms.

Or take Apple (Inc.), whose predominance online make it trickier than it should be to find information online about the popular green fruit.

Google et al are very good at finding what most of us want, most of the time. But what about the rest of us?

We've played around with Million Short. It's intriguing to search for a popular topic – whether it's the French elections, or Kim Kardashian – and see what 'the rest of the web' thinks.

A search for 'apple', excluding nothing, is all iPads and Macbooks. If you cut out the top million, though, you're left with lots of juice (so to speak).

Natural language search is one of the great innovations of our time, and all but essential for finding your way around online, but it's worth remembering what we're missing because of the whims of Google's mysterious algorithms.

It almost reminds us of the power Google has to control what we see. Remember when BMW all-but-disappeared from the web for breaking Google's rules?

[soundmate-blog]

I Fought the Law...

The Guardian's Comment is Free section published an interesting speech by Cory Doctorow, the digital journalist and campaigner, on Thursday.

Cory asserts that the questions surrounding digital freedom go well beyond SOPA, the recently-defeated US anti-piracy bill.

SOPA was widely decried by the tech industry as unworkable and heavy-handed. It would have compelled search engines to stop indexing certain users and websites – any deemed to have infringed copyright – based on the say-so of a third party. Similarly, PayPal would have to stop facilitating their transactions, YouTube would have to disable their accounts, and so on. In other words, it turned due process on its head for the entire Internet, putting the rights of copyright owners – and particularly the rights of big copyright-owning corporations – above the rights of website owners, and of free citizens.

Cory notes that whilst online freedom advocates may have won the battle, they certainly haven't won the war. A digital computer is a programmable device that permits a competent programmer to do almost anything. Computer programs can play music, determine when a toaster pops up and fly aeroplanes.

This ubiquity means any attempt to control what people do with their computers legislatively – preventing them running certain types of software, say – may have far-reaching consequences. Disabling the games-playing 'feature' of a digital computer isn't the same as selling a car without a cigarette lighter, because the only way you stop them running that software is by spying on them – by running programs on that computer that tell you what the user is doing.

Simply: where does this end? If you start totting up a list of corporate interests who may want to limit what you do on a computer – media companies, automobiles manufacturers, defence companies, medical device manufacturers – you'll quickly run out of paper.

There is no practical way for these limits to be made, without replacing all computers with appliances that only work when connected to the grid. In other words, the war is not with copyright-infringers, child pornography distributers or international terrorists – it is with digital computing itself. 

Unless the banning of the digital computer comes to pass, it will remain all but impossible to limit what people do with their computers and their Internet connections – and heavy-handed rules, imposed by the will of large corporate interests, are likely to harm innocent punters more than international criminals.

London's Olympic Games provide another example of the difficulty of legislating against human nature. In 2006, the UK Government passed the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, which introduced copyright protection around the Games. This was done largely for the benefit of corporate sponsors, who are paying big money to be front row centre.

The rules limit what corporate non-sponsors can do, like using the term "London 2012" in their adverts. But they also limit what athletes can do – they can't talk about other events, or tell us they have Weetabix for breakfast – and what attendees can do – posting pictures or videos from events.

The Olympic Games involve thousands of athletes and millions of spectators. Whether or not you think making such restrictions for the benefit of corporate interests is reasonable (and I'm skeptical), one thing is clear: it isn't practical.

John Graham-Cumming has proposed a neat workaround for those who want to dodge court: Londinium MMXII, this summer's true sports extravaganza.

[soundmate-blog]

The Grok Organogram

We have a hunch that the word 'grok' – a sci-fi term which means, to quote the OED, "to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes the observed" – is unlikely to find an audience away from the free-loving streets of San Francisco.

The broader idea it describes, however – the mingling of minds, and the cross-pollination of ideas – is already catching on, not least in the design world. Practically, it means deep collaboration between the design department and other parts of the business, and so developing products in a design-led way.

Baking designers into the heart of product development seems sensible enough, but it jars with usual company structures, where market and business analysts tell designers what their new product will be. However, some companies – not least a little upstart from Cupertino by the name of Apple – are demonstrating the value in rethinking that traditional approach.

                                             Grok design was the topic of a talk last night at The Book Club, Shoreditch, part of the Future Human series of lectures and discussions. We learnt about the history of grok – with special reference to Apple – and we discussed how grok can inform design processes.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the distinction between designer, maker and retailer didn't exist. There was only the artisan, and his work naturally took into consideration form, function and market opportunity. Grokking is a way of replicating that in modern industry, and ameliorating the downsides of division of labour.

The late Steve Jobs loved grok, and his ideas about 'grokking' were central to the way Apple's product design process worked. Just as Google venerates its coders and engineers, Apple venerates designers. Jonathan Ive and his team are seen not as hired hands to prettify a product, but central to product development. They are given generous R&D budgets, direct access to the CEO, and rare latitude to experiment. They work alongside the business development teams, the salespeople, the marketeers. Thus the elegant gestalt products, the marriage of form and function – and, perhaps, the eye-watering revenues.

It's easy to make a cult of Apple – a point made by Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum, who noted that Jobs' corporate structure – with just about everyone reporting directly to him – had as much to do with his megalomania as his business philosophy. But the basic intuitiveness of grokking design processes is hard to ignore.

In the end, James Moed, a business designer at IDEO London, came through with the take home messages. Firstly, anything can be designed – from coffee cups to sales teams to human resources departments. It behoves big companies to stop thinking about design as a siloed process, or even to think of designers as a discrete category of employees. We can all design things.

Secondly, design at its best is interdisciplinary. Good design comes when product designers, industrial designers, interface designers, graphic designers, ideas people, marketeers, thinkers and strategists work together, with eyes firmly on the bigger picture.

It's something that's at the forefront of our minds at Conran, too. We've found that when we work together, across traditional design disciplines, we are usually more than the sum of our parts. It's what we did with Boundary, a restaurant, bar and hotel complex in Redchurch Street that came of a collaboration between our architects, interior designers, furniture designers and brand strategists. Increasingly, we see this as the model for how we should work.

The Boundary's rooftop bar

Whether it's Apple's super-designers or Google's 10% time, the world's most successful companies are finding ways to turn the soil – and watching their revenues grow. We can all take something from that.

[soundmate-blog]

A sharing future at Social Media Week

I dropped in to the Social Media week event on the Future of Sharing at the Design Council this morning. The format: a panel discussion between representatives from Facebook, Reuters, Microsoft and Nokia.

The discussion covered the recent rise of 'frictionless sharing' - in other words, the kind you see on Facebook when someone has read an article on the Guardian and it appears in your timeline by magic, or when you connect your GPS running device to your timeline so all of your friends can be amazed at your sub-30-minutes 5k time.

Most of the time, when I see this kind of automatic post, I wonder whether the originator has actually understood that I'm going to be seeing it. Case in point: yesterday I saw someone reading an article on whether marriage was dead and buried. For a newly-wed, quite an interesting insight into their mindset? And this morning I saw someone reading about the best way to handle job interviews. I bet she's glad that she doesn't work for me…

The point is that pretty much all of the social networks we use don't do privacy very well - and most users of social networks don't really understand privacy control either. So, we have a lose-lose situation. I reckon that what's needed is a privacy button similar to the private mode in most modern web browsers which allows you to go about your web businesses without the risk of you over-sharing something that you might regret.

Friction-free seems to be the buzz-word of the moment!