Robert André

I’ve just taken a look at my dissertation timetable and, although it’s still more than two months before I have to hand it in, I’m bricking it. Although I know I will have it finished and handed in on time I’m dreading that it won’t be as good as it could be or that I’ll remember things, that I should have made a note to put in, at the last moment.

The good news is I have interviewed my primary sources: Chris Whatmore, head of post production at BSkyB and Merrill Wallace ex-management at Cable & Wireless. Both were brilliant, articulate and mines of information. The bad news is I have so much more information that I have to process while holding down a full time contract (until October) at Ipsos MORI, which isn’t that bad since that organisation is one of the most recognised and prestigious research institutions in the world.

I’ve structured the chapters and written half of the first chapter. More importantly, I’ve decided, finally, what it really is about. The title now is: Who Decides What We Get: How design governance affects the world. It’s a lot broader in terms of how we get things but more focused on why we get them. Once I began to write I really started loving it but now that I’ve stopped I’m anxious to get back into it to get the momentum going again.

Only four and a half more chapters to go. Arrrrggghhhh!

What a brilliant Olympic Games. Despite all the projections of failure, protests and pollution, the Beijing Games has managed to get me interested in televised sports that I wouldn’t normally give to hoots about.

The spectacle alone was worth the license fee. China has set the bench mark for all future games. London 2012 will have a tough act to follow but if they work to making it their own vision — rather than competing to be more spectacular — then I think they have a chance of at least equalling these games. The closing ceremony was every bit as good as the opening: where the former was all choregoraphed in absolute synchronisation, the latter was a beautiful spectacle of laidback togetherness

I didn’t realise how a nation doing well can actually make the nation feel good. Why do I feel so happy that we won 19 Gold medals. I don’t normally have an interest in diving, boxing, gymnastics or synchronised swimming! But each event had me enthralled whether there was a British (or Dominican) interest.

There’s always the China’s human rights record to address. Well, I believe these games will go a long way to get people to see that nation in a different light and, conversely, for China to see the world differently too. As for Tibet, I don’t know enough about the whole story to comment, and you know what? Neither do most people but they do anyway.

Can’t wait for 2012.

According to a new report house prices are set to rise. Don’t believe it. In fact, who cares if prices rise or fall. Since I don’t need to sell at the moment I don’t really care if the value of my home goes up ten fold — I’ll still need to find a place to live. With other properties going up at the same rate I wouldn’t be able to afford it.

Right now Gordon Brown’s getting a pounding in the polls for something he has no control over. The credit crunch has nothing to do with the PM’s policies and everything to do with people’s greed. The sooner that property programmes and faux real estate economists are taken out off the media the better off we’ll all be. Just for the record, your house is worth only as much as the cash you have in your pocket once it’s sold. In fact, until you’ve completely paid for it it’s a liability rather than an assett. Don’t be fooled.

So my prediction is this. House prices will continue to drop until they get to the point they would have been if they had risen at the rate of growth common in the 60s, 70s and 90s. This faux real estate economist reckons that’s a drop of about 45%! You heard it here first folks.

Whilst listening to Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood on my iPod, it occurred to me how little things change. Replace the dates, the main protagonists and the threat and you have, essentially, the same story. We can laugh now at the very idea of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) but we weren’t laughing in 1983. In comparison with what we have today, Ronald Reagan sounds pretty tame.

It sometimes makes me wonder if these things are created to keep us distracted. As we watch the magician sawing his beautiful assistant in half we miss his cronies pick-pocketing us.

The Government’s great plan for tackling knife crime is to make young people caught carrying knives go to accident and emergency wards to see the consequences of stabbings for themselves.

Great.

The main problem with this initiative is that people who carry knives know what knives do. That’s why they carry them. They either don’t want to be a victim and by carrying them they believe that chance is lowered or they’re an agressor who wants to cause harm. Either way by sending them to a hospital will only reinforce what they already believe, that is: “I don’t want that to be me. i have to protect myself.”

What needs to be done is to get the agressors off the streets. Now I’m not saying to lock them all up, for one thing, you’ve got to find them first… and how do you know whether the person carrying the knife is a potential victim or a potential perp?

I’m saying get curfews in place. What business does an eleven-year-old have walking the streets at ten O’clock at night? Give police and the ’specials’ enough powers that let them use physical force but not too much that they can abuse it. Get the parents in and fine them, or threaten them with jail. Take off the kids gloves and start using physical punishments — not beatings but hard labour. Don’t try to embarrass or make them feel small because that will backfire and breed even more resentment.

And in twenty years time do you know what you get? Responsible adults saying to the generation beneath them, “Kids today don’t know how easy it is. In my day if you carried a knife ….”

School’s out for summer which means I have to work. For the next few days I’ll be falling back on my skills as a graphic artist and artworker at Cavendish Design and Advertising. It’s been fun. Hope the rest of the summer goes as well.

I really didn’t have much hope for this movie when I heard it was going to be the second movie on the Marvel Studios’ slate but it isn’t a bad attempt. In its favour it isn’t anything like Ang Lee’s adjectiveless Hulk — but then no one likes the Hulk when he’s Ang Lee!

Marvel is using a kind of joint up thinking with their movies. Characters, institutions and themes are crossing over. You don’t need to have seen Iron Man to appreciate this movie but if you do you’ll notice they have done something that hasn’t really been done in movies before: sharing a universe.

This movie is a lot closer in tone to the TV show than it is the comics. So while you get the ‘Lonely Man’ music riffs and the whole “don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” thing, there’s still no Rick Jones in there. However, all the Marvel geeks out there will get the references to at least two possible nemeses for subsequent movies and it’s good to see a bit of foundation in their back stories. Plus, the ‘Captain America’ bit with Tim Roth augurs well for the character when his movie comes around.

Ed Norton is a much more believable tortured Bruce Banner. He has just the right amount of bullied geek boiling under the surface to believe that you really wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. Still, how he manages to pull Liv Tyler’s Betty Ross is anybody’s guess. Maybe she loves him for his brain. Tim Roth and William Hurt never ever give bad performances even though they have been in some pretty dire films in the past (Planet of the Apes, Lost in Space). Also a nod to Tim Blake Nelson as the over-excited scientist. Hopefully we’ll see him in any possible sequel.

All in all pretty pretty good. Not brilliant, but it is hard to empathise with a roaring green ten foot musclebound giant. Come on guys, give him more than two words next time.

After a lot of hard thinking I’ve decided to write my dissertation on Design governance and how it affects the world

I’m interested in the way the world works: systems, structures, interventions and consequences and how everyday decisions can, and do, impact on our lives and the lives of others. Designers play a major role in the world we live in. From fashion to architecture, to television, communication devices, transportation, medical technology and devices that keep us alive, keep us warm, keep our food fresh and our water clean — designers shape the world around us.

The designer’s role, fundamentally, is to find a solution to a problem or to fulfill a need. In finding that solution there is a process of decision making and, subsequently, implementing those decisions. That process is governance.

Should designers take responsibility for the governance of artifacts and systems they create and if not, with whom does the responsibility lie? Is it with manufacturers, markets, or consumers? Where does the responsibility begin and where, and with whom does it end?

I will be investigating the types of governance that exists in design, design technology and designed systems, and how that governance determines what products and systems become available to us, their usage and how much value is put on the end user.

I will look at several types of national governance and investigate whether there are similarities within design governance:

Democracy:
Power of the people for the people: Where people have the power of choice. If enough people (usually the majority) choose, then the idea goes forward. This is about balance and economics. With enough people choosing, a design or an idea has a life within a specific community. If there are not enough ‘voters’ then the idea is shelved until it is economically (or otherwise) viable.

Power by the people for the people: Where users tinker with the original design to make it better for other users. Everyone has the ability to have a say in the process and because all ideas are welcome the process never ends. The idea is always a work in progress. This is the ethos behind open source.

As a sub-strand, Meritocracy: Where success is rewarded. Within this system people have the opportunity to ‘better oneself’. Work hard enough and you will succeed. This system doesn’t truly exist as a form of national governance although it is common in corporations and governments.

Dictatorship:
Where people are dominated by one absolute power: Dictatorships can be benign. This is a top down system. The leadership is all powerful in this system. Within dictatorship it is a given that, while there may be other options, the ones that are given are the ones that will be used. The ‘beneficiaries’ of this system have no choice in the matter.

Oligarchy:
Where people are governed by an elite class: Within this system governance is determined by those who are fit to rule. Within national governance this might be an accident of birth, however, in the design world it would be qualifications, experience, connections or the ability to sell oneself.

I will divide the work into four chapters…

Chapter 1: Needs and Wants:
In this chapter I will be examining how design fulfills needs. When are decisions made? What processes are used, and who is in that decision making process? Where is the end-user in the design process?

Chapter 2: Media and Markets
I will be looking into the way markets have a hand in design governance. Whereas the designer’s role is to fulfill a need, The Market’s role is to make money, preferably at a profit, and to seize an opportunity. Should there be moral implications to design governance? Who decides what products are placed in the market and when? Why don’t things work? And who is liable when they don’t. Do we really need what they are selling?

Chapter 3: Utilitarianism and Egalitarianism
What is high quality design? How useful are the things that are being designed? Who needs them and why can’t everyone have one?

Chapter 4: Citizen and Consumers
How is the end user valued in the design process? What is more important: the quality of the product or the quality of the result of the product? Today, Western consumers are inundated with choice and the trend is spreading throughout what was commonly called the developing world. Are people users, consumers, citizens? How does design governance define the end user?

Celebrity Red Carpet: Update

In order to get the feedback from the audience when the user walks over the carpet we need either sensors of touch pads. We’re going with touch pads. Here’s how it works:

We took a USB keyboard to pieces and re-wired it so specific keys would be replaced by the touch pads.

We got the touchpad to trigger the ‘p’ key. The idea is to command MAX MSP to trigger an action whenever the ‘p’ key — and any other key we’ve re-wired — is pressed. MAX looks for a particular keypress to trigger an action. ‘p’ is replaced by a touchpad which will be sewn into the carpet.

Last week I was invited to go to BSkyB as part of a kind of relationship building exercise with Ravensbourne. As I’ve said previously, I really enjoyed the experience because I got to throw ideas around.

One of the things I learnt was that people are too cautious. I was in a small group, apart from the larger group of students and Sky people, who were devising the entire show; a perfect opportunity to get real good ideas out there. From the day before, talking to kids and finding what they liked, disliked, enjoyed, entertained by and bored by we should have understood that they were a very discerning audience who would not put up with crap. What they really wanted as viewers was exactly the same as I wanted when I was a kid: thrills, surprises, clever and off-beat stories or situations. I suggested what I thought was pretty off-beat ideas — I would really love to see a giant, flying goldfish crash land in the middle of a football pitch on match day — but nobody in the group bit. My thinking was go really far out and then maybe we could pull it back in. Starting cautious just means you haven’t got far to go, after all, if the water’s cold who wants to wade further in?

When I got back to college I told anyone who asked, how good a time I had. To the question of how it helped me as an interaction designer, I really didn’t have an answer. What had I learned? At home, while lying in the bath, it suddenly occurred to me why the four days at Sky was so important. The experience! That’s what matters. I may never ever have to write a TV show. Or edit. Or operate a camera. But I like knowing how things are done. I just have a curiosity for things. Almost everything. I like to know things, I like to know how things work. That’s just how I am and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Thanks Sky!