[Music] you oh yeah okay hi video so anyway just a lil a saw brief intro really I I learned my design shops in a print shop so how many of you guys ever ever worked in or used to print shop in a professional capacity great okay you're my compadres I'll buy some of you a beer there's too many later so that's how I learned designers are basically like an apprentice and that's in the early 90s 1991 that's why I started the web came along in the mid-90s and we all got involved in it all got really excited about it as designers it was all really complicated my brother came to me in the early nights as I said he said it's a broth I'm going to be a web designer now it's like we're talking about so web designer and he said oh you know you write code and like stuff happens on the computer screen and I was like okay that sounds cool so we got into it that way anyway fast forward a few years we're working on the web we're doing all sorts of interesting things then we've got this sort of problem basically and nothing really works that well I have a friend he works a BT and he's got a computer that beetee's given him on this on this Apple computer which was black plastic if you can believe was running Netscape so I'd made something looks at it on Netscape and there was nothing there crash course wait so I'm going to fast forward a little bit to a day in October 2002 I'm working on the web for a few years I've got my head around how to do tables T V T DT DT D for all of you who remember oh crap I want to change that okay we're going to go back again delete delete delete and it's 2002 its October I'm 29 years old I'm sitting in my office at home and and I saw it you got any he remembers this gosh some of you're so old this is why ad news in 2002 and October it launched I had no prior knowledge of this at all I I saw it and I was like oh cool why it's got a new site let's have a look first thing you do web design and view source Wow oh my god totally blew my head off like utterly blew my head off there's only two sites of any scale at this time that actually deployed web standards one was wired another one was University of Salford owned by Patrick loudly those were the only two and I don't know which came first but the first one I saw was wired and um and suddenly they're kind of like the world opened off and I thought okay we're going to make some massive progress here this is a really really big deal and other people agree with me because there's an article about Wyatt they actually referenced browser Wars like you know it's wild magazine talking about the browser wars the browser Wars is what we dealt with every day pretty much and then when Eric Meyer said this he said I can't overstate the importance of web news new design and then importantly the site will be a great deal easier to maintain what Eric is doing here is really clever right he's my he's been interviewed for Wired magazine he's not talking to web developers he's not talking to web designers he's not talking to anybody what he's talking to us he's talking to all the people who make the decisions about what kind of web sites get made because the whole argument at that point wasn't about what kind of technology we should use really it was about why should we change the table stuff that you guys deal with every day and hate because it works and then when Jeffrey wrote about it he hit the nail absolutely smack bang on the head like so often does and he basically predicted what was going to happen from that point forward and why it did it that was the argument any time I came up against us this this we thought about web standards that was the argument why it did it let's have a look at that and as a designer working at that time you know we were all coding and we were just basically like rip each other off really someone would do something solver saw the solver thing sometimes they publish it sometimes they wouldn't but we just go and look right and then we play with it and keep iterating on it and you know Rachel was talking about this earlier and that culture I think still pervades what we do today is still definitely does for me so the reason I'm going through this a little bit of history is because what I want to do here in this talk is when we're looking at things like Wyatt is look at where we've come from and look at how it influences where we are today and explain to you how I extrapolate from that about my own practice about where we're gonna go in the future and like like it or not it might sound a little bit self referential but all of us in this room working on the web give me an idea who you why I see who you crossed themselves as a designer okay there's not many of us okay we need to get out of here fast who's a real developer okay all right whose souls design problems they feel like in their work there you go you're all designers really ask be honest and the reason I want to do this is because going forward I think it's going to be really really important because we shape the future in our conversations with our colleagues with our clients with the audience that we serve we shape how our industry will be going forward in the future and we're being kind of a little bit dragged to one side of the moment by a lot of external pressures mostly commercial pressures and I want to have a little conversation about that today by looking back about what where we've come from so no more slow to home pages and web designers gone mad so fast forward a bit 70 years later it's 2019 now and look how far we've come I mean these are just sort of some rough stats I won't read out to you can you see them all right if you can't 587 million online in 2002 in 2019 4.1 billion point one five megabits connection average speed into in 2002 and why it launched 102 I wanted to kind of represent this a little bit sorry does my voice go away when I turn that way a little bit okay I'll try not to do that I'll try in robotic alright so I wanted to represent what this means an actual actually visually so I thought right I'll typeset 2002 and then I'll typeset 2019 and I'll do them mathematically precise to the difference in speed and 2002 is so small hard to put a circle around it this is where we've got to so then when I was first doing this talk usually I give talks about very practical typography giving stuff because that's my first love type will always be my first love but when I was first doing this talk I was going to give it an event support and I want to do an example of a problem that we're still facing this is live video this is me waiting for a site solo on an iPad pro which isn't really that old and this is live right there is that was live so hold on the connection speeds gone like this technology's gone really great we can do all these amazing things what's that by the way the Wi-Fi connection was good I'm not completed yet so and then I the same time as I did that little video I emailed working class zeros which is such a great name for a shot for someone line news half working class while some Chinese and generally kind of oppressed from every direction including at home and Adam replied with this because I would say item I can't give you any money I'm trying to check out dude I want to give you money desperately please let them help me give you money and this is this reply and this is my reply to Adam was no Adam just just no dude it's 2018 at this point and it doesn't even make sense Apple's latest update is messed with our site did it oh my god you get some personal attention I wished I got that kind of visit our site is optimized for Google Chrome wait what 2018 I didn't even know it's have that conversation with Adam at all but why so why and this is my answer in the word entropy entropy being the things always well that's the nice explanation things always basically end up turning to sorry video they do and as designers and developers and people building systems part of our job is to try and deal with that right we know at some point we're going to get some content from someone who's using this site it's going to break its gonna break something Rachel's talking about how to handle that just now which was great but we know these saw problems we're going to get some commercial pressures they're going to want to add this it's going to degrade eventually there's going to be apples going to mess with our site I hate that company so much no not so entropy and we solve it with design that's my personal opinion we solve it first and foremost with design we don't solve it with polyfills and with with clever development checks all the time they're really the first point of contact that we have with the problem has been is in design and that's where we can solve it most of the time that's why thing because the job as a designer my job is to mitigate entropy so think about how this might be used what might happen and to try and make things better by thinking about those kind of conditions that this thing might be used in or it might be there might be might need to change into in the future because fundamentally what we're trying to do here is it's all about quality of life we're trying to improve quality of life for ourselves for our clients for their audience for anybody who needs to come into contact with this code for ourselves not to be too precious as a species we're trying to improve quality of life lots of different routes that we can get them we can argue about that all day but fundamentally that's really what we're trying to do and design has a role to play with that and working on the web has a role to play so how do we get to this point I want to go way back give you some context of my thinking about this so a hundred years ago Picasso did this I'm not even sure if I like actually to be honest it's a really hard thing to like but I always thought was really interesting and what this is is a this is sort of late whereas in late nineteen eleven early nineteen twelve you did this the reason this is important is because this is almost the first ever collage at least a commentary collage in art history as we understand it now I want to focus on this for a second and not go too deep I'll give you some context this is 1911 1912 right this is the very earliest point of modernism before this is art deco before that as art nouveau this is when the world is changing in its ideas in its reacting against mechanization against industrialization people who are thinking about this stuff are getting worried they're like ok how does this stuff serve human beings these machines that we've got so much control and power over and at the same time as an artistic movement modernism is starting to be a challenge to the existing establishment no longer is it always about simple ittle compositions laid out in one media so what Picasso is doing here is in this weird thing that I sorta like is you can see the chair caning bit that chair caning isn't chair caning that's chair caning photograph printed onto canvas so he's just completely overturned the whole the whole idea of using some kind of material in a different way because he wanted it to be literal chair caning or seemed that way and then also on here with other things like a pipe and there's a newspaper of the journal and in Paris there's all sorts of odd things going on that's kind of like Phoebus weird stuff right what he's doing is he's trying to describe what it's like to look through a glass table top down onto a chair cane chair below it but he's doing it using mixed-media a collage and that thing that he does there translates directly into how we experience information right today because in some ways were in that we live in the collage aesthetic right today because what the collage have said it led to is also montage and film before this point most storytelling like I'm kind of doing now to you it's very linear right it follows time usually follows one perspective one point of view after this things started to happen that we just take for granted film comes along and it gives you one point of view say a family sitting around table and then it switches to the other point of view which is appropriate at this sign of say someone one of the sons of that family at war ok so we have all this kind of interesting stuff going on about this montage collage idea moving through space and time moving through distance and perspectives to provide information and that's the web that we have today constantly providing us with information from all sorts of different points of view in different places but it's the modernism bit in this which is which I find really important and so round about the same time this guy called Peter Behrens he's an architect and he has this amazing job title he's just artistic consultant for AEG ok if I met someone I said what do you do for a living they say I am the artistic consultant for shop Sony like what is that what does that mean like you get shame are you know this is the person who buys off offices right but in the reasoning of this job title artistic consultant is because the job that he did haven't even been invented yet he invented this job and he was basically the very first industrial designer Peter Behrens also so he did heat Andrew AG's first corporate typeface he developed their branding for them he developed the first complex branding the world's really ever seen brand system if you like he designed the Turbine Hall they designed a fan a clock this guy is prolific but it's job Tyler's autistic and Saltzman what he's doing is he is the first person who puts design at the center of a company really because of his personal power kudos charisma tall it wherever you will and EEG indoors this and they make a massive success out of it and at the same time as Peter Behrens is doing this for a Eugene's involved he's a founder member of the Deutsche berkland you don't be heard of this okay brilliant so Deutsche verb 1 just to skim it over top is this is a bunch of architects and artists and all those sort of people who are concerned about modern like about mechanization about industrialization they're concerned that people are going to lose their skills their craft that they've had for generations in making things and they're basically riffing off the idea of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement who baby who wanted to see still the hand of the maker in the objects that we use today and what work what third one wanted to do was take the craftsmanship of art or design or making things that wasn't even called art and design then because if you made tools you were just a blacksmith take that that craftsmanship smash it together with mass production and completely open up and democratize the availability of really high quality stuff to everybody that's for mass market today isn't it supposedly except thought reverb bond could see a problem with this because before this before this modernist movement of Oakland we had art deco in our Nouveau and that was for rich people that's fine lovely things made by craftsmen that cost the equivalent of someone month wages for a person working the factory for example okay so this is slightly political for me but you have to indulge me slightly but they saw this as a problem because why should it only be rich people who have access to high quality stuff does it kind of ring the bow today a little bit maybe okay so vote one have seen this and the port of vote bond involved in it he was an apprentice to Berens was this guy under oath bangla also was the less lust director of the Bauhaus so you can see the lineage here Connie you see all the stuff that's going on in the early 20th century barons then van der Rohe he designed this what's interesting about this is because it's almost a direct descendant I mean this is a reproduction of a bottle in a pavilion but it's almost a direct descendant of that of that card modernism fundamentally is about or theta authenticity of materials about using the things in the way that they should be used and representing them properly and trying to create a world for humans to live in better trying to make things better and then decades later you'll know this place this is probably most famous modernist house ever right fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright it's a slightly different point of view because the traditional one looking down the gorge at the waterfalls and though he's me I've seen it before too many times so Frank Lloyd Wright's doing exactly the same thing he's using materials in the most honest way he can to try and create a different way of living I'm sorry if that pictures not really that great on the screen but I'm going to point something out to you this is the interior and what what here is a massive rock now it looks like he could have just been a bit of a not only wanted a massive rock and it and in his lounge okay but that's not what's happening here this is very deliberate that Rock existed there before they built the house and incorporated all these natural elements and materials he incorporated the natural world into his life into his life in this work and also into the life for that for this family your commission this as a as a kind of country house right and that's modernist and that modern materials modern production techniques trying to democratize all this sort of thing if you can trying to make it available to everyone putting but having an authenticity about the materials and about what you're doing in your in behind it so what you've got is you've got barons van der Rohe who was in charge of the Bauhaus when Hitler shut it down in 1932 you've got the Eames and you've got direct lineage to dieter and dieter Rams join the ice inspiration although he's gone slightly off the path since then dieter Rams reference barons as his one of his heroes one of his inspirations and they were designing entire democratized democratized design itself time make it available to everyone but we end up today here this is where we end up van der Rohe Barcelona chair if you buy it from the official license people cost four thousand seven hundred quid who spends four thousand seven hundred quid on a chair if you have spent four thousand seven hundred quid on chair do not tell me it will color our relationship it's very fundamentally the Eames design was supposed to be fully democratic this is a comfortable easy to produce mass-produce chair using really easily available materials five of us and steel at the time 390 quid for God's sake people and visto this is an amazing system visto it's been made for decades and decades it's supposed to be you buy a little bit and then you buy a little bit more all fits together and you move it from house house wherever you go and you end up with this whole storage system which is amazing except to buy this who the hell no wonder why key is a thing I could say right so I'm looking at all this not and I've this running around my brain in it occasionally when I'm not working flat-out to understand earn a living you know I think about this sort of stuff and it leads me down a path about where do I want my practice to go now hoping there's something in this for you guys to take away as as ideas to mull over yourself so I came up with this whole idea these three words they're really important to me durable inclusive and aesthetic as a principles of my practice and what I want to do no I'm not going to say it's easy I'm not going to say hey you know every client that we have we can find money to do loads and loads of really good stuff and we be the ethical and the way that everything gets done and that's not the real world that we live in but where we can make it which whitey right as long as we don't end up on Stokes Croft with a river with a bowl which is where I live so I'm not doing the area down a piety kind of like it so what does juror will actually mean well you know the definition is table was to withstand where pressure or damage hard-wearing but durability to me is about relationships it's about relationships we have with code relationships we have with devices relationships we have with our colleagues and our audience and it's about building durable relationships across all those kind of different areas all those things that we have to interact with in our in our work because fundamentally all the problems that we have at the moment is we live in an attention economy every single big business on the web it's fundamentally just trying to get people's eyeballs on them just trying to just trying to get some kind of attention on what they're doing and every we're all competing for that same that same space effectively with the work that we do a lot of the time but the problem is of course is that in this collage aesthetic of all this information all this perspectives coming from all these different points of view it's consuming people's attention it's a cognitive load which is why some well some of us take screen breaks right for a couple of days try and go on holiday try and pretend you have got your phone with you never works because attention is a resource persons only got so much attention that they can give and part the relationship I want to build with durable design is about being respectful of people's attention whether they're whether I work alongside them as a colleague or whether I'm trying to do stuff for them as a client or whether I'm trying to serve them as part of my audience for the work that I'm creating and one of the ways I do this is I do it with two with two little words impact and emotion this is one of my little friends sort of lenses that I look through in terms of my own work because I often find were either designing for one or the other of these or both at the same time impact being isn't my kids by the way right yeah but when they were cute they're not like that anymore having a marked effect or influence impact as basically advertising is doing all the time it's trying to have a quick impact on you grab your attention get you to notice something an emotion obviously is when you get much more immersed in something of it like when you're playing a game when you're reading a book or even when you're reading an article these days that will count as immersion for me as long as this as long as it's not you know tiny with two paragraphs and just to catch your headline together look at the advertising and using impact in the immersion is about using interruption carefully deliberately in there typesetting which is an obvious example for me you know this is how you would interrupt a sentence and this is how you would not interrupt a sentence and if any of you have read an e-book recently this is what happens all the time to me I can't help but notice we're very resilient as human beings we kind of skip over problems that we have in typesetting but I can't it's rage-inducing the Kindle is on the way out the door I have to go grab it and go like don't do that because that's expensive so when you're interrupting it's really careful to do how you do it you know deliberate interruptions are good that's really crazy by the way I kind of hope that still exists cuz I kind of have one I guess go see it just for the hell of it like what but you've got to be really careful how you do the interruptions with it's for impacts or remotely alright because if you don't get the town wide people are going to be annoyed yeah like me with my Kindle or if there's too much advertising coming your way or whatever I guess it might be that design that is designing interruptions is almost an art and of itself and I would say that's almost at the core of what design is is managing interruptions because when you give people the opportunity to interact with things right you don't know what's gonna happen who Josh is ace you just say just just got up there Chuck just got a pole Mandelet I mean I sprayed high things when I was kid right you know you it's a lot of effort you have to think about this josh is a good designer so what do we need to understand thing we need to understand the real world context in which people operating and we need to understand what kind of spaces we're designing for them to do things and how we design those spaces to respect their attention because we're living in this collage aesthetic crazy multi-dimensional informational age so another thing I use is enacted versus emergent narratives and enacted narrative is one where you want people to follow a set path one two three four to an endpoint think of a check up for example that's an enacted narrative you might go off it for a minute come back but it's still a very linear path it's an enacted narrative any kind of task that ends up with it whether there has a single focus point is an active moiety and Henry Jenkins who's who co-founded the component a contemporary media course at MIT he wrote about this in 2004 and the content and the other thing that I use is the emergent narrative space is designed to be rich of narrative potential think in a way social networks are emergent narratives but there are also loads of other emergent narratives that we are designing they're working for all the time any out when people people can use any app or any site to tell the story of some kind even if it's just storing a couple of data points it's an emergent narrative so durable design has a component and these emergent narratives and active narratives impact emotion those are just my tools that I use in my practice because I'll try and understand what I'm doing in terms of making the relationships that I'm having durable not with customers and their colleagues with everybody else being inclusive is really important to me because it's a subset really of a durable relationship the durable design relationship and obviously inclusive means not excluding anybody because when you exclude people it's really annoying right and I just love this gift it's actually I can't I can't look at it without remembering how much I laughed when I saw it for the first time but no I'm not going to stop there we'll carry on I want to punch Thor so bad because inclusive does mean colleagues too it's not just about accessibility but super so long and I still see this every day I still see it with people that I work and we're with design gets chucked over the fence and you get something else gets chucked over the fence there's all this segmentation all these silos that people are still working in and actually the only way as we've heard today and as you as you're continue to hear from loads of people the only way we all know to do effective work is to talk to all the people that we have to work with you know everything that I design if I'm if I have the slightest doubt that something I'm working on will be a development burden for the people who are going to have to build it alongside me I talk to them it's just logic isn't it but so something so being inclusive means I like that as well as the same being inclusive also means including colleagues one of the things about this modern era of design when I first started in design there was no such thing as UX design didn't exist there wasn't interesting a service design that didn't exist either who comes from sighs as UX designers or service designers that's very courageous obviously there's only two of you to admit it I can't believe there's only two in the room that's a massive problem because actually I think we're all in UX designers and we're also this designers and they're in the practice that we have anyway and it was and it was a subset of my practice all the way through so data became became really big right in the last 10 years we've got to have data we've got to use data to prove our arguments and prove the direction we want to go in and who we're going to serve and look at because data has got a better idea right data knows data science and science is the trump card there's a lot of illiteracy in that and I wouldn't ever doubt it I'm not Trump so yeah but data is actually so far because when people say to me we know our audience we've got all this data all these metrics on who they are and how they behave and what they do of course it's wall-e isn't it because I mind says ok are there your audience because I like these guys I don't even know what whether I should say like we're an ass for sitting here to play music or I don't know whether day but they're awesome but one thing we know for sure about being inclusive is we don't understand really what people are doing sometimes and we have to be really careful about the conditions in which they're operating even if it's a colleague who's in a bit of a bad mood that day right that's a simple thing about context we don't understand and we're very probably very British and we don't like to ask because there are no edge cases for me at all I don't believe in this rage edge cases it annoys me edge cases is just a really easy way of excluding people there are an edge case and truthfully it's just people trying to get get to do stuff while they're really distracted and as loads of other things going on for them because we live in this collage aesthetic world because fundamentally there are a lot of us and we're all doing different kinds of stuff especially in the developing world which is a massive part one audience really these days has to be a massive part of everyone's audience and because like it or not they actually have money to I told myself that all the time because I have a colleague who used to work on these guys Nokia's any girls work on Nokia s40 Symbian one person okay because in India with 1.3 billion people Nokia had a 54% market share in 2009 think about that 2009 that's after the iPhones came out Nokia was 54% of everybody with a phone in India any phone in 2009 there were 159 million Nokia 5230 Seoul how'd you ever make 159 million right it's definitely way beyond the Arts and Crafts movement let's just say that and into 2018 360 million smartphones exist on that in that subcontinent and I have a colleague who worked at what's up who's a friend and he basically did all the development for whatsapp for Symbian for Nokia and he's a good mate it doesn't want me to use his name but he told me the story and I was fascinated by it 2014 there was over 50 million people using what's up in India mostly down because of his work that's incredible thing to do as a developer I think we like also lose a lot of people relying on you not to not to get it wrong it's a lot of pressure luckily it's very chill guy and in the same year whatsup sold for 19 billion which is just kind of obscene really but it goes to show how much value they put on what saps access to markets through things like Symbian and Nokia and devices that we wouldn't have even considered having in our pocket at that time really that's what the what's up do so what's up did is they tried to support all handsets that was a policy they had internally they also wanted to help people up to pay for SMS which is a normal thing in the developing world you have to pay for us and that's usually or the we just get it's part of our package they wanted to focus on what people are actually trying to do not just given the features for the sake of it they wanted to give people the ability to send messages anywhere in the world to any device if they could and they weren't they used to do this these native controls on their hands from there and this is critical the developing world starts to drive the developed world this is how what's up became so successful aunty in India has got what's up on a phone because that's the cheapest way she can communicate and she hasn't got a lot of cash so aunty speaks to her nephew who's living in the States and says can you use what's up because if you guys remember and you may do what's up was kind of like an outlier normal really interested in what's up it was kind of crappy kind of sucked like earth what's up uses that then suddenly what's up went from that to being everyone's got it and who's got what's up on their phone today right okay and that is directly related to the inclusivity that what's up built into their product the ability of the relationships that they built with their customers by understanding the context they were operating in and we're all using what's up because the developed world used it first day led the way so the last thing on my list today because I've been trying to go quick is I looks like this picture a Landrover by the way I actually just want one if you guys want to buy me a present if I do all right you know chip in crowd fund you know pioneer fund anyway the company is called cool vintage con check it out because although we're not supposed to be driving petrol vehicles anymore this is amazing well that's what what's up is for me it's like the Land Rover Defender all that and they're building in and they built in an understanding okay it's Facebook now everyone's left everyone's bailed gone to work the signal or whoever else they might be okay but the principles that they started out with us still the same ones that we need to be paying attention to I think today still and I work if we can about the relationships that we build and how inclusive we are with our work when the opportunity presents itself to be so the last thing on my list was aesthetic and this is this is super short because I'm a designer so I I like pretty things they don't really have to serve a purpose sometimes I just generally like them if I didn't hold myself back I probably have lots more balls and crockery in my in my in my place and I would ever need because I like him a lot but aesthetics for me it's not about that aesthetics is about emotional aesthetics it's about the kind of kind of feeling and emotion that we try and engender with our work by making it durable by making it inclusive so athletic divine is giving pleasure by just I would say it's giving any kind of emotion eliciting some kind of emotion through Beauty through a sense of beauty there's no such thing as identifying that is beautiful and that is not that's called taste right beauty is what you perceive in something an object a person a situation context well beauty's also got form and that's what we work with we work with form we work of interfaces and interfaces send messages because our brain has a little bit in the middle called the amygdala and the amygdala is the lizard brain and it receives sensory import where it has no language what that means is the amygdala is where you hear music and you can't explain what it sounds like the amygdala is were is where you receive the sensory input about what this color is and then someone asks you to describe it and you don't know so you say it's greeny brown okay when we're done founded and we have no language for to describe things what we're doing is we're receiving sensory input but we haven't had time yet to process it through our brain and we don't have the vocabulary necessary to describe it emotion and there's an example here's a word from Malay setting a typeface called grave blade by type Adamic and here's another word in Malay setting a typeface called Bello see those lovely curves are they lovely and those what were the actual words just a really simple example first typeface hypodermic everything culturally about us tells us to interpret this is somewhat aggressive may be associated with a Nazis right but actually somewhat aggressive angular second one soft gentle but those are the actual words so I set X really sometimes means the words don't matter because there was this great paper and some people don't agree with this what I think it's good that Isleta said that aesthetics does not affect perceived use usability but usability has an effect on post use perceived aesthetic it's such an academic phase right post use perceive just what are you basically means is sometimes things that look good even if they don't work well we don't think they're beautiful anymore right that's true isn't it how many times have you picked something up and you thought oh this is amazing used it's been absolute utter crap or thrown it away or you've gone to a website and you've gone like are these guys to the goal some job you tried to use it and you're just pulling your hair out biting the monitor is that just me but that's this is it this is a good point know that if something works really well something it's durable as inclusive as aesthetic and it works for us we start to develop an emotional response to we start to like it we start to think of it as a beautiful thing at least a valuable thing at the very least because usable there's beautiful for me then my practice and that has to come first everything flows from that and usable for me is designed it's viewable inclusive an aesthetic [Applause] you
