Design In A Nutshell

The Open University has released six great, animated videos about famous design movements through history. After you've seen the videos you can follow up with their ten hour course on design thinking. 

Gothic Revival

Gothic Revival was one of the most influential design styles of the 19th century. Revivalists adhered to the romantic notion that stuff could and should look more meaningful, with designs based on forms and patterns used in the Middle Ages.

Arts and Crafts

This influential design movement began because people got fed up with machines. The Arts and Crafts movement promoted economic and social reform, sticking up for ordinary workers and craftspeople.

Bauhaus

Bauhaus was a totally different type of art school, training students in many art and design disciplines, with the ultimate aim of unifying art, craft, and technology.

Modernism

Modernism was a far-reaching ideology applied across virtually all forms of creative expression. The general rule was that function should always dictate form. The approach celebrated mankind's intelligence, creativity and radical thinking, even if it sometimes verged on the absurd.

American Industrial Design

From the ashes of the Great Depression, American Industrial Designers brought us the age of mass consumption with their "utilitarian art": sleek, sophisticated and beautiful objects that everyone wanted to own.

Postmodernism

Less is a bore! More than just an artistic style, Postmodernism was a mindset, a way of rejecting how we understand our world. Because the Postmodernists refused to see things as one thing or another, this blurring of boundaries had the power to bring about great social change.

How to Write a Better Case Study→

From the Newfangled newsletter:  

Most of the time, we write a case study because we want the world to know that we landed an important account. It's about the name of the client and what it means that they were willing to work with us. If we made some pretty things, we of course want to show them off too. But in both cases, we're doing it to create an impression, either by name recognition or aesthetic seduction. And that's what we think sells.

You might get someone into your store by putting pretty things in the window, but if that impression doesn't hold up once they're inside, they're not going to stick around long enough to buy. Once they're inside, they need all kinds of reassurance to defeat the voice in their head telling them to hold on to their money: A trust-building connection with you. The chance to hold that thing you're selling and imagine what it might be like to own it. A good story about that thing that explains where it came from, why it's one of a kind, and how it's just as good as it looks. A promise that you'll make it right if that thing doesn't hold up.

Some ideas and suggestions really worth considering. It's not enough to have an idea, you have to execute and it's certainly not enough to make something, you have to sell it. 

Creativity Top 5: Week of June 10, 2013

When words fail, say it with bacon.  

"then we begin to craft around our intention"→

Apple's WWDC 2013 keynote began with a rare sight, an intro video, a beautiful and brilliant sequence. A direct and clear declaration of Apple's intentions. Simple, in black and white, with prose that elegantly addressed many of the recent criticisms aimed at the company. My fellow artists, artisans and technicians, may our intentions be this specific and clear so we may craft our works around them.  

From the newly launched Designed by Apple page on their site:  

This is it.
This is what matters.
The experience of a product.
How it makes someone feel.
When you start imagining
What that might be like, 
You step back. 
You think. 

Who will this help? 
Will it make life better? 
Does this deserve to exist?
If you are busy making everything, 
How can you perfect anything? 

We don't believe in coincidence.
Or dumb luck. 
There are a thousand "no's"
For every "yes."
We spend a lot of time
On a few great things. 
Until every idea we touch
Enhances each life it touches. 

We're engineers and artists.
Craftsmen and inventors.
We sign our work. 
You may rarely look at it. 
But you'll always feel it. 
This is our signature.
And it means everything. 

Designed by Apple in California

Theater Business Models: The Next Frontier→

Scott Walters, Professor of Drama at the University of North Carolina, encouraging arts organizations to really consider innovation in performing arts' business models: 

I’m a theatre historian, and as such I am prone to making sweeping generalizations without batting an eye, especially when I am trying to cover 2500 years of theatre history in a single semester course. Here’s an example of such a generality: theatre people spent the first 2000+ years innovating about theatre spaces: they invented the arena theatre of ancient campfire storytelling, the thrust stage of the Greeks and Elizabethans, the moveable stages of the medieval mysteries and commedia, the proscenium of the Italian Renaissance. Throughout most of that time, while storytelling techniques waxed and waned, generally speaking we had a fairly consistent form: plays written in verse with a presentational relationship between the actors and the audience (i.e., usually somebody talked directly to the audience), and a mixture of words, music, and dance. We then spent about 300 years getting really good at writing plays — Shakespeare, Moliere, etc. Then in the 20th century (if you extend the 20th century back to the 1870s), we spent most of our time developing “isms“: realism, naturalism, expressionism, symbolism, dadaism, theatricalism, absurdism, and so on. Postmodernism stands as the end point of the “ism” period, an admission that we’ve pretty much discovered all the isms there are and now all that’s left is to create mashups out of them.

So we up until now innovated about space and about form — what’s next? Well, in my opinion, the next area for innovation is (drum roll, please) in theatre’s business model. […] Back in 1947, Albert Einstein said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Well, without a new business model (or, better yet, many new models), I predict theatre will end up back gathered in a circle on the threshing floor telling stories around the fire, the theatrical equivalent of sticks and stones.

This is a subject that really fascinates me, particularly when I'm at board meetings for arts organizations.  Most artists work very hard to look ahead, to create ahead. Sure the great ones know the history of their craft very well, respect it, and they look ahead. On the other hand the boards and operations, in essence those artists' support systems, seem determined to continue to do their work, their art, only in ways that worked before.  

The fact is, as Walters mentions on his blog, most regional theaters, and I would venture most performing arts organizations, are working on the business model first made popular by Danny Newman's Subscribe Now!, first available in 1977. 

Marketing and advertising struggle with this as well, with a changing world that may not be interested in what they have to offer unless is presented in a better, more relatable way.

Technology on the other hand is all about innovative models, sometimes very risky but often revolutionary. Arts organizations need to start thinking a bit more like startups, reconsider how they get funding and how they make, market and sell their "product." We don't like to think about art as a product but the truth is the audience we need for the arts to survive thinks of it that way. 

We need to learn to trust the artists we align ourselves with that they will create worthwhile art, while they in turn have to learn to trust us, the behind the scenes, that we will create worthwhile ways of telling the world and make money. The status quo is no longer a successful business model.