After Making and Thinking, Now the Doing

There’s a final tradition at every AIGA conference I love attending, and one that most people who were chugging 60oz “bottomless” beers on Beale Street probably didn’t make it to—the Sunday morning Town Hall. At this intimate gathering, AIGA staff and board members take questions about the state of the organization. It’s a great chance to not only reflect back upon the programming of the past few days, but to get answers about the future, right from the source.

Ric Grefé opening the discussion at the Town Hall meeting

As AIGA executive director Ric Grefé noted first, there was one fact quite obvious to everyone in attendance at Make/Think: Registration was lower for this conference compared to two years ago, down about 30%. Only about 1300 designers attended this year’s conference compared to over 2000 in Denver. But actually, that lower number is standard for all conferences this year. AIGA believes this is part of a general shift towards smaller conferences—the big 4000 person conferences are gone. “It’s not because we can’t attract them,” says Ric, but because of economic issues and changing cultural and technological issues. But that doesn’t mean every big event will scale back. Design is a young profession and still needs to prove itself to the greater population, to show that design has cultural importance. And that’s why events like the AIGA Design Legends Gala, which honored mainstage speaker Carin Goldberg among others a few weeks ago, is important not only because it shows the relevance of the discipline, it actually raises quite a bit of money for AIGA.

But as conferences go, look for more specialized regional events like Compostmodern and the Y Conference, or ones like GAIN that can reach outside the design world into the business world and help bring understanding of the discipline to a wider audience. In light of the fact that not as many people can afford to attend a conference, AIGA has also stepped up their video production, so now look for “TED Talk quality” video online soon (awesome!). I, for one, think the scaling back of events like this is a good trend. Some conferences have gotten far too big. But what’s a good size? Ric Grefé considers this definition: “Where you can see the people you want to meet with, and then it’s small enough that you can still meet with them.” I think that was true for this year. Memphis felt just right when it came to numbers. The lines of designers who waited to talk to the most popular mainstage speakers, otherwise known as “The Two Stefans,” Sagmeister and Bucher, were long, but not overly long.

Talking to Stefan Sagmeister at the Design Observer party

When a speaker like Bennington College president Elizabeth Coleman gave one of the most talked about presentations at the conference, it’s obvious that education for both designers and at the K-12 level is a white-hot topic. Several people at the Town Hall asked for more educational support, and the AIGA design educators’ chair Louise Sandhaus, directed them to a new site, designeducators.aiga.org. In addition to the ongoing community conversations, Adobe and AIGA sponsor two education conferences every two years, and the next one will be Response/Ability on May 13-14 in Toledo, Ohio, followed by another one in Raleigh, NC in the fall. One question that was resonant throughout the conference was how to encourage all designers to begin and sustain the ever-important self-initiated work at a very young age. Both Daniel Eatock‘s and Jill Greenberg‘s talks proved that some of the most fruitful and powerful work—as well as the most entertaining—comes out of this experimentation.

Daniel Eatock experimenting with students

In the sustainability realm, a new set of guidelines called the Living Principles was announced and launched Friday by the Center for Sustainable Design. This new set of principles is built around the idea is that sustainable criteria isn’t just environmental and it examines the various guidelines for other organizations that are also guiding social responsibility, economy, society and culture (the traditional “triple-bottom line” + cultural sustainability). “We’re trying to make sure that the U.S. design community is actually part of the global design community,” says Ric. “We’ve been so focused on economic success we’ve become isolated.” By publishing these standards, AIGA also hopes that they can help designers educate their clients. “This is what the profession expects from itself,” says Ric, but it can also be used to tell other corporations, “this is what you should expect from design.” This could push forth more of the work being done by people like R/GA’s Nick Law, who spoke about rich designed experiences with a social agenda for Nike and the Ad Council that doesn’t fit the traditional perception of “sustainability” but drives change in a positive way.

Just the fact that a strictly interactive figure like Google’s Marissa Mayer was so prominently represented at AIGA’s conference is a huge step in showing that the traditional graphic design limitations no longer apply to the organization. There seems to be a general concern about continuing to bring in people from outside industries that don’t identify with traditional print industries, or even how to attract people who don’t think of themselves as graphic designers. AIGA has resolved to include non-print practitioners but also pledges to focus on younger designers. “If we focus on older designers as the center of gravity we miss the changes that are inevitably coming,” says Ric. Not to say that the elders will be ignored:  One idea AIGA has considered is to have younger mentors for older designers. How fun would that be? I say that initiative should be headed up by power duo of designer Charles Harrison and current student Ethan Bodnar, who spoke together about designing in two different eras of the industry.

David Butler, Global Design Director, Coca-Cola

But design, as Coke’s David Butler reminded us, is only getting bigger, and designers will need to learn how to design across boundaries they never could have imagined before. AIGA is proud to be aligned with ICOGRADA, the international group of designers which allows them to share information and practices on a much larger scale. The Cross Cultural Design Group (XCD), and chair Zelda Harrison, looks for other opportunities to bring other countries and cultures into the design conversation. ICOGRADA’s summit will be held in China next week, where AIGA has a strong presence with their AIGA China office.

Finally, taking a cue from Roger Martin’s incredible talk about why designers make such good problem solvers, there are a group of designers working hard to create a real presence in design within the U.S. government. A National Design Policy would bring together designers working in all design government agencies to find out how they approach service design, possibly culminating in a conference. This happened in the ‘70s but it has lost momentum, so AIGA is hoping to be a major part of getting this group united, which can hopefully bring the high-level design thinking concept to be applied to policy in the government. As far as proving value to our own country, Design for Democracy is being used for election ballot redesign, and continues to be the greatest way to demonstrate how design can help society. In addition to the ballots, Design for Democracy is working on redesigning the veteran experience, as well as a “nutrition facts” standard for credit card contracts and mortgages.

AIGA President Debbie Millman addresses the Town Hall meeting participants.

While we only have a Town Hall meeting every two years, Ric reminded us, you’ve got our email addresses. And there’s a special focus on inclusiveness and connectivity from AIGA president Debbie Millman, who wants to explore having more meaningful conversations using social networks, a true embrace of technology using whatever tools we have on hand to make people feel like their voices are heard. And even Ric Grefé is on Twitter (although I don’t see a post yet, but I’m optimistic!). Just like 69-year-old former Stax Records chairman and recent joiner of Twitter Al Bell put it so eloquently in the opening talk:  “If we follow each other and keep communicating, good things could happen.”

Jill Greenberg is The Manipulator

You’ve definitely seen photos by Jill Greenberg, razor-sharp, deeply saturated portraits, often with an angelic halo embracing her subjects. But these photos have also been the center of controversy, like when the ardent democrat took unflattering photos from a shoot with John McCain and altered them for her own website in a devastatingly witty series that made McCain look quite literally like a monster. The right came after her, claiming she tricked him into the shots, which she doesn’t deny. She shows her actual, unsigned contract with The Atlantic for the McCain shoot to prove that she didn’t actually do anything wrong, and she actually did give publication some attention (by the way, she made no money, was only supposed to be reimbursed for her materials—which she never was).

Jill Greenberg discusses the controversy and motivations behind the infamous McCain photo shoot.

Although so many of her portraits make those depicted in them look heroic, she is actually hired quite often to make people look ugly, she says. And ironically, exactly a year after the John McCain fiasco she was called in by GQ to shoot another person who disagreed with her politics: Glenn Beck (even though she didn’t think he’d agree in a million years—the photos eventually got picked up on the cover of Time). At that shoot, she made Glenn Beck cry, which was similar to another series she did that was fraught with controversy, End Times, where portraits of crying children that were named things like “Four More Years” and “Torture” to make statements about the Bush administration. She flips back and forth between wet-lashed children, their tears dripping onto their bare chests, and Glenn Beck’s overdramatic sobs (a video shows that she uses Vicks Vapor Rub right below the eyes to get grown men to cry), juxtaposing the two projects.

Greenberg brings the best out of Glenn Beck

Jill Greenberg and her crying babies

But where Glenn Beck’s portrait made it onto the cover of Time with nary a stir, in the case of End Times, a blogger came after her for supposedly traumatizing the children, resulting in a global fracas. “I knew they were powerful images but she didn’t expect the level of vitrol,” she says. “Apparently it’s controversial for children to cry? I don’t know, mine do it so much.” So she moved on to shooting bears, which were “somehow more safe” than children. She rounds out the session with a montage of bears, followed by some from her monkey series. For each, it’s apparent that her ability to bring out the good or evil in a human subject can also be used to give animals almost human-like personality. No word on how or if she’s successful in getting monkeys to cry. Her new book, Bear Portraits will be out this November.

David Butler: Massive Change, Pop Edition

When David Butler came to Coca-Cola, it was as their first global director of design, ever. It’s not an easy task:  A quarter of the earth’s population drinks Coke products every day so maintaining that red and white across so many cultural lines calls for some pretty drastic designing. He is carrying a Diet Coke, which he slyly puts atop the podium.

David Butler, Global Director of Design, Coca-Cola

As a designer, the “preciousness” and the “smallness” of design is what frustrates him. He opted out of “Design” in 1999 and moved towards systems thinking, which is more results-oriented. “You can’t look at results without looking at behavior,” says David. “And you can’t look at behavior without looking at structure.” When Coke called, he honestly didn’t think the structure would be able to change to support new results. He wasn’t sure they were ready to take such a holistic approach.

Redesigning design.

Just a few hints at how massively massive Coke is:

450 brands
206 countries
1.6 million servings a minute
A company valued at $68 billion

David Butler breaks down the numbers

So designing for Coke really is like managing a massive system. Small decisions like paper and typography are magnified so much, into such insane applications, with seemingly so little control, he needed a different approach to his designing. “Think Do” is that new approach.

But David’s not going to talk much about Coke actually (for that, see the article in Fast Company’s Master of Design issue with his face on it that’s plastered all over the conference). He wants to use this time to tell us that in the U.S. he doesn’t see much driving innovation in the U.S. He was upset that at the National Design Awards luncheon at the White House, more people were focused on Michelle Obama’s yellow dress than the reason designers were there. Channeling Bruce Mau, he challenges us to look ahead 20 years: 7.5 people call the planet home, 1.1 billion more people added to the middle class, 1/3 of the world’s population are teens. Maybe we all need a new approach, because design in the U.S. today will not be able to scale to support that kind of change. So first, he calls for a move from Art + Design to Design + Innovation. And instead of creating ideas, create value. And a move from national blogs to national policy. From products or anything that’s physical to a morecollective goal. A focus on “we.” We are the change we’ve been waiting for, he says. And David Butler has a sip of his Diet Coke and smiles.

David Butler, Global Director of Design, Coca-Cola

During the Q&A, Kurt tried to get David to chime in on the controversial and slightly odd story of Pepsi’s recent rebranding. David declined to comment, only saying this: It’s hard to make things look simple, but it’s really hard to get things to be simple.”

Charles Harrison and Ethan Bodnar: Two Design Careers Converge

Charles Harrison was an industrial designer for Sears starting in the 1960s who designed things like the View-Master, the gas-molded polypropylene trash can, and hundreds of other appliances and powertools, from Kenmore fridges to a portable phonograph. “It’s not how I became a great designer,” he says. “It’s becoming, I’m still becoming.” He grew up in Louisiana in a segregated community and attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which just happened to be one of the only schools that offered degrees in industrial design at the time. He tried to get a job at Sears in the 1950s they would not hire him because he was black. But a few years later, they did offer him a job, and when he finally landed at Sears it was the largest manufacturer of products in the world. He traveled extensively, over saw the design of over 700 products. His book, A Life’s Design, is an amazing journey through his years in the profession, ending with being honored by both AIGA and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards for lifetime achievement awards.

Charles Harrison

Harrison designed the iconic Viewmaster

As comparison, we have Ethan Bodnar, a 19 year old. I’ll say that again. 19 years old. The Hartford Art School student thanks AIGA for giving him community and connecting him with other designers. The child of a graphic designer, he started his own layout work using Adobe Pagemaker and designing logos. In high school he discovered the online community of designers. He even put the word KERN on his backpack and happily explained to people what it meant. In his short career, he’s done signage for his high school, posters, an art installation, and the launch of the blog Synthesis. But it’s the personal projects that really drive him and because he loves them so much, HE HAS ALSO WRITTEN A BOOK. At 19. Repeat: He is 19 years old. It’s called Creative Grab Bag: Inspiring Challenges for Designers, Artists and Illustrators and it’s a collection of exercises that help launch those personal projects.

Ethan Bodnar’s first book, Creative Grab Bag

Check out our videos with Charles Harrison and Ethan Bodnar for more great stories from their careers.

Command X: The Complete Second Season

Easily the most popular new tradition at AIGA conferences is Command X, a graphic design reality show that takes place in real time during the course of the conference (with contestants working out in the open, 24 hours a day). Featuring Michael Bierut as your host (the “Heidi Klum”), Sean Adams as a contestant advisor (the “Tim Gunn”) and judges Bonnie “Randy” Siegler, Paul “Paula” Sahre, and Chip “Simon” Kidd, as well as a rotating guest judge. Seven contestants walked onto the stage on Thursday night, and only one was named the winner today. A recap, and then, the winner…

Monina Velarde, Alison Medland, and Ryan Fitzgibbon waiting for the judge’s verdic

Round 1: The first brief, which was given 24 hours before the start of the conference, instructed the designers to redesign the logo for Graceland.

Winner: Ryan Fitzgibbon chose to embrace the lights, the glitter, the Vegas, the showmanship, in this elegant and simple depiction of Elvis’ career.

Round 2: Redesign packaging for Cap’n Crunch cereal to make it more appealing to adults.

Winner: Alison Yard Medland wanted to remind adults of a good time in their lives, by connecting it to the pop culture of their youth. And acid trips.

Round 3: Make a statement about civil rights. The three remaining contestants were taken on a private tour on the nearby Civil Rights Museum.

Winner: All three contestants said it was one of the most challenging assignments they’ve ever had in their lives. Monina Velarde wins for her civilrightsandme.org campaign, a social networking site that allows people to upload images and statements that define equal rights for them, then spread those messages virally.

Congratulations to everyone and thank you so much for providing such fantastic entertainment. As Michael would say, you’re all winners.

Nick Law Says You Don’t Have to Hate Advertising

“I’m dry as a nun’s nasty,” Nick Law tells the shocked audience in his opening line. “I can say that because I’m from Australia.” Huge laughs.

Nick Law is from Australia.

Growing up in Australia, Nick learned to hate advertising. He headed to the UK to work at Pentagram, and learned to hate advertising even more. Then he went to work at an advertising agency (DMB&B) and learned to hate graphic designers. And now he works at R/GA, where he’s learned that advertising and design can not only play nice, they can create rich and meaningful experiences that could never have been achieved without the other.

Because its origins are as a production company, R/GA is very good at making things, says Nick. He shows a nice chart going from make to think on the y axis, and story to system on the x-axis. Before, the advertising process would be taking a story and bringing it to life in a method like moviemaking, the work on the internet is more like building massive systems. But the internet can now be home to that conceptual storytelling told within the format of a large, scalable, global system.

He uses Nike+ as a case study because they took a little piece of technology (a chip that can go on your shoe and track your running mileage) and built real life situations around the product (huge urban races with concerts at the end) and connected them through an online platform where users can train using the Nike Plus and track their mileage, find running clubs in their city, and upload their photos. They also produced trash-talking videos with celebs like Kanye West (trash talking? Kanye?) who challenged other celebs to step up their training. It worked: 800,000 people ran in 142 countries. It was a beautiful collaboration between advertising and design; between storytelling and systems. See the whole case study on the R/GA site.

Nick Law talks about RG/A’s That’s Not Cool Campaign

Here’s a project—and a problem—that was probably news to many in the audience. R/GA worked with the Ad Council on the issue of “digital abuse,” where the proliferation of messaging technology and devices among teenagers can lead to teens verbally abusing and sometimes cyberstalking each other (how about this phrase:  “textual assault”). Thatsnotcool.com was launched so teens could start to understand what kind of behavior was appropriate. But they did it in an irreverent way, which used edgy sock puppets, notebook doodle-like ads, and these pretty hilarious commercials featuring a person in a cell phone costume. Again, check out the whole beautiful case study, explained with a perfect blend of storytelling and systems, on R/GA’s site.

Nick Law interviewed by Kurt Andersen

Memphis Nights

We can’t sit in affinity sessions all day, designers need to dance, dammit! And before dancing, we need to fuel ourselves with charred meats. A few shots from last night’s debauchery…

Chip Kidd’s Command X judging has made him so unpopular, he’s forced to dine alone, his tears dripping silently into his glass of fine chardonnay.

The “Dance Observer” party at the not-so-New Daisy Theatre.

Complimentary cocktails and appetizers at the Design Observer party.

In case you’re wondering, Michael Bierut did win this dance-off.

The wait for Stefan Sagmeister is currently five attractive female designers long.

Thanks to DJ Chroma (aka Kevin Smith) and Winterhouse’s Jade-Snow Carroll for making (and thinking) such a great party.

Be sure to tag your Flickr photos makethink and we’ll include them in our next round up; these photos all taken by Make/Think With Gelatobaby’s Official After Hours Photographer, Scott Stowell

Stefan Bucher’s Inner Monsters

We’ve had a lot of nice This is My Life montages, but Stefan Bucher‘s is pretty much the best (and you can see it online along with a bunch of other awesome videos!) From a young nerd to working at Wieden + Kennedy to becoming an adult who made a lot of professional mistakes, Stefan says there’s a common theme throughout all this madness:  “Why did I do all this? So I could stay up late and make the things I want to make.” But he’s regulated his lifestyle by staying independent, and living within a very small footprint. Of course this means he’ll never get a huge airline account, for example, but he also doesn’t have any debt.

Stefan Bucher explains a book cover design.

But you know how some people have inner demons? Well, Stefan’s could be called something more like monsters. Dueling monsters. He finds himself constantly fighting the eternal battle between his subconscious and his conscious; his sunny side and his dark side (is that also his German side vs. his American side?). Some glimpses of his double personalities…

When re-envisioning a new Super Bowl logo for a New York Times feature, he eschewed flashy, even sporty: “I wanted to make the nerdiest Super Bowl logo in existence.” He not only designed, but concepted, wrote the copy for, and assembled some amazing parody products for the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, a tutoring center in Los Angeles. These back-to-the-future convenience store products include Mammoth Chunks and the Time-Freezy Hyper Slush machine (an old Slurpee machine) which is tagged with the brilliant hand-written sign: “Out of order, come back yesterday.” And Stefan’s own brand of humor is extremely apparent in his blog alter-ego, The Neologist, a special website where Stefan himself will create an impressive compound word that answers your word needs.

Stefan Bucher and His 100 Monsters

Finally, Stefan’s Daily Monsters, his ongoing project that began as a challenge to draw 100 monsters in 100 days and eventually led to a book. Stefan drew a monster just for us! And he’s interacting with it onstage (is this like his dark side and his bright side having a conversation?). But something truly amazing came out of the monsters project; the new version of The Electric Company signed him on to turn the monsters into letters by coloring in the negative space. Yes, typography and monsters can work together to teach children how to read. We’re learning through fear.

Stefan Bucher’s Superbowl “Logo”

But the two Stefans got to cooperate for his latest project, The Graphic Eye, a book of designers’ photographs he curated and designed. Even though it’s a beautiful book full of sumptuous photographs, he was able to arrange the images into curious narratives and juxtapositions, which tell some pretty subversive stories. It’s the one time he’s truly felt like he could be true to: “It’s a subconscious and conscious came together for a family picnic.”

Elizabeth Coleman Schools Us

Stately, elegant, eloquent Elizabeth Coleman, the president of Bennington College, is a designer of sorts. She redesigned the college 20 years ago into a radically different curriculum that focused on a more broad definition of a liberal arts education. This is an especially big issue for design, which usually has such a focus on technical skills and specialization. Her argument is that design can be a central part of this new kind of education (the other part being critical writing and rhetoric). In fact, she says, you can see evidence of design thinking in philosophers and thinkers as far back as Plato. “Lest you think that Tim Brown is the first to appreciate the value of prototyping,” she says. “If you don’t get the design right, you’re not going to get much else.”

Elizabeth Coleman of Bennington College

Education in general is a mess (no surprise there). But our schools are going in such a direction that we’re too focused on specialization and skill acquisition. This means that instead of learning more and more about more, we’re learning less of less and less. The risks to society are massive: oversimplifications of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, only technical mastery and neutrality…which all can put people at risk of getting educated by the media, or as she calls it “the ‘other’ educational institution.” She encourages a broader curriculum that focuses not on teaching right and wrong, but engagement. More specifically, civic engagement, and environmentalism, health, ethics, equity and governance. “The point is not to treat these as topics of study but a course of action.” Sounds great, but where do we enroll?

Kurt Andersen interviews Elizabeth Coleman

Marissa Mayer and the Design of Google, Explained

Google’s Marissa Mayer has been the “keeper of the homepage” since its inception in 1998. And she’s going to tell us how a focus on the user, paired with a focus on simplicity, has made them, well, a verb.

Marissa Mayer explaining the first Google homepage

The site has been celebrated for its elegance and criticized for its sparseness. Google’s original homepage was actually designed by founder Sergey Brin, who was less than willing to do a fancy design (“I don’t do HTML,” he told her). In user testing, at first people didn’t know to type things in the box because they were waiting for “the rest” of the page to load.

Marissa Mayer talks about design at Google

At Google, designers’ intuition doesn’t rule. They let the data decide. For example, Google discovered they weren’t using the same blue on the search and the GMail pages. So they entered into testing to check a range of 41 shades of blue between them (this is the famous “shades of blue story” that designer Doug Bowman cited in his departure from Google). They proved that the more green you add, the lower your click-through rate and the higher your abandonment rate. Adding an image to Google Checkout slowed user response rate by 2%. “It’s interesting to see how you can change the way that people respond to the web in ways that are not intuitive,” she says. (It’s kind of the complete opposite of Roger Martin’s talk.) Recently, they expanded the search box a teeny-tiny bit, and immediately saw more effective search results.

Kurt Anderson interviews Marissa Mayer

Little known fact: Their Google language preferences were actually volunteer efforts by people from different countries who translated the terms for free. Littler known fact: There is a Swedish Chef option in the language preferences. Pick this one: “Bork Bork Bork!” But look at this, Marissa’s only been gone from Google for a day, and look what they did already to her precious design!

Come See Your Friendly Make/Think With Gelatobaby Team!

I have three words for you: Mashed Potato Bar. And I have three more: Garlic, Herbed and Sweet. Last night, attendees from Make/Think filtered out of Command X’s first cut (more on that later) and into a swanktastic reception on the Design Fair floor, where they clinked large glasses and filled small plates with creative heavy apps, like the mashed potatoes served in dessert bowls. They were like sundaes. With bacon bits.

Alexander Isley swings by the booth

But all dream meals aside, we were also thrilled to toast the grand opening of the Make/Think With Gelatobaby HQ, right here on the Design Fair floor! So many friends, old and new, stopped by. Abbott Miller came over to give us the lowdown on his New York Times piece on typographic shopping. The dashing Sean Adams—new to the blogosphere—swung by with some snacks and flashed us that 100-watt smile. Alex Isley swung through; Pentagram publicist Kurt Koepfle said hi. We met photographer Jill Greenberg, who is a hilariously funny bombshell blonde (pssst, she’s looking for a web designer; ping her on Twitter). Print editor Emily Gordon, Design Observer editor Julie Lasky, Fast Company editrix Linda Tischler and Chappell Ellison, Winterhouse Awards for Design Criticism winner, all took advantage of our exclusive design writer concierge services (writers/bloggers, come see us, we’ll give you the special treatment!). Louise Sandhaus came by, looking lovely, as did Print editor and illustrator Michael Dooley, Art Center’s Petrula Vrontikis and Steve Frykholm from Herman Miller (his beard cascading over a fantastic checkered shirt). We saw the New York ladies contingency of Carin Goldberg, Bonnie Siegler, Jane Mount and Liz Danzico this afternoon.

Louise Sandhaus mingling at happy hour

Come see your friendly Make/Think with Gelatobaby team at tonight’s happy hour! We’re the ones who look like a local news team, but in a trade show booth: Alissa Walker, Randy Hunt, Ryan Feerer and Wheat Würtzburger LIVE at 6:30pm. You’ll also like our neighbors, Blurb, and of course the Felt & Wire shop by Mohawk Fine Paper, across the way. Or if you see us elsewhere at the conference, be sure to say hi!

Roger Martin Says Designers Can Predict the Future

Rotman School of Management dean and author of several fantastic books Roger Martin wants to tell us why design thinking is the next competitive advantage. He breaks down design thinking this way: Problems begin as a Mystery, and “mysteries are enormously expensive for the world.” People then try to break them down into Heuristics, a way of understanding something. Eventually, problem solvers can convert that into an Algorithm: an exact formula for figuring out what we want.

Roger Martin on the competitive advantage of design.

He gives the example of McDonald’s as a solution to feeding casually-dressed, beach-bound Southern Californians, which became a franchise, repeatable again and again all over the world. Any organization who can take a mystery, and convert it into an algorithm efficiently, has a competitive advantage, he says, and they can make money to invest in solving the next problem. Obviously the next algorithm to conquer for the restaurant industry was to create food that didn’t kill us. “That’s why we have Subway,” he quips.

Analytical thinkers prove their decisions through induction and deduction; intuitive thinkers make their decisions based on gut reactions. Design thinkers have a perfect 50/50 balance of the two. The result is a great combination of both Reliability & Validity, what Roger calls a productive balance. The design thinker finds out ways to communicate to both the analytical thinkers and the intuitive thinkers at a corporation to help them bridge the gap between everything that came before (what can be proven) and what is yet to come (what we must imagine). So here’s the thing. Since designers are so good at cultivating their intuitive skills, that they can envision what hasn’t yet happened. Yes, designers can predict the future. Tell that to your boss.

Daniel Eatock Talks in Circles

A new word to describe the seamless connection where the beginning meets the end in a circular line.
A sentence, as a subtitle, to a word that does not exist.

This is the name of designer Daniel Eatock’s presentation. And he doesn’t use Keynote or anything, he has a PDF and he drags it along from image to image. And there’s no other way to cover it really, than to give you a play by play, sometimes telling you what he showed, and sometimes simply passing along some instructions from Daniel himself.

Daniel Eatock talking in circles

Daniel Eatock is obsessed with circles.
He puts his camera into the audience and asks members to take photos of each other, as they pass the camera along.
Google Giotto and circle.
He’s obsessed with drawing circles
Google Lego spheres. Lego Master Builders must be able to create a sphere shape using only the cube-like shapes.
Put a bunch of chairs in a circle, and have everyone lean back until all the chairs are supported by the person behind them. A perfectly balanced circle.
A necklace made from interlocking necklace clasps.
Take a photo of your camera strap.
He shows a pair of scissors strapped to its packaging with zip ties: “This is a pair of scissors that requires a pair of scissors to use them.”
He took a cassette tape where he removed all the tape except for what fit perfectly in a single layer: A real tape loop. It’s 4 seconds long and he uses them
A Tube ticket, rolled into the shape of a tube.
An image of a card with a card on it: “I don’t have to say anything about that one.”
Wrapping paper made by Daniel with a pattern of price tags.
A jigsaw puzzle depicting unassembled puzzle parts.
Watercolor paintings of bottled water where bottled water is used to mix the paint.
A photograph of a number of food items that all expired on the same day. Then a photo of them the day after they expired. “One second past midnight, poof.”
Google Steven Wright. Google Zeno’s paradox.
He rigged a camera to a lightswitch and tried to capture the moment the light went off.
He took one balloon filled with breath and one with helium and tied them together, one rested on the floor, one touched the ceiling. Another series.
He often photographs the sun, eclipsed by an object.
A photo of the light on a gallery wall, hanging on a gallery wall.
A bookshelf built with a curve so books are aligned by their top edge. It looks like it sags in the middle.
A vandalized tree is given a new perspective.
More chair art: Leaning back to balance. “A lot of projects I do deal with that balance.”
Balancing markers upright on the table, then balancing paper on top to make prints.
A series of shelves with only one bracket, and items on the shelf must be perfectly balanced upon them. They fell down in the gallery.
A photo of him taken by the last person at the last presentation.
And the circle is complete.

With one addition: He didn’t show it, but I simply must share my favorite Daniel Eatock project: The Alarm Dance.

Carin Goldberg: Inspiration vs. Motivation

Carin Goldberg presenting her life’s work

And now it’s the lovely Carin Goldberg, our newest AIGA Medalist, taking the stage. And she is going to talk about a different make/think dichotomy. Inspiration, namely, design ephemera: “our potato chips, our junk food” vs. motivation: “sustenance, a breakfast for champions” (usually money). Designers are constantly battling with the two concepts, and she describes her own trajectory in the industry as a timeline that began with the need to be Cool (“I wanted to be cool but my hair wouldn’t cooperate”), Bravura/Art (book covers), Change (Time Inc custom publishing), Proviso (a type poster), Despair, Flattery (magazines and newspapers actually starting to assign great editorial illustration), Love, Fear/Disco. She then plays a film with a tremendously dramatic lead up that features all her work, each piece pulsing onto the screen for just a second each (you can create your own simulation at her website). Why so short? It’s so she could avoid the inevitable fear that comes along with seeing any piece of her work up there for more than a nanosecond. Of course it’s set to disco. And she’s dancing!

Stefan Sagmeister Makes Us Think

The crowd welcomes Stefan Sagmeister

And here’s our far-flung designer, Mr. Stefan Sagmeister! Every seven years, he takes a year off: The Seven Year Itch. As humans, we spend the first 25 years learning, next 40 working, and the final 15 retiring, and then we die. So take five of the years you use retiring and put them into the working phase (big cheers for that).The first time he took his year off and stayed in New York, but this time he wanted a change of scenery. He picked Bali for its beauty and because he didn’t know Asia as well as other places like Europe. But there is actually some science to this madness of time off, he says. The restaurant El Bulli, open only 7 months a year, and widely regarded as the best and most successful on the planet. Companies at 3M give out 15% of their time to do personal projects—Post-Its and Scotch Tape came from this time off—and Google gives their employees 20%. (Stefan, in comparison, only takes 12.5% of his time off. The hardest thing about it,” he says, “is putting it on the books.” Ain’t that the truth.

Sagmeister and Sagmeister

Some incredible work that came out of his last sabbatical: A beautiful identity for Casa de Musica in Portugal, the book Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far, as well as the zillions of paid projects that had their origins in that time away. This time in Bali, he made beautiful typographic films which were created by animals (you can see these at TED.com). And apparently we are also the animals in his next experiment, as he gets all 1200 designers to rise and sing along to the tune of “Ode to Joy”: “All my clients drive me crazy/Never show no guts at all” and then later…“Stefan always shows the same stuff/See it all on TED.com” (which is not true if you watch the TED video, he wrote this “high end karaoke” experiment just for us!). It’s a pretty great moment, and we sound good! During the Q&A with Kurt, we learn a very little known fact: He actually said no to designing the Obama campaign because he was already planning his Bali sabbatical.

Stefan breaking down time to pursue personal interests.

Makers Meet Thinkers

First of all, I must give a thank you to our incredible Paul Sahre, Dan Covert and Andre Andreev, Kate Bingaman-Burt, Bobby Martin and Emily Pilloton for opening the conference with an amazing Student Symposium this afternoon. You were inspiring and energetic, sobering and silly and so, so generous with your time and we were all honored by your presence.

Paul Sahre and the “Are You A Graphic Designer” test

And now we’re in the opening session! AIGA executive director Ric Grefé points out how Make/Think is more relevant than ever in these trying times, as we have to keep making, and thinking, to prove the value of design. He introduces our fearless moderator Kurt Andersen. “I like design because I’m a word person,” says the astute cultural commentator. Because unlike art, “design comes directly out of conversation,” says Kurt. “And it can sustain and support conversation.” Kurt compares the Make/Think theme to the Large Hadron Collider , where 350 physicists and scientists live together underground and their practices are divided into theorists and the experimenters. One group is the thinkers and one is the makers. But they have to work together in order to produce results. Makers & Thinkers unite!

Richard Grefe kicks off the conference

As chairman of Stax Records and president of Motown Records, Al Bell tells us that Memphis has creativity with courage, a place where art has literally driven the economy of the city. Sure we know this is the home of soul, and the birthplace of rock’n'roll, but did you know that it’s also the fertile grounds of so many types of music, an insane list that ranges from Muddy Waters, to Otis Redding, to Justin Timberlake, to Three 6 Mafia and the fact that the city has been responsible for a whopping 240 hits on the all-time top 500 Billboard chart. And, of course this gem, he notes: “Who’s Making Love to Your Old Lady While You’re Out Making Love.”

Al Bell tells about the relationship between creativity and Memphis

Even while recording moved to LA and NY, Memphis has remained home to music innovation, creativity and ingenuity. And he acknowledges the unique relationship that music and graphic design have together, in that design has always been the engine pushing albums to cultural “the power to persuade: “You have creativity with courage.” At Stax , he says, the creation of albums was high art. “They make you think, with anticipation of what you will get. Make. Think.” And no, the veteran of the music industry does not think today’s music is cutting it: “Sorry, CD covers don’t give you the glory that our album covers did.” Agreed, especially when you view the genius that he puts up on screen: The Complete and Unbelievable Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul. But, being a true innovator, the 69-year-old has decided to join Twitter: “If we follow each other and keep communicating, good things could happen.”

Walking In Memphis

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been to Memphis. And I trust AIGA and all for picking this city to host the conference but soul, rock’n'roll, BBQ, Elvis, marching ducks? Those just don’t seem like the kinds of things designers would be interested in. So I did what I do best. I took a walk to find out. And you know what? It turns out Memphis is the ideal place for designers…

Long ago the Egyptians sent their most skilled architects to settle here, along the banks of the Mississippi.

They also built beautiful, aesthetically-pleasing Victorian houses.

And a monorail! (Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!)

The city branded itself with beautiful neon signs that designers would like.

Because in Memphis, even parking can be fun—with good signage.

On this street, everyone was all excited about some guitar sign out in front of some studio but I was far more interested in this establishment.

Memphis really appreciates good logos—they even named the biggest building in town after one!

Yes, Memphis knows designers so well, they put a welcome banner right in front of the club that serves all-you-can-drink hurricanes.

And just a few minutes ago I ran into AIGA executive director Ric Grefé in the lobby of the Peabody. He pointed out how even the local paper was named with designers in mind—or at least some of them—The Commercial Appeal.

Make/Think with me, won’t you?

Hello design fans and friends! It’s that time of the every-two-years again where designers pack up their business cards and Moleskines, coordinate outfits based on how they look with a plastic name badge, and practice what they’re going to say to Stefan Sagmeister when they run into him in the drink line. Yes, it’s the AIGA conference Make/Think and this year we’re going to Memphis, home of BBQ and Beale Street, Stax and Sun, Elvis and FedEx.

This year is particularly exciting, and not just because of the headliners, although they’re pretty fantastic—David Butler, Jill Greenberg, Daniel Eatock, Marissa Mayer, Stefan Bucher, Carin Goldberg, Roger Martin, to name a few—and not just because of the hands-on workshops, affinity sessions and exhibitions, although they’ll be really good, too, and not just because of the parties—because, let’s face it, the Design Observer party is going to blow the neon off the New Daisy Theater—no, this year is going to be especially great because I’ll be live blogging and live videoing and live Tweeting and live whatever-elseing right there from the very conference of which we speak.

But I understand that many of you will also be doing much of the above (especially the live whatever-elseing) and so we’re hoping that we can gather all your coverage and all my coverage in one amazing place. First, so we can share this awesome experience with those who can’t be with us, but also, so we can have this vast compendium of everything we see and do and make and think, all in one location. And that location, my friends, is right here at makethink.withgelatobaby.com

Of course I couldn’t have done this alone. First of all, thanks to all our tireless friends at AIGA for coordinating such a great conference in the first place. Co-creator of this bright idea, and handling design and development is Randy J. Hunt and his team at Citizen Scholar. Snapping photos (so don’t forget to smile) is the unequivocal Wheat Wurtzburger. And thanks to our good friends at Mohawk, who are presenting this fine experiment. Come see us in their booth, where we’ll have a place for all you bloggers and Tweeters to power up and hang out, right there on the Design Fair floor (I hope it’s close to the Rock Band stage—yes! Rock Band!).

For those of you in town in time for the Student Symposium, I’ll be moderating a mean lineup (of very nice people) scheduled from 1-3:45pm, then the conference kicks off with Kurt Andersen taking the mainstage at 4pm. Meanwhile, you can still sign up for the Mojo Memphis tours and roundtables with design luminaries. I still have a few spots open at my breakfast roundtable, which will be the morning of October 10 from 7:45-8:45am. Since attending such a thing at such an hour will practically require medical assistance, I will have a special treat for whoever signs up. And remember, it’s never too early for gelato.

So we’ll all see you in Memphis, but’ til then, start your coverage! Follow me @gelatobaby or Make/Think at @AIGAConference and to ensure that your content shows up here, be sure to tag your Flickr posts makethink and your Twitter posts #makethink See you there!