Hello Everyone! 

You may have noticed I have not published on this blog for a while. I've not disappeared...other projects, platforms and hobbies have got in the way of regular updates. I am keeping this 'AnotherDesignBlog' archive online as a design resource and am currently working out my future plans for this blog. In the mean time, you can find my huge, ever-growing archive of design pins on Pinterest and a mix of personal projects and interests on Instagram - see you there...

This week I went to a Google Design Breakfast ‘DESIGNING FOR TRUST IN AN AI-FIRST WORLD’ - a thought proving session which the panel talked around best practices designing for inclusive, human-centred AI. Here are my key take-outs from the session:

LONG TERM TRUST RELATIONSHIPS 

• Tom Taylor, Co-Op: Customer and company/brand relationships can be ‘For the whole of your life - building trust to do things with you and for you’. That relationship is much longer than you’d expect, trust has to be earnt with such timescales, can be easily broken. 
• This is earned trust vs engendered 'trustiness' (which is the cheap way of getting trust) - companies putting symbols of trust all over your system but the underlying system/principles are unsafe.
• When a brand gets it wrong (e.g. Talk-talk data breach, Ryan air pilot holiday crisis) - if your brands fail is picked up by the media, the damage will have much more effect. Trust can be irreversible and can bring down the company. 

EASY INTERFACES, EASY LOSS OF CONTROL

• Sarah Gold, IF Design Studio: How much access to your data have you given away when are you are trading off of transparency over ease within an interface/experience.
• ’Making an interface easy doesn't make it easy to understand’ - Matt Jones from Google said we ‘wilfully push away complexity’ and that can mean we give away much more privacy than we realise.
• We almost need a ‘trust mark’ for tech, a symbol for safety. This is happening with the password strength green bar - a piece of interaction which gives you trust in the system, it’s the tip of public key structure trust (it used to be done with padlocks).
• Public messaging at point of need - tell people things they need to know when they need it.

TO BE HUMAN…

• In the future, how much is going to be auto written (future emails/comms etc)? How much of ‘ourselves’ are being compromised from a human level - does it matter that your receiving comms from AI bots vs. human? How will this effect how you relate to companies, people, information?

• Priya Prakash founder of D4SC, thinks there’s a lack of imagination with bot content and design. She’s sick of fast feedback - asking how can we make a lazy AI - an AI which would speak like us - adding urms and ahhs - which would make them more human. Question is, do we want them to be more human. How will we tell the difference. Maybe we should have a way of interacting and speaking with bots and a different way to speak with humans?

• Rachel Coldicutt, CEO of Doteveryone said AI is pointing towards a normalisation of behaviour - it teaches you the so called 'right' way of saying something, e.g. Ask Alexa for something with a stutter and Alexa doesn’t respond. It validates doing certain things over other things, and as a stutter sufferer she is concerned that anyone who is ‘different’ for any reason will be seen as irregular to the norms of the system. Who controls what is deemed as normal? The people who create the system may have unconsciously created it with their own preconceptions and bias. 

• Will language and manners be dictated by what you learn from system feedback - e.g. if you insist on hearing ‘please’ when asking a bot for something, does that improve manners in society and vice-versa with low manner systems?

Q. WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE AS DESIGNERS IN DESIGNING FOR TRUST?

• Showing a different way things can be, making and testing alternatives to a typical big business agenda
• Share research openly, learn from each other
• Be clear about the test data - who created it (was there any bias), who has access to it (data protection), how much of your design is being effected by it 
• Designers need to have a strong opinion at a policy/industry level - do we need Ethical specialists to keep standards on ethics?

BAFTA, Oscar and Cannes Lions-winning VFX house Framestore took a group of school children on a Field Trip to Mars, courtesy of a one-of-a-kind US school bus, Unreal Engine and a brilliantly conceived shared VR experience. This removes the headsets and makes for a truly immersive experience...and really exciting future projects that could be inspired from this.

Happiness is...discovering these wonderful mid-century Industrial Design Magazine Covers from Sandi Vincent's great Flickr Collection

Seasons Greetings from AnotherDesignBlog - get your phone and desktop looking Christmassy with these festive wallpapers.

Also available on Flickr: Desktop or iPhone

I just LOVE Peter Chadwick's new series of posters about Thamesmead, the London town of Clockwork Orange fame built in the 1960s and 70s. Posters for sale in a limited edition run. A2 designs are £30 + pp and A1 at £45 +pp, and both printed on matt 200gsm paper. Contact info@thisbrutalhouse.com. 

Source

I found this last year, then lost the link but thanks to Pinterest found them again - SPOLLO kitchen, a visual cookbook, the result of a crossover between design and cooking. 100 designers from were invited to participate in the idea by CTS grafica, in collaboration with Aiap (the Italian Association for Visual Communication Design) and Adci (Art Director Club), to illustrate their favourite recipes in a call to create the ultimate culinary poster. The results speak for themselves.

I had a couple of these on my bedroom wall in the 80's. I used to stare at them for ages pondering their boss-level airbrushing. I absolutely loved them, taking regular Saturday trips to Athena to paw over the collection.

Apparently the 'Kiss series' by Syd Brak was planned specifically to appeal to teen and pre-teen girls who 'aspire to maturity and sophistication.' Yep. Sound about right. Source: Wikipedia

Today, London saw many thousands of protesters unite for the ‘March for Europe’ rally in opposition to the UK Brexit vote. 

Marching from Park Lane to Parliament Square, a positive day of protest was accompanied by some top notch banners. From "Fromage not Farage", Rick Astley puns like "Never gonna give EU up" and straight to the point "Boris you arse" jibes, an array of inspiring and clever graphics and copy shouted loud and hard today. Here's a collection of the best ones. Enjoy.

Beautiful posters designed by Atlas for the Barcelona Design Museum and Design Hub

Source

“We construct our reality in our own way. We do that everyday on our Instagrams, blogs and other carefully curated outlets. Knowing that the world around us doesn’t look like this, we somehow want to believe that all those often extremely filtered and post-processed images in our IG stream are actually the real thing.” 

Polish graphic artist Pawel Nolbert

Source 

SOOOO many monsters

I love this. A unique and perfect tribute for David Bowie by Skratch Bastid.

The 2017 Forecast (Summary)

Four themes that will shape 2017: 

A New Singularity explores the creative, cultural and technological innovations that allow people to express themselves in new hyper-individualized ways.

Touch Enabled World delves into the world of simulated environments and how performance-enabled fabrics will allow people to use gestures as the physical world begins to incorporate a digital overlay.

Life Partnering highlights contextual and intelligent services that offer intimate, relevant and personal support during quotidian tasks evolving over the course of a lifespan.

Closed-Loop Community investigates how distributed tech will connect citizens no matter where they are to offer intelligent services to people in every corner of the world.

"The digital trends with the most staying power all have one thing in common: focus on the consumer. Today’s consumers are more powerful than ever, and they are telling us what they want: implicitly through behavior and data—and explicitly through direct communication. Emerging technologies and opportunities enable brands to place consumers at the center of their marketing strategies like never before." Source: Edelman website

Apps as we know them will disappear. Luxury will trickle down to the masses. VR will go mainstream....

Source here and condensed on Fast.Co

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Here's a little Pre-Christmas gift from AnotherDesignBlog...a choice of grey or red winter stag iPhone wallpapers. 

Now with permission from Radiohead, for the first time in years Prince's incredible cover of "Creep" at Coachella in 2008 is available to watch again. Simply amazing.

"The Design Studio method has become one of the most success methods in Agile and Lean UX. This rapid, iterative approach blends concept creation with critique. Design Studio is a great way to jumpstart your design process, create 300-400 design concepts in just a couple of hours, or get team buy-in and ownership." via Vimeo

Having recently participated in a hack day using this process, what struck me was how effective this is in getting dozens of ideas generated quickly - once you get over the 5 minute rule shock, you can actually get a lot down and democratise the design process as everyone is sketching, not just the one who is deemed 'good' at drawing.

The Guardian has recently released their brand guidelines through a series of posters around their buildings and a youtube video. These are to visualise the importance of their design language within their DNA. Stunning stuff. Found via It's Nice That

Did this for fun...

The Illusion of life by Cento Lodigiani, great illustration inspired by the 12 basic principles of animation developed by the 'old men' of Walt Disney Studios, amongst them Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, during the 1930s. Also see animated gifs here 

"Ward pulls from his ten years of experience to tackle lighter subjects such as design fetishists, Helvetica’s neutrality and urgent briefs, alongside discussions on more worthy topics such as the validity of design education, the supposed death of print, client relationships and pitch planning. In addition, the book features contributions from more than a dozen established practitioners such as Milton Glaser, Stefan Sagmeister, Christoph Niemann and David Carson."

Roos van Dijk
Born in Utrecht, 1989

"A fascination with modern architecture and the rush of modern life are themes that are strongly present in the work of Van Dijk. The aesthetics of the human-made environment is cast in paint, and forms and places from our daily life are moulded in a new way of seeing. Through the action of capturing large architectural structures and their beauty first in photographs, Van Dijk frames her source in a way that is surprising. As a following step, the artist translates the photographs into paintings where the departing point is left aside and the layered, refined painting takes over. What moves this process is the artist's will to give shape to her personal encounters with such overwhelming spaces and hidden places, in a way that becomes an accessible and open experience for the viewers as well." 

Suzie Hermán, 2012

Mesmerising - courtesy of http://giphy.com 

Graphic illustration perfection from Zenji Zunabashi of the Tokyo illustrators Society