Buying design and innovation in Government

We need your ideas

You’re probably an innovator, a creative, a problem solver – someone who makes a living making things better for your clients. Well, UK Government wants your views on how design & innovation can be bought and put to better use in the public realm. If you provide these services to public sector clients you will have a view on how the procurement process could be improved. So let’s have it.

Influence the decision makers

The Design Business Association and the Associated Parliamentary Group on Design and Innovation (phew!) are meeting at Portcullis House in Westminster next Wednesday. This session will be used to develop a brief for a series of inquiries throughout the summer where a panel of parliamentarians and design industry representatives will question various witnesses on their perception and understanding of government procurement of design. The results will then be published as a report, launched in Parliament.

There isn’t room for everyone that wanted to attend to do so. However, you can contribute your ideas and views by commenting below. I will make sure the comments are fed into the discussion next week.

Let’s use appropriate technology

It is evident that at a time when society, locally and globally, is facing such challenging issues (economic, environmental and social), the harnessing of good design and innovative thinking has never been more important. This is a simple use of new tools to make a vaild point to the biggest client in the business. A collective voice will be much louder than those of us in the room. Please take part and pass this on to as many people as you can.

More planting? More planning first!

I like this poster. It’s visually appealing, nicely executed and the internal logic hangs together well enough. But look at the call to action.

Why? Because you can’t text from an underground platform 150 feet down.

Put a bill like this in a dwell spot, yes. But make sure it’s at least in a place where the call to action can be, er, actioned. If I were the client I’d be banging heads now.

This is the kind of sloppy planning that irritates so many of us user centred thinkers and wastes untold mountains of client cash. A bit of joined up thinking between creative and media, and a moment’s thought for the end user, would have saved and raised more money at the same time.

It doesn’t grow on trees you know.

Some of my best friends are dyslexic

The Economist has published a special report on entrepreneurship that looks at the psychological traits most often displayed by venturers and compared their mindset with that of managers. The piece draws on research from Harvard, Cambridge and the Cass and, unsurprisingly, concludes that the people who start things tend to be more comfortable with risk than the people who run things.

But the most interesting data is that 20% of the British entrepreneurs and 35% of the American entrepreneurs are dyslexic. Compare this with a measure of only 1% of Corporate Managers who are ’similarly afflicted’. The phrase that springs to mind is ‘Er, hello?!’

Is it just me or does this suggest we are investing in the wrong people? Do we really need more managers educated at Harvard, Cass and Cambridge? Or should we be recognising that maybe dyslexia is a talent possessed by people with exceptional potential for creativity, innovation, and the gumption to get things started?

Both of my school age kids, my wife and countless friends and business associates are dyslexic. Architects, designers, environmental consultants, and yes, many entrepreneurs among them, the traits discussed in The Economist certainly ring true. Also evident though in all the dyslexics I know is a constant inventiveness, a unique way of solving problems and sometimes a clarity of thinking that is disarming and insightful.

In the right environment dyslexia is no more of an ‘affliction’ than being really good at art or music or sport. Problems arise when we try to process people that think and do things differently, through the sausage factory of school, and then on to the even bigger sausage factory of lots of types of work.

It is a fact that many dyslexics become expert delegators and develop ingenious strategies to avoid being thought of as dim. They do this though, just to get by and ‘getting by’ means ‘conforming to expectations’. This is a waste of time and effort. It makes as much sense as forcing entrepreneurs to retrain as corporate managers. Much better surely to use their time, tenacity and natural inventiveness to play to their strengths?

Education in school and at work are at the heart of the solution. Finding schools in the UK that are truly child centred is almost impossible – and expensive. If we don’t adapt education and the way we organise work to allow for different types of learners, we will keep producing more managers and hail them as indicators of success. In doing so we will miss the pool of untapped potential of differently abled people and stifle their ability to get things started. At times like these this is surely another grave error.

PR your way out of this one Sony

Thanks to Chris Reed for drawing my attention to this. It’s genius, and no small amount of headache for Sony’s PR people. Over 1m views on YouTube alone. Ans that’s not counting bods like me and everyone else sharing it. What would you do?

If you object strong language, even when it’s funny as f*$^k, step away.

Advertising needs a kick up the jacksey

There are 14 bill poster sites on the northbound National Rail platform at Old St station. Today, just 24 hours after banking bosses were hauled over the coals in a Select Commitee mauling, and made to apologise for the financial meltdown, 8 of the 14 are advertising financial services.

The revisionist tendencies are alarming. No, actually, they’re appalling. These ads read as if everything’s rosy, business as usual, like the last 12 months simply didn’t happen.

So who’s calling the shots here? The whizz in marketing with a short memory and an inability to change direction? Or, as is more likely, the ad agency team who, knowing their days are numbered, advise the client to spend their way through the pain until they create a new version of reality?

I think these ads show contempt for everyone that’s lost their job, pension or home. And their existence shows the ad industry for what it really is. Unprincipled, unscrupulous and deceitful. Surely the best advice they could give now would be for clients to acknoweldge the mood and changing circumstances of ordinary people. Re-think the strategy and promise to put a new planner on the account. One that understands what it feels like to have to re-think all your priorities.

There are some very smart people in adland. A bit of real world empathy and common sense would go long way just now, and maybe even prevent them joining the growing jobless too.

Fast Food

So there’s a squeeze on, that much is undeniable – and unfortunate. But in the digital media space there is plenty of work out there. Especially if you’re fast as a takeaway and cheap as chips.

One recent conversation with a potential client revealed that what they really wanted was a site like one we had already done for someone else. Just like that one in fact. The site they referred to took 9 months – research, strategy, user requirements, UCD, IA, iterative design and development, content strategy, content writing, testing, training etc and cost way north of £100k.

The person we spoke wanted that. Thing is, they had 4 weeks to the go live and ‘nothing like £30k’ to spend.

There’s an arms race on twitter

The brilliance of twitter is being made bland with endless RT tweets and links to ‘look at this’ content that only a machine or the jobless could keep up with. It’s getting clogged up.

I’ve recently been followed by a lot of folks from across the pond. Checking out who they are, and following the most interesting, I’ve noticed they seem particularly prone to OT over-tweeting. 12-16 tweets in a row is not unusual. And some of these are highly regarded figures.

Calm down, consider more, make the tweets interesting. Too many signposts make any environment confusing and hard to navigate.

Is publishing getting it?

For a number of years our business provided design services to one of the world’s most coveted literary awards.
In our last meeting, shortly before our contract was terminated, I mentioned the potential of blogging from the award ceremony. On Twitter to be precise. It wasn’t thought an appropriate channel for the brand.
I wonder if the news that Twitter has grown 974% now makes it more so?

It’s gonna be a beautiful day

Some of us remember 1997, the morning after Tony Blair was swept into Downing Street on a landslide. After nearly 2 decades of disenfranchised opposition the feeling was sweet but oddly hollow. This should have been our time. A new era for a new generation. Boy we made a mess of that.
But today really is a new era. President Obama’s inauguration signals a step change. It has to.
Internet people have been operating in a parallel dimension for sometime now. A collaborative, social, networked, bottom-up ecology where value is measured by contribution. This is the future. Our era. It starts today.

Price

Always a tricky subject. It’s a totally subjective, or at least relative, matter. The shenanegans we go through to reach a fair price – it’s often painful, stressful and completely counter productive.

We have a few clients that never question our estimates or invoices. And you know what? They probably get the best value. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s just implicit in the trust that exists between us.

In my late teens I met a girl whose dad, as it turned out,  had a profund influence on my outlook. Treating me a bit like the son he never had he opened my eyes to literature & classical music, and gave me insight into a life in the mind rather than on the hands. He maintained that price was a wasteful and destructive force in most people’s lives and felt we should reorganise and invert the dynamic. If we ask for less we would actually get more.

Had he lived another 15 years he would have seen this emerge as a viable way of doing things online.