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Long Overdue Post on Computational Creativity

Last Thursday I was speaking at Imperial College's Tanaka Business School.

We were debating this, "Computers have become indispensable tools to designers of all kinds and have transformed the practice of design. With advances in computing power and artificial intelligence theory, we can begin to envisage computers taking on some of the creative act of design. What potential advantages or drawbacks would this have for designers? Should we fear that creative software is a threat to the design craft or industry?"

The lecture room (is that what they're called?) was fantastic. Tanaka is brand new and designed by Foster (click on project and then Imperial College to see more pics).

(Picture taken from Foster & Partners with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)

From the reception it looks like a huge slinky or a baked bean tin with the label taken off. This houses a lecture room for each floor. Inside it's all cool blacks and greys. What really impressed me is that the lecture room had WiFi. And each chair has a broadband point and a power point. At the front there was a PC all hooked up and ready to go with the sound all wired up to the speaker system. In short everything a speaker could want.

There were three speakers before me, Geraint who's Professor of Computational Creativity at Goldsmiths, Simon who's written his PhD about this stuff and an architect whose name I can't remember (which is bad, sorry about that). They were all pro computational creativity, I was the anti view. I won't go through their presentations mainly because I'll forget something and secondly because I won't do them justice.

Simon and Geraint both had examples of where computers had been creative. Geraint had some music that had been generated by computer, Simon showed us work from this exhibition and showed some phrases a computer had generated too.

So far so good.

The architect showed model (after model, after model) of structures the computer had helped construct. Or something, I didn't really get his presentation to be honest.

And then it was me.

I had 10 minutes and I had to say why I thought computers couldn't be creative.

I started the same way Russell started his presentation here. The same black slide, the same music (it's OK, I asked him first).

I started like that for two reasons. Firstly, because it's a bloody good way to start a presentation and secondly because I believe a computer couldn't generate a piece of music that could generate the feeling of expectation, of excitement that that piece of music gives. That was my statement of intent, if you like. The audience seemed to like it.

Then I moved on to some fairly obvious stuff, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare etc

and then this:

(Heads nodding in the audience) you can guess what people are thinking, "but that's a computer generated film".

Yes, a computer can help, but that's all it can do. It can't actually create. The computer is not Walt Disney.

It couldn't come up with a story like this.

 

Why? I think the main reason is that creativity isn't linear. As Michael points out here, creativity does not happen like this:

Computers do think in a linear fashion (we can argue what linear means another time) and therefore they can only produce versions of things. You'll never get that spark of genius.

And talking of geniuses. These people are all considered creative geniuses.

Round pegs in square holes. What concerns me is that if we tell a computer to think like Einstein we'll get this:

 

Which isn't creative at all. What was creative will now be the norm and something new will have to emerge. With computers we would never have gotten from Glenn Miller to The Beatles. If you see what I mean.

In the week Alan Fletcher passed away it seemed appropriate to hold this up as a great example of creativity.

Then I showed this

and asked who could see the arrow. Most of them couldn't. When I pointed it out, someone actually gasped (I was pleased with that). You see, whilst we could probably get to the stage where a computer could produce a logo, there is no way it could create the added value you get when you see that arrow.

And I finished with this.

Next up there was a panel session and a lot of the questions were for me. We kind of agreed that a computer may be able to produce something that we could apply the word creative to, it's just that it wouldn't be very good. It's a question of scale.

Considering I had two days to put that presentation together I was quite happy with it. I wasn't as familiar with the slides as I would have liked, but I think I did OK. The Chair called my argument 'powerful' so it can't have been that bad.

Afterwards I bumped into Nico, who is very interested in the Design is the New Management Consultancy stuff. So we had a good chat about that.

So, what do you think of computational creativity? Did what I said make sense?

Was anyone in the audience?

"Design represents a powerful alternative to the dominant management approaches of the last few decades and is an important perspective for leadership to embrace."

Another interesting tale over on Bruce's blog.

"Many firms that have experienced dramatic gains in shareholder value over the last few years (e.g., Google, Apple, Motorola) register innovation as a central driver of their progress. One can argue that innovation, and a culture that inspires and supports innovation, is the only sustainable competitive advantage. A frequent manifestation of recent innovation has been breakthrough design. Design represents a powerful alternative to the dominant management approaches of the last few decades and is an important perspective for leadership to embrace."

Rainy Reading

Some good things to read on a rainy Saturday morning.

1. An interview with David Hillman in the Press Gazette

David Hillman designed The Guardian before the recent redesign and art directed the original Nova magazine. He has some great opinions about modern news design.

About The Times redesign, "a total and utter fucking disaster" about the Observer "It looks like the fucking Beano with pictures. Now it's just colour and design and type 15 feet high for no apparent reason." And my personal favourite, "at WHSmith's now, it's just a haze of tit and bum and bright colours". How very true.

2. An article in Fast Company about the awkward romance between business and design.

"Design, in short, is becoming an ever more important engine of corporate profit: It's no longer enough simply to outperform the competition; to thrive in a world of ceaseless and rapid change, business people have to outimagine the competition as well. They must begin to think (to become) more like designers."

Why isn't there a British Fast Company?

3. A special report in Business Week on Design Schools.

This ticks lots of boxes. Design is the New Management Consultancy and China, being two of them.

"Desperate to innovate, companies are turning to design schools for nimble, creative thinkers."

4. Graham's brilliant post

Last but by no means least, having said there are not enough women in director/equity roles I recommend you read Graham's brilliant post about & Daughter companies.

Or you could Switch Off Your Internet And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead.

"design can be a valid business model"

"1,273% rise in Apple shares over the past 10 years"

Great article in IN about design, Apple and Jonathan Ive.

Me, Claire, Bruce, Michael and some Bostonians

My stuff about Design Being The New Management Consultancy has been picked up by Business Week, the Boston Globe and Design Observer. Not bad for a Monday.

So that makes it Me, Claire, Bruce, Michael and some Bostonians. Kind of. Anyone else care to join us?

Bruce Nussbaum thinks Design is the New Management Consultancy

"Companies are moving design upstream--using design to shape the corporate strategic vision and brand vision. Many CEOs are demanding that design have a straight connection to their office."

Read the full article here.

And you thought it was just me and Claire Beale didn't you?

"design agencies often have the ear of the client CEO"

I was given a free Independent this morning and I was delighted to see this when i opened it.

Claire is not referring to my post but commenting on the BBH/Sony thing. I don't really have any strong feeling on that, so we'll skip neatly over it.

Let's have a look at some of the things Claire says in her article.

"the management consultant is rapidly being replaced by the design consultant as the industry bête noire." I'm not 100% sure on this, but I do think design consultancies are gaining more respect and kudos. Especially the good ones. Obviously. In fact it's probably because there are so many bad ones that the good ones are starting to rise up.

"There are plenty of good design agencies that inevitably have a view on how a brand could communicate with its customers." Yes. But there are probably plenty of market research agencies, printers and photographers who have a view too.

"there are plenty of examples of design agencies all but writing the advertising scripts themselves." Really? Like who?

"The fact that design agencies often have the ear of the client CEO while ad agencies have generally been frustrated in their attempts to get into the boardroom" OK now I'm getting interested. I would probably think the opposite, but now that she mentions it, I bet the CEO's at companies like Nokia, Phillips, Sony (haha) and Apple listen to designers more than they listen to ad agencies. Interesting.

So, nothing major going on here, but perhaps another step towards world wide acceptance of my Design is the New Management Consultancy theory.

Claire Beale says design might be the new management consultancy

In her Indy column today Claire Beale says, "the management consultant is rapidly being replaced by the design consultant as the industry bête noire."

I'll write more later, but do you think I'm a little bit less mad now?

What would you recommend us students to learn? Design.

"Question 4 What would you recommend us students to learn?
4a. Design
4b. Tech
4c. Management

If you had to choose one thing what would that be?
That really depends on what you want to do - increasingly online design and tech will be interlinked.

I think design is in some ways going to be a higher order skill set - something that can't be outsourced - but design will be difficult to untangle from tech."

Some interesting ideas about the web and design from Faris. Kind of explains how (true) design is becoming more important and touches on my theory about Design being the New Management Consultancy. Sort of.

Design Is The New Management Consultancy

This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I've been discussing it with a few people including Russell, who deserves equal credit for spotting this trend and for helping me formulate this post.

I think I first mentioned Design Is The New Management Consultancy in my post about The Future Of Graphic Design. It seemed to strike a chord with most of you and was picked up by Michael Bierut on Design Observer.

(By the way Design Observer has got a lot, lot better since that redesign).

I keep reading things that elude to this theory, but nothing that's explicitly concentrated on it. So here goes. Deep breath.

Why is Design Is The New Management Consultancy?

Because true design thinking means that design is a verb and not a noun. It's a better way of thinking and not a production process that's applied at the end of a project.

Design is so much more valuable when it's brought in at the start of a project or the start of a problem. As Clive Grinyer (director of Orange's Design & Usability Innovation team) says in his current RSA Journal article, "Design is habitually brought in too late, used simply to paint and decorate products for which the major decisions have already been made. Thus we have products that are easy to build, designed by technically minded people, but that are not desirable or usable."

How is Design The New Management Consultancy?

Think back to the 50's. If you were bright, intelligent, had a slight eye for the unusual and wanted to earn decent money you went to work for an ad agency. The CDP's of this world. Nowadays you work for one of the big consulting companies, PwC, KPMG, Deloitte or Accenture. Discard your prejudice management consultants and what this means that these places are full of bright, entrepreneurial thinkers. Think about it. When Tony Blair wants to "reform" something his first thought is to call in one of the big four. It's the same with most of the PLC's in Britain. I'm not proposing that Tony Blair rings Interbrand and asks them how to reform the NHS, but what I am saying is that designers are natural problem solvers and a new type of design (and designer) is emerging from the dark days of DTP.

Post DTP and post Brand (as Trade Marked by Wolff Olins) designers have turned to innovation and strategy as a new revenue stream. Some design firms are brilliant at this, IDEO and Imagination spring to mind, whereas some are bad like Interbrand and pretty much every packaging design firm.

A good designer / client relationship will already have an element of Design Is The New Management Consultancy, they just won't know call it that. I'm talking about those moments when a design company suggests things that don't involve a specific below the line outcome. For example we were recently asked how to increase attendance at some employee feedback events. We suggested holding them at 4pm instead of 5.30pm so that employees felt they were getting some extra 'time off'. Really simple and it worked well. This is a small example of what I'm talking about.

Here's another, much more brilliant, one. I posted this a while ago but it's worth revisiting.

John Sorrell (who founded Newell & Sorrell) runs a thing called the Sorrell Foundation. They worked on a project called Joined Up Design For Schools and now they're working on one called Joined Up Design For Health. Take a look at some of their initial research.

An ambulance driver said, "One of the biggest problems is space to turn. We get obstructed by other vehicles dropping patients off, or by police vehicles." So a designer in his role as management consultant could design a bigger turning area, the ambulances wouldn't get obstructed and lives might be saved. Sure, anyone could have made that suggestion after talking to that driver, but what I'm saying is that a designer is much more likely to think like that than an Accenture employee.

It's really hard to write this post as I see so many examples of this but they're all really hard to collate. I'll start a new category and try and add them as I go along. Here's another one.

I stayed in this hotel last week, here's a picture of the lift.

The button on the far right is actually the 'emergency alarm' button, although in real life it looks very much like the 'call lift' button. I almost set the alarm off every time I went in the lift and I'm sure it must have been set off loads of times before. This kind of stuff will be affecting their business and yet good design and good usability could solve the problem.

Here's another slightly obscure example. We worked on a project once with a massive catering firm. The managing director of this firm was a dynamic, inspiring lady whose proudest moment was that she'd changed the recipe for sausages in the Little Chef and managed to shave 1p off the cost of the sausage. This saved Little Chef millions and millions of pounds every year, and she reckoned the sasuages tasted better too. That's not design related, but can you see how designers could contribute in a similar way? By changing the way customers move around a supermarket or by changing the way the door of the AA van opens or by making more space for the ambulances to turn around.

Here's another example. Wayne Hemingway famously acted as design consultant for the Straiths South Bank housing development in Gateshead. A bold move by the developers. If you every hear Wayne talk (and boy he can talk) he gets really animated about this project. One of the things  they wanted to do was to bring back the idea of communities, neighbours that actually know each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you'll be thinking, every house builder says that. Wayne (a designer by the way) identified that one of the big problems was that parents were afraid to let their kids play outside because they couldn't see them from their lounge windows. The reason they couldn't see them from their lounge windows was because their cars were packed right outside their house. The reason their cars were parked outside their houses was because they were worried about them getting nicked.

George Wimpey had discovered that if they built homes where you couldn't see the car from the window people were less inclined to buy. Really. All subliminal stuff that people would never mention in a focus group, but true none the less. So, driveways in front of houses meant no gardens and therefore nowhere for kids to play where parents could easily keep an eye on them, therefore kids played inside or in the back garden, which meant less social interaction (if you've got kids you'll know what a brilliant conversation opener they are) and no community.

Solution? They designed homes with a garden right outside the front windows. Cars were put in a secure underground car park under the estate, so parents could stop worrying about their cars and keep an eye on the kids. I might be a little bit wrong on this bit because I'm trying to remember a talk from a few years ago, but you get the point.

That sounds so simple, doesn't it?

Here's yet another one. I was in a van the other day. A Volkswagen van. In the top corner of the windscreen, drivers side, they had a little sticker that told you what oil the van took.

Isn't that a brilliant idea? They ought to put more useful info on there, like tyre pressures (I always forget tyre pressures) and service intervals and stuff.

Am I making sense? There are already designers doing all this and there are already people talking about this kind of thing. I think this is going to be huge in the coming years and the good designers, the successful designers will have to start thinking like this.

What does everyone else think?