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The Future of Design (and how to prepare for it)
A handy guide to navigating what's coming up next in the design world.
Technology is changing at a rapid pace. In five years, mobile platforms have gone from being an emerging part of a company’s strategy to the focal point of its future. So who’s to say when virtual reality and automation become more prominent? Quickly-evolving tools like these and a shifting playing field make it almost impossible to predict the future, because the gadget that will drive our lives in 10 years probably hasn’t even been invented yet. And then there is the matter of divergent career paths. The age-old standard of working your way up the ladder at a single company for the duration of your life has been disrupted by career professionals blending skills that were once thought to be mutually exclusive — like design and computer programming — to make entirely new hybrid careers in anticipation of the market needs of tomorrow.
Visionaries and experts across the design world take on what the field will look like in the next 10 years when the very definition of the designer will begin to loosen up and designers will soon be called on by companies to re-think the entire way businesses function, from how teams collaborate to how corporations are structured.
It’s setting up to be a golden age, one filled with wonderfully-wild new possibilities and opportunities.
1st Mar 2019
A handy guide to navigating what's coming up next in the design world.
The 5 Best Ways to Collaborate With Your Team
As more teams are becoming remote, it is even more essential to get the right team together to accomplish set goals. The problem that most workers have is that they aren’t trained to collaborate. They attend colleges that simply don’t teach the necessary skills needed to be a good collaborator when working in teams. Yet everyone is in a team while at work, so those skills are even more important than ever before. Employees work less independently now, a trend that should continue especially because of how connected we are.
A new research report shows that less than one third of teams effectively drive project success. 65.5 percent of workers believe that their organization’s project performance would improve if their teams worked more collaboratively. Furthermore, 80.9 percent need help with communication skills, 49.6 percent need help with leadership skills and 47.3 percent need help with critical thinking skills. The problem (again) is that companies are not providing training on these skills, so it’s left to the individual worker to handle.
Here are the top five ways to lead a high performing team and collaborate with them most effectively:
1. Get everyone on the same page.
The most important thing you can do to collaborate is to get people to work with you on the same goals. If everyone is distracted by working on their own projects, nothing gets done. As a member of the team, or the team leader, you need to sit everyone down and discuss your short and long-term goals, how you’re going to hit them and dictate who does what work.
2. Set expectations.
Everyone on the team needs to know what they have to do and when they have to do it by. They should know how much work is expected of them and the amount of hours they should put into it. They should also know what part of the project they need to be working on and who they can count on for support and resources. Leaders need to connect their teams goals to the overall strategic plan of the company. It’s important to also align the individual expectations with the shared expectations of the team. You also need to establish program metrics and timelines with the team and share progress updates so that people know when things are accomplished and can focus on other aspects of the project. Reporting is important so don’t forget to update your boss or the executives on your status so you can show steady improvement.
3. Use tech tools.
As you know from being on this site, QuickBase is a cloud-based platform to easily build your own business process applications that can help you collaborate better in teams, no coding required. QuickBase allows you to set reminders, alerts and notifications to match your team needs. Google Docs is a free and easy to use way to share Microsoft Word and Excel files, edit them and see who is accessing them. However, if you’re using spreasdsheets for online collaboration, you may want to assess if they are slowing you down or worse, causing manual errors. Evernote allows you to take notes and share them so that you can flesh out ideas and work better in a team. Timebridge gives you features like the ability the share your calendar availability, a meeting countdown, and setting up a staff meeting in one step.
4. Be open about everything.
If something isn’t going right or you aren’t getting along with a team member, you need to be upfront with it. The more you hold back the more it will impede collaboration between the team. People love transparency because it makes them feel like they are part of a team. If you aren’t honest and hold things back, then you won’t be able to get everyone on the same page and people will be angry at you for not being upfront. If something goes wrong, bring it to their immediate attention so they can help you solve the problem.
5. Hold effective team meetings.
Most teams waste time during meetings catching up about personal things. Before you start a meeting, have a reason for it. Then, tell each individual team member what they need to bring to each meeting and set an agenda. This way, you can measure the success of a meeting. Don’t feel like the meeting has to be an hour or two hours – make it more about the tasks at hand because the more time people spend in the meeting, the less time they have to do work.
Adopt New Tech Before Everyone Else. Because being first puts you in a strong position to win new business.
The glaring constant in your career is that the technology you’ll use for your craft will regularly change. When this happens you have a choice: Hold on to what you know or become an early adopter, exploring the next thing. It’s the early adopters who take the early lead towards mastering the newest tools will have a greater chance of winning the race for new client opportunities. While mobile innovators are the stars of today, futurists are already looking ahead at the possibilities of virtual reality.
Despite this new kind of parallel universe still being in its earliest incarnation, Unit9 interactive filmmaker Anrick Bregman has shot out the gate and has already produced virtual reality videos for the likes of Lexus, Stella Artois, and Water.org, along with devising his own video game, Storm. The London-based Bregman has so far tagged along with professional cyclist Christian Vande Velde in the Malibu hills for the Lexus shoot, while he traveled to a remote Honduras village for the Water.org production sponsored by Stella Artois.
By being a leader in the developing field, Bregman has been flooded with commission requests and now sits in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose what he works on next, whether that’s a humanitarian video in India or commercial production in Spain. (or, like he is doing now, both)
So how does one know when to leap into new tech? We recently caught up with Bregman who explained how he was became one of the first VR adopters in the creative community and how you can make your own art when you see the next generation of creative tools beginning to come into view.
Take the Initiative
“I started by putting my own money down in early 2015 and looked at this as making an R & D investment,” says Bregman. “A friend of mine built a 360-degree view drone rig and we went to Ireland and flew the drone over a cold, icy landscape in February. The filming wasn’t perfect, but I was impatient to learn about the process and have something on my reel to show off, to say ‘I’m doing this now.’
When you’re willing to put your own time and money into a project and see that through, people are impressed by your determination.
“When you’re willing to put your own time and money into a project and see that through, people are impressed by your determination. A lot of agency people had seen the inklings of VR at the time, but they needed to see someone be able to pull off a project first. My first virtual reality client was Team One, an agency in Los Angeles that deals with Lexus. The creative director there saw my Ireland project and wanted to make a project together.”
Takeaway: No matter how often big corporations say they want to be on the cutting edge of cool, they tend to be less willing to experiment with emerging platforms…until someone else has tried it first. So you’ll likely have to undertake the experiment for them, like Bregman. Once you show them the possibilities that come from new tech, they odds are better they’ll try it – and commission you.
Do your research (even if you have little to go on)
“The biggest insecurity I experienced was that I never know if something was going to work,” says Bregman. How could he? Virtual reality was so new when he began his first project with Lexus that he essentially had nothing to go on. For the Lexus shoot, Bregman and his team had to attach 360-degree cameras to cyclist Vande Velde’s helmet so Vande Velde could film his perspective of biking around the Malibu hills at 40 mph. There was a lot at risk: Would the camera stay on at that speed? Could the helmet rig impair the champion cyclist and cause some kind of injury? And was the camera able to take clean shots atop a constantly-moving head?
New technology doesn’t give you an excuse to say, “I don’t know what will happen” when working on a client project.
Prior to flying to Malibu, Bregman held a camera test day in London. “We got 3D-printed versions of all of the rigs that we would use in the real shoot, and we had an amateur cyclist spend the day biking around London testing out the rigs and giving us feedback,” says Bregman. This way Bregman could address any problems with the rigs before he started the shoot with Vande Velde, rather that wasting the first day of production in Malibu messing around with them. Bregman’s preparation paid off. All went well with the shoot in California.
Takeaway: Sure, it’s fun to explore with new technology, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to say, “I don’t know what will happen” when working on a client project. Before you tackle paid work, you have to thoroughly research what you plan to do. While you can’t remove all the risks given the unknown, you can certainly minimize by doing your homework. Corporations are typically risk-averse, so make it easy on the by removing the unknown.
The tech will force you to change and evolve traditional narrative and design formats
“We are seeing this split in VR,” says Bregman. “The commercial work is going more towards traditional film making, such as TV commercials. Our clients want us to do what they have traditionally done with film but just have us add the 360-dgree perspective to it. But in documentary work, it’s a very different landscape. If you’re shooting a documentary using film, with the way the 360-degree camera works, you’re putting the viewer middle of the space and allowing them to explore and discover it for themselves.”
“When you’re filming in a small poor village in the middle of a jungle eight hours from the nearest city you have to change your approach.”
He first began to notice this split after the Lexus shoot when he went to a remote village in Honduras to film a documentary for Water.org. “Everything we learned from Lexus, we tried to apply to Honduras and you can’t because it’s a different landscape,” says Bregman. “When you’re filming in a small poor village in the middle of a jungle eight hours from the nearest city you have to change your approach. You can’t approach it like a commercial shoot and put lights on peoples’ houses.”
Takeaway: New tech will impact how you create your work and the final result in ways that run counter to your habits. You will potentially have to apply different techniques and ideas to each one of your projects early on to discover what fits best in the new medium. Don’t get frustrated. Think of what you’re doing as accumulating a broad set of services that you will be able to provide for any kind of client assignment down the road.
Keep your skills sharp
Once Bregman started receiving corporate projects, he didn’t stop with the personal projects. In fact, over the last six months he’s been developing a video game concept called Storm, a self-funded idea where the player has to see if they can survive in a virtual reality snowstorm.
Experiment! But don’t use your clients as guinea pigs.
“The project has grown week after week and now includes a small team of people who work on it outside of their day jobs,” he says. The ultimate goal is to sell it directly to consumers once it’s ready to be published. Experiment with new ideas – and fail – in a safe environment (i.e. without having to worry about upsetting a client if something goes awry). “A personal project like this helps me with my commercial work and vice versa,” “They feed each other.”
Takeaway: Don’t use your clients as guinea pigs. Create an ongoing project that only you or your office works on, and have that be your hypothesis testing ground. This way, you’ll be able to perfect your zany notions in-house, so you don’t bring them to your clients in a still-evolving form.
Use the new frontier to recast who you are and what you sell
Brands are finally starting to set up budgets for virtual reality work.
“I get stuck in my fascination for production work, for making, building, writing and animating when really I’d like to develop a great concept and get investment for that concept.” “As people decide there is more value in investing in content, it’s about the right time for me to connect with them,” he says.
Takeaway: As an early adopter and market leader, you’ve got the chance to decide how you are viewed in this new world and what you sell. If you spot an opportunity to make more money or expand your business offerings, by all means jump on it. Utilize the technology to elevate your career standing.
LONG COPY ADS: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Of course everyone will tell you that long copy is dead. Copy should be short and punchy. People don’t have long enough attention spans any more. People don’t like reading nowadays. Everyone will tell you that people are too busy in this so-called ‘Internet Age’ to read long copy ads.
It’s certainly true that clients are less likely to commission long copy these days. But is that the same thing? Advertising as a whole has become a lot more conservative in the last ten or fifteen years. It’s rare that ads grab the public attention and actually become loved like they once were. So, just as clients play it safe on TV the same is true in print. They tend to do what everyone else is doing and, unfortunately, everyone else seems to be doing short copy.
PEOPLE STILL READ. SHOCK HORROR.
What’s the reason for that though? Received wisdom says that it’s just the way of the world: life has moved on from the days when we had the leisure to read anything more than three paragraphs. But even today, according to The Reading Agency, “reading is one of our most popular pastimes” in the UK, more popular than going to the cinema, theatres or concerts. People do still read.
WHO’S AFRAID OF LONG COPY ADS?
Since short copy ads have become the norm though, it’s difficult to go back. By definition a short copy ad is easy to grasp – and that’s not just for the customer but for the marketing manager who’s asked for it too. It’s easy for him/her to sell on up the line to senior bosses because, on the one hand, there’s less to discuss and, on the other, all the bosses think this is the way advertisements are meant to look these days.
In short, those commissioning ads and those providing them are scared of doing anything different.
2000 WORDS ON WHY MARS BARS ARE GOOD
That’s not to say that every product would benefit from a long copy treatment. There are plenty of studies that show that short copy is better suited to low cost, impulse buys like a bar of chocolate for instance. (Imagine an ad with a 2000 word exposition on the delights of a Mars bar. Hang on, actually that could work!) And if we’re already very familiar with a product or brand we’re more likely to be sold on short – or at least shorter – copy. But when a product is a big ticket item, when it’s something technologically advanced or simply has a lot of features then a long copy ad is not only more informative but it’s reassuring too: “Look at all those words, it must be a serious bit of kit.”
I use the phrase “Look at all those words” advisedly, freely acknowledging that a big wodge of text might seem off-putting. But that’s where the craft and guile of the copywriter comes in. For a start a copywriter doesn’t necessarily expect a reader to read every word. That’s why the ad is divided up by sub-heads which give the whole story in a glance. The clever copywriter also knows that people are most likely to read the beginning and the end bits first so those paras had better be especially good. And if the copy is well crafted and compelling it should draw the customer in beyond that cursory look.
GONE? OR JUST RELOCATED?
There’s one other thing that we tend to overlook in this ‘Internet Age’. The internet. One of the reasons why advertisers can get away with making every ad a short copy one is that they include their web address at the bottom of the copy where a prospect can go for more information. All the copy that used to be on the page is now on screen. Now, whether online copy should be long or short is a question for another day.
by Jeffrey Rausch
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