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Gary
All right, so I want to thank everybody today for participating in this podcast. Could you just quickly go around and everybody say your names and say where you’re from?
RJ
Sure, hi everybody, this is RJ Thompson; I’m an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Youngstown State University.
Gary
All right, thank you.
Neil
I am Neil Ward and I’m an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
Phil
And I’m Phil Franks, I’m a Partner and Director of Design here at Dynamit, the agency that we’re sitting in today for the podcast.
Gary
So, I guess to start things off, the first one that I want to ask everybody, but I’m going to start off by asking our professional over here is, one of the competencies was, and I’m going to read it, “describe the primary business operations, stakeholders and the functional relationships among them in bringing messages, products and our services to the public” and from doing this podcast, almost every single professional said that that was a huge problem, so…
Phil
Right, I think that’s one that stood out to me as I was reading through this. For us and I guess I’ll use our experience and how we operate as my baseline here, but every Designer, UX Designer here; in fact, everybody across the board, is very tuned in to the business objectives and we do see a gap. When we’re talking to people straight out of school, young ones looking for their first hack at a career, the idea of design not just applying to what they’re making is a huge gap that we see, and so understanding relationships, how to communicate and understanding need and digging into the psychology of people, all the skills that we practice, I guess we go into these tools that we actually create our outputs, the idea that that same principle is applied to the person I’m sitting across from is not something that we see a lot of competency in, so they get that school here when it’s, how do I deal with clients? How do I understand their needs? How do I facilitate brain-storming? How do I get them all round the table to feel comfortable? There’s a lot of that human psychology baked up into it which we all know and love as designers but that’s it, that’s one of the things you have to have on a project to be empathetic for our client and deliver a great product.
Gary
So, my fellow educators, how do you do that? How do you bring that business into the classroom, especially at an early level when students can’t produce anything that the client could use anyway because the students just don’t have that skill-set yet.
Neil
Well, I think early on, in design education, it’s about getting their legs in design, so at the Freshman/Sophomore level, it’s really difficult to start injecting that, but we still go over brain-storming in class and how to do that, but as we progress into upper level courses, at Drake, my last two senior level electives, they were human-centered design-oriented, so we were talking about all the stakeholders and what this project, how this is going to impact them, and we also talk about wicked problems in the world. So, what are wicket problems? They’re not exactly solvable but to understand the impact that you’re going to have when you attempt to solve that and then to have enough integrity to own those solutions, I guess this is what I’m doing, this is how I’m doing it, and I acknowledge that it’s going to cause issues down the road, but this is where I think is going to be the best use of everyone’s resources and this is going to help solve the problem; or, not really solve the problem but it’s going to help improve…yeah…
RJ
So, I have an interesting angle on this. So, Phil, you mentioned there’s a lot of practical knowledge that is developed on site as an employee; that kind of education is so unique to the agency that’s providing it, so if Neil were working for you, he would learn one methodology and then if he quits and works for your competitor, he’s going to learn something else completely. And also find out that your methodology is not compatible with everything else. So, one of the things that I like to focus on with my students is as soon as I get them, I usually don’t see them until their junior year, so at that point, in some cases it might be too late, but one of the things that I try to focus on with them is that their idea of the designer as the individual and how they plug into a group. And you can correct me where I’m wrong, at least as it applies to your agency. I first off tell my designers, agencies want to hire someone that they genuinely like and would want to work with, as opposed to this idea of someone that can do everything all the time at a high quality but they’re the most de-personalized human being every and have no….
RJ
My students in general and…hey, I love you guys if you’re listening, but you gotta open up a bit. For God’s sakes, you all have wonderful, creative personalities; you’ve got to share that with the world and by being quiet and intrinsic, you’re not doing that. So, I’ve got to break them out of their shell a little bit because they’re never going to provide quality brain-storming, let alone quality results if they don’t break out of that shell. Even if they’re comfortable. Actually, even if they’re lucky to get a job based on having that kind of personality and then also just don’t happen to break out of their shell in their position. So, this idea of you have to break out of your shell, one, to produce quality results. Two, now that you’ve broken out of your shell a bit, you have to understand that you need to be at times completely and totally reliant on yourself to provide high quality work product. And that is a very daunting thing to put onto someone, especially like a nineteen, twenty year old kid. But, that strengthens their character later on. And what I like about that is, you can assign a task to that type of individual and expect them to get it done. And then to also bring that to the group that they’re working in and strengthen that group as a result. So, that’s the other thing. Bring your leadership to that group, so if you can form a group of leaders that understand how to lead and how to be led, that in turn is also going to lead to a higher quality brainstorming. Not just brainstorming, but results in general. So, I have…and this actually has nothing to do with design; it’s all about maturity.
Phil
I love it.
RJ
Yeah, it’s all about maturity and getting these kids to grow up a little bit more quickly than they want to and that means applying the pressure, because you have a junior designer and you put a deadline on them, they’re terrified probably. The stress is super-high because they like you, they’re lucky to be employed, they understand that, but they’ve also earned that right to be employed, so they don’t want to lose that. So, they work their asses off to provide that quality product and…
Phil
You know one more thing I want to touch on too, because you’re striking a chord of mine that’s very, very…I’m passionate about this, and I love that you’re starting education at the self level; that’s amazing. So, kudos to you my friend. I think, if there’s a third prong to that, and maybe I interrupted you before you got to it…
But I think the idea of vulnerability is a huge one, because I think as a designer, in most scenarios you’re looked at, at this shining light of creative and you’re the big idea and you’re the one that’s going to solve the problem, and effectively that’s a team effort. You have one thing…
…that you’re going to execute on and you’re going to need this person and this person and this person to do it, and knowing when you need to stop yourself to get others’ inputs and help to be able to ask for it, that goes a long way, especially with a young designer.
RJ
And that’s wisdom at its core: being able to recognize that, now’s the time I shut up! And learn and listen. So, that again is not a design trait. That is just a trait of a good student and again, this idea of failing forward, so you break out of your shell, you understand group dynamics and how to lead and be led. And then also not be afraid of failing and more importantly, asking questions. So, I purposely put my students into situations that they cannot work themselves out of, to the point where they have to ask for help. So, I have some students that are obstinate and will not do it: they will work their butt off to try to figure a problem out. And you know what’s interesting is that typically those problems tend to have the easiest solutions, but it requires investment and sometimes multiple people and just being observant. And for God’s sake, knowing how to use Google effectively, right?
Gary
So, on the collaborate idea, and this will lead into another question I had was…I pulled out another thing from here. It says, “collaborate in teams using specific techniques for leadership, communication and negotiation” and I think we all, again, agree with that, that we need to be teaching collaboration and I’m kinda looking at Neil for this one and for Phil in that, when you’re in a Graphic Design program, you’re generally silent, so you’re teaching designers to collaborate with themselves on something that isn’t a natural collaboration. So, what does a collaboration look like for you here, Phil, and I’d also like to hear about your collaboration to support it.
Neil
Absolutely. So, a course that I just have the pleasure of teaching this past Fall is an app design course at Drake University, where it’s a collaboration between Computer Science and Journalism and Graphic Design, so it’s team-taught by three Professors: Computer Science, Journalism and myself, and the students have to collaborate on creating an app. We give them a prompt and then they have to narrow down that idea and build an app from the ground up. So, they have to collaborate, all of them have to collaborate on the idea, the site map, the user flow, the wireframe, what it’s going to look like, how it’s going to function and in that process, there’s only one Graphic Designer, one Journalism and thee Computer Science students in each group, so they’re really having to collaborate with one another and understand each other’s language and try to figure out when Computer Science student says they’re designing, that that means something completely different than the Graphic Design student saying, I’m designing for the interface. So, that is a way at Drake that we’re collaborating, or forcing students out of their design studio to communicate with other disciplines and other methods of thinking and talking and conversing and whatnot.
Phil
That is actually very in line with what we do. I think…I love that we start it at the foundation, the core being of a person, because even with that, you start to touch on things like empathy and communication and all the things you have to have in order to break out and understand other people. That’s essentially how we run projects here. We have a discipline and another discipline and another discipline that come together and are band around a business problem. You might throw in other things on top of the scenarios like budget constraints or technology constraints; if a client’s working with legacy technology that you have to work around so your solution can’t always be pie in the sky. There’s your idealistic reality and then there’s reality. And so those kinds of things we really give our junior people a chance to trial by fire, so if it’s build an estimate out for a new project, go in and understand the business requirements, come together with the project team, you just have to work through some of those constraints with the team around you to really understand what solution we can actually build, and I don’t want to get too off-topic on this, but another big topic for us is the idea of feasibility is a big thing that I see with, even engineers and designers alike, and I’m speaking of my own experience coming out of school: everything was my best-case scenario. It was what I believe is the best-case scenario amidst the constraints that I had and having constraints put on groups of people with young people in a group dynamic like that to solve…it’s design at it’s core, right? That’s the definition of design; design with constraint!
Phil
And building something that is a project but around something that can be more applicable to a business need. When we get to talk to people, that’s the gap. We were talking briefly before the podcast started about the applicability of real life business endeavors that we get hit with every day and what kind of constraints we’re hit with to then pass on to the team to say, go solve these problems. It’s not, design a beautiful app that solves a random problem that you think would be cool, like autonomous cars or anything like that. It’s…we need to build a business to business tool that facilitates serving of our four thousand hotels around the world, our staff is comprised of age groups of X, Y and Z, they have this technology constraint: there’s a lot of depth to those needs that really start to form our solutions and a lot of that is design, in air quotes, and design in its own right as creative visual output, the requirements of the business, the technology constraints, all of it in itself is design, and that’s how we think about it, but I love…I’m so energized by the fact that you guys are collaborating cross-functionally already because that’s how it works. You cannot work in a silo at all in these environments.
RJ
I have a question for you. And it’s based on something you said about having Junior Ds, like do budgeting. I love that, in the sense that it gives them this entrepreneurial point of view that they may not have had previously. I’m always charging my students to become entrepreneurs, even if it means forming a single member LLC, and hey, you gotta do your business taxes and save up some money and be responsible for your own successes in that respect, but my students are mostly too timid to do that and if they do happen to form their own business, it’s maybe five years after graduation when they’ve just been laid off for whatever reason and it becomes a necessity. It becomes a catalyst, a necessity, and not necessarily a desire. But I like the fact that you’re making them do that because it gives them that world view of, these little things cost money. Even you changing hitting the undo button takes…it might take a second but we can monetize that and that’s how you have to do it and I love that…what that does is it re-frames design as not even necessarily a business: that’s just a general thing, but our students spend so much time in front of the computer trying to get the right design solution and then, I would love it if they actually priced out their time.
Phil
Right, and that knowledge and being able to say those things against real prompts, real endeavors and I’m speaking again from my own experience, but I would maul over the finest of detail all the time with no constraint of time of how long I had to spend on a project, nor did I ever cross-reference that with a Computer Science major to say, hey, I have this option. How many hours do you have budgeted against our overall budget to make this thing come to life. And we do that today, that’s a practice at Dynamit where once we design something, our entire Design Team has to go check against our balances on Front End and say, hey, Front End, check us and we’re collaborating along the way. Do any of these things push us outside of our boundaries of what we know is scope, what we know is budget, be a lot of time; you may have said twenty hours to do this but they’re making these estimates well before we design something, so how do we collaborate to make sure that empathetically, my solution fits inside of your constraint. That’s a big gap that we see with people coming out of school.
RJ
And that’s going to ultimately create the best results possible because it’s an efficiency model, really.
Phil
When I think design too is you think about even a Junior Designer in an agency, wouldn’t matter if it’s eighty to four thousand people, you’re designing not just for you, the customer or the business: you’re designing for that company that you’re working for. That’s a think.
Right, I mean, you have to and actually we have a little design manifesto that I wrote some years ago about our focus areas and it’s user, client, the business. And the business, the entrepreneurial mindset that you mentioned a second ago, the business is theirs too. Every single person out there is not a cog: they manage an aspect of the business being financially successful or a project being delivered on time, on scope, on budget; all that stuff’s a part of their job description and they have little nuanced ways, obviously as they rise in the organization they become more adept and in depth with those kind of things but yeah, it’s a huge part.
Gary
I want to jump in here and ask Phil a question. And this is from the benefit of since I’ve done this podcast for long enough now, seeing repeating patterns and one industry repeating patter is, students when they come in, don’t do things fast enough. So I’m just wondering if I came to you and said hey, this is my project that I want to introduce; this is how long I think it should take and I said to you, can you give me what it really…how long would you have in the real world it’ll take? Would you be able to do that relatively easily?
Phil
Yeah, totally. When we do estimations, there are obviously, they get the funnels wide at the top and you start to narrow things down. We always use the analogy of building a house and the answer’s always yes. You can have the big square footage or the marble everywhere or whatever it is in your house, but you’re going to pay for that kind of cost, it’s going to take more time and more energy and we really set that foundation from go with our clients and with our people and the answer to that question is, we’ll dig at you a lot about what is it that you wanted to do functionally, aesthetically, what are your time constraints, because you can’t have all three, you can’t have the treble; you have to have two of the three. So, which is going to give and how are you going to work with that? But we give estimates all the time. We do projects anywhere from quarter of a million to two to three million dollar web applications, mobile applications and sometimes those are really complex in scale and you don’t know all you need to know and so to build an estimate for something like that, we may even go into a strategy period where our design team, our business requirements team, our development team actually works with the client for a duration of a month to three months to uncover the rocks that we can’t see up front to be able to say, OK, this is actually going to cost 2.4 instead of the 2 that we thought. Or sometimes it goes the other way. But distilling that down to the newest person in the door, we try to do that every day to make that applicable so that when they’re getting a chance to touch the flame, they’re applying their skills in a way that are in line with the vision and the constraints that we have from start.
RJ
I have an additional thought, and maybe you can reinforce this. I like the fact that by having them do that, it invests them in your company and not in the monetary bottom line but the qualitative output, the results, so it’s like, well, if we could do this more efficiently it’s going to yield a better result and better results will get more work and more work, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And some people don’t even consider that, especially when they’re fresh out of school.
Phil
I was just going to say, I think the idea of efficiency is interesting and speed was the original question. The philosophy that we have, we have a lot of these kind of random Pinterest quote philosophies that you might find as you’re browsing, but anything can fit in a box, is what we say. Anything could fit in a box. It’s what are you going to put in that box that makes sense, so is your box this big or is it this big? And what you go in there, use those as your boundaries and those boundaries usually are everything we’ve talked about over the last five minutes but giving them incentive to say, cool, it’s our job to figure out how to fit our best solution based on what we know and what we can find out into this box to deliver this for our client on time, on script, on budget with high client satisfaction. Those are our key pillars.
Gary
So, this is for my fellow educators: I’ll start with Neil. So, my question is, the time thing. Like I said, I keep getting battered with, in this podcast, with how long things take students, don’t work at velocity, of what the industry really is and so I’m like, how do you go about determining how long a project takes, and I’ll be the first to admit that I go based on, I’ve got semesters and I know I have certain objectives that I want to achieve by the end of the semester and then I figure out how long I need to fit each thing to achieve that objective in the semester which is radically different than the profession.
Neil
That’s a loaded question! So, how do I go about time? Well, as I’ve…the more years that I’ve been teaching, the more flexible my timeframes get. So, at the beginning of this semester, I set up my syllabus and I have a schedule of about how long I think things should take, which is not a professional schedule or time-frame! But things change through the semester and there are student needs that have to be addressed, so a lot of times, that well laid-out schedule just doesn’t happen and at Drake, we have a lot of students that double-major or triple-major and they have a lot of other things going on outside of the class do I could be very optimistic and really, really run them ragged but in the end it’s either going to produce really crappy work or they’re just not going to do it. So, the time-frame of working in a professional environment, that’s something I feel that they’ll learn in their internship and they’ll learn when they get to that first job but to me, it’s more important that they learn the course outcomes and how to go through different methodologies to get to that end point rather than trying to get that, OK, get this logo done in two days and go through the whole process for it too.
Phil
I love what you’re talking about with processes and stuff. Coming in here and seeing people every day that do this, one of the things that I’m always talking with them about is, I think about the box mentality again. The processes that are being taught by you guys, the wonderful processes of research and how to define yourself in a project and work with other people, all of that stuff, is also flexible and I think the rigidity that you could teach somebody is actually counter-intuitive to the flexibility that you might be giving them. The flexibility in a good way, meaning that those things from time to my methodology and what I can fit inside of those constraints can go up and down based on what I need to do and I can put myself inside of that scenario and that constraint and be just fine. There are a lot of people that we get a chance to interview, work with and experience here where they’ll say, there’s just not enough time for me to do my best work and I say, oh, that’s not a great answer! That’s not a great answer!
Because you have to be able to bend and flex everything that creates the product you’re doing with the time that you have and so flexibility for what you’re teaching is actually a wildly beneficial skill for a designer to have coming out to say, I can do this in two days if it has to be a quick turn-around but here are the things that I’m going to sacrifice and here are the things that you may see on the other side that you might sacrifice, may it be revisions or the amount that I come to comps for table with
RJ
I have a really unique perspective on this. And more often than not, it kind of results in the phrase…Thompson’s a prick! But…so, some of this is like a test in futility or a test in patience so for my advanced students, I personally would be fine if they worked on one project for the entire duration of the semester and in some respects, I wouldn’t even be focused on it being the best possible quality work product that they could develop. And the reason for that is, OK, let’s just say it’s a brochure. I have a student design a brochure. OK, well you’re going to have a round of revisions. I want them to revise it into the ground until they do not want to look at it ever again because that is actually a mirror situation of reality and at the end of that five month period, if they get a C in the class, it’s not just because of the design, it’s because of how they approached resolving the adversity. I faced so much adversity working for Heinz. It’s a huge, international corporation and one thing I would have to revise fifty times and that builds patience and a patient designer is a better designer. So I’m not against situations like that and I’ve put some students in those situations, particularly if I felt it was a lesson they needed to learn and otherwise, I try to give the appropriate amount of time for the project so my projects are a bit more grand in concept so I would maybe do three weeks to a month, depending on what it is, so for example, right now, I have an intro class where it was based out of a grant that I received where they have to design a social cause poster; two posters, as a matter of fact: one’s an infographic where they have to understand a subject and the issue behind it logically, numerically, all of the data and then they have to create an emotionally resonant counterpart to that so they learn all the research and then they create a concept that pulls at your heart-strings, that gets you to act in accordance with what their goals are. Then they have to take both of those prints and then animate them, using the same design assets, so it’s consistency across the board. We upload those videos to YouTube; now they’re starting to understand intelligent expressions across all channels, one deliverable across a variety of media. That’s really a great skill to have to understand that perspective and world view and then they have to build a website out of HTML and CSS that not only is in line thematically and aesthetically but features that artwork in interesting ways, so it could be a one-page parallax scroll that shows all of the information, it’s a beautiful design, but they know that when they’re at an agency, they have that one client, thing they will know the best is everything about that client and replicating that scenario in the class is very worthwhile but that takes time.
Gary
Again, just to let the listeners know, I sent everybody a draft, that draft of Designer 2025 and so I asked Phil to look through there and pull out whatever he wanted to pull out for whatever reason, so I’m going to ask him to do that now.
Phil
Yeah, totally! We were speaking a little bit about this before we got started but semantically I pulled out a couple of things that are really interesting to me that we do see a lot of and I think we really value as we start to think about the next wave of people, not just designers, but engineers and so on and so forth. One of them was relevance and data and validation. Being able to…and we’re experiencing this as an agency right now over the years we’ve been finding more and more ways to practically build that type of process into our workflow. How do we use data to validate prior? How do we use these user testing scenarios and things like that to the best of our ability that fit inside of our scopes and things like that because for us, as we’re teaching methodologies, and I loved your point earlier about methodologies change from place to place, there’s also another constraint that is market and what market’s going to want out of you as an agency and what you can sell as an agency to clients. Some people value that depth and breadth inside of data and inside of validation and market research others; they love rapid iteration and ideation and they want concepts thrown at them and they don’t need as much validation and so being able to test the waters and which method works for the scenario that you’re in, the theme though is true across the board. A lot of our big clients that we worked with this year all were craving it and I tend to watch the market when it comes to our touching of clients, hearing what they’re telling us, where we may fall short, how some of our processes are working well and not working well and one of the things we uncovered today was under that umbrella was, we need to continue to evolve our validation practices of design, to make it not about I saw this, so it works or this company’s doing it so it works, or we tested it on usertesting.com with a small group of people. More depth to that research and analysis and how do you bring it to the table. Another one that I think was maybe scraped…
Gary
Before we move onto the next spot. So, with…what you just talked about, that idea of validating what you’re doing. Is that going to be in the realm of the visual designer or is that going to be in the realm of the user experience designer and can you give more of a concrete example of it?
Phil
Great question, and I think as you guys maybe know with where students go after they have the opportunity to work with you guys, it varies dramatically based on the roles and responsibilities and specialties any house has. You may have teams that are much larger with a creative, in air quotes, and you have visual designers, brand designers, motion, UX strategists, design strategists, all those people; you could have much smaller teams. We actually have a very lean team that has UX designers, UI designers and strategy team and that’s what we have here and can loop in a front end. And our eco-system, the strategy team and the UX team are part of that responsibility. The visual designers actually doing it on their own; they’re going out and getting their own market research, their own validation as they do their ideation to get things going, but they’re working really closely with our UX strategy team and our strategists to be able to bring those to light but other agencies, there are dedicated teams that just spend their waking hours, forty hours plus a week, digging into usability research, going on your ??? and everything like that to dig into what works and what doesn’t. Posting studies behind glass and things like that, going out to stores and giving mobile apps with gift cards. All of that stuff is happening but again, further comment about market and what you have to spend, that constraint, you either want people to buy that, you have the cap to do it or you don’t and it’s evolutionary: you don’t flip the switch on that kind of stuff, it’s what are you being told, how do you slowly integrate that into your process and over time, I was saying earlier, we’re only fourteen years old as an agency, working with some really tremendous brands around the world, and we’re just now getting to the point where we think that stuff is being applicable to us, with the brands that we’re scraping, so it can vary, it can vary. I think that to get the deep results, you’re going to want to be its own role. To get the broad strokes it could be a really creative, smart woody team that has the ability to do that as part of their process in creating.
Gary
So are either of you incorporating that into the classroom?
Neil
So far, just going back to that app class that we’re teaching, the students on that course, they are rooted in user research and we actually require them to go out and find users that they feel are going to use the app so it’s not just their classmates or the faculty; it is people who are using, who will use the app, so they’ve had to go down to the Farmers’ Market and get people on the street to test out their app. They’ve had to wrangle some Freshmen on campus to be like, hey, try this out, if you needed to know where this jazz event was tonight, how would you do that on this app? And getting out there and either confirming what their assumptions were with their user needs or thinking, oh well, nuts; that’s not solving that user need.
Neil
Very much so, and just having that…just having that confidence, I want to say, to walk up to a stranger and ask them, can you test this out for me? We’re trying something new…
I mean, those, what you were talking about, is definitely being involved there but in other courses, not so much, just because one, there’s not time and two, there’s not time! Both in terms of the semester schedule and the student time as well.
RJ
So, you can edit this part out, but I would love it if you could put a bleep in with this! I think for me personally, it comes down to this emotional response I get to the lack of literacy with my students to the point where I say, read a Goddam book! I struggle with research with my students; it’s something that I absolutely enforce because it’s as simple as you’re right or you’re wrong. If your information is incorrect or outdated or misguided or misinterpreted, you’re wrong. So, you have to look at the right data sources and the right information, be it qualitative, quantitative or whatever; you’ve got to find the right sources to interpret correctly. For example, I have a student who’s a really great designer. He’s one of those kids that you know is going to have a great career and he’s got the aesthetic down. But he’s designing for himself and as a consequence of that, his work consistently fails conceptually and in meaning so it’s a tough pill to swallow because it’s like, well I thought I designed it right. It’s like yeah, you probably did, but I don’t know if this is right or wrong; you designed it for yourself, so for example, the project I mentioned earlier where they had to design a poster and then an animation, I gave them three weeks to do all of that, which is a lot, tight turnaround, and he spent two and a half weeks just designing one poster and he kept spinning in circles, spinning in circles and I said, well let’s talk about your process, talk about your research. Where did you research? He was like, well, I just found this stuff online…well, did you call the agency that, I don’t know, did you call United Way? No. Did you know United Way? No. Well, do you think your information is right or wrong versus United Way? He was like, well, United Way would probably have better resources because I just saw some of the stuff as external links on Wikipedia, so it’s like OK, well scrap everything, just put it in the trash and start over: you need the best resources and the best information possible and I don’t know anyone, any agency, that would suffer that. I mean, I would…yeah…so yeah, we really reinforce the research as much as possible but again, it comes down to the fact that it’s a maturity thing and the students have fun designing. They don’t have fun reading.
I teach History of Graphic Design. They hate reading. I can’t get a class to read seven pages of a fourteen page chapter of which the latter seven pages are pictures, so, reading, and this is something I’ve heard from everybody, reading is just a tough thing for our students to want to do.
Neil
And it has to be in the form of a website that’s bullet-pointed.
RJ
Yeah. Cliff’s notes.
Neil
And within like three minutes, that’s about it.
Gary
I was going to say as a Haiku, but….
Neil
Well, to go back to the research element, we have a research and application course which is a senior level elective which might be a little late in the curriculum but we have it, we have it and a project I did last year was a way-finding project so they had to look at the building and there was no signage there but they had to create an assumption, or write down assumptions as to what needed to happen in the building to solve that problem and then they actually had to use visual anthropology, ethnography, observational research and interviews…
They had to learn about them first, yes, but then they had to go and actually do them within the space so they felt awed, photographing people going through a door or stopping and questioning, where do I go from here because there’s no signage, but part of that was…you get to people-watch.
…and then you get to extrapolate from that what the user needs are so in that course specifically, we went into thinking in systems as well because that’s one gigantic system so in that course, there was a really, really deep research component to solving this design problem but again, that’s at the senior level after they’ve had internships and whatnot, so my hope is when they graduate and go to their first job, they understand the amount of research that goes into a project.
RJ
I think our students, designers in general are more finely attuned to research through experience. So, after they break out of their shell, I think…I don’t know, and I might be a bit forward here but it’s like you read all of the quantitative information, whatever it is, whatever conclusion you come to may rival that thematically against what a designer may find on their own through what they intuit. The idea of intuition here, especially as a designer, is so important, but you have to cultivate that intuition and you have to train it and that’s best done just…maybe it’s just experiencing it. You want to find out what a design agency looks like and how it functions? Walk in the door. Shoot them an email and walk in the door and say, I’ll make all your photocopies, I’ll make all your coffee for the day. Or if you need a compliment, you’re feeling down, I’m there for you.
Phil
Dude, fortune favors the bold.
RJ
Exactly. Fortune favors the bold and a part of it’s maybe coming back to that breaking out of the shell but I’ve found that where in absence of my students actually investing in reading and understanding actual written information, they find other sources to experience it so a situation in my practicum class, the students were asked to create some ads and some annual reports for St Vincent de Paul Society which primarily deals with the homeless population, feeds them, food kitchens, things like that. So I said to my students, well, you can look at all of their history or you can actually go to the shelter and feed these people and talk with them and they learned so much through that experience that that data didn’t even matter and that was…not only was that cool to see, but how rewarding for them. It’s like, come to class, do your projects, do well and you won’t necessarily end up on the street, but there’s a lot of very…
Phil
I mean, it actually touches on another point that was in this document that was about the core values about understanding what it is and why you’re designing things. I think the generation that is coming up in the game right now wants to have more of that finger on the pulse of reality. Gone are the days where your students and the people that work with us today go to corporate environments, sit at their desk for thirty years and try not to get fired. That’s not what…they don’t want to do that. Our generation is not that and so giving them opportunities to do that where there’s pure value, pure impact. You can’t walk away from an experience like that and say, I didn’t do something good for someone today. That just sets their skills on fire to let them know what I do for the world is this thing and I can impact through design and through execution of this problem to help someone like that, even if it’s one person. The thing that I always say is like, you don’t have to build the next Goddam Apple. Go to a food kitchen and serve somebody and that’s impact; that’s it.
Gary
Do you know how hard that is thought? Because I literally, there’s a class where I make my students ride the flipping bus and that becomes the basis for anything they do for the rest of the semester because you can find an infinite amount of design problems by riding the bus from time, from personal space, whatever, but I can’t tell you the excuses that I get. I can’t even to get them to get on the damn bus, they’re like, well I missed it or I ran out of time.
Neil
So you don’t ride the bus during your class time?
Gary
And I’ve tried that but there’s…unfortunately I’ve only got two hour blocks and by the time we got to the City there would be literally no time because I’ve actually…I’ll rent a bus, we’ll go to the City, then I’ll make them do it, but I can’t even get them to go…I don’t know if it’s because they don’ t see the value in this. It’s user research.
Phil
I’ve been really in tuned to this idea of value proposition and I actually use an acronym called WIIFM. What’s In It For Me? And I think if you distill everything down to any interaction, there are always people, even today, each of us sitting round this table, there’s some WIIFM for us and that’s why we’re here. Also, we’re highly engaged in the community and this thing we’re talking about but starting there and it’s not a valuable thing to them yet. It’s not a valuable thing for them to invest their time when they could be out partying with their friends or having a beer on Friday night or whatever it is, to ride the bus. Getting them and maybe it touches back on the maturity thing, but getting them the chance to experience that own journey, it’s actually the may I look at it, it’s a natural curation process. If I want that special student and I want that person that’s going to be hired at Dynamit, they are the person that does that and everybody else is going to find out the hard way that they’re going to get rejected by life, in a lot of ways.
Gary
So, I just kind of noticed the time, so I don’t know how much longer…we only have the room for about another twenty five minutes but I don’t know how much longer you have so I figured I’d let you to get to a couple more of the points that you wanted to pull out, if you’d like to respond to them?
Phil
I’ll throw this on the table for you guys because I’m curious as to how you guys think about this in the EDU space right now, but we’ve mentioned a couple of times today and it’s in this document briefly about the idea of coming out of your shell’s really the corner-stone of it, but how do you communicate and how do you effectively negotiate is the word you used earlier, but I don’t think it needs to be adversarial. The idea of this natural persuasiveness that is design is not just making something that works functionally, beautifully, visually, all that stuff and solves business needs: it’s psychologically getting people to believe in the idea and that is a huge gap that we have today with some of our junior talent and when they come out, a lot of it lives on the execution side but they haven’t yet had the intentional reps or come out of their own shell yet to be able to say, I believe in this so hard that you’re going to feel my energy around my solution; I’m bought into this so hard that I’ve done the research and I’m here. You’re going to believe me and tell that story effectively so others can actually feel that same energy.
RJ
So, I would say from the student perspective, so from the student perspective, they’ve got a lot going on; they’re not just taking Design classes but they’re taking other classes that they probably have no interest in because if they had their choice, they’d probably be designing all day, which is ironic because I know some Graphic Designers now that’d be like, I would rather not be designing at all or at all today. But from the teaching perspective, we look at that and it’s just like, OK, we’re only going to be able to get maybe forty five per cent potential, if not lower. Maybe that was a bit gratuitous, but it depends on the day. So, I think on that note, because we’re challenged with students that are busy with everything, where our energy is suppressed. So for example, I believe in the power of design as a cultural catalyst for change. Change for social, change whatever; I can make you start smoking if I wanted to. It could be disastrous or it could be great. And I think part of my issue is that I always understand the power that design has to make someone change their mind or act in a certain way and because I get students that come in, they’re busy, they’re tired, I can’t necessarily share that enthusiasm with them because they’ve just been beaten by the system. So again, just coming back to that, how do I constantly reinforce the power that design has to not only transform others but themselves through that process, quite frankly they don’t understand the influence they have at their fingertips and they won’t necessarily get that until they see their first successful real professional project. It could be a simple brochure; it could be a billboard, but as soon as they see that they’re like, ohhhh, wow! I can actually change a lot here. So this idea of social good, that could be effected at a very early level. Design a poster that makes someone donate to local charity, X, Y, Z. There, it’s done: you just enacted influence. That’s what your design…design is a tool. Your job is an influencer and design is how you get there. That’s what I really want to convey.
Phil
Maybe it goes back to the value thing we talked about a couple of minutes ago because I think to tell that story and communicate that impact you can have and be able to share that with you guys, much like you said, you could get me to start smoking. That’s true: we’re in a space that is to influence and some of that is visually executing but the other half is verbally executing, not only with the people externally who you’re touching with your work but the people who you’re getting a chance to collaborate and work with and how does that dynamic work? And so maybe it’s a value thing, maybe it’s a confidence thing, maybe it’s not knowing how yet to articulate those skills that they have balling up inside of them they’re just now realizing but something that fosters that goes a long way because here, even our Junior Designers, one of my practices, they present every internal team, it’s just a rep; it’s rep, rep, rep, rep, reps and I practice with them prior, we come in and we go as a combined front, they’re the leaders, I get to back them up on things that they miss and then we have a reflection after and we sit down and talk about what did they do well, what could they work on, get some critical feedback and it’s a practice and a process. I was just curious if there were things like that, that you guys are doing inside?
Gary
Well I think the problem that I perceive as you mentioned it is not having
Phil
You’ve planted that…
Gary
I’ve planted that…I’ve planned the solution. Now they’re just decorators. They’re decorating the solution, so they may not fully believe in it…
…to begin with, whereas if they went from a research based method, they would say fundamentally, yes, this is what we need to deliver, now they go about it and I think that’s fundamentally the problem in design education…
…it takes them a few years.
Phil
That’s a great point, really great point.
Gary
And that’s the selling part, that’s why they can’t sell it because…
Phil
They don’t believe in it. Yeah.
RJ
Hey,
Neil
who’s your favorite designer?
Neil
RJ Thompson, of course!
RJ
Oh, what a sweetheart! Well, just real quick, the reason I ask that is I always ask…you should always ask your designers and I’m telling you what to do here. Any time you interview someone, ask them who their favorite designer is because we have our Design History class for a reason but think of it this way: let me re-frame the question. Who’s your favorite musician?
Neil
Oh gosh, I’m across the board. I’m agnostic, I just love a good sound.
RJ
You have one artist or band though that really influences you: you turn them on and your creative energy just hits.
Neil
Right now, it’s Avicii.
RJ
OK, I don’t know that band or person!
Neil
PDM…
RJ
OK, but on that note, I ask my students, who’s your favorite musician? What type of music do you listen to? Why do you listen to it? Or even movies because those things resonate and sometimes it has that transformative effect, so it’s like, you should look at your own work in that same lens, with that same viewpoint because if you find what you like in your own work or in others’, I guess you’re a big Milton Glaser fan, OK, you can channel that and you can express it in a new way with a new perspective.
Neil
Actually I love that feedback to students and even people that we’re talking to because I also have a concept, it’s called modeling, and it’s one of the things I do in life and…creativity in itself is a…acknowledgement, a recognition and then a twist of what you believe its impact could be based on your interpretation of what you’re seeing. I think that in its core is what I’d put as my definition of creativity. And a lot of that is the trails have been blazed; the Glasers of the world and others of the world who have done these things across the board, you can look and learn from the trail of success that they’ve left and then take the pieces and pick up the breadcrumbs to do the things that are best for you to define yourself, so I think that’s a beautiful piece of advice.
RJ
Damn it, Milton, leave some for the rest of us!
Gary
So, does anybody else…did either of you get a chance to look over the sheets and see anything you wanted to bring up out of the Designer of 2025? And I know you still have one, we’ll just jump to you…
Phil
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there’s one that really steps out to me and you mentioned it earlier. It’s the idea of design being more omni-channel. It’s about it being not just one medium but all mediums. The idea of to translate what is branding physical and digital experiences. As an agency, we’re always at least three to five years out in front of business trend; consumers are in between us and business and so just now, our organizations we work with are starting to think about, hey, how do we digitize a retail experience or in-store experience? How do we make things more omni-channel to bring them in to the space physically so then interact with them in digital tools? How do we have a customer database that knows you when you go here, here and here and then when you’re in store, our associates actually know who you are, what pant size you wear, that’s crazy to think about but it’s where everything’s going and where consumers now expect brands to understand you. I have a fantasy of walking into any one of my favorite stores and getting hit by an associate that says, hey Phil, you purchased these jeans last week: how are they fitting? Do they fit good, do you need any advice on the next pair? We have a new season coming out next week. This kind of stuff is amazing and it’s not just about a marketing website, it’s not just about a campaign that you see as you’re getting on the bus, it’s about how design is more impactful and so the system that you set up with your projects is a really good starting point for that, to get them thinking about not just building websites and not just building print materials but it is every-changing, it’s becoming the circle of influence, and digital’s leading. Digital will lead, if it isn’t already leading that charge but yeah, that trend of crossing mediums is a huge thing. And a question I ask designers all the time is, what are you inspired by in your work and usually a lot of them are like, I love doing promotional posters or gig posters or this and that; I love book covers. I’m like, it’s all great and no disrespect to that, but have you thought of X, Y and Z? And I don’t know if there’s a fear or the adversity wall that is learning a new medium and things like that, the transition from a print to digital.
Gary
That’s back on design education again because we’re the ones who tell them what to do! So, ultimately that’s us.
Phil
But yeah, I’ll stop talking now and give you guys a chance, but the omni-channel idea of everything is design is a big one.
Neil
Well, it’s interesting that you mention different mediums. In a Context and Process course where they’re introduced to new methods and processes of design, I made them stay off of the computer. They were creating posters for a pedal art show for bike month for the month of May in Des Moines and there were five different mediums they had to work with, so…found paper and found items, they had to use the photocopier to enlarge, to use the different color channels; they had found material that they actually had to mold and bend and create a poster out of; they were on screen for…or they had to take photos of bike parts, put them in the computer and then glitch them to create a poster and then they had to screen print a poster and then the final piece of all that was they had to take a piece of every poster and put it into an animation that was going to be shown at the gallery. So, they just moaned and groaned through the first part…
Phil
Photoshop or Sketch: what am I doing?
Neil
Exactly! Working with my hands…oh my gosh!
Gary
They aren’t even using Sketch!
Phil
That’s another topic: tooling.
Neil
But, going back to RJ’s comment earlier, the iterating and they had to do these really quickly. Every single day the next poster we were starting on and the last one was due, so it was pretty immediate. But it was iterations of the same thing but they had a really, really interesting process. Now, was it conceptual? Maaah…but as they were working through this, concepts started to float up to the surface, yeah. So it was just a different method of working, masked by this, and it was really nice I think last week, one of the students in that course that had graduated said, I loved that project: it prepared me for agency life for all the iterations!
Phil
Amen! Well, I think, and sorry to jump in before, but as you think about…you guys are the platform, the springboard for them to jump into their first hack at a career and I’m sure you talk a lot about growth and where you want to go in defining your vision and what does that mean for you. In an agency world, there’s going to be vertical growth and lateral growth and you can come in as a UI designer and really find out that you enjoy UX but if you’ve not had any chance to exploit those things early on in your career and school, you’re not going to know those things or have any ability to hone that craft, so I love the idea of positioning that growth mechanism for them as they come into the real world to say, I actually can do print, I can do inter-active; I can also do some animation and motion. You become so much more marketable and growable inside of an organization when you have those types of skills.
RJ
Yes, OK, thank you. Well, you asked a question about to your designers, what inspires you the most? Right now, I’ve been obsessed with way-finding signage, digital and otherwise, so Neil’s with me, I’ve been photographing stuff. So that’s what’s inspiring to me, mostly because it’s me having a physical…I can touch these screens, I can touch this signage; I can look at the craft within how it was built, so I’ve been…that’s been resonating with me. And not only that but it’s so public. I love work that’s just in your…not in your face but it’s ever-present. To the point where you kind of forget about it; someone made that twenty years ago and it still holds up. But the omni-channel printing…printed and digital and in sometimes versus, so my students…the way that my program is set up, I have a wide variety of interactive classes I teach, but they’re only required to take two, so generally the upper…cream rises to the top. Those students take the remaining interactive classes and consequently they’re more in line with your agency, for example, because they’re ready for that. But the students that just take the two classes, they’re generally the students that say, I’ve experienced inter-active and that is not something that I want. So they’re only a single channel creator and instead of being ahead of the curve, which is where I try to place them, they purposely set themselves behind the curve, for whatever reason: fear, anxiety, timidity, immaturity. And one of the things that I tell those students is that if you don’t take the upper level interactive classes, that’s fine, but you always have to keep learning and employers, and I don’t know what it’s like here, but…
Phil
It’s core value.
RJ
Well, yes! But one of the things that we’re experiencing, the three of us, is that oh, we have to teach our students how to do everything and they have to be a master of everything and I tell my students, all right, I’m not going to teach you Premier at all. If you want to use it, learn it on your own and good for you for doing that. But if you don’t have the time to learn Premier, at least know what it’s capable of and build that into your strategy because there will always be specific producers of specific content. My students can do front-end web design and they may be beautiful designs but you are not going to let them code it because there are expert coders that do that perfectly, but those students know, this is what I need to do to make those developers happy, so if I understand the full capabilities of what they can do or what this software can do, I can build that into my strategy and then better accommodate that multi-channel marketing.
Gary
So, I just noticed the time, so does anybody have one thing they want to add before I send this all off?
RJ
I would like to thank you, Gary, and your beautiful face for hosting…well, for leading this podcast and all the myriad episodes that you have and Phil, of course, thank you for having us here at Dynamit and hosting and…who bought the pizza? Who…OK, so I should really be thanking Gary but I’m going to thank Phil for that!
Gary
Well, the coffee and the drinks came from Phil…
Phil
I love the dialogue guys, it’s been really energizing to talk to you guys today and share thoughts and hear thoughts from you guys so thanks for the forum to do so.
Neil
Yes, thank you guys for your time. </dl>