Concept design

My favorite movie design moments

Documentary or drama, I’m a sucker for watching people be creative. Here are a few of my favorites:

Drama

Documentary

  • Making The Incredibles (some clips; the DVD has the best stuff) – My all-time favorite. About 90 minutes of in-depth stories and explanation about the process of making the film, with a ton of similarities to great product design. I watch this at least once a year. My notes.
  • The Mystery of Picasso – Picasso painting on an illuminated sheet of glass, so you see the strokes build and change into something completely different than he started with. The paintings at 1:00:00 and 1:04:30 are mind-blowing.
  • Comedian – Jerry Seinfeld tries to follow up his outlandishly-successful sitcom career by getting back on small comedy stages and writing a new standup act. Inspiring to see the courage and introspection that goes into it. My notes.
  • Sketches of Frank Gehry – Gehry’s experimental way of developing buildings combines art and science in a unique way. My notes.
  • A Day in the Life of John Lassetter – Lassetter seems like a wonderful leader (2017 update: not always) and his optimism is infectious. My notes.
  • Art and Copy – I find advertising has a lot of parallels to concept design, and this film collects the thoughts and processes of several different advertising luminaries. My notes.
  • The Pixar Story – The way they build collaboration among roles in a team is unparalleled. My notes.
  • Tough Room – Ok, this is just audio (from NPR) but The Onion’s headline pitch session is amazing. I love how they judge stories by the headlines alone.
  • Six Days to Air – How each South Park episode is made in a week. The forced constraints have created a lot of innovation in process and technologies.
  • Get Back – The extended version of The Beatles’ Let it Be sessions is worth watching in its 9-hour entirety to see how the famous band actually operated. I love how they mostly sound like a bad Beatles cover band, forgetting words and hitting the wrong notes, until you realize they’re coming up with the iconic songs on the fly. My highlight is watching Paul noodle his way to the composition of Get Back over 4 amazing minutes.

Speculative spending

> It’s actually very difficult to spend meaningful amounts of money, relative to Google’s scale, on things that are speculative.

– [Larry Page](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/10/17/larry-page-google-should-be-thinking-even-bigger-with-its-rd/)

One of my favorite Larry moments was when he used to regularly ask the whole company to work on artificial intelligence [and no one would do it](http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/29/magazines/fortune/larry_page_change_the_world.fortune/index2.htm):

> My own experience within Google is that it’s hard to get people to work on those kinds of things because of the personal risk they feel they’re taking…

> I’ve told the whole company repeatedly I want people to work on artificial intelligence – so we end up with five people working on it. Guess what? That’s not a major expense. There’s a reason we talk about 70/20/10, where 70% of our resources are spent in our core business and 10% end up in unrelated projects, like energy or whatever. [The other 20% goes to projects adjacent to the core business.]

> Actually, it’s a struggle to get it to even be 10%.

Proving imagination

> What is now proved was once only imagined. – [William Blake](http://www.blakesociety.org/about-blake/gilchrists-life-of-blake/chapter-x/)

More futures

> With enough minds, all tomorrows are visible – [Jamais Cascio](http://futuryst.blogspot.com/2012/09/design-is-team-sport.html)

Concept design too

> Fiction is the study of the human condition through the medium of interesting lies. – [Charlie Stross](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/05/spoilers.html)

What kind of designer do I need?

I wrote up the following questions to help a friend at work think about his design needs:

* Do you know the core user you’re designing for, and the top 2 or 3 ways your product will improve their lives? Do you think that combination will make a successful product? Could you [design the launch advertisement](http://www.designstaff.org/articles/opinionated-product-design-marketing-first-2012-03-16.html) today? Does everyone on the team agree on these things?
* If not, you need a *product* designer. Lots of explorations around a variety of opportunities & a process to decide on them. At the end you’ll have decisions on your target user, key benefits, and “unique selling points”.
* Do you know how those features will work: how they will be accessed and controlled, in what order, how they fit together, and how someone interacts with it?
* If not, you need an *interaction* designer, someone who can design a system that works elegantly and flexibly. You’ll get things like wireframes, interactive prototypes, flow diagrams, and page layouts.
* Do you know exactly how the product should look, all the way down to fonts, colors, and animations? Do you have pixel specifications for all these things?
* If not, you need a *visual* (or *industrial*) designer, possibly with motion graphics or video experience. You’ll get pixel-perfect specifications and design assets that are ready for production.
* And if you don’t have any of these things, you’ll need all of these people. They build on each other, but I’d start at the beginning with the product designer, who will understand the rest of the process. It’s very rare that one person will do all these things at a high level, however.

See also: [What I talk about when I talk about design](http://bob.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=4367)

How fairy tales help us think

>”Once upon a time.” Four words. I don’t need to say anything more, and yet you know at once what it is you’re about to hear. You may not know the precise contents. You may not recognize the specific characters. You may have little notion of the exact action that is about to unfold. But you are ready all the same to take on all of these unknowns, the uncertainties, the ambiguities. You are ready to succumb to the world of the story…

> First, there is that semblance of distance. We are not in the now, but rather in some place in the removed past…

> Distance is a psychologically powerful tool. It can allow us to process things that we would otherwise be unable to deal with—and I mean this in both a literal and a more metaphorical, emotional sense—and it frees up our mind in a way that immediacy does not.

> Second, there is the vagueness, the deliberate lack of specificity…that which scares us in real life—the lack of definitions, rules, clearly defined borders and boundaries—is not only unscary but entirely welcomed in the fairytale…I can indulge in abstraction and play, engage my curiosity and foster my creativity, and remain the whole time protected by that vague veneer of “once”.

[An insightful article and nice tribute to Maurice Sendak](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/2012/05/08/the-power-of-once-upon-a-time-a-story-to-tame-the-wild-things/).

Doing what no one else will

> While I could assign most good ideas, every once in a while I’d get a great idea that I simply could not sell…It took me several times to realize that this was a signal. It said, “This is the one you have to do”…

> What I had been inadvertently doing was weeding out good ideas that I could do (but others could do as well) from those few great ideas that only I could do…Work at its smartest means doing that work that no one else could do. – [Kevin Kelly](http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/09/what_you_dont_h.php)

I’ve noticed this recently…no one else understands your truly unique ideas, you have to lead them yourself.

Doubt and certainty

> Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. – [Voltaire](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire)

Quick thoughts from “Make it So”

Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel presented a talk about learning from science fiction interfaces. A couple insights:

* Visual concepts are incredibly powerful at setting expectations for products
* But they don’t even need to be visual to have an impact: audio and behavioral examples can similarly shift expectations. For instance, R2D2 only beeps and buzzes, and he’s an incredibly emotional and likable character.
* The fidelity of your representation (especially how human-like it is) should be appropriate to the level of technology you have. Don’t show a realistic person if you can’t back it up with technology.
* Pay attention to what bothers and impresses you while producing the concept–chances are those same constraints and opportunities would apply to the final product. For instance, while filming Minority Report, Tom Cruise had to take lots of breaks because his arms got tired operating the gestural interface.