Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product. In addition, focus groups seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences in using existing products and brands.

Hacking for Social Change

Hacking For Change

Calling all developers, creatives & artists:

You are invited to the first annual Rapp Hack-a-thon, an ideation lab where creatives of all walks come together to build the next big idea that could change the world.

Details

February 13th – 10AM TO 10PM
Hosted @ RAPP
437 Madison Ave, 3rd Floor

Register by email: rappathon@rapp.com

Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product in the context of an Agile development process. In addition, research seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers user products in their particular context and feed those findings immediately into the scrum’s decision-making and development process.

User Research takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable, locally specific as well as intersubjectively reflexive. In AgileUX Product design, contextual inquiry and other methods of user research asserts that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, so that AgileUX Teams are always making product design decisions on actual customer feedback and behavior, and not opinion or instinct.

As a Lead UX Designer here you will lead efforts to create, concept and design new ways for our community of jobseekers and recruiters to interact in meaningful and engaging ways.

We work quickly, nimbly, and collaboratively. We are an AgileUX team, which means that you will not be designing high fidelity deliverables. You thrive concepting with a team, using sketches and wireframes as conversation starters to explore possible solutions. You must bring your top-notch interaction design, information architecture, and user research skills as well your opinion. Most importantly, bring your passion.

The Skinny:

• Develop a deep, empathetic understanding of our customers
• Create iterative, lightweight prototypes to concept solutions
• Lead cross-functional teams to solve business problems
• Design elegant, efficient and sophisticated solutions
• Prototype, Usability Test, and then Prototype some more (we do testing weekly)
• Be able to defend your design decisions with well-structured arguments
• Thrive in an environment of constant change

The Specs:

• 10+ years experience as an information architect, interaction designer, and user experience designer
• Thorough understanding of design principles
• No fear of speaking with customers (we do that a lot)
• Usability testing – you’ve done it, you love it, you want more of it
• Love of data. We have tons of it. Use it wisely.
• Proof (we’ll ask you to demo it) of taking an idea from concept to implementation.
• Be able to speak to your work clearly and succinctly (we value brevity)

**Note: This is not a graphic design role nor a front-end coding role but should you bring those skills along with solid IA/IxD chops, that’s just more of you to love.**

In Marx’s critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things (commodities and money).

In the work of the semiotician Baudrillard, commodity fetishism is used to explain subjective feelings towards consumer goods in the “realm of circulation”, that is, among consumers. Baudrillard was especially interested in the cultural mystique added to objects by advertising, which encourages consumers to purchase them as aids to the construction of their personal identity. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), Baudrillard develops his notion of the sign that, like Debord’s notion of spectacle, aims to elaborate on Marx’s theory.

The Future Fossils by Bughouse series imagines what kind of artifacts future civilizations will come across when exploring their past and our present. It is comprised of ‘fossilized’ technology such as an Atari joystick, Polaroid camera, Rollieflex, Nikon SLR and Technics turntable. Interestingly enough, the Future Fossils series doesn’t just focus on the 21st century, but simply the age of technology in general which has, perhaps more than any other, been the age of commodity fetishism.

Find more at Bughouse 

Good designers must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times. They should, and must, question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes. For the reality in which they live, for their dreams, their desires, their worries, their needs, their living habits. They must also be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology. – Dieter Rams

Neither Retrospective, Nor Predictive
Finishing out the year, I thought it would be worthwhile to re-visit a designer whose visionary approach in design I hope will never goes of out style: German industrial designer Dieter Rams. While some may write predictions for 2012, an endeavor most certainly useless after having read “Fooled by Randomness,” I am convinced the author of said predictions is stuck hopeless between writing something so vague and obvious as to be completely useless (i.e. just about any of the hyperventilating cyber-circle-jerking social media predictions for 2012); else meaningful, measurable, and specific, in which case almost certainly to be proven a fucktard.

Given this Scylla and Charybdis choice, I decided to simply write about the principles of design, the design of objects as sign systems, and the projection of identity into these sign-vehicles.

A Concern
Back in the early 1980s, just after the United States elected a B-movie actor to the most powerful position in the world, preparing to flex American military testicular fortitude in Operation Urgent Fury, designer Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.”

Packaged Meaning
If we consider that all objects are “packaged” to deliver certain meanings – what might one say about the semantics of well designed things? Further, if I imagine, as we head into the new year, with the hope of new objects released into our culture, what role does the desire for our fetishized objects act to package and perform our identity in public? Does desire package meaning?When we dress, we package ourselves, our bodies adorned in a grammar of social signals. Every thing and object has a skin through which it speaks. We live in a world, and there are objects in this world. We have intimate feelings about and for these objects — we project into them, and communicate through them. I think there is a ritual relationship to these objects that occurs on a daily basis.

A Semiotic Dance
In primitive societies, objects may be found on the ground, literally, strewn about the place as in a “natural” state. But in our advanced hyperreal branded simulacra of society, objects are found on iPhones, on tables, on electronic billboards in Times Square. These surfaces are vehicles of presentation; they are objects, they have functions, but they also have skins, histories, narrative performances. . . objects then become a partner in a semiotic dance of self-reflexive co-creation.

“To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. – Walter Pater

Designing Self
Something happens when you choose to project yourself into the creation of an object. It becomes a canvas of idealized self. Aware that Rams was a significant contributor to the world of designed objects, he asked himself, “are my objects manifesting good design? What is good design?” To which I add, “what is the meaning of the objects that I design, and is it projecting something positive into the zeitgeist?” As good design cannot be measured in a finite way Rams set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.) Here are his 10 principles of good design which have been written about all over the interwebs, but worth repeating, which can apply to the design of objects, interfaces, products and services, but also the design of ourselves in the New Year.

Dieter Rams 10 Principles of Good Design. 

Good design is innovative
The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Good design makes a product useful
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological, sexual, and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it’s core beingness.

Good design is beautiful

The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our selfhood and our well-being. But only well-executed things can be beautiful. Ideas and ideals never executed can never be beautiful.

Good design makes a product understandable
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product engage in conversation. At best, it is self-explanatory. In HCI we call this affordance. Tautologically speaking, it is what says it is.

Good design is unobtrusive
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression. An object should allow a person to project themselves into and through the product.

Good design is honest
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept. It never promises magic, or a bigger penis, or a happier life.

Good design is timeless
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway, designed for obsolescence, society of the spectacle.

Happy New Year.

AgileUX NYC 2012 is a single day, single track conference about designing great user experiences within an agile development process. It will be held in New York City on a Saturday in February.

Overview

This conference is about how great experiences are designed and created within the structure of an agile development process.

This conference is for stakeholders, product managers and user experience designers passionate about building products that delight their customers, whether you work for a lean startup or a large organization. The day will focus on bringing thought leaders in the AgileUX community to cover the entire lifecycle of software development including organization and cultural change, team building, process design, customer research, design studio and transparent design, user story writing, pattern libraries and mid-stream rapid cadence usability testing. Attendees will walk away with a strong understanding of the complete lifecycle and practical methods they can use immediately.

The Program

The conference will consist of 8 x 35 minute sessions, and 5 x 8 minute talks. There will be approximately 45 minutes reserved for lunch with 2 15 minute breaks.

Speakers will be announced over the next 4 weeks.

Sign up here to get the latest information first.

You can also follow on twitter.

Gidi Vigo‘s transmogrification of Superheros into Pantone Colors: A correlation is evident between the recent swift development of science, technology, and economics, with its contribution to the formation of new social attitudes, and the dynamics of the rapid development worldwide of minimalist representation – perhaps as environment becomes increasingly saturated with sponsored corporate messages mainlining hyperreality with volume pumped up and images racing past as if life itself is stop-motion – it has become increasingly necessary to view minimalist (and post-minimalist) art through a semiotic lens of signs and sign systems seeking amplification through simplification.

One reason why people gravitate towards superhero imagery is because of its dynamic visuals, but Gidi Vigo turns that notion on its head with these ultra minimalist representations of crime fighters.

Relegating popular Marvel Comics and DC Comics characters to only colored swatches, Gidi Vigo really tests viewers’ fandom as they should be able to identify each hero simply based on the different hues of red, green and blue alone. Vigo doesn’t make the task impossible though as he also denotes who each poster symbolizes, as well as the RGB code to replicate each piece.

This isn’t Gidi Vigo’s first foray into making minimalist superhero posters, but it is certainly his most extreme attempt at removing unnecessary identifiable features from each costumed vigilante.

I eliminate as much as I can to express the beauty of the human spirit. Due to this, I often use metallic colours, in an attempt to bring the spectator to meditate through colour, materials, reflection, and silence.

What we cannot speak of, in the sense of being unable, rather than disinclined or forbidden, to do so, we have to pass over in silence, not so much because we ‘must’ as because we can’t help it.

Born in Florence, Italy in 1961, abstract painter Luca Brandi has produced a wonderful collection dating from 2001-2011.

Inspired from a very early age whilst working in various churches in the city of Florence, Brandi studied under Paolo Galletti, who taught the theories on the separation of geometric form through painting and colour. After studying the works of Richard Serra, Brice Marden and Frank Stella, Brandi discovered a passion for minimalist art. He then began working on new works based on the layering of metallic colours that are still the basis of his work today.

Branding, Semiotics, Objects

One problem for a  designer is the nature of design itself. To design is to “show thy own true self” – to explore and then make manifest myself in some way that which an audience can then view and judge to solve a particular problem. First, many designers are too busy solving problems for their customers. Another is to design their own brand is to be left open to judgement. Is this not the reason most designers have such a poor website? Piece of shit business card? Does the cobbler’s children really have no shoes, or is the cobbler a charlatan.

I am reminded of an old friend Todd Zaki Warfel, having this discussion some years ago. Some choose not to engage in this discussion, but others, when forced, simply say – here we are – here is our work, here is how we did it, and this is it – please judge me. This is how Todd and I have always felt. We prefer to do things from scratch. It may be tough, it may suck – but we’ll do this from scratch and we’ll share it all –  It’s an honest approach harking back to the Scottish Empiricists of the 17th century.

I want to discuss this, as well as the meaning of business cards, but first, to lay bare what I am talking about, I took as a case study my own recent experience designing my personal business cards. Here they are so that I don’t build them up too much before we discuss the philosophy or semiotics of them too soon,

Business card technical details:

Size: 3 x 2.25
Paper: 260# Pegasus Duplex Cover, Midnight Black Vellum
Side A: Foil Stamp Black + Foil Stamp white
Side B: Foil Stamp Black
Finishing: Duplex + Cut

The cards are custom mounted stock which means that it technically doesn’t exist. It’s 2 pieces of paper which is letterpress printed on the outer 2 layers and then glued together. They are then die cut to the right dimension and inserted into the custom folder that was designed for them.

Sleeve technical details:

Size: 3.625 x 5.5 folding to 3.125″ x 2.375″
Paper: 80# Pegasus Cover, Midnight Black Vellum
Side A: Foil Stamp Black
Finishing: Make Die + Diecut + Fold + Glue

I think that “Brand” is a complex media object, its very definition is a contested metapragmatic domain between interested popular discourses and varied professional discourses of designers, lawyers, marketers, consumers and activists.  Furthermore, as a privileged semiotic object, the semiotic categories of brand are frequently extended not only to a whole new range of services, quasi-commodities and objects that are not in themselves economic objects (including experiences, places, countries, even recent discussions of ‘anthropology’ itself as a brand), so that the semiotic language of brand has undergone a curious form of genericide in which brand is often coextensive with semiosis as such.  As a result of these tendencies, brands are typically represented as being in their very essence a kind of deterritorialized, immaterial form of mediation, a kind of globalized intertextuality, a semiotic image of the global capitalist economy itself , very far from the materiality of messages on bottles in which they are often encountered on a token level.

Discussions of a category of ‘brand’ or ‘branding’ in anthropology inherit many of the tendencies of popular and professional discourses on the subject.  In anthropology, for example, following much popular discourse, discussion of brand is almost always made identical with the discussion of the culture of circulation that brands indirectly index, hence, brand is almost synonymous with globalization, and therefore, most attention is given to specific highly salient brands engaged in cultural hegemony – killing off indigenous objects, media, and signifiers of consumption in favor of those imposed through free-trade deals and western military power. I care less about brand as global imperialist imperative and more of brand as inter-subjective co-created cultural fetish-object.

Do these cards themselves stack up, so to speak, according to that? How are they a media-fetish object? An interesting note on object fetishism comes from a friend, Thomas Wendt, writing in an article “Inspiration Fetishism,”

“Fetishism” is a Portuguese, Latin, and Spanish hybrid related to art, the act of making something, sorcery, and artificiality. It has only recently become related to sexual objects and things that are thought to hold a power for which there is no basis. That power, for example, can be religious (a crucifix), sexual (leather), or otherwise. For Karl Marx, commodities are the universal fetish; for Sigmund Freud, they represent adisplacement of libido. Either way, it relates to a perceived necessity without which one cannot perform a certain function.

In some cases, particularly recent discussions of virtual environments, it can much more directly be argued that the line between producer and consumer is truly blurred (Coombe et al.) such that brand as fetish-object is co-created between designer and consumer and that which is signified by the card itself – even if it person, becomes commodified, at least if what Marx says holds true. To borrow from Jerry McGuire – you no longer complete me – you commodify me.

Importantly however, the intertexts of brand that occur as it is appropriated and redeployed by consumers, sometimes helping define the brand or lending it their own labor of consumption, is not legally recognized in property law and is subject to unilateral restriction.   This area of brand has become a dominant theme in recent literature, linked to often uncritical appropriation of the professional discourses, definitions and claims of marketing professionals into anthropological discussions, a reflexive move aided by the frequently porous professional boundaries between the two discourses (Callon et al. 2000).  Here, again, just as producer or designer is treated as a Goffmanian ‘figure’, so too the consumer.  Here, as well, we can see shifts from the interpellation of the consumer qua consumer to interpellation of the consumer as citizen, among other modalities, thus conflating different social imaginaries (for example Berdahl 1999, Bach 2002, Jain 2007,Özkan and Foster 2005), or as having certain specific desirable social properties that are associated with the prototypical consumer, for example ‘cool’, ‘cute’ (Allison 2000, 2004, Iwabuchi 2002, 2004), or even secular ‘culturedness’ (Gronow 2003, Kelly and Volkov 1998) or religious piety (Jain 2007). So what then, is the meaning of brand as it relates to business cards? Or of these particular business cards?

As brand objects attract more properties of subjects, whether of producers or of consumers, we come squarely into the vexed category of the brand as a fetish (especially when we talk about these business cards), or at least, certain aspects of that notoriously polysemous entity, specifically those having to do with the conflation of categories of subject and object. Do these cards represent nothing more then themselves? Have the been elevated to the level of fetish-object that they no longer signify me, but only themselves?

It is at this point, too, that analysts turn from Marx to Mauss, often finding in brand a kind of curious image of the Maussian ‘total social fact’.  So the question remains – what is the meaning of this brand-image? What things have been conveyed with the sign-image of these cards? Are these cards nothing more than festish-images? I don’t know.

I do know is that, as a designer, I have finally designed cards that I feel comfortable with.

Much thanks to the great people at Publicide who say my designs, didn’t faint, and worked diligently to make them to specification while allowing me to stop in regularly to check on the progress. If you need high-end letterpress printers, let me know and I will connect you with them

Special thanks to Todd Hoza who did photography for this cards.