It should be noted that I don’t condone violence or weapons, but I do really appreciate the design of them.

I watch the two videos and love both of them in their own right. Projectile weapons, as terrible as they are to the health of living things, tend to have a really cool design outcome. It’s raw functionality. I can’t really say they’re precision things, because there are many examples like the AK-47 whose famous reliability is based entirely on working with sloppy tolerances, but there is something inherently precise about the design of weaponry. It’s rarely arbitrary; the outcome design is based on examples and data. The aesthetic is the realm of the neo-classical mind and is appreciated for it’s reasons and purpose, not it’s overlaying being. It’s gorgeous. Like the tiny gears and ticks inside a watch.

Part two is the difference between them: one is made in a factory or machine shop and each will come out 99.999% identical to the others. The other is made from a plant that is found and chosen by a man and then crafted into something by him, by hand (or foot, as it may be) and will be very different from the one beside it in form, but ideally identical in function. This, I feel, is an important distinction.

You can tell, for those who have already read the book, that I’ve been looking at the world though these lenses (or divisions of Phaedrus’ knife, as his metaphor would suggest) lately. It’s not a new concept to me, certainly, but it’s nice to look through someone else’s eyes for a while; see the world anew.

I’ve learned something about myself recently: I’m much more artisan than I thought. Originally – and realize this is untrue – I equated artisans solely with hand spun clay pots and woven wicker baskets. The people who sell laptop bags on Etsy made of sewn together scraps of old mens’ tweed jackets. The essays with reference to Yanagi Soetsu in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams (towards the back half, pages ~716 if I remember correctly – forgive me as I don’t want to look it up) feature his philosophy as a counter-point to Rams’ (representative here as all of industrial design) way of design for not only specific objects, but how those objects relate in context to the mass production and usage in culture. His point, from the perspective of craftsmanship, looks at objects in an uncannily similar way to the mass produced method: a means to achieving a goal. If the industrialist and the artisan both make a thing it should look to first achieve it’s intended task. Makes sense. This is where my misguided preconceptions come in again; I thought they inherently had to differ after they agreed on that. The industrialists to the neo-classical function and the artisans to the romanticist to the aesthetic. But! As I’ve recently discovered, not true. Not quite.

Aesthetics, of course, are a tricky thing to nail down. They’re different for everyone. I equated function with minimalism and practicality and ruggedness and the things that I personally appreciate and like. I was an industrialist, then. That’s what they do. The things that are frilly and useless and mass produced are just misguided. The artisans who made minimal things were rare and the minimalism was probably a result of skill lacking rather than intentional functionalism. They’re supposed to make what I deem gaudy. The ornamented and decorated. The bright and flashy and visually loud. They’re artisans, which I say (and, I apologize, still do) with a certain pretentious derision.

So aesthetics aren’t a function of romanticism but rather outside of those classifications, like a heading under the two forming a four box chart.

You’ll laugh, but these past few months have led to a lot of personal discoveries that are so obvious. I’ve shared a few others previously. How did I miss them? I’m not sure. But I guess that’s the point of being young and curious. I’ve come out of it with an even more apathetic spirit, though. Before there was a conviction for “right” and “wrong” where my personal standings were concerned, and while I still vehemently defend things, they are broader ideas instead of specific (and often meaningless) examples. Namely the ‘problem’ or ornamentation. I hate it and that’s okay, but I might design something that’s ornamental because I know you like it. I wonder though where the line is drawn between selfless and spineless, but that’s a question for another article.

If aesthetics are independent that implies I can be a minimalist artisan. I still dislike that word. Sorry. But I like the design philosophy of wabi-sabi so much. I’m not saying it can’t be incorporated into mass manufactured things because the design definitely can use elements of it, but there’s something inherently at odds when having objects being made identically imperfect. The idea of the imperfection is the beauty of it’s uniqueness.

Uniqueness. Each of those Yumi bows is unique, but they all provide the same function – accelerate an arrow using a string and the materials’ natural properties. Each of those crossbows has the exact same function and as a result of mass manufacture has the exact same form. There’s something beautiful in both, though, don’t you think? Something romantic in buying a hand-made bow (or a hand machined gun) but also that there’s a machine somewhere in the world that makes the same piece over and over again at a speed that would stagger the mind and that piece gets assembled perfectly into that spot on every single product. It’s just, beautiful to think about for me. That’s my fear though; I think hand made things resonate with people better in general. It takes a very functional mind like mine to appreciate a factory.

Now, am I giving up my industrialist tendencies for a life behind a potter’s wheel? Certainly not. But I do wonder where that broad, overarching line is. I have such a passion for the method and craft itself that the outcome seems almost secondary – whereas a true blood would set up a factory without a second thought and have the focus be entirely on the output product.

I’ll be coming back to this topic; I have other examples and explorations.

TL;DR Aesthetics are independent of design philosophy divisions and form and function are independent yet again of both each other and the previous classifications, creating unique possibilities I hadn’t considered before.

Warning: contains math, graphs and statistical figures.

So. Are the wealthy actually happier than the bohemians? I could point to any number of studies but the long and the short of it is no, not really.

But I have another theory that goes back to the cause and effect of things.

In the past, let’s say the last 100 or so years, we’ve had a lot happen; we’ve had markets crash and boom, wars fought and depressions hit. We’ve gotten to here, the internet age, and things are different now than they used to be. Entertainment is different. We still have wealth gaps which although shifted haven’t really changed in the grand sense – there are still poor and there are still wealthy. “The lack of money is the root of all evil.” and so on. But wealth meant something different then, and this makes up my theory.

Using ultra basic variables I’m going to assert that wealth, for the most part, in the past, would allow for more entertainment. Not only did you have more time on your hands, but you could also afford to buy lavish dresses and fancy cars. Remember, this was an age where the average, boring car could cost 8x (v. yearly salary) what they do today. We’ve got it pretty good now, relatively speaking.

Entertainment too has shifted. I can buy games for $5 and get 50+ hours of enjoyment from them. I’m making a bold and completely unfounded guess here when I say that’s probably the most amount of entertainment per dollar you could get, ever. A bit of math proves that if these numbers are to be trusted you could get roughly two movie tickets for the price of our $5s (relative to average wage again, which I’ll be using for buying power). Now, that isn’t terrible – nearly 4x cheaper than 2 movie tickets’ worth today – but still, the evolution of these things has shifted such that it’s much, much cheaper now to be entertained. Does that make you happier? Debatable. But I’m willing to bet it’s not hurting.

Piracy. I won’t go into the moral, ethical or legal issues but suffice to say, if you really wanted to, you could be infinitely entertained for the price of your internet service which is a) something you’re probably paying for anyway, even if you bought all your movies, music, books and games and b) decently cheap. It’s worth about 46 couple’s movie tickets, if we’re holding on to those numbers. Now, this seems expensive, but that means they’re getting 2 people x seven reels (~70 minutes) per week for 46 weeks. That’s 26.8 hours per person for the same buying power. Back to us: a firehose. Like, you’re literally limited by sleep deprivation when doing these calculations. There are enough movies, enough music, enough books and enough games out there to fill that entire year’s worth of time. It is, for intents and purposes, unlimited entertainment. Even if you ignore piracy and go legit, Netflix is $8 a month. Plus your internet connection, plus your computer or whatever you’re playing it on, plus the biggest screen money can buy you’re still laughing. There’s just no comparison.

The big difference is that no matter who you are, if you can afford that internet and have something to watch it on, you’re the exact same as the wealthy people. There’s no gap there. They would pirate the exact same things you would pirate. Their entertainment – at least, in this digital facet of life – is exactly the same as yours. Back in the day the poor looked at the wealthy enviously because (in part) they could afford more entertainment, but if it truly is as infinite as I make it out to be, that’s rubbish now. It’s the same.

So what does this all mean? Surely I have a point.

Well. Not really.

TL;DR I had a theory that entertainment is much cheaper now than it used to be (and so it is) and how wealth as a measurement of happiness via entertainment is therefor much less of a thing now. The internet breaks down at least one part of the disparity gap.

Algebraic!

Oh, and I regrettably don’t have sources for the above car photos because Tumblr is remarkably bad at keep track of those sorts of things. My bad.

I find myself at two points simultaneously and as much as I don’t want to bring personal life into this column I feel like it’s an important topic for the inspiration of all: beginnings.

The two points are at odds with each other. The first, a cliff soaring over the sea, with salt and spray and rocks at the bottom. I stand at the top, looking down. The second quite opposite: sitting securely in a rollercoaster cart at the base of a hill, ready to be pulled up by the chain lift. These things both are my upcoming graduation. I’m excited, to say the least.

And so I watch the above and I try to absorb the wisdom of those who have gone before me and I try to keep an even mix of those who succeed and those who fail, which often become the same person over time. Ze Frank, as I’m sure we’re all familiar, is a fantastic example of both of these; perhaps one of the first viral sensations.

There’s a subtext in that video that I really like, and it reminds me of Ira Glass’ writings on the similar subject: a call to make mass, mass bodies of work. Whatever you want. Who cares? And this is where obscurity actually works in your favor because you can put crap out there and learn from it and not fail in front of (too) many people (something that I, though minor in my celebrity as I am, fear personally). And I think we as designers get pigeonholed into genres that we feel trapped in. I think Ira and Ze (and, for that matter, Jobs and Rams and Eames etc.) were successful simply because they did whatever they felt like. Typography here, toy design there, maybe some bottles for a craft brewhouse, radio plays, interviews, dancing videos. I mean, the diversity of Ze’s work by itself is bizarre and remarkable. Having never met him, obviously, I can’t really testify, but he seems like the kind of guy who a) often finds something around him that trips his fancy and b) actually does it. I am, at the moment, trapped in the first part. I’m constantly amazed and inspired and in love with the world itself but I get distracted and forget to ship, which is the key part to the whole learning-by-doing/failing – you actually have to do things. I know. Shocker.

So. An invocation for beginnings. “Fuck, let’s do this.” as he says, to be blunt. Throwing caution to the wind (which, let’s be honest, is anything you design actually going to be that dangerous to make?) and just getting things done. Seeing all those inspiring things and actually doing them. Walking Dead isn’t that good anymore anyway, you don’t need to sit around and waste your time on that.

As for me: I don’t even mind the cliff I’m looking over. I think I know deep down inside that I can swim and the fall in between, well, is an Olympic dive really any different from a fool’s flailing? Nah. It’s a good show either way.

I don’t have any ad-related photos, so, uh, here’s something completely different.

This shouldn’t turn into a rant, but I warn you now, it could go off on tangents.

Today I was walking home from class and thinking about the advertising around. I thought back to Banksy’s brilliant sentiments regarding billboards and immediately my designer mind went down the path of how to make them better. “I know!” I thought “Why don’t we make them so they recognize you and show you things that’s you’d like.” and then I thought “Wait. That’s ridiculous. That’s what Google does already and everyone’s against it.”

But then, why?

Like, truly, erase everything you know about ads and think about this hypothetical: You’re browsing around these websites. Your Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit or whatever, your news sites and TV shows and billboards on the side of the road, they all have this box of content. What if all of that content was the best thing you could think of – not ads, but whatever you wanted. What would that look like? My initial response, personally, would for them to just be flat colours. A few white, maybe a couple 80% grey, some bright orange or green or that teal-ish blue that I love so much. So, that’d be cool. But maybe… boring? What if they could show me cool things. What if – and remember, not ads – they were just like, cool cars and adorable kittens and bits of my favorite movies. Pretty neat. Okay. But I’ve already seen those things, old hat. What if they could take all those things I love and then show me new things. That’s pretty much what I’m doing when I spend hours just cruising around looking for new things anyway. Like, what if those billboards were showing the next thing on my RSS reader, so it integrates into my lifestyle instead of purposefully sitting down to read it. For one thing, I’d crash my car into everything trying to read them, but that’s the idea – it’d be so compelling.

Okay. But what if those cool, compelling articles and things were products (really, it would be hard not to be) that you could buy.

“But Brennan, wait!” you cry out “Those would be… ads” you say, with mock horror. Exactly.

What if the ads around you were so attuned to you, so compelling and so cool that you would actually – heaven forbid – be interested in them. Crazy talk, I know.

And that’s why I’m in full support of intense targeted advertising. I want them to know what I like so they can serve me. Banksy says they own you and that’s true, but that’s spam – things that don’t apply to you. Do I as a male ever need to see lady deodorant ads? No. That’s the spam that clutters up my field of view. Would I be the poorest person in the world if every ad was a product from The Black Workshop? Yeah. I’d be tripping over myself to give them my money, because it’s exactly what I want.

So don’t say it with such disdain. The alternative is them advertising to the mass and general appeal which rarely relates to you. I’d much rather be excited and interested in the things presented.

I mean, it’s not like they’re just going to stop advertising randomly, right?

A tweet the other day from @eris reads:

I’d pick a villain as my project manager any day. Heroes are too reactionary. Villains can scope a Death Star and ship it. Twice.

It may be playful, but it’s entirely true. Good designers ship. Ideas are worth very little; execution is everything. These are mottos repeated endlessly by the startup industry and contribute to the very small rudder steering the very large ship slowly but surely. These are things worth listening to.

I wouldn’t even call the market equivalent ‘heroes’ – they are the lazy and unimaginative, the safe and the apathetic. They see a trend years past it’s prime and try to bank on it. That’s not really helpful to the people to whom the trend applies because they are exactly the demographic who has already ridden over that wave. Is your business plan to cater to late adopters? Not in writing, but all too often happens in practice. Being small is especially wonderful to take advantage of that agility and human nature; you’re allowed to make moves that the slow and ugly simply cannot make. These are the hard decisions and what used to be niche markets becoming larger and larger every day. These are the people you should be selling to: those who used to be bleeding edge but are now broadening into the general 10-40% of everymen. The people who follow these trends because it’s deeply ingrained to who they are in the marketplace but don’t feel pressed to buy the obscure things just for some marginal difference. They’re smart enough to realize a good, innovative idea and they’re a generally willing to take the gambles that the older types won’t. They’ll be your smoke when your product is on fire. You need that word of mouth to drive your small, agile company and they’re happy to provide it given they feel at home and believe in your product. There’s a transparency about companies like yours that they can appreciate and get behind. Personable.

So if the ‘heroes’ are the Walmarts out there villainy looks pretty appealing. You get to play by your own rules and do things however you want which usually means efficient and cunning. You survive by innovating circles around them and have schemes and plans for everything you see. You watch people and cater to what they want instead of waiting around for trouble to happen and trying to give them what they already have. That’s what heroes do. They react. They don’t sit in lairs inventing life rays. They wait until the villain invents a death ray and then stops it. If we put aside the metaphor for a moment, that isn’t actually helping anybody. Sit in your lair and make an awesome ray.

One more thing: villains don’t sit around reading blogs. They’re busy taking over the world. What are you busy doing?

We walk out of the theater into the crisp night and laugh, “That movie was ridiculous” and proceed to point out plot flaws and the bizarre events that occurred. But there’s a distinction, I’ve realized, between realism and reasonableness.

We use the word realistic to mean both and it’s not quite accurate: suspension of disbelief is actually really easy and we don’t mind much at all that there’s aliens or zombies or people with super powers roaming about. That’s fine, it’s a movie made to be fictional and larger than life; we don’t dislike that. The parts that we really mean when we say ‘unrealistic’ is that the characters didn’t do the reasonable thing given their situation.

Transformers was decent (certainly better than it’s sequels) and while we’re entirely happy to suspend disbelief for giant alien robots than choose to take the forms of American earth cars we get really upset (if subconscious) in the part where the awesome giant robot gives the AllSpark cube to the relatively weak and flimsy human to run through the battlezone with. These sorts of plot decisions are made to sensationalize the movie but it actually resonates the opposite with us as viewers because it isn’t a reasonable action for characters in that situation.

So it’s not about how real the situation could be, it’s how reasonable the characters act within it.

We have a lot of classics in the action movie category like Terminator, Predator, Rambo and Robocop that are actually very reasonable movies because of the perhaps flat acting and very static characterizations. Are they ridiculous? Yeah, sure. But the characters (namely those played by Ahnold) behave in a predictable manner. He’s a robot sent back in time to protect understandably afraid and confused humans. This is a dynamic that feels right when played out. It isn’t realistic (time travel, robot singularity etc. etc.) but the interactions between the flat, unfeeling robot and the weak and dazed humans makes sense if we as the audience were put in the place of those actors. Compare this back to Transformers where if the robot gave us the AllSpark we’d look at him like he’s crazy: “Uh… why? You’ve got guns for arms and a 10 meter stride. You take it.”

The recent rash of Marvel movies are played out in the same way: Wolverine is actually a much better character than Magneto was in First Class – one knows what he wants and does it. It’s reasonable. It’s slightly unfair to compare static and dynamic characters like that, but the way Magneto acts when confronted with things doesn’t really make sense and we lose that connection to him since we silently deplore his actions. It’s like those horror movies where the girl is in the house and we know the killer is upstairs and instead of getting the heck away she decides to explore in the dark alone and weaponless and we sit there thinking “NO! What are you doing?! Don’t go up there. Go to the police! Get away!” This is done intentionally, of course, for that tension, but it shouldn’t be happening with the character’s we’re supposed to identify with.

Even insanity can be reasonable. We look at movies like Memento and characters like Dark Knight’s Joker or Inception’s Cobb (notice: all Nolan films) and we can actually develop a fairly deep bond with characters who although don’t represent us do the actions we would do if put in that situation. Now, are we insane? No. And it’s not really fair to put ourselves in Joker’s shoes since he is actually crazy, but his actions are reasonable given that characterization. In Memento he’s just trying to figure things out like any of us would. Inception is interesting because every character except for Cobb is static and serving him, so in a way each of them is a splinter of his personality (after all, it is his dream) and combines to create one unit who we can identify with. The actions of the insane might be unstable and unpredictable but still remain reasonable to us.

So, in the blue corner we have things like Mad Men or Memento – entirely earthly, normal, real environment with people acting reasonably within them. The yellow might be the Terminators and Predators or Shaun of the Dead type where there is some element of fiction to the world but the overall reactions to things makes sense to us. Green: any number of dramas and soaps or the serial killer movie (where the killer is just a normal – if deranged – human) where the characters do things that don’t make any sense given their environment and situation. I might even put Drive on the line between blue and green; it was realistic and worked but some of his actions made no sense to me. Red could be most things that are in theaters these days: The G.I Joes and Transformer 3s. The Fast and the Furious series started in the yellow and has moved down over time. These are the movies where even if we can suspend disbelief for the unrealistic aspects the people who inhabit the world don’t seem to follow any logic for their actions and so alienate us as an audience.

I’m entirely happy watching the yellow category – often those are the best – taking some fantastic fictional realm and providing a good adventure within them. It’s not that I’m a stickler for “Oh, well that would never work in real life” because those things are the cool part. Neo can fight an entire mob of Smith agents? Sure, he’s the one. His reasons for fighting them make enough sense that we don’t even mind the sheer ridiculousness of the fight scene itself. That’s the entertainment.

TL;DR  It’s not about realism, it’s about having a character that does what makes sense instead what would raise the stakes purely for the sake of arbitrary sensationalism.

That’s us, that man standing there, onlooking Hollywood.

The quote that best describes this comes from a recent article by Marco Arment:

The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.

Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.

Those of us who use Netflix or Apple TV forget how truly annoying physical disk movies are to try and get to work on anything but sanctioned players – and even then filled with unskippable threats.

But I wonder what is to come of the entire thing. Bigger than Hollywood, bigger than the games industry, bigger than the MPAA and everyone, what will our entertainment be in the next ten years? 20? 100?

It’s sort of an unusual situation we find ourselves in. The Roman gladiator games lasted roughly 135 years and only really ended when the particularly vile leaders had died and the newer generations looked at the entire sport with confusion and unease, yet we see entertainment mediums such as radio come and go entirely because new technology (television) claimed it’s overtaking. But here we are in an age where movies on the whole are not very good and the industry blames piracy instead of truly looking at why people aren’t buying the films anymore. I mentioned previously somewhere that the movie going experience is jaded. People aren’t interested in paying $14 to sit in a room with a 100 other strangers who talk and text and spill sticky things on the floor. Since bigger home screens mean the theater screens aren’t really as interesting anymore, the cons are outweighing the pros. It’s a matter of poor experience.

Y Combinator, the famous startup investor has issued this statement denouncing the whole thing and I have to agree; what exactly are we going to do with all of this?

Time to design.

Design, at it’s more pure roots is simply problem solving. The hardest part, often, is finding the problem to solve. Are we really solving piracy? Are we solving entertainment? Are we solving the problem that many people have, which is a lack of choice in the matter?

It’s interesting to read message boards and see everyone’s take. The consensus here seems like people want a new distribution model like iTunes did for music or Steam did for games but I have to wonder if that even solves the overarching problem which is, in my mind, the lack of interesting things to watch. Sure, we have a few great shows targeting various demographics, but on the whole it’s a lot of filler. Worse yet, this:

Really? Reeeeally?

No wonder people aren’t watching things like they used to. It’s a reboot of an old franchise from the 70′s which, admittedly, did pretty well, that features scenes like this which are basically just commercials featuring the characters in the show. Then, there are actual commercials between the show segments. Where did the actual entertainment go?

I propose a threshold is being reached: There is a certain level of product placement that you can put alongside entertainment because the entertainment factor is still high enough to make it bearable, but at some point it isn’t anymore and people will stop watching the “show”.

So I ask again, what will our entertainment be in the next ten years. 20? 100?

Hopefully, not this.

If you follow any tech news site or CES itself, you’ll have seen this clip already.

I dismissed it when I first saw it, but over the week thoughts started creeping in about how truly disruptive this technology is. I mean that in both senses of the word.

First, the good: The technology is cool, straight up. It’s a clear LCD panel that can detect touch across a massive span. I’m curious as to how it works, and, if IR based, how well it works in front of an actual sun. Similarly, how opaque are those pixels? If it’s facing south on a sunny day, does it actually block all of that energy? But, it has some cool potential.

The bad: The first thing they do is put a calendar on it? A clock? Twitter? Hooo boy. And a skeuomorphic blinds system? You have all of this technology to put whatever you want on it and you choose to copy the relatively terrible interface and effects of a physical blinds system. Why not a fade in opacity instead of 100% on and 100% off bars of light and dark? This is supposed to be the future! It’s easily possible, but someone somewhere thought that this would be an easier analogue to understand, as if we haven’t been using touchscreens for the past five years of our lives. We might not understand all the technical details, but we’ve gotten used to touching sliders and seeing effects. Design to your audience, and there is no audience to which Venetian blinds applies. Even five year olds these days are more in touch with technology (pun intended) than that. Is there really an uproar with seniors that feel more comfortable with seeing blinds vs a much more practical variable fade? So truly, there is no reason to take such a step backwards. Unlike desktops with files and folders drawing a metaphor to deeply abstract ideas, the control and effect of a slider here would be obvious and intuitively understandable without drawing such unnecessary comparisons.

Back to the Vista style widgets. Why? We have them on our phones nicely arranged exactly how we want them. We have them on our computer desktop. We have them on our tablets. If you’re old school, you probably have your notes, calendar etc. printed on actual chopped up trees. How often do people actually check their calendars in real life? I lead a pretty schedule-centric life and I open the calendar app maybe once every couple of days – I certainly don’t need all four of them around me at all times. Of course this isn’t true for everyone, but the people who use it more are probably going to use their phone rather than walk over to their window. Same with Twitter. I love Twitter, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not something I want to stand around and scroll through on my window.

Maybe I’m over reacting. It’s a tech demo, after all, maybe the real life one will be stripped back. But, somehow I doubt it. Somehow I can just see it coming with Nortons Antivirus and I’ll have to stand next to my window for hours trying to get rid of all the crapware. At least on a laptop you can sit down.

On a macro point, I jest feel like we’re drowning in all of this. It’s literally coming between us and the outside world now. I think the variable opacity LCD blinds idea is awesome. Truly, I’m excited for that technology to become cheap and widely available. But I’m uneasy about have a dashboard on a window – the invention whose sole purpose is to see out of. I just imagine some executive somewhere thinking this is the coolest thing – and it is cool – but missing the real point of it’s usage. They like technology for technology’s sake, when really, technology should only exist to make our lives better. We’ve forgotten that, it seems.

Moral of the story: Exciting technology, but you have Twitter in your phone so you can travel anywhere in your house / city / the world with it. Why tether yourself to a permanent fixture?

I realize this will probably be the most controversial thing I’ve ever written, and I’m entirely fine with that; that’s how the deeper questions get asked and, hopefully, then answered. I’m not saying any one side (on either side of the metaphor) is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but I draw the comparisons for both interest and learning’s sake and observation of the real world.

I would say, looking on it all from the outside in, that people are not into religion for rational reasons. No one coming from an unbiased secular upbringing looks at it completely emotionless and thinks “Yeah, this seems like a good idea for this and that reason.” – people are drawn to religion, people stay within religion entirely because it’s an emotional thing. They find sanctuary in it mentally. They don’t choose based on specs and perks and logic.

A good brand, and I say this in a slightly manipulative way, should take this principle to heart: appeal to people’s emotions. We are a society who likes to make the best choice or the ‘rightest’ choice; we don’t like to be wrong or make the wrong choice or through inaction have the less desirable thing happen to us. I’ll reference Barry Schwartz here for further info (and it’s very good info), but I’ll leave that point as it is and move on.

Apple is often accused of it’s cult-like following, and from a marketing standpoint that’s exactly what you’re trying to generate. A cult following of people who will preach your product is incredibly powerful against the boring, stuffy approach of comparing numbers. And that’s a dying culture, I think, the type who choose the product based solely on specs. Other than the oldest of nerds and hardcorest of early adopters actually seem to care about that sort of thing anymore. A product isn’t just numbers, and the mainstream is realizing this. I should back up a bit, because I’m pointing too much at consumer electronics. One last point in that field: which person do you want to hang out with if given the choice between an iPhone person, a Blackberry person and an HTC EVO 4G? Exactly. So if your goal is to sell to real people, be aware of how real people think and market to them. The nerds might be vocal, but don’t confuse that with actual selling ability / market size.

By all means, the iPhone should not have the market share it made up in the years since it launched. The Android people are quick to point out it’s relatively slow processor and lower RAM so why is did it not only succeed in the market but surpass the people who have been doing it since the beginning? This:

Mentions of RAM? Nope. Quad cores? None. Screen resolution? Nada. These are things some people care about, but people in real life don’t and Apple knows this. They make simple ads about a parent taking cute photos of their kids and tweeting it. Because, you know, that’s what matters to people. They don’t care if it has one core or 16, they care about the end result. That thing people so often miss because they get stuck on the bridge in between the technology and the result. Ideally, there should be no numbers at all; ideally it should work flawlessly no matter what’s inside that little magic box. Since we don’t have that, we invent little counting systems to compare things and often don’t realize that they’re arbitrary and often don’t actually mean anything. Galaxy tablets have four cores and still can’t smoothly scroll through a list of song titles without lag. That’s what matters – the 4 part failed. The experience is ruined. The number can be superior, but without the result being effected for the better, it’s a moot point.

Full circle:

People aren’t in religion because of numbers, because of superior technology inside or because of rational, logical thought about the event. They’re in it because of how it makes them feel: part of a group, often special to a deity, often promised rewards after mortal death. The emotions can’t be proved or disproved, and yet people still do it. They don’t choose which religion based on cost per positive event. They choose the one they like and the one that fits their lives the best.

Reason two: mutual hatred. I personally think it’s ironic in the sad way, but on a whole religions exist because of a mutual dislike for something. It’s a way for people to come together and try to stop something, be it other races or lifestyle choices etc. I seem to recall I’ve mentioned this before somewhere, but Apple is the anti-Microsoft. They succeeded in part because they were the group who had a mutual agreement that they were better than the other computers. So, when people had issues with Microsoft products, even if Apple didn’t have a better solution, they thought about switching to the “better” side. So as a brand, and from a designer point of view, what is your product against? Why / how does your design solve that? And, make this abundantly clear in your message. Do you hate peeling oranges? So do lots of people, you made a thingy that peels oranges and you want to help everyone who hates peeling oranges themselves. Using hatred productively! Sometimes it isn’t so apparent. Were people outraged because there wasn’t an easy way to tweet photos from their phone? Probably not. But, once you have the ability it becomes hard to live without and perhaps that would discourage users from switching. A lot of design and invention is identifying invisible holes to fill with solutions. Marketing (I mean the sleazy infomercial type) is the creation of products that fill holes that don’t really exist. Snuggies are a solution without a problem unless you are truly that terrible at keeping blankets on yourself.

Woah. That went on a lot of tangents. But, I think all are important to note.

TL;DR Emotions are human, so appeal to them. Unless your market is bleeding edge early tech adopters, you probably don’t need to market the numbers and specs of your product. Show people why the thing exists (because you hated problem X and this solves that) and what it’ll do for them in real life. Numbers are meaningless without corresponding outcome results, so cut the fat and advertise the product for the result it generates. If it doesn’t, your product needs to rethink itself.

This is another one of those posts where I write about what’s happening without knowing the answer.

Silicon valley, as most of us are aware, is exploding with cool apps and helpful tech solutions to our online problems. And, as Kickstarter shows, there are lots of people with cool ideas for products that are perfect for market. But while the UX / UI people are in vogue, I wonder where the market for us ID types went. Projects like Nest and Twine are brilliant and needed to come from somewhere, but how do we as designers lend a hand to these people with ideas and become part of those lean startups?

Surely I’m not crazy for thinking there’s a market for this (and perhaps there already is, hiding somewhere from me.) I suspect it’s mostly word of mouth and the local designers are recommended by the people they’ve worked alongside most their lives. But if we’re in such high demand (or so they keep saying) how do we tap into such market and become that available resource to fill the void?

And that, as I grow ever closer to graduation, is what I intend to find out.