I recently read Jennifer van der Meer's thought-provoking piece, The Crowd Will Save Us: How the green movement taps participatory networks to drive innovation at Core77.

TCWSU is an appeal to marry up two significant and recent cultural developments which have affected nearly everyone in the design profession, namely, the "green movement" and design strategies employing social networking. The first really compelling bit of her argument is this:

Over 50% of consumers want greener, more natural [e.g.] housing cleaners, but only 5% actually purchase this category of product: consumers do not want tradeoffs. ...green-leaning consumers are looking for proven efficacy, broad availability, comparable price, and a brand they know and trust. They're not willing to settle for a product that performs less than a more eco-unfriendly alternative.

This statistic offers up something deep for us to think about: The (relatively) recent groundswell of interest in environmentally friendly product design is, while certainly "real," nevertheless only marginally capable of altering whatever practical or psychological norms motivate individuals to actually buy things.

The rest of TCWSU deals with some practical strategies about how social innovations in design might help us solve this complicated psychological problem afflicting products and brands, and rightly so. In addition to her practical conclusions, though, this strange statistic should certainly tell us something theoretical or psychological.

Namely, I wonder why, exactly, the psychological dependence on extant brands as the guarantor of quality isn't overcome by people's self-professed desire for greener products?

It's not you, it's me (via).

Several possible reasons occurred to me:

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We just finished up writing a longish RFP for a client. This client, quite understandably, wanted to make sure to take advantage of all the best new social networking technologies and the hottest trends of Web 2.0.

One point that we regularly insist on instilling in our clients in an engagement like this is that, while all these technologies are great in theory, the key to their success is that they are well integrated into organizational culture, and that the organization can manage and support them well.

We learned this lesson the hard way: The last firm Nick and I worked for had a client for whom we designed a social networking strategy that was, while great in theory, never maintained. Their organization just couldn't support it. Recently, they brought it offline, sinking a significant amount of work. This reflects badly on us and on them, and we're not apt to make the mistake again.

Apropos of a lesson learned, and in an ongoing attempt to maintain the precarious balance in "experience design" between branding and visual design cohesion and business process design, let me refer you to Advertising Week's Benjamin Palmer, who recently wanted to rethink the user experience, and to Ron Shevlin, who immediately wanted to re-rethink it.

Palmer:

What if we added more to the UX designer's plate? What if we not only charged them with thinking about the interface, but also how that interface reflected upon the brand?

Shevlin:

Too often — and this might sound heretical — site designers (oops, I mean user experience engineers) focus too narrowly on the customer or site user. What they fail to recognize is that what they’re "designing" isn’t just a Web site, but a business process. A business process that often exists in the offline world. And a business process that, even though much of it occurs online, still interacts with the offline world and the people (often known as “employees”) who execute that business process offline.

Hence, your weekend ponderable: How can you better design your next website or corporate online strategy to improve the lives of both a business' customers and its employees?

On my best days I find self-marketing unpleasant, and on the other six days a week I find it nearly impossible. I am regularly torn between my ethical imperative — that the whole practice is ugly and should be unnecessary (that content should be king) — and my ontological one — the stone fact that it is completely necessary (that relationships are king).

Needless to say, this leaves me at what feels like an impasse. Namely, either I invest a lot of time learning how to market myself that I could otherwise be putting into client and personal projects that are in my major field, or else, I can doom myself to permanent obscurity. Can't somebody please help?

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I had another post all lined up for today and then my delicious feed alerted me to a recent presentation on surface by Michal Migurski: Greebles, Nurnies, Tiles, and Flair. I thought the last section was such a good read, I just had to share it and offer some comments.

Greebles are a great little design trope that is not widely known outside modeling circles. In my earlier 3D modeling days, I used to play with them quite a bit. Sci-fi aficionados will recognize greebles as the texture that covers the Death Star, Star Destroyer, and Borg Cube.

Migurski describes them thusly:

Greebles are the parts that "look cool, but don't actually do anything". There's an entire discipline here composed of special effects artists and asset designers working to hide the plywood spaceships and simple game world polygons beneath an encrusted surface texture.

Migurski’s thesis is that while greebles themselves don’t do anything, they do serve a purpose. They are the “slight of hand” that suggests complexity and activity—which can be very important to an audience’s impressions of an experience. For example, the experience of social networking.

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David Armano recently wrote some new lyrics to an old tune at Advertising Age, bemoaning the continued reliance on flashy microsites, and appealing to a policy of community activity as the most effective – however unglamorous – strategy for building brand loyalty.

When YouTube arrived on the scene, we responded by putting our TV spots on it or – better yet – creating spots that looked like they were made by amateurs. Little did we know that the real action happens in the comments.

He appeals in the article to the My Starbucks Idea idea, which in turn appeals to Starbucks loyalists: "You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What's your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it."

So that's the big idea. Ask people what you should do with your business, and let them vote and discuss their answers. This is, in fact, the big internet idea (qua advertising) in general, at least as it's developed over the past five or ten years. But, looking at the My Starbucks Idea site, I started to wonder if it was really working at all.

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If you haven't checked out Google Insights yet, and you run a website, you probably should. The idea behind Insights is that you can compare and evaluate a handful of metrics — volume, regional interest, top search terms — on search results, given a particular topic and/or geographical area. For example, I took a look at the search patterns and volume in my area (Omaha) for "web design," a key item on the DLB menu, and promptly established that we're in the wrong business.

This is clearly an unproductive metric. (From top: Generic search term, generic search term, generic search term, generic search term, indicator that people are uninterested in paying for service, indicator that people are uninterested in paying for service, generic search term.)

All glibness aside, Insights could certainly be used smartly to provide agile firms with a real-time look at trends in their geographical areas. These trends could be used to indicate growth markets, and this information could inform rapid-SEO strategies (aka. blog post keywords).

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