A gap in the culture

Don’t look for gaps in the market. They don’t exist, never really have. (Yeah, that old thing about markets sometimes not existing in gaps…) Look instead for gaps in the culture. But this means you have to first find the culture.

I spend most of my working days finding and articulating cultures. Little cultures. Behaviours and ideas that stick and spread, ever-evolving and shifting and morphing at indecipherably small increments.

Product design should definitely look to find a gap in the culture. But so too should marketing and comms and even retail for that matter. We should be fostering and building cultures not markets. Clearly we *all know this*, but I still find this language is greeted with novelty every time I explain it.

Each time a brand goes out to say something or do something or make something, they should know exactly what kind of cultural legacy they’re leaving behind; something future archaeologists can look back on and puzzle over. What culture did you create? You didn’t make pies. You didn’t make shoes. You didn’t fly planes or sell cars… you either invented or fostered a culture. Chances are, it was a culture that already existed, but there was something missing. Some galvanising piece that articulated exactly what that culture could be… or better yet, could stand for.

The problem with cultures is even the smallest thing that is slightly off-culture (and hell, we’re talking about a moving target here), won’t appeal. The trick seems to be anticipating where the culture is going and be there right on time. Not before, not after… the culture will have moved.

So please stop talking about gaps in markets and behaviour being off-brand. If it’s a gap in the culture, sure. If it’s off-culture, will it be on-culture soon? Or has the moment passed? Is there a cultural legacy you’re planning to leave behind… or is it just stuff?

Image via Trendtablet

Typologies of storytelling in design

“Storytelling” must take the prize for most over-used strategic-creative bullshit. But the fact is, lots of us use it, and it works. Our brains like stories. 

Interviewing Tony Dunne a couple nights ago, we inevitably fell onto the topic of storytelling in design and it got me thinking about different types of storytelling. Or perhaps different purposes of storytelling. 

1 The first type uses design to tell a story. We see this all the time in branding, packaging and retail in particular. The design implies there is a story out there which is communicated thus through colour, through a specific graphic style, through imagery, through shapes, etc. It would be quite difficult to pick out any sort of ‘narrative’ from this, but an overarching ‘story’ seems to permeate the stuff that gets made. 

2 A nuanced variation on the first type, the second is when design uses narrative to create an experience. Much more visible in say, architecture, retail, exhibition and interior (the world of big things you can move around in), because people more literally can become characters, actors, agents - and their movements, motions and emotions can be choreographed through the dynamic space. It’s in these experiences one might find explicitly designed “events” or cinematic qualities (suspense, pacing, surprise, etc), treating one’s existence in the space like a story that needs plotting out. Turn a corner and WOW! This approach sort of argues that narratives are the best way of communicating a complex idea in an emplaced context like a historical event in a museum or a brand in a store. 

You don’t need narrative tools to tell a story, but if what you’re designing is an emplaced experience, these tools become pretty important.

3 The third type uses story to create a design. Here we can invent possible worlds, with different sets of assumptions about human existence, different laws of physics, different biologies. It’s from these worlds we’ve written that some of the most inventive design emerges - because it’s been designed for a world that doesn’t exist. (Or perhaps in the case of scenario planning, is a world that doesn’t exist, YET.) Once the design is created, the story can then fall away like scaffolding. 

4 The fourth type tells a design through a story. The world of design fiction and site writing designs us impossible objects. Things that cannot exist physically are manifested through written stories. These story-things are not real nor fake, but likeable untruths which we conjure in our minds. 

This list is incomplete, as it should be…

Image by Raquel Kelmanzon