Quick and Dirty No. 3
Quick and Dirty is a (semi-)weekly dump of interesting links that recently caught my attention and may or may not be related to design and business.
1. Entreprecariat, Everyone Is An Entrepreneur. Nobody Is Safe by Silvio Lorusso Link
The title Entreprecariat, while difficult to pronounce, is an apt one for workers in today’s gig economy. As a trained graphic designer, the description feels eerily familiar. During my studies at the Hochschule der Künste in Bern, there was a penchant for design for projects in the cultural sector. Commercial graphic design was always looked at with a sniff. This created an unrealistic ideal of the graphic designer as author and superstar. Many graduates start their small design studios either alone or in pairs and try to keep their heads above water with more or less poorly paid jobs. This may work for the first few years, but by the mid-thirties at the latest, many realize that financial success will not materialize and that if they continue like this, they will remain part of the precariat.
In his book, Silvio Lorusso describes how society, the media, and especially influential authors of management literature promote and idealize the idea of the entrepreneur. Be like Elon is the title of the first chapter of the book, and the title sums up pretty well how we elevate individuals like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg et al. onto a pedestal in the hope of learning from their careers and becoming as successful as they are.
In the other chapter, Unboxing Precarity, he bridges the gap from successful entrepreneurs to gig economy workers who are just barely keeping their heads above water financially through projects and short-term jobs. While this form of work may not be considered entrepreneurial, all of these workers are entrepreneurs on their own behalf.
I believe that entrepreneurship in the context of the art school curriculum and working as a graphic designer needs to occupy a larger space in education and training in the future to better prepare aspiring and practicing professionals for the realities of today’s job market. It is a book worth reading to reflect on one’s own situation in the creative job market.
You can purchase the book through Onomatopee
2. The tweet of the Week
Here’s another #dalle2 variant stream of consciousness animation.
— Alan Resnick (@alanresnicks) June 20, 2022
Every image, except for the first frame, is an AI generated variant of the previous frame. All I did was select my favorite variants.@OpenAI pic.twitter.com/xbWD6noTaN
Quick and Dirty No. 2
Quick and Dirty is a (semi-)weekly dump of interesting links that recently caught my attention and may or may not be related to design and business.
1. Meta: Was sich Facebook vom „Metaverse“ verspricht und was realistisch ist (in German)
Metaverse, NFT, Web 3.0, yada yada yada. The article by Marcel Weiss is a good and measured article after all of last week’s hype and hate about Facebook’s renaming to Meta and its announcement to focus on building the metaverse. The key takeaway for me is that the renaming and the repositioning are ultimately more about signaling to the employees and third-party suppliers a commitment to a new kind of focus of the company. Basically, it’s the announcement of a huge change management process with a strong narrative.
The article does an excellent job setting the context for the metaverse and what the immediately overused word means for the future of our digital lives.
2. A famous type foundry’s sale to a PE-backed giant has rattled the font industry
Yes, Monotype is marching towards the monopolization of the font license market (It’s uncanny how much its name describes what they are doing). Monotype, the most prominent company for typeface licensing globally, recently acquired the famous and notorious type foundry Hoefler & Co. With the acquisition, Monotype adds at least two considerable assets to its possession: The typeface Gotham, famously used by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and the domain typography.com.
The article talks in-depth about how type foundries compete against such a big player and how founders plan for their exit. Jonathan Hoefler has achieved a lot as a type designer (even if his behavior in recent years led to a lot of aversion towards him) that the sale of his company doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. Nevertheless, it’s still sad to see that one of the most prominent independent type foundries was acquired by the industries’ MegaCorp.
Even though the article might paint a bleak future of the font market, I am convinced that the acquisition poses an excellent opportunity for independent type foundries to at least easily defend the niche of independent type design. The fact that Monotype is managed by a private equity firm, its poor reputation among type and graphic designers, and its licensing model based on recurring font licenses will eventually bite Monotype in its tail.
3. The IG post of the Week
Quick and Dirty No. 1
Quick and Dirty is a (semi-)weekly dump of interesting links that recently caught my attention and may or may not be related to design and business.
1. AlphaGo — The Movie, on Youtube
I knew that the game Go was considered to be one of the biggest challenges for artificial intelligence but I didn’t know why until I watched this documentary. Go is comparably more complex than chess. There are thousands of possible moves at every stage of the game. However, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of the best Go players in the world, in a series of matches in 2016. The documentary follows the events and gives insights into how AI works. What’s remarkable about the epic encounter between man and machine is that AlphaGo starts to feel like a living counterpart because of how its creators talk about AlphaGo’s decisions during the games. But fear not! Even DeepMind, the company behind AlphaGo, says that their AI is limited in its abilities (at least in 2016). So even if it might seem scary that AI can win in Go, its complete world domination will have to wait.
2. The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions, by Stratechery
In this article Ben Thompson talks in-depth about Carlota Perez’s book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital from 2002 and her thesis that we’re in the middle of a fifth technological revolution. Ben Thompson looks back and tries to determine what stage of the technological life cycle humanity is currently in.
3. The Tweet of the Week
LOL
— hareem (@hareemmannan) October 16, 2021
Why Would You Need Design?
I recently had a discussion with my father during a hike along the white chalk cliffs in the national park on Rügen, Germany. He told me bemused that the Inselspital — the university hospital of Bern — invested heavily in programs aimed at combining design and medical care. He said he wouldn’t understand how medical care could benefit from adding design to it.
His confusion comes from the fact that design is regularly used to describe the creation of visual or tangible artifacts. For example, Norman Potter writes in his book What is a designer that design is an activity that gives “form and order to life arrangements.” I like the expression life arrangements but it’s too vague.
The definition of design in Merriam Webster’s dictionary is broader and could serve as a first reference point to explain why medical care could benefit from design activities:
: to plan and make decisions about (something that is being built or created)
: to create the plans, drawings, etc., that show how (something) will be made
We can conclude that design is an activity that happens when it’s not yet clear how you get from point A to point B. Thus, design is linked with planning but also the execution of a project.
In that conclusion lies the hint that design is inherently strategic. Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines strategy as:
: a careful plan or method : a clever stratagem
Both the creation of a strategy and design are therefore activities that involve the planning of an outcome.
Designers, in general, learn how to think about problems and how to find solutions for those problems. Designers of visual communication, for example, are tasked to find a suitable form for a message. Understanding the message is the first step. The second step is to research and find out how the message can be perceived differently. Third, the planning part is how the message will be communicated effectively. Finally, applying visual design principles to underscore the message is the execution.
The overused saying of thinking out of the box applies to design. To find solutions for problems, designers have to look at the problem from different angles, in the best case that leads to solutions whose initial issues weren’t considered before.
So, how can the area of medical care benefit from design activities? Health care consists of many touchpoints, where design plays an integral part. On a basic level, you could say that medical devices, for example, have to be designed so that they are properly operated. But the processes in hospitals and in care are designed as well. Designers can support medical experts in rethinking the processes and strategies in a hospital and find solutions for problems the medical practitioners didn’t even consider a pain point in the first place.
Start
I thought a long time about how to get more into writing. The main driver behind that urge is to learn how to structure my thinking and force myself to learn continuously. In 2009 I finished my Bachelor’s in visual communication. Then, between 2015 and 2020, I did an MBA because I felt the need to understand the business side of things. The topic of my thesis was to research how remote SMEs implement continuous change management. Ever since, I have felt the need to communicate my findings and, most importantly, combine my design background with the business lessons I learned throughout my studies.
I might eventually start writing about my thesis, but for now, this page is an attempt to get me into writing. (Graphic) Design is just another type of business, and I’ll try to write a short text that covers design and business-related topics every other day. The content of the entries won’t be long, and I won’t make the blog public any time soon. Let’s see how this goes.
(Update) Welp, it’s 2023 and I haven’t managed to do what I set out to do.