The search is over. Many have heroically tried. But a decisive winner has emerged.

Behold! the most elegant and usable conference badge design ever:

This badge is from The Web and Beyond 2010, held in Amsterdam two weeks ago, where I spoke and saw many excellent sessions.

Let me explain the mechanics of this great design:

Lanyard: The lanyard is nothing special — a branded ribbon with a simple clasp at the end. As far as I’m concerned, the lanyard is interchangeable. Irrelevant, in fact: you could use a metal chain, a hemp rope, whatever. That’s part of the awesomeness of this design.

Graphics: The first name is big so you can say “Hi Christopher”, and the last name and company/affiliation is a little smaller. The same information is printed on both sides. I imagine the text could be a little bigger all around for readability’s sake.

Booklet: Here’s where it gets really clever: The “name tag” is actually the cover of a little booklet. The booklet’s cover, as you can see in the picture, is printed upside-down from the contents of the booklet itself, so that the badge wearer can flip the book up to read the contents. The lanyard attaches to the booklet using “loop staples“, the same staples that hold the book together, thus requiring no additional hardware and, even better, no plastic sleeve. I’ve seen plenty of attempts to make badges with little pockets for holding a conference booklet, but this unified solution blows those ideas away.
It doesn’t hurt that the 35-page booklet contained great facilities maps, a full schedule, and biographies and photos of all the speakers. The covers were color-coded, too, with different colors for attendees, speakers, and staff.

Of course, not every conference can afford all of the bells and whistles on display with this badge design, but it’s easy to see how the basic principle — a book on a hook — can work for smaller budgets. For example, the custom-printed attendee-name covers could simply be blanks on which stickers are affixed. The booklets could be briefer, focusing on just the schedule, for example.

Conference organizers: Please steal this idea!

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What is interesting about Wikipedia? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not how it it is made.

A “wiki” is a content source powered (in general, completely powered) by social software technology, with people collectively creating and refining the content. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the quintessential wiki — while there are other major wikis, from the addictive TV fan site Lostpedia to the new and astoundingly-awesome online typography reference Typedia, Wikipedia is still the mother of all wikis. Wikipedia has so thoroughly conquered our mental model of what an information reference is supposed to be that its most salient concept (social editing) has become inseparable from its fundamental purpose (complete information).

(In fact, I’ve started to notice people using the wordlet “pedia”, rather than “wiki”, to indicate “socially-powered content”. It seems that, for some people, a “wiki” and a “pedia” are the same thing, which to me is tantamount to thinking the “hi” in “hijack” means “airplane”, justifying “carjack” as a legitimate word.)

The “pedia” in Wikipedia is a nod to the “encyclopedia”. The wikipedia, we are supposed to infer, is an encyclopedia powered by a wiki. It’s beyond encyclo, it’s wiki!

The word encyclopedia means “complete or well-rounded” (i.e., encyclo) + “knowledge or learning” (i.e., pedia). So, interpreted one way, “Wikipedia” can mean “People getting together to record knowledge”, which of course is exactly what Wikipedia is.

But Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales could just as well have called it “Encyclowiki”, meaning “people getting together to describe everything”, which in many ways is what Wikipedia, in its blossoming omniscience, has ultimately and more resonantly become.

For it is no longer impressive, at least to me, that Wikipedia is community-generated. Big deal, I get it, I agree with it. I buy into the Here Comes Everybody premise. I take the wisdom of crowds for granted. Like millions of others, I am thoroughly sold on Wikipedia, especially after seeing topics I thought I knew everything about described in informative, passionate, and sometimes astonishing detail. It’s the content that draws me, not the phenomenon that caused the content to get there (if anything, the phenomenon has, and continues to be, Wikipedia’s biggest perceived weakness).

This is why I am glad that Typedia is Typedia and not Wikitype or Typewiki. Typedia is, above all, a compendium of knowledge about type. The fact that it is socially-powered is something we can and should take for granted (and, of course, participate in). This kind of comprehensive one-stop collection of esoteric knowledge simply isn’t going to happen, ever, without social participation.

Basically, we’re all wiki now. We already work together. It’s the pedia part, the knowledge itself, we’ll always be striving for.

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When it comes to social media, it is easy to be dazzled by big numbers and strong opinions. But often what is really needed isn’t a comprehensive strategy with metrics and targets, but a charming and intelligent human personality.

The majority of people who today call themselves social media experts, even the legitimate ones who actually know what they are doing, were complete social media newbies only a couple of years ago. Some very likely took the plunge only a few months ago.

I’ve seen people who didn’t have a Facebook page, people who’d skeptically asked “What the hell is this Twitter crap?”, jump in head first and, within a few months, become absolute masters of social media with tens of thousands of connections and followers and influence over some of the biggest names in their field. I’ve seen people in their teens and in their 60s become social media virtuosos, at least within the fields they really know and love, some of them virtually overnight.

I also know hundreds of people who have lots of friends on Twitter, who regularly blog and speak about social media, and who know all about the different companies, people, and technologies in the social media space, but who would be absolute freaking disasters if they had to put those skills to the service of a brand or company. I know this because they have volatile personalities, crummy writing skills and sloppy grammar, glaring personal issues, or are just ignorant of important subject matter. But with thousands of friends and immense popularity across lots of social media.

In other words, jerks, blowhards, and idiots are perfectly capable of mastering the logistics and technologies of social media, but do you really want them managing your social media?

There is undoubtedly a kind of social media skill that has nothing whatsoever to do with expertise with social media tools and technologies, but which all great social media success stories have in spades. Social media tools and technologies can be learned in a matter of days or weeks by the right people as long as they have other important skills: A passion for the product or the field they are working for, for example, is essential. A great personality. Great interpersonal communication skills. A sense of dignity and balance, and political sensitivity. Empathy.

In fact, this traditional stuff is WAY more important than having any experience whatsoever with social media. A so-called social media expert with thousands of hours of experience managing and building social networks and products could easily ruin your social media strategy simply by being a bad cultural fit with your audience and customers. And a total newbie — a kid from the mailroom, a user interface designer, or maybe the CEO herself — might become your company’s social media rainmaker simply because they completely understand your audience and believe in your product.

Charm can be bought, and it can be taught. But usually it’s simply a matter of finding it and letting shine.

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Let’s say you own a big building full of valuable stuff. How do you make sure that the night watchman patrolling your factory floor or museum galleries after closing time actually makes his rounds? How do you know he’s inspecting every hallway, floor, and stairwell in the facility? How do you know he (or she) is not just spending every night sleeping at his desk?

The Detex Newman watchclock was first introduced in 1927 and is still in wide use today.

If you’re a technology designer, you might suggest using surveillance cameras or even GPS to track his location each night, right? But let’s make this interesting. Let’s go a century back in time to, say, around 1900. What could you possibly do in 1900 to be absolutely sure a night watchman was making his full patrol?

An elegant solution, designed and patented in 1901 by the German engineer A.A. Newman, is called the “watchclock”. It’s an ingenious mechanical device, slung over the shoulder like a canteen and powered by a simple wind-up spring mechanism. It precisely tracks and records a night watchman’s position in both space and time for the duration of every evening. It also generates a detailed, permanent, and verifiable record of each night’s patrol.

What’s so interesting to me about the watchclock is that it’s an early example of interaction design used to explicitly control user behavior. The “user” of the watchclock device is obliged to behave in a strictly delimited fashion.

But before I go into the interaction theory at work here, let’s look at how the watchclock system works in a little more detail. The fundamental innovation — the trick, if you will — is that the device itself is only one part of a larger, external system.

Photo by Jeremy Brooks.

The Key is the System

The key, literally, to the watchclock system is that the watchman is required to “clock in” at a series of perhaps a dozen or more checkpoints throughout the premises. Positioned at each checkpoint is a unique, coded key nestled in a little steel box and secured by a small chain. Each keybox is permanently and discreetly installed in strategically-placed nooks and crannies throughout the building, for example in a broom closet or behind a stairway.

The watchman makes his patrol. He visits every checkpoint and clicks each unique key into the watchclock. Within the device, the clockwork marks the exact time and key-location code to a paper disk or strip. If the watchman visits all checkpoints in order, they will have completed their required patrol route.

The watchman’s supervisor can subsequently unlock the device itself (the watchman himself cannot open the watchclock) and review the paper records to confirm if the watchman was or was not doing their job.

This is an idea with long legs. The watchclock is built like a revolver, of good old fashioned brass and steel and encased in a thick leather holster. It requires no batteries and almost no maintenance. The “guard tour patrol system” concept, too, has a timeless elegance. The mechanism itself has barely changed for a century: although some more recent models incorporate GPS and other technologies, the mechanical key-based watchclock system is still in wide usage, with many buildings still employing the same keys and the same clockwork devices they’ve used since the 1940s. It’s a genuine example of an “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” kind of technology.

From a behavioral perspective, I find the watchclock fascinating not simply because it’s a kind of steampunk GPS, a wind-up mechanical location-awareness technology. I’m further fascinated at how this holistic system of watchclocks, keys, guards, and supervisors succeeded so completely in creating a method of behavioral control such that a human being’s movements can be precisely planned and executed, hour after hour and night after night, with such a high degree of reliability that almost a century goes by before anyone thinks of ways of improving the system as originally conceived. The watchclock is a primitive form of technology-mediated interaction design and narrowly-focused social engineering: The “interface” is the whole system: The watchclock, keys, and paper records.

Designing for Control

Many in the interaction design field(s) argue that user experience design most definitely is not about behavioral control, or at least it shouldn’t be. Dan Saffer entitled his excellent book “Designing for Interaction“, the “for” being a nod to the idea that users don’t need to interact with systems in exactly the way the interaction designer intended or envisioned. Interactive systems — whether social networks, desktop apps, or multiplayer online games — often shine best when users break the rules. Systems that explicitly and deliberately give users the freedom to interact in creative and unforeseen ways are some of the most interesting and powerful kinds of interaction design.

But the watchclock is another kind of interaction design, one whose function corrals the user into a single, linear, constrained sort of behavior. The night watchman has a fundamental social constraint — the desire to not get fired from their job. This constraint allows the watchclock patrol system to work so effectively (some would say insidiously) as an interaction design instrument of control.

As a former game designer, I think it’s important to recognize that a really fun user experience will often exist somewhere between these poles of freedom and control. The player can kill the bad guys in whatever clever way she wishes, but she’s got to collect the three crystals to operate the teleporter — there’s no other way off the ship, and no other way to get to the next level. (I wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that so many systems of controlled-play in games involve the use of keys, just like the watchclock.)

Giving a user freedom to interact however they wish seems admirable in principle, but requiring the user to jump through precisely the hoops you, the designer, want them to jump through is also a powerful way to create an emotionally and intellectually compelling experience. In a practical sense, it’s also a way to make sure that the user doesn’t get frustrated or even fail to do what they really need to do.

The watchclock’s user experience isn’t compelling or stimulating, to be sure, but in my mind it is truly an archetype of the “behavioral control” side of interaction design.

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Two weeks ago, BusinessWeek’s next Design and Innovation blog asked for my thoughts on this month’s Facebook home page redesign, as a kind of follow-up to my thoughts in those same virtual pages a year ago.

I was asked to opine on the new design without having viewed the actual live site, which was launching the following week. This seemed reasonable to me at the time given that the site’s new features were announced, illustrated, and widely-known ahead of time (via a very comprehensive home page preview announcement) to anyone who was paying attention to that kind of thing.

I was really excited about the real-time feed user experience described in the home page preview. My exact words:

The new FB real-time home page is pretty cool, actually… it’s crossing the line between the old-fashioned page-based web and the live experience of television and broadcast media. In this case, it’s broadcasting from friends to friends — which it always was, of course, but now it’s more visceral and more real. I think people will love it. They’ll be glued to their screens, and will want to add more friends and applications just to increase the flow of content on their home page.

This is “Web 2.0 Complete”: When web people use the term “Web 2.0″, they mean two different things. First, they mean the social web, where *people* make (and are) the content. Second, they mean the pageless web, where web sites react dynamically and fluidly, without page reloads and refreshes. The new Facebook design combines both of these.

I thought it was kind of clever, if a little corny, of me to note that the new Facebook home page was simply conforming to some kind of basic “Web 2.0″ bandwagon orthodoxy, bringing the two flavors of Web 2.0 niftyness into one delicious treat.

But a week later when the new home page actually began to roll out and replace millions of Facebook users’ old home pages, the backlash was immediate and seething and nearly unanimous (a Facebook poll found 94% of users didn’t like the new design). Oh man was I embarrassed! To have praised a user experience so breathlessly only to have my opinion immediately contradicted by the public’s rabid scorn!

Turns out, however, that users were complaining about the new page’s lack of real-time status updates from your friends. And yet Facebook had already clearly and prominently promised that feature as part of the redesign. In fact, I based the core of my analysis of the new site on that very feature, which they had already promised to deliver. They deployed the new design with much fanfare but without real time status updates.

Betrayed! Betrayed by a press release! There I am, praising a non-existent feature. Like an idiot.

Well, happily my premature praise no longer needs to cause me so much shame: Today Facebook has announced that the real-time reporting is going to occur after all. So the BusinessWeek report won’t be such an embarrassment to me after all.

Of course, this is the second time Facebook has announced this feature before delivering anything. Fool me once…

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In his Time Magazine Person of the Year interview, Barack Obama said “it turns out there’s some spending that has to be done on information technology, for example, that we can do very swiftly.”

If recent speeches by the new President are any sign, I sure hope he’s talking about rural broadband access. Like many others, I don’t think we can be complacent about America’s lagging IT infrastructure, and for a good many reasons.

Some aren’t so sure, however, at least about the rural part of that equation. My friend Adam Greenfield is a well-known advocate for humane connectedness through pervasive urban digital infrastructure (I know “advocate” is not the right word — Adam’s work is equal parts caution and possibility).

From near-term omnipresent wireless broadband to a futuristic cloud of RFID gizmos mediating our social and municipal interactions, the vision of living a seamless networked experience using benevolent technology seems both exciting and inevitable.

And, by all accounts, this will happen most noticeably using the city street as the primary test and launch platform. The urban environment is the easiest and most logical place to implement this vision since the “last mile” (moving information from the big pipes that cross the globe to the little pipes that lead into our homes and mobile devices) will always be an costly obstacle, and since so many people can be reached in a small physical area.

But another friend, David Sleight, opened my eyes to another perspective — the view from the country. Although David is currently a Manhattanite, his family roots are in the woods of upstate New York where for many the idea of getting even regular ol’ wired high speed access to the information superhighway is still an impossibility. David loves the country and would, all things being equal, prefer to live there, but for him urban living is quite simply a necessity for a career in the information and technology economy.

And all things simply aren’t equal.

Millions of Americans still live in rural environments where broadband Internet access is not even an option (except through unreliable and expensive satellite connections). Much of the nation is still unserved by 3G, Edge, or even mobile voice access at all. Living in the country pretty much excludes you from participation in the aforementioned technology economy.

So this is what I hope (and predict) Obama is talking about: Bringing the Internet — the *real* Internet, not the dial-up Web 1.0 of 1998 — to the millions of Americans currently living without it. I’m not just talking about high-bandwidth experiences like Flickr, YouTube, and Hulu. I’m talking about the less-glamourous low-bandwidth experiences that happen every day on the Internet: co-workers exchanging PowerPoint decks, transferring medical records to rural clinics and hospitals, downloading hundreds of emails from friends and family, people debating politics on blogs and message boards, or even just regular everyday surfing through dozens of websites without waiting endlessly for them to load.

Some will argue the current situation isn’t so bad given the disproportionally rural residency of our country when compared to broadband leaders like South Korea, Denmark, or Iceland. Some even argue that people in the country don’t really need or even want broadband access.

I don’t buy either of these arguments. I don’t think we should settle for inequality just because we’re a less urbanized nation than our global competitors. What’s more, I really don’t think people who lack access to technology have any idea about the user experience they are missing. It’s not like we’re talking about force feeding cable TV to the Amish here.

Some, like Adam, might say that people who choose to live in the country have by definition chosen to live a technologically backwards (and, importantly, increasingly unsustainable) existence. That the responsible and ethical choice for any modern human is to live somewhere easily and affordably accessible by wires and roads and mass transit (and food and water), in an economically-efficient and environmentally-benign way — i.e., what cities do best.

I find this argument immensely appealing. But I, too, happen to love oceans, forests, lakes, and mountains almost as much as I love the city. I often entertain a fantasy of living at least part of my life in a beautiful, remote rural setting. Perhaps this fantasy is selfish and wasteful, but I also wonder if ever information technology finally replaces the combustion engine as the primary medium of human economic activity could we not, in fact, flatten this ethical disparity a little and make rural life a little more appealing to those of us who want to leave a slighter carbon footprint?

Want vs. Need

Is supporting rural broadband, then, merely a way to make urbanists’ retirements more luxurious, or to explore an impossible utopian future? Is this a matter of want or need?

I’ve never thought that we should cease to push the boundaries of our science and technology in order to ensure that more down-to-earth and pressing needs are met. We need to find a cure for cancer and land a person on Mars, for example. They’re both noble goals.

And although I am deeply critical of its implementation, I never really opposed the One Laptop Per Child project on principle, nor did I ever think that the money would be better spent directly on food or medicine. We need both experimental and conventional programs.

Broadband for rural America should be seen as a “great work” project, like the Internet itself, whose benefits may take years to be fully realized.

In short, we should be investing in technology for everyone, in cities and provinces. Clearly we should pursue subsidized free public WiFi for densely concentrated urban areas, transit systems, and public facilities — it’s the cheapest way per capita to bring our citizens and our economy to where they inevitably want and need to be. But we should also invest in the likely-far-costlier enterprise of bringing broadband and digital cellular access to people in the country: those who can’t walk to a corner Starbucks, who don’t ride a subway, and who can’t possibly use some cool iPhone app to find a great Korean barbecue only a few blocks away.

Economic Benefits

So why do this? Well, most convincingly there is the economic argument: Can it hurt to have tens of millions more people shopping online, consuming online media, opening vast opportunities for information and education and, most importantly, enabling millions to participate in a future of information-based labor through rurally-situated technology industries, telecommuting and self-employment? Can one argue against having as many people (Americans, if you’re patriotic :-) ) as possible learning to use and navigate what will undoubtedly be the primary medium for any future world economy?

This is a matter of global competitiveness. America has fallen from 4th to 17th in the world in broadband penetration. The US began our critical interstate highway system in the 1950s — 20 years after Germany began building their autobahn network. We shouldn’t once again wait until we are two decades behind to do this.

Social Benefits

Beyond of the plain economics of it, I also can’t help but to advocate this idea as a matter of sociopolitical principal: It does harm to the group psyche to perpetuate a have/have not culture, where one cohort is participating in the emerging cultural and economic hegemony and another is excluded. The free market alone cannot make this happen any more than it could bring about universal education, the interstate highway system, or the Internet. This will take government action.

But it’s more than a simple question of fairness to me. As long as rural America is kept in the slow lane with respect to access to information and culture, the more they will feel isolated and resentful of the mainstream “connected culture”, viewing them, incorrectly, as out of touch elites. They will then, I fear, vote regressively and conservatively. I’ll admit this thinking may be a matter of unjustified faith in certain (liberal) ideals, but I actually believe that exposure to diverse ideas and people, combined with full and equal participation in a healthy economy, produces, in general, increased social tolerance, better education, and cultural and intellectual progress. Wisdom, peace, and prosperity through connectedness.

Perhaps best of all, wouldn’t broadband for the sticks enable an actual reversal of the polarization of our culture, ending the “The Big Sort” phenomenon where conservatives and liberals are increasingly locating themselves in self-segregated homogenous counties. Hell, decent Internet access might make life in the country attractive to snobby urban sophisticates who might otherwise find the boondocks economically and culturally untenable. If I can meet city clients online and connect with city friends online, why do I need to live in the city?

Ultimately if you like to walk to the store to buy food, if you like bright lights and hustle and bustle, if you enjoy bumping into hundreds of interesting and diverse people every day, then no amount of broadband access will draw you from your urban world. You can certainly count me in that camp. But I can’t bring myself to simply write off non-urban America to a life of electronic destitution and information poverty — their deprivation does affect my happiness. We’re all too closely connected to let the digital divide continue to grow.

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Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek’s editor and blogger on the design and innovation beat, has declared that “‘Innovation’ is Dead” and that “Transformation” is the new “key concept” of 2009.

He correctly observes that the word “innovation” is overused in the business world. This, of course, has been obvious for a long time to a great many people — in particular, I think, among practicing designers. But it’s fascinating to think about what his declaration reveals about the nature of the whole innovation craze Nussbaum helped start.

The conversations around innovation over the past few years have in large part focused on producing innovation where it does not exist. It hasn’t been about innovation itself, but rather about cultivating innovation. It’s been about transforming groups of people who, without clever and forward-thinking leadership, would utterly fail to innovate. The literature, then, is aimed at people who fancy themselves as that same clever and forward-thinking leader.

To those of us whose everyday job is to innovate — e.g., designers — the hype around “innovation” has always seemed a little weird. As if not innovating has ever been an option for a designer. We do this all the time!

So what Nussbaum and the innovation cheerleaders have been talking about all along has not been about how innovative people can be more innovative. It’s been about how to take teams that cannot or will not innovate and getting them to actually come up with new ideas. Which is why, I think, he has chosen to zoom in on “transformation” as the key word. It’s always been about change.

In fact, I would go one step further and posit that what he’s really talking about is therapy. How to take a damaged or under-performing body and build it into something that works. To repair broken methodologies that produce the same-old solutions. To build up capabilities that have atrophied, or that may never have even existed.

The innovation conversation, then, usually begins with this (usually unstated) presumption of dysfunction and failure. You can probably insert a subtitle under most headlines: “How to fix your backward company”. Even Nussbaum’s new “transformation” implies that organizations need to implement radical change just to keep up. But what about organizations who are already keeping up really well? What about organizations that are already leading the way? What relevance does “innovation” and “transformation” have to someone cruising along on the cutting edge?

Transformation is for when you’re doing it wrong. Therapy is for when you’re injured.

But what do you do when you want to really perform?

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice.

Practice is what athletes and musicians and actors do constantly to stay on the top of their games. And practice is what great designers do. All day every day.

For those of us who are designers, then, the whole innovation conversation often leads us to think about the difference between practicing and managing: A great design leader may or may not practice their craft every day, any more than a great coach or choreographer needs to break a sweat every day. Whether a design leader does hands-on design work, however, isn’t as important as that design leader pushing their team to do that work. Not to talk about innovation, but to actually do design work. If your team isn’t innovating, then chances are they simply aren’t designing enough. Make them design new stuff. Make them practice.

And, of course, there’s talent. Many assume that innovation comes almost exclusively from talented people. I tend to think this way, too. But a great team is a team of great people working together. Innovative people will doubtlessly fail to innovate in the wrong environment. Managing innovation may simply boil down to leading innovative people to practice their craft more, or maybe even simply creating a space for innovative people to thrive on their own. But it most certainly is not about transforming a mediocre team into an effective hive mind.

This goes the same for organizations. You want an innovative organization? Make ‘em design. All the time. Make them practice.

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Newsweek invited four “hot” design firms to “reboot” the brand of the Republican party to appeal to younger voters. Not an easy challenge. And while the design work itself looks good, I think each of them missed the big picture objective by failing to speak to core Republican values.

First up is Pentagram.

Pentagram proposes a solution that zooms in on the “Re” part of “Republican”, tying the prefix to a list of positive, progressive, change-oriented objectives. It frankly and straightforwardly admits that the party needs to do some soul-searching and needs to rebuild some of their ideas from the ground up, but spins it in a positive
way as if the change is complete.

Awesome Obama flag flying proudly outside Pentagram’s Manhattan headquarters

I’ll admit, however, that I was shocked at Pentagram’s solution from the first moment I saw it: Two years ago I proposed that, in response to the GOP’s habitual use of the term “DemocRAT Party” (rather than the preferred term “Democratic Party”), Democrats should respond by simply using the term “RE-publican”, suggesting that the party’s ideology is just old-fashioned, backward-thinking slapped with a new paint job. But here’s Pentagram using the “re-” prefix as some kind of positive, forward-thinking signifier.

Newsweek explains that Pentagram’s “re-” approach “shifts the dialogue” from potentially negative connotations by commandeering the prefix for positive purposes. I think it does just the opposite, inviting us to fill in our own descriptive words. In fact, I think Pentagram may have already used up almost all of the positive “re-” words in this single design. All the rest are pretty awful: retread, regressive, repressive, retarded, reactionary. I don’t see why any party would want to be “re-” anything, in particular the Republican Party.

In fact, just yesterday a candidate for RNC chair pre-emptively rejected (no pun intended) exactly this approach:

“I’m trying to avoid the use of words that start with ‘re,’ words like renewal, rebuild, recharge, re-this and re-that,” Steele wrote in a memo to RNC members. “I’m convinced we should not re-anything. Instead, we must stand proudly for the timeless principles our Party has always stood for.”

In fact, it’s hard to see Pentagram’s design as anything but anti-GOP propaganda. The editors at Newsweek claim that these four firms are “non-partisan”. I don’t know about the other three, but in the case of Pentagram I suspect they might have a sleeper cell on their hands. If so, seriously: Bravo Pentagram!

Our next redesign comes from The Groop, the only boutique firm in this mix. I didn’t know much about them before, but their portfolio and clients are really impressive.

Newsweek describes The Groop’s design approach as “Out: ‘old money,’ ‘faith-based.’ In: ‘new wealth,’ ’spirituality-based.’”. And I think right there is the problem. How many Republicans would ever want to replace “faith” with “spirituality”? That’s the kind of thing that Republicans make fun of Democrats for! This is great liberal design.

Next up is Razorfish, who proposes, essentially (and I hate to be petty), that the GOP should copy Barack Obama’s groundreaking iPhone app almost verbatim, with the biggest differences being fewer features and using a red background instead of blue.

Yes, I know the point is to show that the GOP should use social media more. But seriously, “GOP Issues Trivia?” I don’t even think there is an idea here.

At least Razorfish isn’t asking the GOP to abandon their policies. Let’s move on.

The fourth firm is Frog Design, who focuses on emotional qualities of freshness and vitality without a radical shift in ideology.

Frog, I think, hit the nail closest to the head. There it says, plain and simple, “small government”, not just getting the GOP’s ideology right, but predicting what will likely be the right’s biggest critique of President Obama’s policies and leadership in the coming years. And while the photo suggests diversity, it’s not too diverse.

My criticism of this design, however, is the weakness of it –  weakness in contrast with strength. Compare it to John McCain’s or George Bush’s graphic design, both of which evoke muscular military and sports brands. Hand-written lowercase lettering and a cute sumi-e elephant don’t quite evoke the “daddy party” strength that the GOP has traded on for decades as its core emotional and psychological attraction. Without this fundamental strength on display, I wonder if this branding would alienate as many Republicans as it embraces.

Perhaps it’s the initial framing of the problem itself that’s distracting these design teams: They were asked to reposition the party to appeal to younger voters. But how can a party appeal to a demographic who already cherishes certain values (such as diversity and tolerance) that are permanently and irrevocably diametrically opposed to the values of at least a third of the party’s base? Not an enviable challenge.

But maybe it’s an even bigger problem, one that branding cannot solve. Re-branding cannot help the GOP any more than re-branding VHS can help it compete with DVD. The product itself is obsolete and needs to be changed.

All these redesigns attempt to paint the GOP as something it is not: an organization in favor of scientific and technological progress, social change, a capable and pro-active government, and cultural diversity. But the party itself has, with great success, for almost five decades specifically defined itself against these things — that’s what loyal Republicans like about their party.

If these four firms really addressed the re-branding challenge correctly, they would have focused on selling the Republican Party’s values to sympathetic customers, not on presenting the party as something it is not. All four approaches would clearly speak directly to the party’s core values. Despite a change of voice and style, the re-branded message should still speak about the GOP’s actual policies: That taxes and regulations are oppressive, that abortion is wrong, that homosexuality is wrong, that excessive cultural diversity is undermining American society, that a strong military is what makes America great, and that individual freedom trumps even well-meaning government intervention.

What’s probably true is that the party itself needs to change and needs to actually embrace some of the values on display in these designs. It seems likely that these design teams were, in a way, suggesting to the GOP that they need to change who they are, not just how they present themselves. But that’s a long way off — a generation of Republican politicians will need to retire and die before the party will bend on many of these policies. These redesigns might be useful in 2025. For now, however, I doubt the GOP will take any of this advice.

Until then, perhaps some of these branding ideas could still be useful: Recycle them and give them to the party they best fit: the Democrats.

Are you a Republican? Do these redesigns speak to you?

UPDATE: This article by Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica outlines exactly how clueless the Republicans are when it comes to using social media and technology to communicate about their message. But more fundamentally it argues that the party itself doesn’t have a clear message in the first place. What’s more, it’s only remaining message — opposition — is weak:

The dangerous temptation right now, especially for a party in the minority, is to seek to recapitulate the Cold War coalition model through oppositional self-definition, when something more robust is called for.

I feel like I better stop before I give the GOP any more good ideas.

UPDATE 2: Okay, I had to add this after I saw it the other night. The Daily Show went to yet another brand agency, this time to Droga5, for one more angle on Republican rebranding.

I don’t know if “Reagraham Lincool” was Droga5’s idea or The Daily Show’s (and in either case Samantha Bee is a genius), but of all the rebranding contenders I think these folks got it just about perfect.
Republicans, take note: This is how you do it.

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What do you do with a video camera? You video.

I’ve always wanted to coin a phrase or invent a word, to have a term of my own invention be spoken by thousands or even millions of people every day. An astonishingly large number of my friends and peers have done exactly this, some spectacularly so. From ambient intimacy to ajax, blogs to folksonomies, topless meetings to everyware, veterans of the Information Architecture scene have been a prolific lot.

I’ll admit that while I don’t spend a lot of time trying to invent catchy and useful new additions to the lexicon, I do harbor a hope of someday joining this group with a worthwhile word of my own.

For now, then, I wish to formally submit for peer review a humble nomination (so to speak) in the rough vicinity of true coinages. It’s not exactly a real neologism, as the word itself as a string of letters already exists. It’s more like a newly permissible usage:

• video (verb) to record motion pictures to a medium other than film, such as video tape or digital media, whether recorded directly from life with a camera or transferring from one motion picture medium to another non-film medium.

The word’s current definition doesn’t include a verb form. I think we need one. Examples:

• I will video my daughter in her school play tonight.
• Make sure you set the DVR to video the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica next weekend.

We already have one-word verbs for most technological communications: mail, film, photograph, record, tape, phone, and fax. We email, IM, Google, and tweet. We even used to use the one-word verb videotape when video was recorded on whirring VHS, Hi-8, and DV cameras. Why must we bend over backwards linguistically to say “shoot video” (as if cameras were guns) or “record with my digital video recorder” just to avoid the anachronistic “videotape” — when “video” does the job so succinctly?

Interestingly, the Latin origin of the word is a verb: “video” means “(I) see”. And in the future “nadsat” vocabulary of A Clockwork Orange, the word “viddy” is used as a verb, meaning both “to see” and at another level “to understand” or even “to dream”. Perhaps we need to go that far and start using a whole new word for recorded visual experiences as we enter an era where the line between fantasy and reality, truth and fiction, media and life itself, is becoming blurred.

We can always viddy later. For now, however, we need to video.

Finally, I will confess that one of the main reasons for writing this post is to shamelessly and selfishly lay claim to this usage call for making this usage acceptable in the new official history of early 21st century humanity (i.e. Google’s index). Yoo hoo, Google? Guess what? “Video” is now a verb.

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Disagreeing with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as I did two weeks ago, is like walking into a minefield. Although Gruber has a cutting wit, he is thoughtful and respectful when it comes to discussions of technology and design. But when you spar with Gruber, you also step into the ring with his readership, tens of thousands of people who have strong and spirited opinions about design. People not afraid to say what’s on their mind.

It’s eye-opening, to say the least. And not just Daring Fireball’s readers. Any large group of opinions is going to produce surprises. As seen in last week’s post on Lizard People, when you look at the reactions of large groups of people you get a fair share of what Malcolm Gladwell has called “outliers“, folks whose ideas and opinions don’t quite fit in nicely on the map.

Going out on a limb and taking a position on an issue — even if you’re not sure you’re right about it — will always inspire debate. And from the churn of debate, good ideas can emerge. The more churn, the more likely a surprising outlier will emerge.

This is the essence of collaboration.

The only thing that will put a damper on this healthy churn is disrespect. Respect is absolutely essential to fruitful collaboration, especially if you want to glean powerful insights from a lively debate. And respect is multidirectional — in any group there are going to be power dynamics. For example on a blog the blog’s owner has the power of the soapbox (and the moderation toolkit) to suppress or censor debate. And some commenters exploit the power of anonymity, tossing firebombs with no regard for any common objective.

It is the responsibility of all who want to benefit from discussion to do what they can to flatten these power relationships by bending over backwards to respect their collaborators. Those with more power must frequently cede it. Those with less power must not resort to rhetorical violence to assert it.

This also applies in organizations — managers, bosses, and clients often have to relinquish the leverage they posess (the ability to rule by fiat, or to veto at will) if they want their teams to really open up.

Khoi Vinh recently wrote about a project his team at the New York Times has been developing and has just released, called Times Extra. It’s an optional user feature that introduces links to related content on other web sites. It’s a pretty radical idea, guaranteed to ruffle many feathers. Khoi and his team really went out on a limb with this, and they knew it. Khoi described the trepidation they felt (and managed to get over, thankfully) as a kind of “Fear of Design“.

Times Extra is an experiment in modestly redesigning the user experience; whether it’s a success or not is up to you and all of our users. Hopefully enough people will find it useful for us to evolve it further; I don’t think any of us suppose that this is really the last word in how third-party links can be expressed on the site. My point is that, as designers, an aversion to flouting the rules of visual decorum often doesn’t serve us well. Nor for that matter does a fear of failure.

The opposite of fear, of course, is courage. It takes courage to present your design ideas when you are sure you will face criticism. When even you yourself are unsure of the correctness of your idea. Simply put, you will never be a good designer without taking risks.

Team of Rivals

I am extremely pleased with President-Elect Obama’s Lincoln-like “Team of Rivals” approach to building his cabinet. Great ideas simply can not emerge from single-minded groupthink.  Greg Storey sees this as extremely relevant to design collaboration:

The more you live and work around people who rarely present a different viewpoint, the softer your brain gets, the more complacent you become…

I am a big fan not just of permitting multiple perspectives, but mandating it. Forcing yourself to come up with more than one idea. Requiring a team of designers to all contribute multiple low-fidelity solutions before focusing on only one. This is why I love sketching as a formal practice — it permits the creator of an idea to put any single idea aside and work on another one without too much investment (of time or emotional energy).

• Jerome Ryckborst has a great slideshow describing his company’s “Five Sketches or Else” approach to ideation.
• Victor Lombardi encourages a breadth-before-depth approach to early-stage concept development.
• Of course, Apple works this way, too.

Okay, so we’ve got multiple voices and ideas out in the open. How shall we decide which to believe? Next post…

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