Audience Thoughts From the Good Ideas in Design Panel

This past January, PSFK held a Good Ideas Salon in London bringing together the most forward-thinking tastemakers, innovators, and experts from around the world to discuss key areas steering innovation and opportunity.  In addition the the good ideas presented, we wanted to hear what our audience had to say, so we’re doing a series of posts containing feedback and comments from the event sourced from blogs, magazines, and twitter.  We’ve distilled the commentary, now you tell us which is the best idea…

For the design panel, we invited some of our favorite creative minds to comment on what aspects of design were currently exciting them. Long time PSFK contributor Amanda Gore rallied an eclectic bunch including Cameron Leslie, founder of the Fabric and Matter nightclubs, Coralie Bickford-Smith, designer of amazing book covers for Penguin books, Kate Moross, creative extraordinaire, and Nicolas Roope, founder of Poke and Hulger. We found a lot of audience reactions on the web.

Ben from Iris said: felt that Coralie really helped define a central theme of the day:

Motto of the day from Coralie Bickford-Smith: “stop designing, start playing”. A really nice thought, and it’s not just designing that it applies to (“stop strategising” would work well…). The point – don’t have an end in sight, don’t be precious about getting to the right answer. Keep your eyes open for new inspiration. Play, experiment. That’s where great ideas come.”

Andy Whitlock also bounced off Coralie’s comments:

Coralie Bickford-Smith introduced a project to LCC students called ‘Stop designing, start playing’. The intention was to change focus from the end product to the process. Which I think is a very smart approach for anyone. Thinking about the end product of something you’re just starting is, by definition, impossible, so you therefore think of other end products and already you’re thinking unoriginally.

John Willshire picked up on Cameron Leslie’s CDs:

Cameron from Fabric demonstrates the ease of creating a really lovely, aesthetically pleasing CD package which they build a relationship with a community to send them a CD every month… there’s the story around the music, and indeed the Fabric guys, and the quality of design that goes with it. Kate has a vinyl-only record label which works on the same principle.

Cameron made the point that even though online downloading of music is rife now, there will probably be a backlash against it – people will reconnect with the tactility of real, openable, ownable objects that they engage with, own and pass down… vinyl, and other real physical formats that have an element of real, invested design in them, will always have a place.

Ben also picked up on this idea about creating value:

A few key methods cropped up for adding value for our punters. Offering utility is obviously a biggie, as giving them free stuff. But design and marketing is also there to provide meaning (richness, experience) to the everyday commodities in people’s worlds. That’s why packaging is so important. An exclusive vinyl adding meaning to a music track – here. A metal tin adding meaning to a fabric mix cd. Premium DM adding meaning to your bingo experience perhaps?

John Willshire noted the focus on craft and tangible deliverables:

The Good Ideas in Design panel (Amanda Gore, Kate Moross, Cameron Leslie, Coralie Bickford-Smith & Nicolas Roope) talked a lot about the design of physical music products (CDs, vinyl etc) and other things, and why design isn’t necessarily either the start or the end of a creative process… it’s something that happens along the way between the two.

I came away from that session thinking that design is almost the thing that tells you just how committed the people behind the project are to it… they believe in the things they make so much that they lovingly craft something that a large, faceless organisation would simply do as cost-efficiently as possible.