Thinking About the Future of NPR

Friday’s Digital Think In with NPR was a wonderful experience, a deep dive into the unique opportunities and challenges facing NPR in the swirling media landscape that intersects with social networking, mobile technologies, shifting demographics, globalization, transformative financial realities, and global communications.

As a long-time NPR listener it was a privilege to participate in the day-long workshop and meet the sixty or so luminaries from a multitude of domains that gave up their Fridays to attend. It was a packed day, but everyone kept up a tremendous energy level throughout the whole seven hours of intensive thinking and collaborating. As one of the three floating moderators I was able to get a bit of a peek across several of the breakout groups, each of which was tackling a specific focus area such as social, revenue, and platform, and it was fascinating to see the teams grapple with the ideas. And there was no shortage of ideas -  we could easily have gone another day and still not captured everything.

NPR’s goal at the end was to define some actionable concepts that they could build on and carry forward in the coming years. To this end, throughout the day each team went through cycles of blowing out new ideas, then prioritizing and refining them. The last activity was to take their concepts and turn them into stories that described the changed user experience that came out of their concept.

The presentations at the end, each lasting about five minutes, were fantastic: richly detailed, compelling, and often very funny. NPR CEO and President, Vivian Schiller, suggested that the next time NPR does this they’ll make it an open mic night, so impressive were the enthusiastic presenters.

Check out Chris Heuer’s Flickr stream of the day, and the Digital Think In site itself with ongoing blog commentary.

Hartmut Esslinger's Book: A Fine Line

Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design, has written a book, A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business, which has just launched. It’s an inspiring mix of personal biography, memoire of the design world in the 80’s and 90’s, and philosophy about the role of design in business.

Available on Amazon and at book retailers nationwide.

Here is a short excerpt, and you can visit the book’s site for more…

Even in these dark, uncertain early years, my youth was influenced by beauty as well as war. As Germany began to rebuild its industrial infrastructure after the war, my parents started a small business in textiles and, on my tenth birthday, we moved to the small town of Altensteig. There my parents bought a live-in commercial space downtown, where they opened a clothing store. That move brought aesthetics into my life on a daily basis. I was surrounded by nice clothes, the latest fashion magazines, and visiting fashion shows, not to mention an ever-changing parade of attractive and exotic fashion models.

By the time I entered high school, my creative drive had emerged. Whenever I saw a car—still an oddity in my small village—I drew it, and eventually filled countless notebooks with sketches of cars, motorcycles, and ships, all of my own design. My mother, seeing the drawings as a waste of time and a warning sign of future social decline, burned my sketchbooks, declaring “All artists end up in the gutter,” as I watched the bright pages of my notebooks curl up and turn to ash in the family hearth. After high school, I joined the German army and then entered school to train as an engineer, but even my commanders and professors understood that my creative energies and interests were driving me toward a different future than their training could provide. Eventually, I was forced to choose between my parents’ goals for my life and my own. I chose to pursue a life in design.

Today, frog helps its clients create defendable, multi-billion-dollar yearly revenues, and frog-designed products, media solutions, and experiences are everywhere. “With a little help from our friends,” partners, peers, and clients, my wife Patricia and I built frog design into a strategic agency jewel with over 450 employees and nine offices located in cities around the world. The company represents the permanent vanguard in the arena of strategic design and business innovation.

Naturally, any reasonable person may wonder why such major global giants as Disney, Microsoft, General Electric, and Motorola turn to an agency such as frog for advice and solutions when they have all the resources on earth at their disposal. Our long-term colleague Steven Skov-Holt answered this question eloquently many years ago: “Our clients and client companies come to creative agencies because they need … radical solutions that they can’t get through their own internal groups [and]… because tender, fresh new ideas have trouble surviving the toxicity of most corporate settings.”

But we never take our eyes off of the business goals that have driven our success. We—and our clients—understand that design is an integral part of any successful business strategy, and not an artistic “boutique” profession. A temperamental clutch of self-absorbed artists won’t form a solid foundation for a sustainable business model. Business design the “frog way” involves attracting the best people to the table, and then providing the environment and leadership necessary to allow everyone to work better by working together. That idea is the secret to frog’s success, and the secret to most strategic professional alliances. It’s also the central focus of innovative business leaders who are seeking to establish a foothold in an ever-evolving world economy.

Jon Kolko on Being a Designer Today

My colleague Jon Kolko in frog’s Austin office has a nice interview over at Yanko design with lots of great thoughts in it.

I think students need to focus on the intellectual aspects of design, rather than becoming enamored with the more obvious, traditional, and seemingly glamorous parts of design. Many students see Karim Rashid, or other flamboyant form givers, talk about design, and fail to realize that these are purposefully produced public approaches to a profession, much like Paris Hilton is to media. Design isn’t about that, at least not the design that’s going to land you a job and help you pay your mortgage. It’s about something thoughtful, and methodical, and useful, and beautiful, all at once. The design I talk about, and the design work we do at frog, is so far away from the “making beautiful objects” of yesterday that it’s almost a different job entirely.

…

I long for a day where designers, without long and convoluted explanations and examples and spec work and hand waving, are paid for the output of their mind, rather than their hands. We produce artifacts to visualize, and to illustrate, and to show what we mean; these are ancillary to the things we think. Doctors, lawyers, even smarmy politicians aren’t compensated directly based on their output – only on their intellect. Ultimately, we need to realize – and we need to communicate to our clients and to the general public – that design is a culturally embedded phenomenon about changing behavior.

Read more >

New Role

With my return to frog design after working on my book, I now have a new role: Creative Director. Having been in the strategy group at frog for the last six years, the last few years as Strategy Director, I’m now going to be working on the design side of the house again. Well, I’ve always done that, but just with a somewhat different role. But I will continue to approach everything from a strategic perspective, and am looking forward to furthering the integration of design and strategic thinking and methods.

Like all CDs now at frog, I’m leading an interdisciplinary group, a mixture of industrial design, interaction design, design researchers and analysts. This is really exciting as we continue to explore new ways of doing convergent work, and expand from product to systems approaches.

frog project in NY Times

The New York Times has a nice write-up on a recent frog project: a point-of-sale device for Intel. This thing pushes the idea of a cash register or self-help kiosk off a cliff and is both very interesting and very beautiful. It brings the breadth and depth of information that we take for granted when researching purchase decisions online into the store environment. The article doesn’t go into it much, but this design (though still a concept) is more eco-friendly than conventional cash registers. We did quite a bit of analysis of the eco footprint of conventional devices and worked on the critical areas.