Loving the Aliens

In the Beginning, there were factories. And the factories made things for us to buy. And the people in the Factories who decided what we should buy (and therefore what the Factories should make) were the Boss and the Bosss wife. As the 19th Century rushed into the Industrial Revolution, no-one had yet heard of Brands, or Brand Managers or even designers. Product Brands were normally the Bosss family name, or the name of the Factory. No Brand existed without a Factory or a Workshop. No-one knew what consumer research was (unless it was the Boss asking his wifes opinion). Products were engineered by engineers. Design was what colour the product was. And the Product was something you needed. So who told the Boss what we all needed? A small group of brilliant employees, usually, plus some of his trusted peer group at the club (oh, and his wife.). Edison decided we needed electric light. Tesla decided we needed alternating current to make it work. Singer said we needed sewing machines. Hoover thought vacuum cleaners made sense and Mr Tate and Mr Lyle thought youd enjoy refined sugar to bake with. Strangely enough, 150 years later, the likes of these visionaries are still amongst us, but they do something different now. They dont build factories.. Steve Jobs of Apple is one of those beings. Autocratic. Visionary. Humanistic. Brilliant. CEO. But hes something else as well, which you didnt know. Hes a Designer. Not a bloke with flowing locks and a pink tie who calls everyone dahhhhling, but someone who can see the whole issue at once without losing sight of the individual steps necessary to achieve it. Someone who understands that people buy things that they find attractive and compelling, and continue to use things that have relevance to their lives and provide joy in the process. He then gets someone elses Factory to build it to Apples spec. Just like Nike does. Or probably your most ferocious competitor, whose brains are here, but whose production is probably in the Far East. And guess what? Hes never asked a single person what theyre going to want. Because he knows two things you dont. Firstly, he knows that people havent the faintest ideas what theyre going to want, so theres no point in asking them. And secondly, he knows its his job to imagine the futureand then create it for us. And just like Edison and Dr Marten and Mr Hoover, he doesnt wait for permission (or a competitor getting there first) to tell him when to do it. Who gave Jobs permission to re-invent the music industry with iTunes? Nobody. He just did it because he knew he could and that wed love it. When Apple gets close to a product launch decision, Jobs and his few trusted colleagues sit around a table and look at what theyve done. They then ask themselves is it Cool? If the answer is yes they launch. Thats it. Good old-fashioned 19th Century Marketing. When you started as a marketeer, you probably saw yourself at the hub of the Communications and Product apparat, Briefing and receiving the creative agencies to provide the ideas for the ads and products, and then taking the ideas and presenting them to the consumer at every verse end to make sure that youd got it right.

Richard Seymour believes that marketeers are missing out on an astonishing creative resourcebecause they dont understand it.
Actually, youre doing all this research because youre expected to prove that youre doing the right thing. If you dont have that Excel spreadsheet to tell you that Design A or Communications route B is the right strategy, then the Boss wont let you do it. Is that because he doesnt trust your instincts? Or is it because you dont trust your instincts? Many of the corporations we work with use consumer research in this way: they ask people who dont know, to tell them what to do. In many cases, spending up to ten times as much in these so-called validating research phases as they do on the design itself. And usually taking up much of the development networks time-to-market at the same time. The only people I know who really know what were going to want in the future are people who live there. Designers. When a product designer sits down to his pad, or mouse or whatever, he has to be a minimum of two years ahead of today. If he isnt, hell create something thats 2 years out of date when it finally arrives on shelf or in the showroom. So he projects in a way in which you cant. Thats why hes a designer, not a marketeer. Hes an empath, someone who absorbs human mores and style and excretes relevant solutions. Thats what drew him to apply for design at University, not Physics. If hes good, hes probably working on products that may be 6 or 7 years ahead of now, because some products, like cars or telecommunication devices, are planned that far ahead. Not designed that far ahead, necessarily, but planned. Long-term design strategy and short-term design implementation. These businesses have a thousand yard stare, which lets them lead what is going to happen themselves, whilst giving them the time to do it properly. While you are staring into the next couple of years and trying

Loving the Aliens (cont)

desperately to deliver the goods that fast, theyve given themselves the luxury of time to get it right. Yes, they started earlier. If you look at what a competitor is doing by reacting to what theyve just launched onto the shelf this season, youre looking into an archaeological dig. What you can see is what they were doing, up to three or fours years ago. If your product development cycles are any more than 3 months long, you DARE not react to what you see launching around you, because youll be hopelessly out of date by the time you get your retaliation in. Which brings us back to 19th Century Marketing and Steve Jobs. Where did Edison, and where does Jobs, get their perspective on what were going to need from, other than constantly living in a world that is going to be in their jobs? By looking carefully at what is going to be technically possible whilst watching the emergent behaviour of the human organism. Not asking people, by the way, but watching the animal at work. At Seymourpowell we have a division called SPF, or Seymourpowellforesight. going through her daily cleansing routines, or preparing a meal, or a guy getting into his domestic stair-lift. Thats not where the magic lies. Its in what the designer sees in this material thats so amazing. Because thats what a designer does. Paul Smith, the brilliant British fashion designer once explained this to a friend, when asked where he got his ideas from; You and I could walk down the street together and look at the same things he explained but Id SEE ten times more than you would. This wasnt an idle boast; by the way, its probably the clearest depiction of the creative process at work that Ive ever heard. What Paul didnt explain, was what happened next. The designers brain isnt the same as yours. You like innovation funnels, or Gates, or Steps or other, linear processes that narrow down your options in a logical way until the answer drops out of the bottom of the funnel or whatever... If that worked, then youd always be creating brilliant new products. in freeze-frame from within, like watching an explosion on film, slowed down to a single frame a second. When a designer as good as Steve Jobs, or many of the people you have at your disposal for that matter, provides what seems to you to be an answer they have just plucked out of thin air (and therefore, highly subjective and untested), you are naturally suspicious of their conclusion, and then go about trying to research validity into it or out of it. Basically, you dont trust him, or his damn wizardry, do you? If you buy a really good designer into your programme, youre actually getting the most extraordinary thing: an object that works backwards The designers mind can deliver the correct solution up-front. But hell then have to go through interminable post-rationalisation to prove it. Its like getting Paganini to run a virtuoso arpeggio while you keep stopping him saying Well, I quite like it, but what will the consumer think? Trust me. Get design into your marketing long before you think you should. Let the designers brain help you jettison the bundle of prejudices that is usually your creative brief and replace it with a series of clear questions about what is really needed. Study emergent behaviour in your target market through the eyes of someone who can really see. Trust their instincts. And then begin your project. Use the Force, before that impudent, driven competitor with no factory eats your lunch.

You could call it a research organisation, because it observes emerging trends in technology, culture and technology and, at the same time, looks for the new, emerging coincidences that provide the raw material for new ideas.

Jobs and his colleages But it doesnt. sit around a table and And youre not. look at what theyve done. They then ask themselves The designers brain works in a non-linear, Is it cool? seemingly chaotic fashion If the answer is yes that, if you could see into it, would scare the crap they launch. out of you.
Driving through Mumbai is almost directly analogous to this process. If you get in a cab and belt through the city to the traffic lights, youll notice a number of things: the first is that two conflicting lanes of traffic will appear to pile into one another relentlessly, sounding their horns and leaping from brakes to throttle in a mad, Nihilistic waggle dance. The second thing youll notice is how few of these vehicles actually strike each other, and the third thing that youll notice is that you generally get through this teeming conflagration unhurt and unusually rapidly. When this first happened to me, I looked quizzically at the Indian Physics major sitting next to me in the cab, and he replied: Its a System, Jim, but not as we know it! This system, in the designers brain, lets him throw the entire issue up in the air simultaneously, and then view it

You might call the people watching part of this process Ethnography. We call it the Conceptual Nursery. This is where the future really lives. But SPFs staff arent researchers, or anthropologists, or technologists.Theyre all designers. Designers who have turned to the Dark Side: the obscured pathway to the future. If they werent outputting their work as dossiers or reports or compelling visual evidence of the animal at work, theyd be turning it into product designs (which is what the rest of us do). If I showed you some of their video work done recently, you might see nothing unusual at all. Youd see a woman

The shape of things to come