I was fortunate enough last night to catch one of the advance screenings of the feature-length documentary “Helvetica” with some friends. I had never been to an advance screening of this sort of movie (or any movie really), so it was really interesting to see what sort of people showed up to hear the director speak and experience the film. Probably most were students as the Massachusetts College of Art, but anyway I can say with authority, from this one experience, that design people are a diverse bunch.

But that’s neither here nor there. The film itself was brilliant. It functioned of course as a chronicle of the typeface Helvetica, from conception to wildfire acceptance and use, through postmodernism and rebellion to where we are now, with the font itself as ubiquitous a communication tool as any we have. Whoever scouted out the scenery / locations / usage examples for the film did a particularly fantastic job; the photography was captivating, humorous, and intelligent.

More important, though, than the straight history of Helvetica, was the way the film touched on the topics of culture and design. By presenting the viewpoints of typographers and graphic designers alike, Helvetica was able to demonstrate the way a tool such as a font moves from conception to use, and further to illuminate the way that cultural artifacts are produced.

It turns out that something as simple and natural as Helvetica is, unsurprisingly, at once the product of much hard work and a refined iteration of a particular line of product (fonts) dating back to the mid-19^th century. From a type designer’s perspective, Helvetica seems to be an almost magical confluence of shapes, a simple font that somehow imbues words with any number of qualities based on their presentation. It’s at once a blank slate and a powerful communication mechanism – maybe the perfect font.

The majority of the graphic designers in the film had, despite misgivings that varied by individual, a grudging respect for the font. Although it didn’t necessarily appeal to their unique tastes or styles, they all essentially agreed that Helvetica was sublimely usable – because it is. There’s really no other way to explain its proliferation. Helvetica, in a very general sense, is one of the best that we’ve got. It’s clear and clean, authoritative without jackboots, adaptable but concrete. There is something in those lines that makes sense to human beings, or at least Westerners, the folks who use a system of written language that Helvetica might comprise. Despite the fact that it is absolutely everywhere, this font is used so often as to be an essential part of who we are. It is everywhere because it is who we are, and we are who we are precisely because it is everywhere.

Design absorbs culture and uses what it absorbs to produce culture. Helvetica is a brilliant artifact because it says this in a crystal clear manner, which really is just what it was intended to do. This is what design as a practice is for - the capture of culture, and the refinement, adjustment, construction of new tools that give culture back to us all. I think we’re lucky to live in a world that recognizes this.

http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/trysumers.htm

From the February / March report at trendwatching.com come to you: Trysumers! In an attempt to continue categorizing consumers as viewed through an increasingly kaleidoscopic lens, the guys at Trendwatching have coined this phrase to describe a newly constructed set: media (especially Internet) savvy, high expendable income, experienced consumers with a taste for the unconventional and a general immunity to caution. To complement these folks, we’re also seeing something the Trendwatchers have dubbed “tryvertising”, which, as far as I can tell, is basically grocery-store-style sampling run amok. The idea is to come up with something new, thrust it into a trysumer’s hands, and let them get to know it. If they like it, they’ll buy it, and so will others who follow these experimenters.

OK, goofy catchphrase compound-word lingo aside, the guys at Trendwatching are obviously onto something.

Back in advertising school, we used to talk about “opinion leaders” – reductively, people who were touchpoints for social networks. Their opinions on specific topics reverberate through communities, as their judgments are respected; they’re one of the keys to a solid word-of-mouth marketing campaign. These are very useful people to have supporting your product in an arena where both communication (access to opinion leaders) and access to new products are essentially limited. However, I’m not sure that we’re in that arena any longer. For products or services that want to achieve some measure of ubiquity, the old-fashioned tribal-chief opinion leader can still play an important role in success. But more providers cater to niche markets, our understanding of consumers keeps fragmenting, and access to information is greatly enhanced by the Internet. Opinions on niche offerings are everywhere and easily accessible.

The funny thing about labeling someone a trysumer is that they are by definition transient, elusive, and almost impossible to categorize accurately, precisely because they’re unreliable in their purchasing decisions. Trendwatching suggests that the number of consumers who function in this way is on the rise, and they clearly have the ability to share their experiences with other consumers. Every one of Trendwatching’s “trysumers” has the potential to become a de facto opinion leader by virtue of their experimental behavior. What the Internet provides is a forum that allows anyone to expound on anything, so if you’re one of the first to step into an empty space, it’s that much easier to stake your claim on some territory. Hooking this new type of consumer is more and more a key component of an offering’s success.

This translates to a period of exceptional potential (and challenge) for the PD / SD communities, and design research as a discipline. No longer relegated to POP influence or even post-purchase word of mouth, form and function as perceived by individual niche consumers are daily becoming a stronger driver of market share. Design research plays an increasingly important role in the purchase dynamic by systematically identifying the salable themes that resonate with ever more mercurial consumers. In a world where “trysumers” will have the first, and sometimes final, say on a product’s success, it becomes tremendously important to design offerings to fit their targets precisely.

As a post-script, this has also got to be a very fun time to be a designer.  With this sort of adventurous, enthusiastic consumer out there, providing adventurous, enthusiastic work has got to be more acceptable than ever.

Well, I guess this thing is underway.

I’ve got this blog up and running, themed to my website. That took a little bit of code-monkey work, but it was ably (if not efficiently) managed. There will still be aesthetic improvements to this as I learn a little bit more about CSS and the whole WordPress way of doing things.

Anyway, most of my bloggish writing in the past has been well-received, because it’s been pointless and amusing. This space, at least initially, isn’t really for humor, though it should be fun in its own way.

What’s going on is that I’m working on kicking off a new career in research for (x.discipline) design. Now that I have a personalized blogspace, I’m going to use it to put up career-type reflections, and potentially get some sort of dialog going with the people who actually read what I have to say. Since I’m a huge neo at the moment, established folks might find preliminary musings to be a bit banal, but I learn fast and I write well. Over time, the hope is that we’ll be able to discuss some progressive research and design-related topics in this space.

The blog’s called “Sagacity”, which is a noun defined as:

1. The quality of being discerning, sound in judgment, and farsighted; wisdom.
2. the mental ability to understand and discriminate between relations
3. the trait of forming opinions by distinguishing and evaluating

Originally this was to be the URL of my website but some fortunate soul got there first and took the name. For design researchers, the folks laying the foundation / groundwork for the physical designers, engineers, programmers, sagacity is a critical trait. You’ve got to be perceptive and insightful, but you also have to be pragmatic. When you gather huge amounts of information, it takes a certain skill or ability to be able to recognize relevant information, organize it, and present it so that it can be utilized to build something useful. In short, it takes sagacity, and this blogspace will function to promote the development of just such a quality.