FJORD MILAN - TRANSCRIPT
Visual Design | Sebastiano Boni
I am Sebastiano Boni and I’m the visual design lead at Fjord Milan.
Designer Precedents
Now is the time of living services, living brands, living digital products, it means the work of the designer never stops because digital products keep on evolving. Visual design is a craft. To be compared or to think of Italian heritage, in terms of art and design is often intimidating but I think it’s part of us.
If I look at the past, designers of the past, even if they were very good at combining aesthetics and functionality there was a sort of naivety that always attracted me. I always talk about Bruno Munari, because I think that he is the Leonardo of the 20th century, and you can clearly see it in all of his work. It seems he approached design and life always with the eyes of a kid.
Bruno Munari and Massimo Vignelli - they represent for me both ends of the spectrum for graphic design. On one side you have Massimo Vignelli who is famous for his very rational style that is very rigorous, and on the other hand you have 01:35 Bruno Munari who is completely the opposite, his work spans from product design to photography to children’s education. Very intuitive, very creative, and together they create this sort of balance and they represent what graphic design for me is.
Design Systems & Visual Languages
A visual language is like any other language, it’s a series of conventions of rules that allows us to communicate but in a visual way instead of a verbal way. They create a shared common language for the brand. So no matter how many designers or how many people are involved, the product that you are going to create will have the same characteristics, the same aesthetics, it speaks the same language.
The most important thing when you are approached, you start thinking or designing a design system, is defining some pillars, some drivers. So what are the values that are driving you, that have to represent the brand and have to represent a very strong concept.
Once you define that you can can start applying it to all the complex assets and elements of a design system. When you have that strong concept then you are also able to translate it to a strong visual language that can be shared and understood by everybody.
Service Design | Lidia Tralli
My name is Lidia Tralli, I'm a Service Design Lead at Fjord Milan.
What I can see is that as designers, we are more and more sitting at business tables and we are more and more facilitating decisions that have nothing to do with traditional design.
Transparency in Design
I think design thinking abuse is creating a lot of problems, and I couldn't agree more with our trend [Fjord 2018 Trends] talking about that, because I think design thinking needs to be done by designers and of course involving other people, but it needs to be done by designers. This kind of activity is done by by not expert of this can reduce the quality, reduce the personality, so i really think this is what can bring to, what i called before sameness.
I think the most important point here is: remember to always take into consideration the importance of transparency in building trust, in our relationship between clients and brands of course. And the key elements of transparency is visibility, and I think that designers are really great in giving visibility.
The most important challenge here I think is on the client side, meaning accepting or doing this cultural shift that transparency requires. That's why transparency and visibility is so important, because of course a specific interaction can be seamless and invisible but the meaning of our relationship between brands and clients doesn't need to be invisible. I mean you need to be really explicit on your purpose, on your values.
Customer Journey Frameworks
Well, I think there is a big misunderstanding around customer journeys. Customer journey is not a deliverable it's a tool for designers.
Every customer journey can be different with different levels of details with different type of information, what is important for being a customer journey is having some key elements like the steps experience, the users, the description of the experience in each step and the touchpoint.
I think a bad customer journey is when you misunderstand the user story with the customer journey; and this is a bad one I think because the customer journey needs to allow you to have the full vision and a big picture of links between things. So you can understand if you work on some part what you have to modify in other points of the experience.
We love user research at Fjord. And we mostly do qualitative research because we love most the whys and the whats. And we use different techniques so it depends on the project scope so it can be one to one interviews or shadowing, mystery, online surveys, and 01:35 sometimes we do what we call Guerrilla Research, meaning that we go around asking questions to everybody because for us it’s really super important starting a project from the right user perspective, and to really understand the context of where we have to design.
Interaction Design | Amedeo Perrone
I am Amedeo Perrone and I am the interaction design lead of the Milan studio of Fjord.
What Interaction Design is Not
The basis of interaction design is always a user, his objective, and the environment where he is performing... but a lot of the time, designers forget the last part.
For me, they are connected since the beginning. Nobody can think "Okay, I am just a digital designer. I don't know want to know about how to cut a piece of wood or how a car works." You need to be curious.
For me, interaction design is the natural evolution of product design. The merging of product design with ergonomy and human factors and psychology, we have interaction design, so there is no more just the need to satisfy a few senses, you need to satisfy the senses in a very complex cognitive environment, which is the digital one.
I don't really think it’s UX [user experience design] as a lot of people think, it’s not making wireframes, it’s not making screens, it’s not making a button positioning, or it’s not a loading circle or something like that.
The interaction design starts from the reality, the physical experience and stops when you finish. Like if you want to make a money transfer in your online banking system, your experience starts when you need to transfer money, and your need has been satisfied once the money is where you want.
Ethics in Design
Since digital can enter into your room, into your pocket, you are responsible to help companies to be less intrusive as possible. If you work in a big company, profit is quite always your priority (the profit of your customer of course or your client).
Well I think the responsibility of a good designer is to find out the right trade off, because you are the lawyer of the client.
And I think everyone, and of course especially those who study design, shouldn't just know about aesthetics or beauty. You should start by thinking "Okay, I have to make things, I am not just talking about things, I have to make things and I need to know how to make things."
Because people are going to use that, people are going to spend the money they have from their salary on the things I am doing so this is why you don't need just to be responsible, you don't need just to be empathetic, you also need to be generous, because there is something good in this.
You can follow all the courses you want, you can choose whatever at university, but you need to make your path. So you really need to understand things, there’s no book with a synthesis, so you need to experience everything.
Let's try go to the root of the knowledge in order to make your own point of view, which needs to be strong in this kind of career, if you want to make a difference.