@markcridge \ muck and brass

New New Thing

After a 9 month break I’ve decided to leave behind my life of leisure for a new roller coaster adventure of fun, inspiration and excitement with the good folks of BERG London.

If you have been hiding under a rock for the past couple of years then you might not already know that BERG are one of the world’s hottest design and tech consultancies and I’m really excited to be joining their team at such an important juncture.

I’ll be taking on a new role of Director of Consulting and my brief is to increase the number of potential collaborations with the most interesting clients and organisations. 

BERG already command a hugely influential following within the global design and tech community (you can see some of their plaudits here at bergcloud.com) and the recent launch of Little Printer has created an almighty buzz online.

(If you haven’t already placed your pre-order you can do so here as the first batch are selling out fast!)

Apart from anything else it is just incredibly exciting for me to getting my hands dirty again directly helping clients make better products and services. 

So much talk in the ad agency world over the past few years has been about ‘doing’, ‘making things’ and ‘innovating’, but I’ve always been slightly worried that this often siloed approach to innovation within agencies was more of a distraction from the business of marketing and in many cases would be pursued more as a new-business-loss-leader rather than fundamentally changing the way agencies work with clients.

That’s fundamentally why BERG holds such appeal. Rather than just talk about the importance of innovation BERG are out doing it for themselves, making not just their own products but creating whole new platforms and genres of connected consumer products - so in one sense I’ve gone straight to the source.

I’m only a few days in but it is already clear that there is much excitement to come over the next few years and it is great to be back in Shoreditch where I’ve spent most of my career to date and working with such a smart and committed bunch of people - plus Matt, Jack and Matt have made me very welcome already.

I’ll continue to volunteer for the Green Party on the side and have a few other things up my sleeve but for the moment BERG is very much my main bag and I’ll try to blog a bit more often here now that I’m back in the world of paid employment.

You can keep track of all things BERG related by signing up for their week notes at berglondon.com and I look forward to hearing all your comments.

Spaces in between

I’ve been stuck on jury service all week, so far without a case.

Clearly not being able to yet fulfill my civic duty has been frustrating, as all of the disruption of being away from work and stuck in the equivalent of a doctors waiting room for a whole week has so far been for nothing.

Yet one of the benefits that I wasn’t expecting was the joy of being released each day at varying times all at a moments notice, giving me a spare hour or two which I could use to either dash back to the office for meetings, or more interestingly try to sneak off to experience something a little more cultural.

My best catch of the week saw me stumble uninvited into the Icon Minds symposium in the Village Underground just around the corner from the Tea Building. A lovely little event packed with an impressive array of talented architecture and design thinkers. Mr Jones and the Bergers were also attending as well and you can see Matt’s long-hand notes here.

I was most keen on seeing the wonderfully entertaining author Bruce Sterling in conversation with conceptual designers Dunne & Raby, and managed to get there just in time to see things kick off.

I’ve been a fan of Mr Sterling’s writing for a long time and was really looking forward to seeing him in the flesh, and whilst he cuts an unassuming figure quietly sitting composed before the talk began, unfortunately for Dunne & Raby on this occasion he kind of blew them away!

His main critical was around his passion for exploring design through fiction; in particular how writing about design is in many ways a superior practice to the actual creation of objects and artifacts.

He justifies this by drawing attention to the fact that the vast majority of design only ever exists as speculative design;

“patented designs that never get made, vapourware that was never more than some ego driven fantasy, hobbyist objects made individually, impossible designs, frauds, fakes, copies and futuristic objects not yet possible.”

This much larger space made possible through imagined design writing can today take many forms, made possible by the dissolving of boundaries between different forms of design practice;

“scientific experiments, scenario planning of all kinds, consumer observation, story-boarding, brainstorming, extrapolations and his all time favorite mash-ups.”

The importance of each of us incorporating design writing and fiction into our own work is brought home by the need to “design for situations that don’t yet exist”.

Rather than remaining hidebound by such petty concerns as usefulness or usability which are essential elements of design for objects required to serve a purpose here and now, especially as “the reality of actual designed objects is too often a disappointment”, so when the very demands of what we are designing for change literally by the day why not instead indulge in a bit more fantasy and speculation.

He went on for some time more, here are a few choice quotes;

“Steampunk is what happened when goths discovered the colour brown.”

“Most objects are sets of frozen relationships, protagonists of a documented process.”

“Experience design may be the most Imperial of all design practices to date. The first school of design that can encompass literature.”

“How can you write a piece of news, that shall remain a piece of news in 20 years? Which of these will last 20 more years; the EU, NATO, Google, Twitter, Facebook?”

“I’d rather be interesting and broke, than rich and on the verge of suicide.”

A great thought provoking and stimulating talk. If you wanted to look at anything he’s written especially on design you can do a lot worse than start with a copy of his wonderful Shaping Things; "...it’s about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's about everything."

Also at the very end of the week I finally managed to sneak off to the fantastic Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy. If you haven’t been yet, GO! It lives up to all of the hype.

What I enjoyed most was flitting between the rooms to catch glimpses of the main red wax elements as the mighty double-decker bus sized block slowly meandered along its tracks, or rushing back over to catch the gun fire its shot into the wall, something I missed twice before catching it below...

The tension as people waited for the almighty explosion or otherwise was palpable (which I don’t think the rather amateurish video quite captures). A lovely involving interactive work.

Anyway, back for another week of jury duty next week.