#a testbed for weird tech

[raeuberkotzenrotz]

I suppose I was way overdue to eat shit on the bike

Big fat bandage n all

[vexwerewolf]

I've watched one too many defunctland video essay and it's got me thinking: would Walt Disney be more at home in SSC or Harrison Armory? SSC matches his weird perfectionism and warped futurism ideals, but HA matches his idealization and mytholigizing of America's past

SSC for sure. Harrison Armory would quickly tire of him.

I think a lot of people in the Lancer fandom misunderstand who the Armory are and what they're about. They are first and foremost a weapons manufacturer, and they are the only member of the Big Three for whom this is true. For IPS-N and SSC, arms manufacture is a side gig which they just happen to be very good at. For HA, all the other shit they do is the side gig - guns, bombs, mechs, tanks and warships are their core competency.

Even the mechs that have weird tech like blinkspace shielding or gravity manipulation have it because it has a demonstrable tactical use on the battlefield. The Sunzi isn't in mass-production yet - it's a testbed only accessible to a select few pilots, because the Armory wants to make sure it's viable as a product.

Walt Disney was a perfectionist with a highly active imagination. That made him a great animator, but it also made him uncompromising and difficult to work with. His ideas were often completely impractical, but he was extremely slow to accept any dilution of his vision. That's not a good fit for Harrison Armory.

SSC are the absolute definition of do-it-just-because-we-can, money-is-no-object stuffy auteurs. He'd be right at home there.

[loverepresentstuff]

01.09.17

You Need Testbed

If you ask Rob Peart what challenges are facing the design industry right now, you’ll get a pretty long answer, but it’s a question he thinks about a hell of a lot. Over the years he’s been a freelance designer, in-house agency art director, associate creative director, zine-swapper and any number of other different job roles at a diverse range of agencies. He’s worn a lot of different hats, so he knows the nuances of the industry well.

For the past two years he’s been out in Singapore working for SapientRazorfish, making digital work for commercial clients. It suited him well, he learned a lot, but having returned to the UK he’s working on doing something completely different, and has just founded a new enterprise, Testbed, that aims to aid designers in areas in which they didn’t even know they needed help. Here’s what he has to say about it.

What have you been up to in Singapore?

For the last couple of years I’ve been working out in Singapore at SapientRazorfish as an Associate Creative Director on the concept and visual design side. It's been great to get some solid, formal digital experience under my belt. As someone who has always dabbled and explored the digital side of design, it was eye-opening to see how large organisations tackle large digital projects, and how they approach other, more general briefs but from a digital angle.

Working in design or branding studios, you have a specific way you approach projects. Even though you might not say it—or realise it—if your team has mainly a graphic design background then every project is going to look like a graphic design project, and you apply graphic design tools to it. So it was refreshing to get another approach.

What was different between the two approaches?

With some differences it’s hard to say whether it’s just the difference between large and small organisations, or something disciplinary, likewise whether some of them are related uniquely to SapientRazorfish or digital agencies generally. But I'd say the biggest difference was how skillsets were valued. Everyone understood that it takes people from multiple disciplines and backgrounds to bring a project to life, not just a designer (although we were all ‘designers’ really). We had business leads, UX leads, delivery managers, copywriters, front-end tech, back-end tech, account managers, visual designers and art directors all giving their expert input into projects. That was really brilliant to witness.

With all those different disciplines come different tools and processes to crack a brief, so projects don’t become visually lead by default, which is what I’ve seen happen in other companies. The lead ends up coming from the most appropriate discipline, and it kind of happens naturally as you make your way through the project and start to understand what's required to make it happen. That probably sounds damn obvious to everyone else, but that’s what I took from it.

How come you made that transition into a more digital area?

It kinda happened a little bit by accident. I was just drawn to it, and to be really honest I didn't think a ‘digital’ agency would have me. I didn’t have any formal digital experience, only my own personal explorations—and my confidence in that wasn’t at the level where I thought I could get a proper job doing digital. I was lucky enough to meet some people in Singapore that valued my perspective and personal work enough to get me on board. I think I was in the right place at the right time.

Have your experiences at Sapient had an effect on the business you’ve just set up?

I've always had a nagging feeling that the way I go about designing feels unnatural to me. Part of it is that you learn a set of tools, and you use these for every bit of work, because it’s what you know. That’s fine, to an extent, and works for some (maybe most?) jobs. People work out what they’re good at, and clients come to you for that thing. But there’s also a few downsides to this way of working—at least I think so.

From a personal perspective, I’m restless. I want to try everything all the time, and not be restricted by a narrow set of tools to create work. So there’s that—the desire to be creative outside of a visual or graphic-design context.

Then there’s the situation we’re in now where design jobs are just a huge mess. Designers are being asked to do more and more; never just a visual identity, but a huge brand; never just a website but a digital platform for everything to be built on—behaviours, interactions, service, blah blah. How do you even go about designing these things if you've only got access to graphic design tools?

All the while you’ve got technology baring down on you; AI this, AR that, VR the other. So you’ve not only got the strategic questions of design, but more and more executional opportunities too. And it’s just impossible to begin thinking about them if you’ve no experience of the capabilities and limitations of all these different things. As a result of all this, designers lose their critical ability. You can’t question the worth, usefulness or value of what you're doing if you just have to bang stuff out without testing it, or giving yourself the time and space to question it.

What are you doing to address that then? What is Testbed and what do you want to achieve with it?

Testbed is set up to help designers, creatives and other people to prototype an idea in an unfamiliar medium. Something I saw at Sapient (and other places) that surprised me was a struggle to work with ideas that forced the team to work outside of their comfort zone. So we’d either fall back on what we knew, or we’d guess our way through a project and something weird might get made. I want testbed to firstly give designers the confidence to start tackling ideas in new media, and secondly give them the space to work out whether it's the right thing to do or not. Opening up technology, even at a crappy, lo-fi level to designers hopefully gets us working a bit differently. There's this habit of thinking the tech is the end product in itself, when we’ve barely scratched the surface (at least in graphics / creative) of using new tech as a creative facilitator—as a tool.

What kinds of people are you looking to come and work with you, and at a practical level what kinds of services will you be offering?

At first I’d love to work with designers and agencies that know they have to start engaging more with technology. They need to understand what it does, how it works, and its limitations so they’re more informed when working on briefs. And the way we do that is by helping them build prototypes of their ideas.

What kinds of prototypes are you talking? What can clients expect from a Testbed workshop/session?

Well it depends what they’re working on. We offer several different services that you can check out out the site; prototyping and testing, consulting and connecting, deep dives, demo days and workshops. The most important thing is I don't care if we come across as messy, personable, or unprofessional. I just want everyone to be open and try to understand what the fuck it is we’re designing or making, and what it's going to mean for the people that have to use it or deal with it.