New Media Addict
By Dave Thomas
About David
Dave Thomas is the online editor-in-chief of E-Gear. When he's not tracking online trends he likes to make movies, eat pasta or just sit around watching Doctor Who.Silver's Screen
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Sep 8, 2009The line between technology and content continues to blur....
SXSW 2009 Part Four - Let Us Now Praise Great Design (and Berate Old Publishing)
One of the hottest tickets at SXSW this year was the sold-out world premiere of Helvetica director Gary Hustwitt's latest documentary, Objectified. This is the kind of premiere that would sell out at a geek-oriented festival. As with Helvetica, Hustwitt explores his passion for design, this time focusing on industrial design, the art of mass produced objects. At the premiere, Hustwitt revealed that his next project would continue this obsession, but declined to reveal the topic.
The film is a celebration of great design, profiling professionals like Davin Stowell, CEO and founder of Smart Design who created the Good Grips line for OXO and Jony Ive at Apple who helped birth their new aluminum Macbook. All the while NYT Magazine columnist and Buying In author Rob Walker chimes in with observations on the impact of this much stuff flooding our society.
The next day, a panel including Hustwitt, Walker, Stowell and some of the other designers explored these issues further. One of the concerns was how the approach to design could be used to solve larger issues than the next laptop. Why can't the intelligence that goes into designing an iPhone go into crafting health policy? Well, as it turns out, interaction design experts are already being hired in the UK to tackle social services and crime management.
Another issue was the idea that the Cycle of the New drives down the quality of design. There's no time to improve on a coffeemaker if you have to make a new version of that coffeemaker every year. But that's what department stores want. New SKU's for the shelves.
But the importance of design, everyone seemed to agree, had more to do with the end product, which is not a product at all, but an experience. "Nobody cares about photo printers," said Stowell, "What they want is to share memories."
On a completely different note, New Think for Old Publishers revolved around the problems facing publishing today but, more accurately, the problems facing authors and readers for a lack of support from publishers. What resulted was representatives from Penguin Group asking the audience to help them answer the question posed by fellow panelist, Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky: "The internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history [now what?]"
To get a picture of just how frustrated audience members were, consider this: The panel wrapped the We're Talking portion of the hour very quickly and moved on to Q&A. They asked, "Does anyone have any questions?" No one stepped up. They then asked "If you could tell the publishing industry one thing they're doing wrong, what would it be?" 11 people instantly formed a queue for the mic and the line never stopped.
A few of the more interesting suggestions included:
- get more authors blogging
- help readers become better cheerleaders for books (like other industries do with records and movies)
- offer an all you can eat model for digital downloads
- offer the first chapter for free and subsequent chapters at $1 each (this is actually being done here)
I have to give mad props to the panelists who basically said to the audience "Come flog us for an hour." Here's hoping it all produces a conversation that leads to a brighter future for books.
(While at SXSW I interviewed former Hyperion Editor-in-Chief Will Schwalbe and BookTour.com Co-founder Kevin Smokler on the future of books. Watch the video or listen to the full-length interview as a podcast.)
Companies Mentioned:
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