by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | Methodology
A writer sits at her computer. All the information at hand, online or in a stack of documents or books. Information from academic writers. Meanwhile, there is all kinds of consultation and participation, looking for consensus.
What will come out of this?
Something all too neutral. Cold-hearted even. I pitch my tent on the edge of a vineyard or tidal area. A lot of fuss, somewhat romantic. But very close to the action.
What will this approach bring me?
Something that feels close.
Intimate.
Refuting presuppositions
In 2016 and 2017, I worked on a book about wine (read more here ), for which I visited 25 vineyards in France and Spain on foot. Often around sunrise or sunset. To do so, one has to make an appointment with the owners of the winery. You then chat with them, for example, when they drive you up the hill in their jeep. Such talk gives you all kinds of insights and refutes your presuppositions. You walk through the landscape, not with a booklet or a map but with a flesh-and-blood guide, full of local and superspecific knowledge. This puts the general knowledge that everyone has on their screens in a different light, it is complemented by stories, by intimacy and character.
Add pepper to taste
That’s how I discovered that interviewing other people who are close to the action all day is a great addition to my own research. It is the pepper that a drawing or a story needs. It takes some work, but the principle is simple.
That’s why I chose an approach that would provide intimacy for the visualization of Geopark Schelde Delta(here): visiting the locations on foot as well as talking to people who are working in the landscape on a daily basis.
Cultivating character
You know, something like that takes a lot of time. And money. You have to be a little smart about that. But designing in a studio with the Internet at hand does not provide enough proximity. A characterful end result must be cultivated.
What you need to tell about the landscape you don’t think up by staying inside.
Wine up close: harvest in the Languedoc, early in the morning.
With Soan Lan Ie looking at small and big things in the landscape along the Zwin, Zeeuws-Vlaanderen.
Interview with Jan Kruijse, seaweed harvester in Yerseke, for the brochure for the Geopark Schelde Delta.
With Nico de Haan, bird expert, and Rico van der Sloot, industrial designer, exploring for panels on meadow birds, for Natuurmonumenten.
by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | Methodology
‘I mean a kind of figurine, not Disney-like, but closer to our own style’
Silly.
Talking about images is silly.
Everyone at the table has something different in their mind, and you need an enormous amount of words, pictorial, descriptive words, to make everyone’s ideas clear to everyone else.
If you want to talk about images, you have to collect images. Simply, with Google, or by taking pictures of an exhibit you do like, or using a movie still from Spiderman. Or by sketching.
Oh, you can’t draw?
All the better. A non-pretty sketch invites more participation than a professional sketch. It’s a thing with little people and houses, or a bunch of rectangles with words in them and arrows in between. It doesn’t have to be on an iPad Pro, it can be on that blank envelope over there. With the janitor’s bic, a sharpie is not necessary.
Invite
And then suddenly it’s a talking piece, or the briefing for the infographic creator, or proof that the compromise proposal that’s been agreed upon cannot work.
Moreover, it is a thing that invites. It’s just pen on paper, and so anyone can scribble something on it. Without logging in.
Yes, it’s okay to work in Miro, as long as you sketch.
Get rid of non-commitment
So I will bring paper and markers to our first meeting and start sketching as soon as you talk. The sketch immediately removes the non-committal. You talk directly about the sketch, realizing that your idea or plan is not quite right, thanks to the sketch. Then we’ll improve it until we get there.
Super effective.
Talking about images: an outline for an animation. There are two players talking about a building. That building has features and specifications. A subtitle can be placed at the bottom of the screen.
Folding sheet for a nature area. A lake, with a route around it, and information attached to it. So simple, it’s almost a pancake restaurant placemat.
Sketch for National Geographic, about fish migration. So yes, there are fish, multiple species, and waterways, and blockages. There are also three types of solutions: a fish ladder, a lock with holes and a fish passage. Like that. Well we have all our ducks in a row.
Four signs about meadow birds, about eating, breeding, migrating and growing up. You immediately see what fits on it. The Word document (4240 words) can now be discarded by everyone.
Also “talking about images”: a wall on which to track the progress of a sizable report. You can walk right over, talk about it together, and put an arrow somewhere.
by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | Methodology
“Normal” designers start with the Word document provided by the client. Usually this is a hefty document, with an academic form. This content describes (at worst) what experts want to say to other experts. Normal readers will not find what they want to know.
It takes a lot of effort to turn this into something that properly answers reader questions. On one A4, or 5 slides, or 10 pages, for journalists or administrators or citizens.
Misunderstanding
I think there is a misunderstanding. Designing is serving, true. But not serving the client with his Word document. Of course not. Both the designer and the client must ensure that their knowledge reaches the reader. You don’t do that by putting the expert’s entire bookcase on the reader’s doorstep. So get rid of the Word document. Its content is intended for peer consultation or as an inventory for communications people. Fine. But the form of that content is inappropriate for the outside world. The Word doc is the base, but it should claim the stage.
Therefore, I do not start with the supplied content. Don’t be alarmed, I read everything.
What I do is “reverse engineering”. Sometimes this is called “storyboarding,” outlining the structure of the story you want to tell. Then you start writing-while-designing.
Why is this course of action the right one?
Everything used to be printed. You could just add a page if you wanted to add more. Nowadays, all formats are strictly defined: a social media post, a powerpoint slide or a poster for on a bus shelter, the number of words on it, and what images is deemed fitting is restricted by (unwritten) laws. These are not only strong conventions, they are baked into the technology of global platforms.
The poster
An innocent example: the poster. Everyone knows, there’s a title on there, a place, a date, a nice recommendation and the artist’s name. There aren’t 100 words on a poster. In the Word document of the briefing there are. The first draft of the poster kills the Word document.
Does this also apply to scientific content? Yes it does. For example, a report page is an A4. Should it include a headline and a figure, then you are left with roughly 350 words for the text. You don’t add a whole A4 if you have 1 line too many. The form (the A4) and not the Word document is decisive.
It seems perfectly obvious to me.
Opposing scientists
I quite understand that for a moment scientists feel that I am tinkering with their content. It’s not like that. I only discard the form, the Word document. I keep the content. Just pretend that knowledge is a cloud, in heads. Once Word is started, knowledge takes shape. A very dominant shape, but the wrong one for your audience. I give knowledge an appearance that does work.
You have to serve so many channels these days, for very different readers, with different devices. Once you’ve established what you need, you see that the copy for a report might not work for an animation.
I don’t throw away content, I put it 1 click away. Like this jewelry web shop. On Instagram, they briefly give a nice idea of what types of piercings there are, and then you click on.
by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | XXL information
I would love get rid of an annoyance I have as an editor.
I walk through an exhibition and see two separate things: form and content. The form is fun, with walls and displays and exhibits and interactive stuff. But the form has nothing to do with the content. The designers pasted the content.
You can trace the content back to it’s origin document or a database. You can also see that the structure of the information stems from the system of historians or researchers.
I don’t understand how this can be, this disconnection between creators and thinkers.
All I know is that in the production process this causes enormous misery. It costs money and content people will be dissatisfied. The reader experiences the exhibition as loose sand.
The solution is clear: transform the content into exhibition-ready content. Content should not come directly from the pen of experts, but through the pen of an editor.
But I can’t put that to paper just now.
I dare not claim anything about it.
But I am sure:
this could be better.
by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | XXL information
Communications people want to captivate the reader. They will succeed only if they conquer the mountain of information that the experts bring. The diplomatic, incisive outsider they hire for this purpose has two arrows in his bow:“start with the form” and “the concept”.
The concept: the thread to which the content conforms
The point is to find a connection between all the individual parts. These are often very specific, somewhere deep in the caverns of a field of expertise. The concept you’re looking for for the exhibition or book is a lot closer to the audience. A good concept connects the private (the personal or subject-specific) with the general, which is recognizable, and translatable. This way, everything, even the craziest subtopic, gets its place.
Example: unify 28 topics from 8 providers
True story. The 28 topics are diverse issues taking place around the Afsluitdijk. Fish migration, an experiment with tidal energy, storm surges on the IJsselmeer, materials for lining dikes, the inventive work of engineer Lely.
Disaster – action – rest
What do you see when you look from a distance? If you lump the 28 topics together for a moment? Over the centuries, the same thing always happens: a natural disaster occurs (a flood, a storm), after which clever people think up something to deal with it (a dike, a pumping station), followed by a period of calm, repentance even (we lower the dike, make a hole in it for the fish). Until another disaster presents itself. Disaster – action – rest. Something like that.
New connections
The concept creates new connections in the exhibition: all the water works from all centuries come together, Lely and his predecessors and successors, and all the things we started doing when the storms were too long ago. In a hall, it works even more strongly: the visitor is free to walk around, but an intuitive walking direction has emerged. An axis. The exhibition begins with a bang (a movie theater with a huge storm), continues with an intimate setting (the wooden office of engineer Lely) and ends with a wide panorama over the Wadden Sea.
Important
A concept is not an iron law; it is the impetus by which everything falls into place. It shows a route to a workable solution. (Many designers pimp the concept until it is a huge system, with all kinds of rules that you must never break. Thus they create a new mountain, which must be conquered again).
Sunk cost
The client had already promised all kinds of stakeholders a movie, an interactive table or a fun play object. And one writer had already written an expository text on all 28 topics. It became a matter of sunk cost: we have already promised and done so much, we are going to go through with it. I’ll say no more.
Starting with the gadgets – no matter how hip they are – is thoughtless.
Allowing the raw copy from all stakeholders to be leading is also a sure road to chaos.
In my experience at least.
A nice example (from a long time ago)
Scientists at the Huygens Institute are working on digital infrastructure. That means they organize and tag all kinds of documents (old manuscripts, maps) in such a way as to create a network of documents and all related research.
If you want to make something visual for this, you have to get away from the technical terms as fast as you can. Visitors to a symposium walked past towers of connected wooden documents, which they took apart after the symposium and took home. The client was tremendously satisfied.
Click on the image to go to the video (it opens in new window, and Vimeo wants to set a cookie)
Another great example
Troje, an agency that leads organisational change, wrote a book, “work in progress”. It’s about the power of improvisation.
The design rests on a super-simple concept: we improvise all the images. I did that by inviting a group of people and having them do all kinds of things. Games, dressing up and painting on large pieces of paper. The images in the book were created through the method the book promotes. Form and content are one. Totally disparate images started to fit together.
See, that’s what I mean.
