Training Day

I am not a morning person. I'm not anti-morning so much as anti getting out of bed. I don't really have words for this morning. Today is one of those very rare days when I have to get up before morning.

The alarm went off at 4:00 am. A co-worker was picking me up at 4:15 so we could catch the 5:05 Amtrak from New Haven to Providence.

So after a very fitful four hours of sleep I am hurtling through the pre-dawn darkness on a government run train. Yeah, this day is off to a great start.

The reason for all of this is train time is training. I am required by my employer to complete 16 hours of personal development training every year. Failure to do so would result in not only a tragic lack of personal development but would also negatively impact such things as raises and bonuses. So I train.

The horizon is beginning to brighten and I am making slow progress toward the bottom of my 24 oz Dunkin Donuts coffee. Thus far the combination has done little to improve my outlook.

I shouldn't really complain too much. It is to some extent by choice that I am where I am. It comes down to get up in the middle of the damned night to travel to a design conference or fulfill my training requirement by sitting in some dreadful two day business class taught by our internal training department (a division of HR).

Today me and eight of my co-workers are on our way to the Rhode Island School of Design to attend a one day conference called "Success by Design." What I expect from having read the brochure is that designers and marketers from a handful of companies and agencies will give presentations on the role design plays in their business. We will hear words like "brand" and "experience" and "brand experience" repeated until the impossible happens and they become even more meaningless.

One of the presentations is from the company that is working to resurrect the Narragansett brand. A venerable old New England beer. I am really hoping they bring samples.

Beyond that it is just the torture of listening to designers blather about the significance of their own work. Have you ever heard a designer talk about the deeper meaning of the graphics on a package label? About how this symbolizes this and that element means that. It's bullshit. All of it.

Designers do things they think look good and communicate what it is they are trying sell. All of that other crap they make up to sell the design to the business people.

Here's an example.

My previous employer was a marketing agency whose name began with the letter "R." At one point they decided they wanted a new logo for the company so they asked every one in the creative department to submit ideas.

One concept that my boss and I worked up was based on an architectural detail of our building. Above the main entrance there was a a round light in a metal frame. We put they R of the company name in a circle. (An idea that Radio Shack developed quite independent of our work).

It was a cool graphic and since we worked on consumer product brands it was a nice reference to the little registered mark ® you see on every logo.

The design wasn't chosen, they went with some Nike inspired swoosh thing like every other company at the time. But we did get some interesting feedback. Someone in senior management liked the idea enough that they wrote several paragraphs on what the circle meant.

The thing about these conferences is that it's designers talking to designers and we all know its BS. But it's a day out of the office. It will cover half of my training requirement for the year. There's the possibility of free beer samples. As for learning and personal development, there is always the possibility that I could learn some useful new bullshit.

12 hours later.

So now the conference is over and I am on the train home. In the morning portion of this post I was tired and a little bit cranky, now I am just tired. It would be nice if I was one of those lucky people who can sleep on trains and planes. I guess that ability comes with the experience of traveling a lot. After a while you must be able to tune out the noise and the bumps but I don't do this enough.

The conference was basically what I expected. Some of the presenters did a good job with their bit so I would have to say I enjoyed it. Did I learn anything?

Sure. From the first presenter I learned that if you talk really really fast and never pause to take a breath you can do a two hour presentation in an hour an 20 minute time slot and still have time for Q and A.

The guy who bought Narragansett, a once dominant New England beer that was very nearly dead, did not bring samples to his presentation.

I learned a good deal more about the personal life struggles of one company founder than I would ever really care or need to. I think they call it "over sharing."

I learned that design is capable of solving all the worlds ills. From bad public schools which could be made better by tricking students into learning with well designed computer games to the terrible state of our energy policy.

I learned that if you are president of Bryant University you can score some cheap applause by telling a crowd that you look forward to the day we elect an landscape architect president and how she will fix everything.

Lunch was an appallingly cliche dried out chicken breast with some yellowish sauce, some funky tasting mashed potatoes and undercooked carrots.

The last presenter of the day was by far the most entertaining. He is a partner at a major design firm that probably even a lot of non designers would recognize. His presentation contained virtually nothing of substance but it was refreshing.

(note: it is an interesting experience to be listening to music on the iPod and have one of your own podcasts start to play.)

What was refreshing was that he presented three case studies. He went through the various stages of the evolution of the projects but he did not take himself or his work too seriously. He made fun of work they did that was worthy of mocking. He made fun of his clients. He made fun of himself. He didn't present the work with the BS designers use to sell design to business people.

There was one memorable one-liner from the beer guy. Someone asked how they determine which bars to use to track sales. He didn't really answer the question when he said

If they have a Caesar salad on the menu, it's not a Narragansett bar.

So why go to a conference like this? That entertaining last presenter summed it up rather well when he was asked how much they relied on testing in the design process. He said that if you start with good research and a sound decision making process that his experience is that testing usually just confirms what you already know.

Basically we go to these things and mostly hear things we already know. But it's sometimes god to hear them and think about them again.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 03:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment