So this article has been prompted by a few things.
Firstly, a number of people of late have asked me “How’s work?”, “What are you up to now?” …or even worse “Haven’t you retired?”…usually at social gatherings or over a pint, and I’ve ended up babbling an incoherent answer which makes no sense to me let alone the inquisitor. It’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing, but the variety and breadth of what I do now is tricky to summarise in a soundbite. I can no longer wrap up what I do in a single sentence or phrase, or if I do it unfortunately sounds a little arrogant. Something like ‘problem solver’ or ‘creative fixer’. Neither sound good.
I tend to shy away from sharing on professional platforms what I’m doing or the work I’ve produced. I prefer to share opinions, promote young creative talent or support people looking for a break in the industry. Personally I find overt self promotion of project work (be it self-initiated or paid) a little crass, but I accept that it is a necessity in certain circumstances. It’s also true that due to the variety of work I get involved with, attempting to summarise concisely what I do ends up being like the English language – for every so called ‘rule’ there are countless exceptions!
However, it is clear that I need to explain myself and at least have a stab at defining the areas I work in and the services I can provide. I’ve listed below the different ways I support my clients but as you will see, it is broad and services may often seem disconnected. I will leave it for you to make up your own mind.
Note: I wrote the entire article and then realised I hadn’t actually mentioned the core discipline I inhabit. Much of what I talk about could easily be applied to management consulting for instance (*shudder*). I am – at heart and in training – an industrial designer. One who has designed for pretty much every market or business type you can think of. For that I am incredibly grateful and fortunate. But I have extended my reach to areas of innovation (as much as it pains me to use that term), usability, futures and strategy amongst others. With that in mind, the following list should make sense…
1. Bona Fide Creative Consulting.
Despite what we have all called ourselves when we work in ‘design consultancies’, we rarely actually consult. We sell. We create. We deliver. But we rarely actually consult in the truest sense. Where someone pays you for your advice in creative matters. Like you would a solicitor or a lawyer for instance. But for creativity or creative experience.
I’m now doing quite a bit of that. And it’s lovely.
Working really closely with a number of different clients to help them with a variety of issues or conundrums relating to project delivery, team dynamics, creativity, recruitment, stakeholder management, process definition, internal politics or any other aspect of leading, running or establishing a design team. This can often link closely to team mentoring or as an external source of design ‘review’ for specific project work or for design team members keen to seek an outside perspective. Often it’s about helping those in management to understand the motivations and behaviours of creative folk in order to build stronger, more galvanised teams.
As you would expect, it is ad-hoc but anchored in a strong relationship to ensure continuity and empathy.
2. “How might we…?” …or “How the hell do we do this?” stuff.
This is probably the hardest stuff to describe or quantify but it forms quite a large part of what I now do. It rarely starts out as a specific design brief and typically stems from conversations with clients who know what I can do and what I can bring to the party…so to speak.
In previous roles, it is customary for a design ‘agency’ to pitch their wares and for clients to silently assess whether what they are offering or what they are saying aligns with the projects they know of in their pipeline. The client then decides (amongst themselves) to appoint their favourite or most relevant agency on the basis of the sales pitch or evidence of work and the project brief is unveiled for the agency to submit a costed proposal against. As the Mandalorian would mumble… “this is the way”.
Whether it’s the nature of my relationships with my clients or a by-product of a more direct and honest approach, I have no idea, but I have been having more open and wider discussions about ‘where’ I can add value, but within the context of understanding the clients’ project pipeline or strategic challenges. Conversations that are more “Which of our projects do you think you could help us with?” than “Tell us what you can do and we’ll let you know what you can work on!”. It’s been one of the most refreshing and rewarding aspects of my client interactions in recent years.
It certainly fosters a greater sympathy for each others’ circumstances and tends towards greater collaboration rather than a “we can do that” knee jerk reaction, which tends to punctuate most design agency meetings. It has also resulted in some of the most interesting projects I’ve worked on, with less focus on ‘you do that’ and ‘we do this’ and more on ‘how do we do this together?”
Less throwing ‘a brief’ over a metaphorical wall and more honesty, skills sharing, and collaborative results that everyone can ‘own’ and be proud of.
I appreciate I’ve not made it any easier to understand this aspect of my offer, but hopefully it suggests a few more conversations rather than a ‘sales pitch’ consultation. You’d be surprised what can be agreed and achieved with a mutual NDA and a genuinely open discussion about apportioning of responsibilities and tasks.
3. Trying to work out what the future might look like.
I’ve helped a number of my clients with defining their specific ‘futures’. There are people who call themselves ‘futurologists’…I’m not one of those. Depending on which market I’m working with, this is about attempting to rationally understand and predict the likely trajectory of multiple factors – be they societal, technological, behavioural, political or otherwise – and craft some pragmatic, optimistic or sometimes down right pessimistic scenarios of where we may be at a certain point in the near, mid or even longer term future.
This isn’t just about spurious storytelling for storytelling’s sake. It’s about placing estimated but well considered criteria at a point in the future against which we can measure potential ideas, narratives or hypotheses. One of the biggest issues with current idea ‘selection’ or shortlisting is that we tend to judge them against our current frameworks, ideals or immediate benchmarks, which by default renders them obsolete a few years down the line. I’m a big fan of having discussions about pushing our ‘viewpoint’ to a different time and measuring ideas against these to ensure we future proof as much as possible. Granted, any such exercise is only as good as the inputs, but we do what we can to mitigate the factors that may sway such predictions too far into ‘preferred’ or easy thinking. It’s certainly not bullet proof, but it definitely helps protect ideas that have merit or challenge people to better think through a potential idea in light of what might be coming.
This has been done with businesses with a strong brand narrative as well as businesses anchored in established technology. FMCG and consumer healthcare alike.
4. Industrial Design.
Despite the name confusion in recent years (I graduated in Product Design…in no way connected to the current discipline focussed on digital product innovation) I still support and deliver significant Industrial Design projects. Whilst there is a tendency for designers as they move up the managerial ladder to ‘step away from the tools’, I’ve kept my hand in and spend a good proportion of my time ‘in the weeds’ of what you might describe as physical product design.
Briefs focussed on delivering well considered, holistic, usable, wholeheartedly ‘human centred’ products with often knotty electro-mechanical internal complexities which are designed to optimise manufacturability, assembly, cost and repairability/disassembly. A rather overly wordy sentence but the discipline of industrial design has recently tended to focus on the superficial. I’m a firm believer in designing for all considerations. Yes, the end user is the critical consideration (intuitive usability, behavioural adoption, seamless ergonomy, appropriate positioning, emotive appeal etc.), but similarly a product cannot succeed unless it has been considered from all standpoints. Many have attempted to explain and describe this process in better ways but I’m a ‘totality’ kinda guy in the sense that I like to consider the end stuff right from the start and ensure considerations and key decisions don’t get lost in translation throughout the journey. I’m a big fan of reducing things to their simplest and working from there. I’m not talking about minimalism, which is a ‘style’, but the principles of finding the simplest way to explain, create, collaborate, determine and develop. Reduce complexity as much as possible and build from there.
I still do lots of this across multiple business sectors. Sometimes it’s total ownership of a project, from conception to production data package, but more typically it’s an element of something much bigger, either working with a larger development team or sometimes for a startup who knows nothing of product development. With heathcare/medical products I typically work up to ‘proof of principle prototype’ as anything further requires accreditation I don’t have the justification (or financial inclination) to seek.
5. Supermarkets…usually abroad!
A slightly odd title, but let me explain. A little under 25 years ago I started working on a category that was relatively new to the industrial/product design field…FMCG. Fast Moving Consumer Goods…or “stuff you find in the supermarket” as I’ve often had to describe it. Ideas and products for businesses like Unilever, Reckitts, Mars, Henkel, Beiersdorf, Mondelez and many others. Seemingly incidental products we spend micro-seconds considering as we peruse the shelves on our weekly shop deciding what to throw into our trolley or basket.
I’ve spent the last 25 years (in greater or lesser bouts of intense activity) working across these sorts of brands and projects. Talking about brand keys, consumer ‘pull’, footfall, gondola ends, narratives, eyelines, shelf blocking, shopper flow, ullage, line stoppage, changeover….the vocabulary and terminology is endless. I’ve designed ice creams, deodorant sprays, chocolate bars, laundry detergents, condoms, bags of frozen peas, toilet wands, in-soles, face creams, tins of tuna, ground coffee, gum…and everything in between.
Whilst the day to day designing of ‘on shelf packs’ is something I’ve done less and less of (although I still work on the early stages of brand strategy and opportunity spotting), I now work on what you might best describe as ‘in store activation’ projects. Rather than working on individual packs or a specific brand (of which I’ve got a fairly robust back catalogue), I have completed numerous projects related to creating and developing in store layouts and thematic approaches to drive particular behaviours and shopper footfall. This has primarily been with clients developing in-store solutions across EMEA as they tend to be more open to increasingly radical and more agile ideas. Some of it relates to obvious seasonality. Some of it is attempting to ‘own’ more of the shopper attention in-store. Some of it is combinations of categories to create ‘super categories’. All of it is about attention, communication, desire and appeal.
A rather strange entry in this list, but nevertheless something I find myself doing a fair bit of.
6. Creative provocation/inspiration (delete as appropriate)
I don’t put myself out there as a ‘speaker’. I haven’t done a TEDx talk. I don’t make a point of seeking out opportunities to ‘speak’ or ‘promote’.
However, I do have an opinion, and I’ve been keen to share my views on subjects close to my industry or to my heart and have published these initially on a company blog, then Medium, then LinkedIn and now in recent years, more formally on the FourBeards website. My predominant aim is to shed light on an industry that is often shrouded in mystery and guff, and alongside this, I veer off into topics like inclusivity, soft skills, education, usability, white male privilege and gender equality amongst others.
Occasionally, certain people read these diatribes and ask me to come and talk to their design team, R&D team, management team or peers about any one of the topics they feel is relevant. My underlying theme is always one of honesty. I can’t stand bluff and bluster. I want to talk to people about the realities of what we are doing. How hard it is. How easy it could be. How to do things differently. How to not shy away from tricky decisions. How to walk away. How to harness creative power. But truthfully. Warts and all.
If you want someone to tell you how fluffy and lovely the design industry is and how brilliant we all are, then book someone else. Think of me as an oddly positive, fiercely honest, mildly grumpy, creatively motivated, middle aged man/designer (I almost used the word ‘old’…), who importantly, knows how the industry works.
7. Creative Mentoring.
I started offering mentoring services back in the midst and tail end of the COVID lockdown. It was a vehicle to allow me to start re-integrating back into the creative design industry while I avoided non-competes and ‘contractual clauses’. I did it because I felt that many in the creative industry needed someone with a similar background and understanding to talk to…be it about career direction, new business guidance, creative ‘soul searching’, or personal development.
It has proved to be an incredibly rewarding experience to date. I’ve met some amazing folk, young and …um…less young, all of whom have allowed me to understand their lives, their predicaments, their inner thoughts to a level that has allowed me to hopefully help them better understand what they need, how they need to behave, what they ought to strive for, what balance they need to strike. You will need to ask them specifically what value I brought to their lives or careers, but I would like to thank them all for their candour, honesty and trust in me. Some of it has been to individuals, some of it has been to smaller teams. Some junior. Some very senior. Some incredibly structured and rigidly timetabled. Some fluid and ah-hoc. Some privately funded. Some funded through businesses looking to support their own teams’ personal development. No two clients the same.
I probably don’t promote it as much as I should, but it’s there if anyone is interested.
8. Next generation support.
When I started FourBeards I had a distinct ‘education’ arm to what I did. I did some teaching of the A-Level DT curriculum. I had an ongoing pro-bono support system for undergraduates and recent graduates – an opportunity for anyone seeking advice or guidance to engage and discuss. I worked with a number of Universities to help with their curriculum or final year project support. I supported the RSA Student awards as a judge.
This worked well for a while, but it soon became all consuming. I was spending more time on activities that earned zero money, which is fine if you have an endless pot of funds, but I don’t and didn’t. People were also starting to take unfair advantage of my time and support which left a slightly bitter taste. So I’ve reigned it back in a bit. I’ve removed the online booking system and no longer actively promote it, but still support a number of school students, the school curriculum, undergraduates or young designers as I see fit and circumstances allow.
I still think it’s important to support burgeoning young talent and give them a ‘leg up’ into the industry that will ultimately benefit from their skills and creativity. I just do it a little more quietly and tactically than I did before.
Not a particularly concise list huh?
But one that attempts to communicate the different things I do and offer as a creative entity.
Polymath. T-Shaped. These are the things I aspire to be.
A client recently described me as a ‘design handyman’. Whilst initially it felt a bit lightweight, she qualified it by saying that she knew I could turn my hand to any design task required.
I’ll take that.
I prefer to measure my impact by the way people who have worked with me, talk about me, rather than the superficial judgement of my ‘work’ per se. To that end, I’d suggest you read a few of the testimonials on the FourBeards website (scroll to the bottom part of the main pages for a selection) – I am measurably more proud of the relationships I’ve built with clients over the years than the work I’ve produced. By some margin.
And one more thing. You will always work just with me. No team. No extended studio. Just me.
