Conference 'Sting'

Here's what I believe those in the know call a 'Sting'.
Artfully put together by Bibliothèque and Moving Brands.

Comments

[Rish]

Interesting that the sting doesn't seem to mention advertising or communication, which leads to questions as to how a) the design community will share with the wider world the wider debates it is having; b) how it proposes to reach end-consumers - is 'media' enough of a catch-all term?

[Michael Exon, Design Week]

Academia, certainly in the Arts, has become increasingly interested in cross-disciplinary, or interdiscilpinary collaboration as a means to create new persrpectives informed from a variety of positions. And to its credit, the Academy has priduced some innovative and highly successful results.

Take the London Consortium PhD programme, which pits together postgraduate teaching from the Artchitectural Association, Birkbeck's School of English & Humanities, the ICA, the Tate, and the Science Museum. Not only is it viewed as sitting at the bleeding edge of teaching by its member organisations, but the possible outputs are incredibly compelling. In theory.

Design professionals are hardly new to the ineterdisciplinary approach, in fact their commercial imperative forces most design groups to constantly refine, adapt, reach forward and wide. Both internally in what they offer, and externally in terms of who they partner with. And yet, there suddenly seems to be a mood for much more rapid change and re-appraisal, led as much by client demand as by design businesses themselves.

The advertising earthquake, which we hear is tearing through the marketing communications landscape, threatening to topple anything that dares to call itself a behemoth, is part media hype, part supply-side shift in the communications world. Charles Handy's thesis in the Elephant and the Flea, is finally, it seems, coming to bear. Handy asserted that the future business landscape would be increasingly dominated by small players, who would nip at the heels of the old lumbering elephants, stealing ever more market share. The elephants, he warned, risked losing their ivory altogether.

In the small player world, the technology enabled network is paramount, and this gives rise to the need for increasing transfers of skills across disciplines. Those who do it quicker, smarter and best will come out on top. In theory.

I say 'in theory' again, because, there is a major challenge these conditions throw up. And that is retaining depth in knowledge and expertise as our skillsets widen. It's a bit like TV. We have more programmes than ever, but as programming budgets fall in line with audiences, doesn't the quality drop off straight away?

The economic challenge then is not to relinquish quality and depth of expertise (the domain of the big agency) in the hunt for breadth of knowledge and collaboration (the home of networks of flexible, smaller scale groups). If the fleas can retain the specialist insight offered by the elephants, they will create additional economic value via their new interactions. If they forfeit that specialist learning, they simply mine a different seam, offering a wider range of less specialised insight.

Interdisciplinary experimentation offers a genuine chance to create new value and grow the input of the creative industries. But let's just beware of spreading the butter more thinly over the bread.