In this episode we find the finish line, even when we feel like giving up trying:
Kirsten Nelson interviews David Bianciardi about Maximum Value Proposition, in Doing More With Blinking Lights
Kirsten Nelson digs deep with Mary Franck in Anatomy of a Creative Practice
Sundar Raman delves into completing things the right way through Occasionally Compromised Conclusions
Preamble
In Experience Design, the end sometimes feels impossible without compromises. Design by committee, unexpected variables and last-minute changes all cause us to recalibrate the final result. As Mary Franck says in her interview with Kirsten, it often feels like “there’s no way of knowing when it’s done.”
However, we can get to the end with the most intact manifestation of the original idea, with the “maximal feeling,” irrespective of the constraints imposed on us. David Bianciardi proposes the idea of “Maximum Value Proposition,” which I want to start applying immediately. I believe it requires that we adhere to some arguably core principles and conventions.
Is that perhaps, delusional?
Let’s dive right in and explore some of those delusions in this episode of Creative Stack.
Maximum Value Proposition: Doing More With Blinking Lights
Photo: phases by AV&C + Vincent Houzé
Mirrors. Mirrors are still really amazing. Build something geometric with them and refract light in surprising ways, and you can actually transport the mind with minimal intervention. No goggles required, no mega projection. Just the bounce of light, potentially accompanied with some sound design and a bit of fog, and the regular old boring world becomes vastly more exciting. Attention gained easily with mechanisms as ancient as our synapses.
I’ll avoid painfully overwrought metaphors here, I promise. But this is something I’ve been contemplating ever since my life was changed forever at Mutek Montreal, way back in 2019. It seemed like the lighting design for so many DJ sets was built around geometric structures of chrome, mirrors and semi-translucent panels that shapeshifted beyond comprehension in a haze of lasers, lights and smoke.
It sounds ridiculously simplistic when described that way, but that super-minimal reminder of what really dazzles us is the perfect entry point into a conversation I had with AV&C founder David Bianciardi about one of our themes for this episode of Creative Stack: Compromise.
I was rambling on about how there was something so evocative about these mirror+light shows, which were “contentless” in some ways, even if extremely precise programming was required to make everything look effortless. Somehow it was easier to feel mystified when there was less visual instruction guiding the experience.
Or as Bianciardi summarized: “Open me up and humans fill in the rest.”
And so that leads in a beautifully tangential way to the topic of compromise and one of the tech-bro phrases that have crept into the creative tech world. That terrible, horrible “Minimum Viable Product” idea.
“MVP is the ultimate compromise compromise,” Bianciardi mused. “It lowers the bar. MVP assumes you’re in a product development cycle. But it’s actually anti-iteration. It’s about getting to market, and then hoping the market allows you to live long enough to improve on what you’re offering.”
In creative tech, we need to flip that definition, but maybe conveniently keep the acronym to impress jargon-driven people in meetings. Bianciardi jokingly suggested an alternative: “What is the Maximum Value Proposition you can make to the client? Even if it’s a shadow-puppet show, how do you maximize the value proposition? You have to define what is important.”
The Maximum Value Proposition ethos is about adhering to the most essential elements of a project, the reasons it was launched, the dreams the clients had at the very outset. And those key feelings are never left behind.
Knowing the things that are most important, the things that define the “Maximum Value Proposition,” allow you to compromise with better intent. When things go off the rails at any point in a project life cycle, revisions will be made in favor of the fundamentals revealed in the immersion and discovery phase.
“Double down on things that were important to stakeholders, and don’t compromise on those things,” Bianciardi elaborated. “Go back to the people whose opinion matters. What are their criteria for success? The only safety you can retreat into is what stakeholders said was the North Star — irrespective of budget, schedule, and resources.”
It’s better to aspire to maximal feeling rather than minimum viability. The bros are seeking the bare minimum out of some imagined sense of efficiency. But Maximum Value Proposition allows for an even purer understanding of how budgets should be spent. When a project is veering away from its most meaningful elements in favor of something sparkly and ridiculous, a truly strong creative partner will say, “We cannot allow you to spend money this way.”
Look, we get it, we get it. “Minimum Viable Product” has its place in the world. But in this philosophical examination of how we compromise, let’s remember that the bare minimum is actually intended to deliver the maximum effect. Just because it works, doesn’t mean it’s ready to be released. I mean, at least not in the sumptuous world of experience design, in all its zillions of permutations. In a lot of ways, we only have one chance to create an impression.
Or as Bianciardi again synthesized my ramblings: “We have to fight the deficit mindset to get to the abundance mindset.”
— Kirsten Nelson
Mary Franck: Anatomy of a Creative Practice
Photo: Specimens, Mary Franck
Centuries ago, I was on a dance floor the first night I met Mary Franck, when she somehow brought a stillness and quiet to the loud, blinky-lights situation and created an unforgettable moment, asking me an extremely important question: “Do you have a personal creative practice?”
In decades of writing about the work of others, no one had ever asked me that. Or at least, not exactly that way. Lots of people have hinted that my journalism career wasn’t enough, and “do you write fiction” was bandied about. But this felt like a more substantial inquiry. It was about an approach to life instead of work.
What Mary won’t know until she reads this is that she prompted an entirely new trajectory in my life with that question. Which is something she probably very generously does on a regular basis with her own art practice, and through her design collaborations, and in the classes she teaches.
Mary Franck is an artist who wants you to be an artist. And I think she would modestly respond to that observation by saying that a lot of people in this mystical world of creative technology and experience design are also that kind of artist. It’s a community of people who want to share ideas, knowledge and talent.
Which is why we’re talking to Mary about lots of things for Creative Stack in this “Studio Visit” interview. When we spoke, Mary was preparing for Specimens, her first solo gallery show of physical works paired with generative organic animations. The new sculptures are an evolution and continuation of the works she creates for live performance and mega-scale generative projections.
She’d recently returned from Chicago, where she created a wondrous pop-up with Faculty for Puma in partnership with Dua Lipa. Chicago is also where another of Mary’s recent projects, Love Letters by the artist Yuge Zhou, was about to debut at Art on the Mart.
So basically, Mary brought the perfect blend of creative practice and design practice for a discussion about how those two things tend to influence each other. And how in the West we tend to create an artificial separation between these types of creative endeavor. Yet it can be rather freeing when you do something practical like make a separate website for your art practice and your design work.
Discover how all of these beautiful thoughts are connected in the full interview in CS6.1: Interview with Mary Franck: Anatomy of a Creative Process.
— Kirsten Nelson
What I Learned About Getting to the Finish Line
Photo: The Empty Quarter, Liwa, UAE. Credit: Sundar Raman
The completion of any project requires bargaining for time and resources, lying about when dependencies will be fulfilled and hoping that higher powers do not create unnecessary obstacles.
Occasionally I have been saved by a hidden reservoir of energy and creativity that helps get to the finish line. But nowadays my saving grace is rethinking the idea of completion.
Understanding when exactly a project can be called complete is, at its core, not complicated. Completion should meet the following criteria:
The experience is bug-free, both from technical and UX perspectives
The experience is debuggable and maintainable by the client, with minimal support from the vendor
Bespoke interactive experiences are, to state the obvious, late-stage prototypes. But they are expected to work like full-fledged, off-the-shelf products. Clients expect the finished experiences to be error-free and stable, as do visitors.
The reality is that most experiences are only 75% complete at launch, in the best of circumstances. Another 25% of the original UX and development resources will be needed to just ensure the final experience meets all the expectations of the original scope. However, this 25% is often not accounted for properly, which leads to friction on both client and vendor sides.
Exactly when we can call a project “finished” or “complete” is contentious. I have personally spent an undue amount of contract-negotiation time arguing for when we call a project “complete.” Simply put, vendors want to be done as soon as possible; and clients want the vendor to be liable for as long as possible. The value of these contractual arguments is questionable, and the expended time and energy would be much better applied to making the works.
At the end of the day, good vendors become partners, and have a tendency to deliver complete, well-tested, maintainable and supported solutions no matter what. The sentiment is “we’ll do whatever it takes until the customer is happy.” Or “we’ll never compromise on the quality of the experience, no matter what.” This is not only good client service, it’s also what’s needed to deliver very high-fidelity experiences.
Policing bad vendors is often just not worth the time. It’s more efficient to switch to a better partner, hopefully having learned an improved selection process!
The issue at heart is the line that separates the work leading up to launch, and the work of maintaining and troubleshooting post-launch. Clients all require a warranty period during which any defects are resolved as part of the original scope, without adding a separate (paid) maintenance contract. The duration of this warranty period, and when exactly it starts, is the main source of contention.
The warranty period should not be used for identifying and resolving core issues. However, finding core issues requires the experiences to run in a “production” environment.
The question then becomes:
What is the fair and reasonable date in the project, when we call the implementation “complete”; when can we start the warranty and support period?
I suggest that it should be at the two-month mark after public launch. Large projects should only consider the experiences finished two months after the general public has started to interact with it. The built-in warranty should start after this period. Paid support and maintenance, if any, starts after completion of the warranty.
Should this two-month period be variable based on the size and duration of a project? For example, should three-month-long projects expect the warranty to start two months after launch?
I propose the following rule of thumb:
Projects longer than six months: completion date is two months after opening day
Projects shorter than six months: completion date is scaled between two weeks and two months after opening day
One potential issue is when the opening/launch date is not fixed. Too many projects have fungible opening dates due to external dependencies. Vendors often can’t hold resources to account for these contingencies, and this is where Project Managers are told to hold firm, causing more stress.
Contracts (should) have clauses to account for delays to the project launch date. There should be stipulations levied on the client for delays to the opening date. So the above should not be the concern that it often is. Clients need to be fair about this, and in my experience they usually are.
One may ask if the suggested duration of two months can be mitigated through thorough, in-depth testing. The experience design process must include rigorous testing and validation anyway.
However, for a variety of reasons this is not sufficient. As experiences are brought more into the real-world, the tools for testing and validating both the technology and the UX are insufficient. It’s still hard enough to test custom large-scale touch applications. Testing haptic and mechanical systems connected to dynamic applications needs a new “experience-testing framework” altogether. (This will be the topic of a future article.)
Given these challenges, setting the “completion date” as two months after launch hopefully starts to sound reasonable.
It is good for vendors because it allows field testing, which helps development and design teams who are committed to giving the end visitor the absolute best experience possible.
It is good for clients to validate and gain confidence with real-visitor engagements. It also pushes the client teams to take active ownership of all exhibition systems.
Nobody wants failed experiences to become a meme on social media! Getting to an error-free state of experiences necessarily requires a period of exposure to end-visitors.
The goal, after all, is to have a successful completion, rather than unending compromises.
— Sundar Raman
Epilogue
Upon launch of every major project someone invariably says to me, “You must be relieved, you can take a break now!”
I have learned to treat opening day as the point in a long hike where I realize there’s no way back! Take a deep breath and get ready for the next crazy round.
My karmic reality is that every single shortcut or compromise that I have ever taken on a project has come back to bite me, sometimes years later. David Bianciardi’s suggestion of starting with the Maximum Value Proposition removes compromises as an option. Go for broke every time, and there’s no backing out!!
Often, this is how experience design starts anyway: with a deck or render that presents the most enthralling and fantastic solution. The thing of Maximum Value. It also pushes maximum emotion. Getting all the solder, joinery and bytes lined up to manifest that vision is maybe where we falter.
I don’t think there’s a silver bullet to completing vs. compromising. There will be compromises. But we are magicians, in that what we create does not always need to be how it seems. This is where planning, and engineering, and collectively accepting the reality of when things are “finished” is important.
All in the hopes that we never diminish the final user experience.