In this episode:
Nathan Lachenmyer explores the realignment of sustainability and tech-centricity
Interview with design studio Avocado Toast’s founder Denis Astakhov
Sundar Raman navigates the minefield of metaphors: sometimes helping, often creating more confusion!
Preamble
A common way to describe Creative Experience Design is by using the term “storytelling.” This helps because people understand that a story is a way to describe a set of events with embellishment.
A challenge in many design engagements, or new implementations, is the difficulty of articulating and describing something that does not yet exist, but which needs to be emotionally compelling. To help envision or provoke a particular result, we try to change the context to something more familiar. When we use metaphorical terms like sustainability for technical environments that are inherently not, are we perhaps doing some great injustice, and can it be corrected?
Storytelling tools such as metaphors, similes and analogies are powerful in the design and implementation process. But they are not a silver bullet! In this episode we consider some of the challenges, and try to suggest some approaches for when and how to best utilize these tools, and perhaps come to better solutions.
No-Rush Shipping
As someone whose career revolves around making site-specific installations for built environments, a thought has been haunting me for the past few years: Experience Design is inherently unsustainable. As Sundar Raman pointed out in the previous issue of CreativeStack, interactive experiences are more often than not pseudo-permanent late-stage prototypes that are expected to work like bespoke polished products. These experiences have unrealistic demands to be bold and different from existing work, but to be developed in a predictable fashion; the work must be eye-catching and emotionally engaging, but also familiar and undemanding; and the technology should be at the cutting-edge of research, but also stable and predictable. There are inherently unsustainable misalignments across the spectrum, from concept to user experience to development.
A huge area of misalignment is our relationship with sustainability itself. The natural world is an inspiration to many of us, and there’s an uncountable number of amazing projects that use the natural world as visual and conceptual metaphors. But there’s a misalignment in how those projects are completed — while we’re inspired by the natural world, the work itself is terrible for it.
The built environment is one of the largest producers of carbon emissions in the world as-is, and incorporating technology as a building material will only increase the burden. The modern technologies we rely on require mining rare natural resources from the earth through energy-intensive processes, and then converting them into electronics through processes that produce terrible chemical wastes.
With such environmental impact, it’s ironic that some of these projects are about sustainability itself — whether they’re projects meant to showcase the sustainability efforts of a client, promote sustainability amongst citizens or just celebrate the beauty of nature itself. There’s a contradiction to our work using technological forms as a metaphor for sustainable behavior, when the creation process is itself unsustainable.
So what are some ways in which we can make our work more sustainable?
Circular Economies
Most people I’ve spoken to tend to equate equipment’s carbon footprint with how much power it consumes. But for computers and display technology, more than half of the footprint is embodied in the manufacturing process — from mining to distribution. What’s even more distressing is that these figures are only true if the equipment is properly disassembled, recycled and reused! If it’s just thrown into the junk heap, then the carbon footprint from manufacturing easily eclipses the rest of it.
We need to shift away from the mindset of doing things the cheapest way possible, and to the most efficient way possible. That means focusing on things that are built to last, built to be repaired and built to be recycled.
Wrapping your head around all of this requires an awful lot of research that most of us don’t have the time for, so I’ve been leaning on the TCO-Certified product listings to do the work for me. While some organizations focus on just the carbon footprint, TCO is looking at the entire lifecycle of products from where their raw materials come from to how the manufacturer supports end-of-life. An increasing number of manufacturers are also making information about the full lifecycle footprint of their products easier to access on their websites.
Maintenance and End-Of-Life
Every project has an ending. Even “permanent” installations rarely last beyond 10-15 years before the technology and designs start feeling dated, which inevitably leads to a refresh of a space. For marketing projects the lifecycle can be dramatically shorter — from weeks to months.
For all new projects we’ve started bundling the end-of-life costs into the project fees so that our clients and partners are essentially “pre-paying” for ethical disposal, as an incentive to call us back when they’re ready to move on from the project. We’ve also been working on a client-by-client basis to figure out how to stay involved to help properly support our installations in a way that’s economical for everyone involved.
Sustainable Process
For the past few years, our studio has been tracking the carbon footprint of individual projects as well as our overall practice (reach out if you want to know more!). One of our major findings was that shipping is a leading source of carbon emissions in a project — oftentimes 2x-3x the actual energy consumption. On one project, I saw a computer (653 kg CO2e footprint) get shipped by air round-trip to another country at the cost of 1.1 tons of CO2e. It would have been better for the environment to just buy a second computer!
And this scales across your entire project. Every time you pick “Next Day Air” to rush that one crucial part, it’s going to be transported by air — the most carbon-intensive way to ship something.
The solution is to avoid the rush entirely. Avoiding the last-minute culture is crucial to minimizing the impact that our installations are having. As an added benefit it also reduces our stress levels.
Circular and Sustainable Design
Lately, I’ve been focusing on how to take these ideas about sustainability and apply them early on in the design process, instead of just in the production of our work.
One way I’ve done this is to set energy goals for the design itself. I’m currently working with a client to refresh an installation I helped create a decade ago. It has over 20 displays and eight computers. We decided that we’d only update equipment if the energy savings justified the energy cost. In some cases, new equipment would actually improve efficiency. Modern computers run faster, require less cooling and render more pixels with a single graphics card. And in other cases, once we consider the cost of manufacturing, replacing the displays would still put us at a net deficit in energy.
Giving ourselves an energy “budget” to play with has been an irreplaceable tool in guiding our decisions. In future projects I’m hoping to develop our budget early on and design from that point forward.
In other projects we’re looking to avoid screens entirely. Screens have become so common that I can’t help but wonder how much we’ve become unfazed by them. Are there better ways to catch people’s attention and engage them emotionally than simply throwing more pixels at the problem?
We’ve been challenging ourselves to think more creatively in future designs. We’re working on a new proposal at the moment that uses motors, shutters and dichroic glass to shape the ambient light in a space. We’re hoping that thinking along these lines won’t just create works that are more in line with our sustainability goals, but that can be more eye-catching, thought-provoking and engaging in new ways as well.
Introducing Avocado Toast: Excerpt with Denis Astakhov
Photo by Avocado Toast
Denis Astakhov is the Founder and Creative Director of Avocado Toast. Avocado Toast describes themselves as “A multimedia storytelling company” who “design live experiences, destinations and projects in extended reality.” The company has an office in London and used to have their second office in Moscow, which they moved to Dubai at the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Avocado Toast has been involved in projects globally. When we decided on CS#7’s topic of “Metaphors and Misalignments” I wanted to have a conversation with someone who came from a very different experience design background, but who also overlapped with my engineering foundation. Denis, with his background from different cultural environments, was the perfect candidate!
Following is a digested and paraphrased version of a conversation that Denis and I had.
Denis and I live in Dubai. However, Denis has had much more exposure to the mega projects that are going on in the wider region, such as those in Saudi Arabia.
The Gulf region’s government-based projects have a stereotype of being hyperbolic. The visions that pushed for the Burj Khalifa, The Museum of the Future, and now the seemingly ludicrous and yet real Neom Project, all play into this stereotype of things needing to be superlative.
They are, at heart, about telling very large-scale stories. We could call them “global scale interactive experiences.”
Denis: We started our engagement intersecting culture, entertainment and tourism.
What we've learned is that all the GCC countries have a program called something vision. And there’s a completion date to it. I think it’s much more interesting than having a concrete plan.
Because if you have a vision, you kind of have the goal where you want to be like in 2031 for UAE’s “We the UAE 2031”, or in the case of “Saudi 2030”. And then you build a road map according to how you see from today, how are you going to reach this goal.
These “visions” are like our overused term “experience.” The mega-projects are a combination of festivals, cultural platforms, branding and all the different ways we talk about “experiences.” We really need another word. Because when you tell people that you do experience design, you know, I find myself at a loss for how to describe it because I define experience by using the word experience.
Exactly. Because now, even clients don't understand what it means, right?
This is kind of where this idea of the metaphor comes in, like I always find myself going, “I will try and translate what I'm talking about into something that you understand because the word ‘experience’ people digest in so many different ways, you know?”
You asked me, how I answer at a party the question, What do I do?
Actually, my grandmother kind of helped me to come up with the answer. After I explained some of our work, she said, “Ah, so you create memories, for those moments where people come together and that's the celebration?”
So metaphorically, we create memories!
Could you speak a bit about your defined approach, or your processes that help your team?
In terms of the internal creative process, one of the techniques is “creating a headline.” We might need 200 slides to convey an idea, to show all the mechanics, all the components, how it's going to work, how it's gonna look, how the audience will feel it, experience it. I always say to my team, you need to be able to create a headline about your idea as if this has already happened. You know, if you cannot put it in the headline, it’s like I'm making it up.
So this is how I would also communicate this to the client when we are meeting for the first time.
This is just one of the creative techniques that we use, it’s a checkbox that we need to mark off, What’s the one sentence of how you describe it?
Read the full interview, with so many more insights, at CS7.1: Meet Avocado Toast: Conversation with Denis Astakhov.
Nothing like some metaphors to really confuse everyone!
My preferred metaphor, for almost everything, is food. We all eat, have cooked or been to restaurants, or watched movies that show the process. My cooking metaphor is a convenient way to make ephemeral ideas more concrete, since it provides a way to map steps in one known context to the imaginary solution we are trying to manifest.
But the metaphor of food doesn’t always work! On at least a couple of projects I only realized well into the schedule that my metaphor had caused sufficient confusion that it could potentially derail the delivery of the project.
I learned from some of these mistakes, and on recent projects I have asked the team to come up with their own metaphors for the solution we are trying to get to. Even the process of finding a workable metaphor is not obvious or automatic.
On one occasion I had to convey an idea for a build to a fellow Creative Director. I asked them if they had watched a certain SciFi or fantasy movie, and they replied that they didn’t watch movies (my shock will be the topic of a different article!). So then I asked what their preferred extracurricular activity was so that I could try to put my idea into their context. The conversation turned a bit surreal because their responses were an attempt to solve my experience problem, whereas I was trying to get them beyond the current context. They were presenting examples of other implementations that felt similar to our problem, and I was trying to get them to think from a very different context.
We come from a variety of different backgrounds and experiences. It’s somewhat obvious that experience design relies on our real-world experiences of the movies we watch, the places we visit, the interactions we perform, the food we are served. But our diversity of backgrounds means that we ingest these experiences in potentially very different ways.
Experience Design has two major contributors: the client and the vendor. On each there are multiple stakeholders, even if there are very few decision-makers. Experience Design involves trying to manifest ephemeral ideas. The trick is to determine how defined the final expectations are, and how ephemeral and intangible the ideas for the experience are. And to get everyone involved on the same page.
The point of metaphors is to help get us on the same page. It’s helpful to have specific examples.
For one project that involved a number of 100-inch screens with a lot of animated content that included both text and photographs, I thought the best metaphor would be a “deep-sea aquarium.” This actually worked out quite well since this helped to define the fluid-motion of the content animations, and also the layered and spatial dynamics of content interactivity.
For another mobile application project that required us to integrate the mobile app into the spatial experiences itself, we tried to get the team to come up with some metaphors of their own. The design team was asked to provide a set of metaphors for how the mobile application could work. The results that came back were a list of other mobile applications that had interesting interfaces. We got everything from nicely designed mobile games, to very sparse shopping apps. But what we were looking for was a metaphor for the app itself.
The dictionary definition of a metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.”
What we had expected were responses such as “the app is a medical scanner,” “the app is a magician’s wand”or “the app is a notebook.”
This is the “not literally applicable” part of the definition. By getting everyone to think about how to create the “not literally applicable” version of the solution, we come to an understanding of the physics, geometry and handling of the solution.
In my case, getting everyone to understand what was expected by requesting “metaphors” required a few rounds of ensuring everyone understood the terminology. Experience Design teams are incredibly diverse. We are further exposed to vocabulary that is not part of “normal” colloquial conversation.
We can probably agree that imagining a mobile application as a wand defines how the user is onboarded, how navigation works, how the content is activated and how the user is expected to interact with space within which the app operates.
It is very important to keep in mind that the metaphor is only a tool in the process. It is not the solution!
The design team that is working on the solution may now have a clear idea of how the metaphor solves the problem, but this may be out of alignment with the client’s expectations (and vice versa). Always explain metaphors at least three times, with clear visuals and a very clear user-journey, and concrete examples of how the metaphor solves individual problems.
Metaphors are not a panacea. Many projects only require comparative examples, since the final objective is very clear. These are variations to existing implementations.
Metaphors can cause us to be coded into a corner. We can get lost in how our content should behave to be consistent with the metaphor. I ran into this with my screens. I wanted some images to have a whale-like effect, where they took over the whole screen, and even felt like they broke out of the screen. (BTW this has been executed very well by Refik Anadol’s recent installations.) But in the process I lost sight of how the content would be read, and if visitors to the space would even understand all these nuances!
Denis Astakhov’s very in-depth interview in this episode goes into his experiences with metaphors that both worked, and didn’t.
The danger of metaphors is when they cause misalignment either internally or in the client-vendor communications. There’s also the very real danger that the end user or visitor to the experience will not understand the metaphorical intent at all! In this case you could end up with a completely confusing experience that only those in the know understand.
How does one avoid this type of misalignment? By always keeping in mind that the metaphor is only a tool. This tool helps us to keep our storyline and visitor experience journey both consistent and engaging. But we have to be careful not to break existing and common paradigms of navigation, gestures and contextual understanding.
In cultural spaces we have roughly 30 seconds to two minutes to onboard visitors to an institutional experience, whether that’s an app or spatial interactive. What this means is that if we try to do something that breaks their existing paradigm, they will lose interest immediately. The metaphor that we ask them to buy into must be very simple.
Interactive experiences introduce complexity to the visitor. So it’s our job, as designers, to minimize that complexity as much as possible for the end user. Reducing misalignment is a critical step on the path to increasing visitor engagement.
We are often exposed to spatial experiences (even though they may not be called that all the time) that use terms like “sustainability” or “gamification.” These are obvious metaphors that often are wildly misaligned with the built solution. Nathan Lachenmyer’s article, in this episode, delves into how even in our discipline, the idea of “sustainability” is both necessary and complicated.
As storytellers, we rely on metaphors, analogies, similes. We talk in the language of emotion and sentiment and synesthesia. This is very important, since this is how we can make the stories more emotionally relevant and compelling for engagement.
As a general population we have lost touch with the process of storytelling, and have largely become consumers. In this world, where we have forgotten some of these tools, it’s important to use them carefully. We must work to minimize ambiguity and confusion.
I’ll be bold and state that the more comfortable experience design teams are with the appropriate and effective use of metaphors, and the more consistent their usage, the faster we get to compelling and unique experiences.
— Sundar Raman
Epilogue
When we try to describe CreativeStack, the metaphor of a library seems strong. We want to create a compendium of community knowledge. And as is happening with physical libraries, we want to evolve into a hub of community activity, with events and gatherings that support the expansion of connections and expertise. Then there’s the very helpful “stack” aspect, which for us starts with tech, but also conveniently refers to “the stacks” of a library. That glorious sense of wandering among towering shelves of books, and the inspiration that may strike at any moment — you never know what you’ll discover in the happenstance meandering amongst titles and ideas. That’s exactly what we want to cultivate here, and we hope that metaphor is one our readers, contributors and participants can relate to and carry forth with us.
— Kirsten Nelson