Brendan Dawes at Full Frontal

Tomorrow marks the 3rd year of Full Frontal Conference, organised by Remy Sharp and the Left Logic crew down in Brighton. We’re sending Mr Beeby down there to cover the conference for us, so make sure you say hello to him if you see him (he’ll be sporting his Mario style mo, I believe). Ahead of tomorrow, we caught up with Brendan Dawes, who’ll be speaking at the end of tomorrow. Brendan is a force in the design world, and having seen him speak earlier this year at New Adventures, I know you’ll be in for a treat.

Give us a brief rundown of your talk at Full Frontal

I’m a geek; I have a thing for pencils and stationery; I make things from Altoid tins and bits of electronics; and I love to play around with bits of tech in all shapes and sizes. But for these things to move things on – to have an impact – these experiments need to be published to a wider audience beyond the world of the geek; they need to used in a real-world sense rather than in an experimental context. I’ll be showing how mN created some work for Arup using HTML 5 technologies that is now being developed as a real world application.

Sometimes it can be hard to get a client to take a bet on new technologies. What advice would you give people who are trying to pitch experimental projects to clients?

It’s not about the technology but about what you’re trying to deliver and how you’re trying to communicate, and the best tools for the job. With the Arup project we wanted it to be used on many devices including the iPad and iPhone. Arup understood that it needed to be ubiquitous so as many people as possible could use the thing mN are now making. Make a a good case for it and good clients will back you up. The thing is, risk is sexy; I don’t care how corporate some companies may seen but everyone secretly wants to be Dirty Harry; tap into that notion and that’s half the battle one.

I know you’re passionate about UX and UI design. Could you elaborate on what you think the impact that the current buzzword technologies (and future ones) will have on the area?

I’ll be honest with you I have no idea what UX is. All I know is how to make something that resonates with people in various ways, whether that’s getting a job done or making someone smile. All I care about is designing objects that have the capacity to be loved. New tools can sometimes help you do that and certainly create new opportunities to explore, but ultimately everything comes down to that.

Beep seems to revel in making real things that are beautiful, functional and fun real-world objects. What can people who design and build for the web learn from the world of real objects?

Well it’s a little strange maybe to say this but I consider the web to be real objects in some ways, even more so the mobile web / apps. The experience of using an app or the mobile web is a vastly more intimate, personal experience than staring into a screen on your desktop; you’re holding this thing in your hand as you navigate, so the feel of it it completely different. To me these things feel in some ways more analogue than digital because of that. Design is often – though not always – about context so the context of holding this object in your hands changes how you design something for that object; how does it appear on screen, how does it move from one state to the other etc. These transitions are a universal design grammar that sits across all well designed objects, and that thinking can inform the making of a digital object just as much as a physical one.

Brendan recently set up Beep Industries, a shop that specialises in making “products free of unneeded features that celebrate the beauty of simplicity. Simple objects that strip away the unnecessary yet keep the necessary; unquantifiable things such as charm, joy and playfulness — the kind of qualities that make you fall in love with something.” Head over to their site to check out their latest products, MoviePeg, POPA and MIXA (All of which I’m a little bit in love with).