The Great Splintering
Watch an early episode of Mad Men and marvel at the poor lads (and occasional lass) trying to wrap their minds around television and print. It’s cute. Now, fast-forward to the age of socially-driven, digital interactive experiences. Shield your eyes as the design department fractures into dozens of specific and overlapping disciplines. A Web Designer may also do Flash Development and Sound Engineering. An Art Director may also be a Motion Graphics Designer and 3-D Modeler. A User Experience Designer may also be a Copywriter. The confusion continues in technology where a Front-End Developer, a Web Designer, and even a Systems Engineer can all refer to the same job description.  For many of us, the social/digital frontier creates another layer of ambiguity around our roles and how they are perceived within our own organization. At Dachis Group, our reputation as Social Business Design leaders determines how knowledgeable we as creatives need to be about a long and ever-growing list of platforms, media, apps, APIs, memes, behavior trends, oh–and whatever our job titles are supposed to cover, too (like designing, producing, art directing). “Design” and “creative” are ambiguous terms at best. What do we need to know to do our jobs?

Give the people back their air (or at least their voice)
Once you fight through the panic, remember that the core job will always be the telling of relevant and engaging stories. It became trickier when we left the old advertising model:  broadcasting a message about the brand or product features and assuming that the target audience receives it. In other words, cast a wide net with a one-way, outgoing dialogue. Nowadays, we help brands create experiences that engage the consumer while giving them ways to share that experience, either back to the brand, or in a small scale broadcast among the consumer’s social graph (with their implied endorsement). We give consumers the tools to evangelize for the brand. Social media marketing should inspire conversation around, with, and for our client brands. Brand-loyalists seek opportunities to delight in and declare their delight about their favorite brands. We create the destinations, pathways, and tools for fans to share their enthusiasm.

Medium, message, and authenticity
Social media has heralded the age of authenticity. Inauthentic behavior, like trying to skirt around an issue of communication, can be disastrous (we’re looking at you, Netflix). Communication breakdown also happens to brands through the misuse of technology. Authenticity becomes corrupted whenever the message is not clearly conveyed. The danger lies in losing or confusing the message due to lack of adequate knowledge of the delivery system. But as the method of delivery shifts constantly (web, mobile, apps, YouTube, Facebook, even augmented reality installations), the restrictions and features inherent to each technology help shape both the design and the concept itself. Design departments need to, at the very least, keep a constant dialogue with development teams. At the very best, companies need to harbor and nurture cross-discipline hybrids, if for no other reason than to act as translators between development and design. This removes potential barriers between the consumer and the brand. The medium is the message. So let the medium inform the shape of the message.

We can work it out
So, what do we need to know? At the risk of sounding like a supremely stoned guru, we need to know what we don’t know and better know those who do know what we don’t know (man). We must create cultures that allow for technology and creative to overlap, communicate at most phases of a project, and collaborate on concepts and solutions. Cutting creative out of technical solutions and excluding development from helping shape a concept is so 20th century thinking. Projects end with either a fantastic design/creative concept lost in a poor technical solution or an innovative and elegantly developed engine, ultimately rendered unusable due to design or UI missteps. The two main production disciplines of creative and technology, when working more closely together, actually can ‘know’ everything. We don’t need Creative Technologists, just the right kind of creative thinkers and communicators on both teams. Whatever your title, be it Media-Diviner or Social Video Transmogrifier, make the effort to understand the medium (down to the nitty-gritty) with the help of your more technical brothers and sisters.