High concept

One of my favorite types of movies is a high concept movie. It’s when the movies’s premise is so simple, it can be explained in a single sentence.

A bus with a bomb that will explode when the speed drops below 40 mph.
A weatherman relives the same day over and over again.
Snakes on a plane.

I watched a couple of high concept movies this week. The Ice Road, with Liam Neeson (a truck driver has less than 30 hours to drive a special drill over a dangerous ice road, to rescue trapped mine workers) and Boss Level, with Frank Grillo (a former special forces agent who relives the day of his murder over and over again tries to find out who is behind it. Or: Like Groundhog Day, but an action movie).

While they weren’t masterpieces, they were quite enjoyable — inspiring even. What inspires me about high concept aren’t so much the movies, but the genre itself: the fact that I can explain the experience with just a few words. I believe good design is also ‘high concept’: a well designed product should only need a single sentence to explain and sell itself.

But the challenge with high concept movies is also the challenge for good products. There are so many movies out there, and we have seen so many already, that it is becoming harder and harder to come up with a unique concept. Something we haven’t seen before. Something so different from what we know, that we become very curious.

Still, I believe that is what I should strive for as a designer: to create concepts so simple, yet so different from what already exists, that they almost sell themselves.