Why in the world are these wall sockets so high?
I noticed some fingerprints on my iPhone around the home button at the bottom. But also around and on the area where the earpiece is. I thought, "Weird."
As designers … [w]e have the opportunity and the responsibility to create a world where each object and experience is filled with value, where living with less but better is both joyful and meaningful.
Hugh Graham in Lasting but Not Least on A Brief Message.
To me, a career and a life of meaning involves both seizing opportunities and assuming responsibility for being part of creating a joyful world.
Obviously, design isn't the only career path that contributes towards this vast goal but I definitely believe the set of skills associated with human-centered design creates many unique opportunities and thus increases the responsibility for designers to do our part in making things truly better no matter where we go and what we do.
Just as each person has their own way of understanding, expressing concern, and offering help, different careers have varying methods and extents to which they contribute towards creating a joyful world. I realized that all the careers I've had interest in sparked passion in me because I felt that the mix of my personal abilities, the working environment, and the problem space could enable me to maximize on opportunities to make solid contributions towards "making things better" and "making people happy".
While I may not always know exactly what I want to be doing in the future (and things inevitably change even when I think I do), from this perspective, what I do not want to do becomes more clear. I don't want to be spending my time on things where I'm not positive if I'll be making things happen towards improvement.
That is part of the reason I decided against pursuing a PhD program. I only considered it in the first place because I assumed it could increase my capacity to execute on my goals more effectively. However, somewhere along the way, I became convinced that the design legs I stood on were already capable enough to do some worthwhile work, so why not see how far these legs can go?
Basically, I want to be part of making things happen; and in particular, meaningful things. What's meaningful? I find it meaningful to be part of creating a joyful world. Making things better!
What would define a career of meaning for you?
Photo credit: Joe Lencioni.
Well, maybe just being able to regularly enjoy and marvel at them will be sufficient. If only there were more museums, galleries, or showrooms that would display and celebrate the cars as human achievements…
I was looking through a gallery of the upcoming BMW X6 and even though it may not be groundbreaking-beautiful (I'm not educated enough to have a meaningful say anyway), as I came to the first shot of the interior, I thought "I wish I could collect great cars." Asking myself why I thought that, the answer was "Because great cars are fascinating like art." (Yeah, it would be nice to collect fine art too, wouldn't it?)
But then I thought that cars may be somewhat different than what is traditionally considered as art - so what's the deal? It dawned on me: Great cars have held a special place for me as a designer because great cars are like highly interactive art with immense utility that are simultaneously demonstrations of mastery in technology and engineering. Truly amazing objects, aren't they?
How cool would it be to work in such an intersection as a designer?
Sure, BMW's Chief of Design Chris Bangle had a TEDTalk called Great cars are Art, but when I blogged about it, my main takeaways were the depictions of love and trust in design and more specifically the process of design and what it means to design. If I remember correctly, Chris Bangle was more interested in car design as art as a parallel for sculpture and artists seeking truth. Actually, I think I want to to watch it again.
For convenience, here it is again:
Empathy gives us the ability to see the other person’s point of view. And when you think about it, there’s no more valuable skill for the working graphic designer than the capacity to see a client’s point of view. The objectivity that designers derive from an empathetic nature is invaluable.
I'm not a graphic designer but I'd say that a combination of keen empathetic and intuitive senses can give a designer a distinct competitive advantage over other designers.
I've been thinking a lot about empathy and how important it is to design.
The best business advice I’ve ever heard was this: “Focus on the things that won’t change.” Today and ten years from now people will still want simple things that work. Today and ten years from now people will still want fast software. Today and ten years from now people will still want fair prices. I don’t believe we’ll have a “I want complex, slow, and expensive products” revolution in 2017.
From a 37signals post, "The 5, 10, 20 year plan". The rest of the post is a very good and short read.
In the BusinessWeek article Case Study: Philips' Norelco, it's demonstrated that Philips is a cool company that knows how to focus on the user. I always suspected Philips to be a cool company to design for (I keep a list of companies where I think it would be cool to do design work) .
The article has 4 headings: The Problem, a call for solutions; The Research, contextual inquiry (watch them!); Prototyping, where engineers, designers, and business strategists dream and build; Marketing, product positioning based on user needs and worldviews. Awesome! Staying empathetic, collaboratively working through solutions, sticking close to the data.
And yes, Chinese men aren't usually very hairy. Philips will consider launching a double-headed razor for China instead of triple-headed razor. Kinda funny.
I re-discovered this blog/site called Core77. Browsing through it I remember why I deleted it from my feed reader a while ago: there is just too much stuff that is really broadly spread across the huge domain of design. I was more interested in design research and user-centered design than industrial and graphic design and all that other good stuff.
Anyway, I noticed tucked away in Core77 is a really neat directory of design firms and consultants. Core77 Design Directory. As of right now, 6427 firms are listed and 1389 are labeled as Interaction Design. Sweetness. I'm going to enjoy browsing through them a bit at a time. I'm really surprised at how many are in San Francisco. I really think I should have tried to tour as many of these operations as possible. I've always wanted to get to know more about design firms and the work they do but I never knew how to find them. Good thing someone else is keeping a directory!
Another thing I noticed on the Core77 homepage is the BusinessWeek Online logo and I'm guessing that means Core77 is owned by or on the payroll of BusinessWeek. BusinessWeek has a cool running "column" on Business Innovation and Design. Front page of this section looks unbelievably interesting. Looks like all those late nights of wandering on the web for more design knowledge are starting to pay off. I'm just disappointed that it takes me so long to find exactly what I'm looking for.
Article at Popular Mechanics website talks about how the US government spent 15 years and almost $500M dollars on military tech but apparently the soldiers don't really like it! Wow.
A soldier is quoted saying "There are a lot of things I'd never use in my position. It seems like a lot of excessive stuff."
From general feature and technology bloat to details like lack of consideration in equipment lag times, this could be a good example of techno-centric development that forgets to address the critical question of the user's experience and helping the soldiers actually work better instead of just working differently (and blowing R&D money).
From the article Facing the full horror of Windows Vista at iTWire:
So far, Transit has been using Vista Business full-time for a fortnight. And so far, we've found nothing that works better than in Windows XP, dozens of things that are annoyingly different without being a functional improvement, and several things that work at best intermittently and at worst not at all. On the whole, we wish we'd never moved.
Is this what Alan Cooper meant in his book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum when a product can lack conceptual integrity if a team of competent designers don't do their homework, develop personas, create specifications and a storyboard?
Well, I actually remember Cooper bringing up conceptual integrity in the context of not letting users directly define the product with feature requests, etc. Instead, it seems to make more sense to first have a bottom-up research approach where data about the users turns into personas and models which then gives way to a top down design approach from there.
Having random feature injections in lieu of user/persona-driven design seems like a bottom-up design approach which could lead to clunky user experience. Bottom-up research guiding top-down design lends itself to focused, coherent user experiences. That's my take on it anyway.
All that research work is to presumably understand what the user aims to achieve and accomplish and then to allow that knowledge to guide design. A storyboard would show how Vista "works better than Windows XP" from a persona perspective and how the "dozens of things" that are "(annoyingly) different" would be actual functional improvements.
As for the "several things that work at best intermittently and at worst not at all," I'm wondering if that's the job for QA and usability testing.
I doubt Microsoft would embark on the production of Vista without "design due diligence" especially with their roster of notable and brilliant designers and researchers. I'd be interested in seeing what their data looked like and how it translated into product specification, interaction design, and the usability testing results.
It would be even more interesting as a case study if Microsoft technically conducted the entire design and development process appropriately and the iTWire comments are accurate. (I've never even tried Windows Vista so I have no bearing on the accuracy of the comments.)
Chanpory Rith wrote an article Talent Isn't Everything over at Boxes and Arrows which has 7 interesting suggestions for junior designers to improve chances at success:
Of course, he goes into much more detail for each step than my copied list does.
What I enjoyed about the article is how he focused on practical details that junior level designers could pick up on such as focusing on getting your ideas and work out for others to see as opposed to spending significant extra time on trying to get it "perfect" since it would probably be more efficient to let other designers give feedback and advise.
I now realize that junior designers and senior designers have different skill sets and are expected to produce somewhat different things. I'm going to try and keep an eye out for information that could help me to learn more about what makes more sense for junior designers to concentrate on and what junior designers should expect to pick up or refine later as they transition into senior design positions.
I find that having realistic and clear expectations for myself and knowing what is expected of me by others helps to significantly reduce stress.
This video is great and I hope many people watch it. The talk is not only eye-opening in content but also in delivery. While BMW designer Chris Bangle illustrates the way designers work and the love they have for it and each other, I found myself wondering about all the things he didn't mention that would normally be mentioned in a story like this. How did they gather data? How did they negotiate things? Who was on the team? What happened to the engineers? And so on…
In the end, I realize that his choices regarding omission and inclusion of content were challenging me to think above all the methods and technicalities of design and think about what it means to be a designer. Bangle's mental provocation will be buzzing in my head for some time to come…
