Category: Design

Next week there’ll be another conference on Design Research in Rio De Janeiro. Unfortunatly the conference website is extremely lousy. I can’t even remember a conference website with so superficial and useless information. Obviously the organizers don’t want to get too international.

First of all I was suprised to read “3rd international conference” in the announcement, which suggests there have been just two other conferences on that topic. But if you look at the prior conferences listed you’ll notice that they just count national conferences and the attribute international may be a matter of wether or not there are speakers from other countries invited. From an organizing committee of an international design research conference I expect a) to list any design research conference in the history of the planet and b) to title their event »3rd Brazilian Conference on Design Research«.

Secondly the list of papers is not available in English (wasn’t that a conference with “international” in the title?). If that wouldn’t be lame enough, the accepted papers are listed without any author names and abstracts – which basically makes this list useless for any kind of research (Wasn’t “research” in the conference title as well??).

Thridly, even though the conference is happening next week, there is no program available so besides some preview remarks on the start page there is no information whatsoever who is actually speaking at this event. Even the past two events are not documented beyond a list of accepted papers (again without any author names or abstracts).

Maybe I should apply to the 4th international conference with a paper called »What does ‘state of the art’ actually mean for Design (Research)?«.

Christopher Gee is running a weblog subtitled »a blog about the graphic design industry«. He is doing interviews with people from the design profession about various topics. It is very helpful that Christopher listed some issues raised within each interview. So you get an overview before listening to the audio.

I quote from an interview Chris did with GK VanPatter (founder of NextD.org) about Innovation Leadership and misleaded design educators:

There is sort of a misdirected sense in the [design education] community that there is a place and a table for designers that will always be there. It’s a fallacy. That place, there’s someone sitting there and we have to compete for that place. And our design educators just don’t get to that. They still are educating people like »That is your destiny. That is you place and your table because you are a designer and designers are always going to lead design!«. That is history! It’s a fantasy! It does not exist! We have to compete for innovation leadership roles.

I couldn’t agree more. It has been my personal experience and I see it everywhere. And I feel the same that many design educators don’t get it and instead stick to old models of the role of designers in business.

I am currently working on defining three seminars that lay out a foundation for design education. These courses are not oriented towards the formal and technological aspects of media, but rather focus on the psychological and cognitive questions involved with almost any design work. This is what I came up with:

• Density: Designing for effectiveness (mostly looking at Information Design)
  Questions involved: How dense can display of information get? How much information can be groked in short time? How can designers organize the attention of recipients/viewers? What do we need to know about cognitive psychology and perception research, to find the best way of communicating visually? How can we identify and build upon archetypes that are available to most humans? etc.
• Simplicity: Designing for efficiency (mostly looking at Interface Design)
  Questions involved: How can we avoid things getting too complex? Is there an absolute measure to complexity in contrast to an obvious relative measure? Why do we instantly feel products beeing »easy to use«? How can we improve our understanding of the »usage context« when designing things? When do things become too simple and thus do harm instead of help? When does »making things simple« become an end it itself? etc.
• Continuity: Designing for adequacy (mostly looking at Interaction Design)
  Questions involved: Is there a »psychology of interaction«? Can we learn from the concept of »flow« introduced in psychology for designing interactive systems and services? Can we identify an area inbetween intuition and concious decision making? Do we have the right epistemocogical tools at hand to identify problems in design work in regard to »fluent interaction«? etc.

I plan to sketch out these three topics as being foundation courses – not as a research agenda. You might start from there into any direction within the design profession. One might work on this theoretically, but one might also use any kind of pracitcal design problem or test case to explore the questions raised.

Ecolanguage.net uses visual animations to explain economical and ecological processes. The animations are planned for a common visual code to represent all issues involved with economy and ecology. They have just three types of transaction: yellow represent energy, red represents money and black represents information.

It comes pretty close to what I intended with the seminar called »Density«. In fact the assignments of that seminar started with visualizing the Grandfather Economic Reports by Michael Hodges. But in »Density« the focus was not so much on the visual code, but rather how visual representations allow rapid understanding. These two ideas are pretty close together. But »Density« is exploring the cognitive limits of understanding information in short time.

I have been doing HTML pages since 1994 when xMosaic 1.0 hit the FTP servers worldwide. The only really radical changes to webdesign for a very very long time had been a) JavaScript, b) tables and c) frames. I hesitate to include CSS, because it was kind of buggy and browser specific for a long time. There have been many other smaller things around but these I would not consider seriously because those brought only few advatages while the payoff was huge: you needed Plug-Ins or it was not working on any browser. Flash might be a small exception, because that worked well across browsers, but Flash itself was very useful for eye candy, little games and ads – not so much for content delivery or web apps (it broke the URL scheme so searching didn’t work and it hadn’t the performance required for user interfaces).

But in the last two years things have changed dramatically.

CSS

Got widely adopted pretty cleanly by anyone (but Microsoft). It actually took a long time to get CSS to be able to replace the TABLE-based templates designers used to trick layouts. But now it’s there. There are still some problems, but generally one could rightfully say that design with CSS is a viable path. (Having said that I admit that my own page here does still use tables. It’s on my ToDo list for month now!)

The XmlHttpRequest object (XHR/AJAX)

XHR is a browser native technology that allows to depart from the traditional interaction model of the web with an request/response cycle the user could physically experience (causing wait states after each click). In fact, I did something like this in 1998 with a frame that had a width of 0 (which essentially made it invisible). The visible page would reload the hidden frame and recieve a new JavaScript there which in turn manipulated parts of the content in the visible frame. From a user perspective this was pretty much like what AJAX is now. I didn’t do enough with that (it was IE-specific), but I speculate, that it had similar implications to the web design of a page. But AJAX is a far more elegant and quicker way to send and recieve data from the server without reloading.

JavaScript & DOM

Got more reliable in the last years. This is a big necessitiy for the DHTML stuff required to have dynamic pages (potentially using XHR). Because all this was flaky in the past designers did not consider designing much for “dynamic layout” and an interactive web interface. Thus it didn’t become a widespread practice. Good JavaScript skills were a plus for web designers and web developers. This probably is going to change: you need to know JavaScript.

SVG

The Standardized Vector Graphics format has been around for a long time now. It had also some cross-plattform issues to solve in the first implementations. Now SVG is going to be supported directly from the browser and it might be good to replace Flash where ever it is not necessary to author content but to have simple scripts that output the required XML data.

Web services and APIs

It has become somewhat of a habit for web application developers to offer programmable/hackable interfaces to their service logic. So other developers could build on that resource. In other words: if your web application does not offer an API it might not be interoperable enough to withstand competitors that do. Think of a Learning Management System that needs to be integrated into a larger Service Oriented Intranet. No API – no go! Well, sort of… / I remember a project once where we could have used a clever indexing system to automatically create category trees. It would have taken me few hours to attach our weblog system to that logic. But there was no API and the developers of the indexing system couldn’t care less about that (they were focussing on their indexing logic). End of the story: they have a system few people use and we don’t have automatic categorization yet.

The Canvas object (new!)

The upcomding Firefox/Mozilla releases (like Safari) will support a canvas object. Canvas objects can be used to create simple graphics with JavaScript within the client. It might remedy the problem to dynamically generating images on the server.

Greasemonkey (new!)

Right now Greasemonkey is rather exotic: It is a way to inject third party JavaScript applications into pages. A Greasemonkey script for instance could enhance the web application of a vendor with new functionality (for instance integrating Google Maps into Flickr wihtout having the need for a special provision or allowance by Flickr for that). This had been done before. But the technique used was to proxy pages and have the proxy server simply patching the HTML page to the needs of the service. ThirdVoice was once a way to stick little yellow notes to pages and make those visible to all other visitors of that page that used ThirdVoice. This technological design never really hooked people a lot because it required to call pages through a proxy server (and thus delaying the responses). I am not quite sure if that will spread out. There may be security concerns inhibiting users to install the Greasemonkey extension. But as a concept it is really a glue for “Web 2.0” applications.

If you think about these technologies, you’ll easily recognize the potential. It raises the bar for students and educators, because the possibilities are endless. People were staring at Google Maps and thinking this must have been very dificult to implement. But truth is, that it is not as complex as it seems. Actually these technologies straighten out disordered things from the past and add options for developers and designers at the same time. Things become possible that haven’t even been considered before.

It might seem so much easier to simply do the “rich interfaces” directly in Flash. But then you depart from HTML completely. With AJAX you can just add as much dynamic to an ordinary web page as needed. Flipping things here, getting rid of a reload there, save states without submitting a form, etc etc.

Essentially it will turn “web design” into “interaction design” thus the notion of “web design” might diminish one day. If you see a book in the store titled “web design”, you might think: “Oh, that is old stuff, I need the new ones…”

Jason Kottke is an invited weblog author at AIGA conference in San Francisco. He wrote some useful commentary and round-ups: Preparation, Lonely in a packed room, 20 courses not taken in design school, Friday round-up.

I am reading John Maeda’s Simplicity-Weblog from time to time – especially because I offered a seminar about this topic a while ago. Most of the posts of John are typical day-in-day out observations of a designer sensible for the details: sometimes I feel he can make an article out of anything (which tends to be a boring read of interesting thoughts, so enough beef to be worth it).

But his post about a MIT meeting about a proposal for developing a super-new-conflict-info-visualizing-and-planning-tool for the US government is just hilarious:

In the same way that VisiCalc was the so-called “killer app” that heralded the concept of a spreadsheet and ignited the business computing boom, I figure that another software system that is waiting to be launched as another “killer app” would be called Scapegoat 1.0. This system would be positioned to run on a normal desktop computer with 512Mb of RAM, average graphics card, standard networking, and so forth. Its purpose would be to be shift the blame away from yourself in any political fallout situation to another targeted faction with point-and-click ease. It could be used in a purely defensive manner (the so-called “Lite” version), and the Professional Edition could ship with preemptive and offensive capabilities. A service contract add-on option would be available where you could have access to real lobbyists.

Hehe!

I am busy doing things that I can’t learn anything from right now (which is always kind of hard work!). But I am trying to catch up with what is going on at the NextD initiative (I wrote about that before).

NextD is currently a spot where designers are thinking about »design thinking«.

An example quote from Dan Saffer:

Designing isn’t about choosing between multiple options, it’s about creating those options.

I really need to take some notes over there… For now I only have a chance to subscribe to their mailing-lists and collect some links over at del.icio.us.

Colleen Taugher is speaking out what many (me too) are propagating for a long time now:

It is clear that the most exciting design professionals work in complex, multi-disciplinary, dispersed teams in order to develop innovative solutions to some of modern life’s slipperiest problems. While design students will still need some old-school training in basic visual communication and in the “what” and “how” of their discipline, they clearly need a new set of skills. Knowing when “the red is really working with the blue” is no longer going to cut it. Can you facilitate multi-disciplinary teams so that no one gets into turf wars and everyone understands what is going on? Can you work in a dispersed environment? Can you push your team to come up with innovative solutions to abstract problems? Can you understand the problem from multiple perspectives (technical, business, social, communicative)? How do you teach these leadership skills to students?

Technorati is running a new »Blog finder« feature: You can find weblogs that cover a certain topic. I looked for »Design« and I got the usual suspects but also some (to me) unknown gems – like Drawn, a blog about illustrators. This blog doesn’t even list (I guess there is an issue with the tagging here).

I browsed through the first 50 blogs (sorted by “Most auhtority”) and wondered it would be a nice idea to set up a 5-day workshop with these people with just one goal: figure out how to make these 5-days a productive time. Simply put these people together in a large room and see what happens…

If I’d had the money for this I’d do this right away – maybe even just to learn if that was a good idea at all… 😉

Andrew Dillon in December 2004 joined the group of thinkers that question simplistic approaches to effiiciency of communication that ask for speed instead of pace:

Is there a temporal aspect to interaction that we should acknowledge? Surely there is a pace that leads to the best fit for each of us between tool and task, between goal and accomplishment, between resource and purpose. Sometimes making it faster just works against making it better, and I am not sure where this insight finds resonance in information architecture or systems design. The rhythm of interaction is partly set by the underlying design choices and that makes it matter of IA for me. Pace, timing and rhythm; there’s a whole world of information architecture yet to be done.

The KDE project has issued a short list of things the’re aiming for in a future release of Linux desktop. Interestingly the first item on their list is »breathtaking beauty«:

Breathtaking Beauty

• putting an emphasis on the form and style of software in addition to the function of it
• creating visually impactful interfaces that support usability

To me it seems the KDE project is not only trying to improve the look & feel of KDE – they want to include design in their strategy. Finally they need to help Linux to get a competitive user experience.

It is a good sign. But we should never forget the spirit of the early 1970ies where user interface design was about inventing interaction patterns – and not so much about selecting preferable color schemes. There have been very few inventions recently (but a lot of tiny ones to be fair).

This morning I was thinking about people trying to hack MacOS X to run on ordinary PC hardware and what Apple might do about it. What would I do if I’d be Steve Jobs? What could be arguments against OS X non-Apple hardware?

Suddenly I was thinking of a list (I love lists) of things Apple has introduced as industry firsts throughout their history of products. It would be a very long list. Apples brand value number on has always been to be ahead of time. Having control over hardware and software has always made it possible to design their products from A to Z. I think Apple has good reason to keep their OS exclusive.

Anyway: This design quality Apple has been able to establish and keep up over the years is a real challenge for other standard user interfaces like KDE or Windows. KDE also needs to come up with an answer to the Next generation Windows (codenamed Vista).

I am glad to see music video creators running formal experiments and pushing styles forward. Here are some:

• The video of Agenda Suicide by The Faint
• the former reminds me a lot of the song Remind Me by Röyksopp
• also a must see is Let Forever Be by Chemical Brother (directed by Michael Gondry)
• Facing That Void by General Electrics features stop motion and marionettes
• World On Fire by Sarah McLachlan’s features text info (usual cynic comments about music business apply)

There are several more examples I remember but I can’t recall the title or band names…

A real good source for seeing VFX experiments is the Stash DVD Magazine.

[some links courtesy of The Last Minute video blog]

There have been three convents of the German Association of Design Theory and Research (DGTF). These are available online now. There are audio recordings of the latest convent available.

I just came across the NextD site – an organisation located in New York – with some interesting interviews – the latest with Richard Saul Wurman.

NextDesign Leadership Institute was created as an experiment in innovation acceleration. We wondered if it might be possible for a small team of practicing designers to help speed the rate of adaptation, by graduate design education, to the radical events unfolding at the leading edge of the marketplace, that are impacting design leadership today. We optimistically guessed that it might be possible and if it wasn’t, finding out seemed like interesting research! To undertake that experiment, we created the NextD initiative and the NextDesign Leadership Institute.

In the »mindscape« section they offer some introduction about what has changed for designers in the 21st century. The Flash slideshow resonates a lot of things that inspired me to compare the “classic” and the “novel” way in design education two days ago. Most documents have been created by GK VanPatter (e.g. a comment about PhD education in design: »What matters?«). He has been recently interviewed by Peter J. Bogaards.