Category: Design

6th International Conference of the European Academy of Design.

Microsoft has create a special website for recruiting designers for their design department.

Dirk Kneymeyer published an article about the “fruits” of a usability discourse ending up in uninspired designs: The yang to our present yin is a dearth of mainstream creativity, visual differentiation, and sense of active design. For example, the financial services industry spends a tremendous amount of money on Web sites, having moved a large…

The International Institute for Information Design (IIID) has published a very valuable documentation about the expert meeting on knowledge presentation online.

Cinematography nowadays almost is unthinkable without computers. I like this story of Kerry Conran trying to render a complex video composition of the upcoming movie Sky Captain in 1994 on a Apple Mac IIsi. After four years (and some hardware upgrades later) he finished six minutes of his feature film. Today it has become not…

Rosan Chow reflects on work by Alain Findeli. She wants to help characterize design activity by projecting a fringe view on the relation between design activity and knowledge, scientific or non-scientific. To me, the essence of design activity lies in the ontological realm and how it affects the way we are that is different than…

Finally there is some movement on the weblog of the “simplicity” seminar. And some very good items popped up already. For instance some explanatory animations by Nigel Holmes which look pretty much like the things we did in the “density” seminar. And also I learned that John Maeda at MIT started an experimental research project…

Virginia Postrel is the author of The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies. She also writes the “Economic Scene” column for the New York Times and maintains the Dynamist blog. In her presentation at SXSW Interactive, Postrel discussed the importance of aesthetics, how design comes into play, the role of expertise, and…

GUUUI.com has news on the economic value of design that has been published by the Design Council UK: Evidence for the link between shareholder return and investment in design has been scarce and anecdotal. An analysis of the British stock market has shown that companies that invest effectively in design, have outperformed the rest of…

As a comment to the Rotman Management design issue (pdf) magazine Victor Lombardi quotes Jeanne Liedtka from page 12: The most fundamental difference between the two, they argue, is that design thinking deals primarily with what does not yet exist; while scientists deal with explaining what is. That scientists discover the laws that govern today’s…

Beth Mazur on her IDblog: The May issue of Design Research News has a very interesting promo about the Harvard Business School (HBS) declaring the ‘Master of Fine Arts’ (MFA) as the new ‘Master of Business Administration’ (MBA)… essential for a business career. But they point to the online publication [PDF, 19 MByte] of the…

Here is a list of quotes about design collected from designfeast.com.

Andrei Herasimchuk has posted the first Gurus v. Bloggers Design Shootout, comparing the sites of Richard Saul Wurman, Bruce Tognazzi, Peter Merholz, Jakob Nielsen, Edward Tufte, Gerry McGovern, Donald Norman, and Andrei himself against design bloggers Jeffery Zeldman, D. Keith Robinson, Andy Budd, Didier Hilhorst, John Gruber, Greg Storey, John Hicks, and Josh Williams. The…

Here is an interview with Donald Norman about the concept of mental models. It contains an interesting (and longer) passage about the possible relation between mental models and emotion: A mental model provides an immediate expectation about what you think is going to happen and the emotional system will evaluate that positively (positive affect or…

Students love to ask this question: “Is there any common strategy to design?”. Then I usually reply: “Yes, clearly there are three simple common strategies!”. They are: Creating order from chaos Creating chaos from order Copy from the best examples Information designers usually have to create order from chaos. Information overload does not mean “too…

I found this year-old posting over at Mark Bernstein about Clement Mok writing this in “Designers: Time for Change”: “In the ensuing years, the deadening effects of social turmoil followed by stagnation and, later, the sheer volume of work created by waves of economic expansion engendered an environment of complacency. Designers increasingly just scrubbed and…