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 percentage of their overall transactions online for both business and consumer activities. Compared to a few years ago, their Web products are very usable and obviously reflect a great deal of research, feedback and testing. But, looking at their home pages, can anyone tell the difference between three major financial institutions?

I had a discussion with Peter Baumgartner last Sunday about the notion of »interface« applied to educational technology – and I used a tea spoon as an example to explain the possible complexity of design decision that leads to so many different types of spoons. He asked why there are actually new spoon-designs created nowadays and I said, that in part design is about creating difference. A different spoon allows a spoon to become part of a self-descriptive process: we create identity by the way we engage the world and use artefacts to conduct actions and communicate with them. The problem with “consumerism” is that it needs to seduce people to think that consuming products is the best and easiest way to create external descriptors for ourselves (thus difference): you are what you buy. But possessing things is not a value in itself – especially if these things have a limited lifetime. So marketing has shifted from “product values” to “product experience” and product are enriched with the ability to constitute a life style and an identity. I have already commented on the idea of experience and consumerism here.

We love to make distinctive decisions about big issues and tiny issues alike (to value details is a way to live consciously). So to complain about a usability culture that generates similarity is non-sense, because it is a declared goal of usability engineering to identify usage standards and to actively create similarity to better serve the ideals of efficiency, learnability, reliability and satisfaction. But as a collegue once said: “I’ve never met an usability engineer who designed something.”.

The difference between usability and design is not so much a difference in regard to their goals (creating better user experience) but that usability does not focus on the synthesis of form at all. Secondly these two have roots in different scientifical and empirical traditions. This “rootedness” is what I think Kneymeyer is regarding as “culture”. My personal opinion is that designers are not well advised to simply ignore this strong alliance of usability engineering with the traditional scientific culture. The more benefitial approach to answer the attack on design as “un-empirical and un-scientific art” would be to establish a solid reasoning for an alternative understanding of design. This could be extremely difficult to achieve, but the retreat to “experience” (resp. “experience design”) as a higher category just shifts the “battle” from engineering to psychology.

Kneymeyer continues:

Design is more than just aesthetics. It is a sensibility that is often visionary and is about seeing beyond the surface. Design skills are getting mainstream attention and a current business buzzword is “innovation.” Anticipating the central importance of design as the lever for competitive advantage, Stanford University is investing in the creation of a pioneering design school. A new trend is beginning, away from the analytical bent of the researcher and toward the creative nature of the designer.

There is also a follow-up article: The End of Usability Culture Redux

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 only possible to apply these complex effects without effort but also to do so with high definition material (with a Kona card). In other words: it took ten years until technology was able to suffice Conrans vision.

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 how science or for that matter other activities do. To assert that design activity destroys knowledge redirects our attention to the important and unique role design activity plays in this world in relation to science and other creative human activities. It pushes us to think hard about the contributions that design activity should be able of making.

There is a german translation available by Wolfgang Jonas.

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 called “Simplicity” (I wonder who will fund such research here in Germany). Interesting as well: “Simplicity – Nine Theses” that have been presented at the equally named forum in September 1994 of the International Design Forum Ulm and Ulm School of Design Foundation.

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 why people respond the way they do to aesthetically pleasing people, places, and things.

Quote from a partial presentation transcript:

We’re experiencing a rise in the value of aesthetics. I don’t mean the philosophy of art. I mean communicating through the senses. Aesthetics is not narrative. It’s pre-rational. Not irrational, pre-rational. As a designer, if you try to create aesthetic affects, you will go through some cognitive process. Ellen Dissanayake, author of Homo Aestheticus looked at art as making something special — “emotionally gratifying and more than strictly necessary.”

Well, I agree on the pre-rational part. What I don’t agree on the conclusion that the value of aesthetics is fundamentally a gate to meaningful consumerism.

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 the stock marked by 200%.

This analysis is available as PDF.

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 reality, while designers invent a different future is a common theme. Thus, while both methods of thinking are hypothesis-driven, the design hypothesis differs from the scientific hypothesis.

[via IDblog]

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 Rotman school of management at the University of Toronto.

The PDF is 76 pages, and in a couple of scans I couldn’t find a mention of the HBS blurb, which you can actually read here (see item #9):
Businesses have come to realize that the only way to differentiate their offerings is to make them beautiful and emotionallly compelling — which explains why an arts degree is now a hot credential in management.
In any case, there are some very interesting articles in the Rotman magazine. Looks like it’s well worth the download.

MFA the new MBA because communication design skills got more important? There is more to that: It is not only the results designers create that can be more effective. In many ways it’s the methodology to generate innovations and think of alternatives as well. It has been observable for a long time now that university programs import design know how to limit negative effects of the growing importance of communication for their graduates.

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 Bloggers win 8:0.

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 valence) or negatively (negative affect or valence). […]
It’s good if we expect something bad that doesn’t happen and it’s bad if we expect something good that doesn’t happen. That impacts the way we feel if we continue using something (like a device) and it may impact what we do about it (continue use or abandon the device). […]
At the intellectual level there is also the causality issue. That is, do we decide to blame the device or ourselves?

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:

1. Creating order from chaos
2. Creating chaos from order
3. Copy from the best examples

Information designers usually have to create order from chaos. Information overload does not mean “too much information” but more precisely “too much information one can handle”. The information designers job is a) attach handles to the information (restructuring, contextualization and renaming) and b) reduce information that is not needed. This always is at risk to go too far and snuff out the life that was there.

Whereas the graphic designers job often is to animate dead things: Information that does not speak much. Attach handles and add context that make information live up. This is always includes the possibility to go too far as well: things turn back, start to live on its own life and hardly help anyone getting anywhere with it.

The problem is: there rarely is just graphic design or just information design. Mostly both ghosts sitting on each shoulder whispering into the designers ears.

That is where principle #3 kicks in: “copy from the best examples” does not mean stealing, but it means to look as closely as possible at how to balance life and death, so neither one can win.

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 brushed what they already had for each successive client and project. They added more bells and whistles as was required by their clients, and chimed all the way to the bank.”
and
“The design profession functions as if each individual designer is selling his or her services in some sort of terminological vacuum, with nothing more substantial than his or her personal charisma or taste to serve as the foundation for vast edifices of public influence.”

Clement Mok is right, but I can’t really see that this is a behavior of designers in particular.