Here is a teaser for a seminar next semester:
Read a more detailed (german) description here.
Also: Overview about my teaching activities with links to other seminar weblogs.
Here is a teaser for a seminar next semester:
Read a more detailed (german) description here.
Also: Overview about my teaching activities with links to other seminar weblogs.
Actually the site PSDTUTS has great tutorials for Web Designers. But one of the recent articles about what design roles that constitute a good web design discipline did not convince me.
The new seminars for summer term 2008 are fixed. It is always a very exciting moment to think about new topics for projects… or rather: to pick the best from the ideas floating around.
And I always love to define topics with a leightweight appearance but at the same time much depth.
Here are the two candidates:
Project seminar: »Habits«
Design research about our habits and how they shape our daily life and how we use things.
Project seminar: »PIM«
Design for Personal Information Management systems.
One of the most interesting topics for information architecture is search. There are ways to find, explore, browse and discover things in digital domains. The value of information increases with the possibility of being found. So design for findability becomes the most important strategy to increase the value of information.
One of the distinct experts in the field of Information Architecture is Peter Morville. He gave an interesting one-hour talk at Google about »Ambient Findability and the Future of Search«:
He talks a lot about the problem of search in general (he is speaking at a search engine company). How to enable better search and findability is a question of a) metadata and b) representation.
It is the representation aspect of searching and finding, that is still a huge area for design innovations. While improving the Google search result page may be too difficult, there are a lot of very specific problems where searching and navigating an information domain gets a very interesting and particular design issue.
A designer needs a good understanding of the fact that users have different approaches of locating things depending on
As there are more and more programs offering podcasts I think there is more interesting content appearing in this subscription format that is interesting for design:
There are much more for sure. I’ll just leave it here now. If you know a podcast of interest for designers, let me know.
On the »SHIFT« conference Luke Wroblowski presented his ideas about »Design thinking« (see his post here).
I think there is a lot of refreshed awareness in die business community about what »design thinking« might be and if it can help to improve business processes, services and products.
Right now it seems there is a lot of very hypothetical talk about that. And as Luke Wroblowski shows by quoting other designers, it is also a very open what »design thinking« is. But there are some prominent figures propagating the concept, so I expect business people and economists will start to discuss what (or what not) »design thinking« may be good for.