GOLD FASHIONED

Design in literature

“The roof of the building weighed 18,000 tonnes, but the steel columns supporting it hardly suggested the pressures they were under. They were endowed with a subcategory of beauty we might refer to as elegance, present whenever architecture has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. On top of their tapered necks, the columns balanced the 400-metre roof as if they were holding up a canopy made of linen, offering a metaphor for how we too might like to stand in relation to our burdens.”

-Alain De Botton, A Week at the Airport

Self-referential culture notes

“We’re living in a time where we’re a bit obsessed with nostalgia, not too many new aesthetics are emerging these days, but we are finding ways to always remix and recombine already established ideas to create something new out of them.”

—Rainer Kohlberger in a Fast Co. interview regarding his app, pxl. #selfreferentialculturenotes

connecting digital with physical, and why (from a directorial viewpoint)

A designer is life’s propmaster. And a good business plan is it’s script. Our job is to place the things that people use at their fingertips and in their hands at the right moment in the story.

Who wouldn’t delight in bringing the digital and physical aspects of a brand to life? It’s great fun, but it takes a connected series of beautiful and functional artifacts to allow real people to articulate these stories we’re trying to tell.

Deliverables are not the Idea, unless that’s all they are.

I work with interaction designers, industrial designers, graphic designers, and packaging designers. I’m around them all day, and often all evening. I spend a lot of time trying to get them to inform each other, collaborate, and align on a common vision for a project with many, many moving parts. And I’ve started to notice something about them; interaction designers are really good at getting out in front of the thinking around a problem, where the other design disciplines seem happy to fall in and play their part.

Coming from an industrial design background, i thought it necessary to get to the bottom of this. Why should one group of designers take more ownership of the problem than any other? I fully subscribe to the 101-level definition of all design: it’s creative problem solving. So why do I find myself leaning on the interaction design role to bring the rest together? 

I think it’s 2 things. The first is more subtle, and it’s that the work of an interaction designer is about aligning a group of people on what is essentially an abstraction. Turning a requirements document into features and features into wireframes is an incredibly non-literal process. You have to get a group of people to have the same understanding of “usage data should be made available to review settings, hours of use, and alarms”, agree where it fits into a diagram of the system architecture and then imagine how someone might interact with it by representing it in wireframe. So communicating amongst the internal creative team the value of these ideas and how they fit into the larger system is kid stuff once you’ve managed to do it with the client.

The second reason took longer to put my finger on, but it has to do with deliverables. The other design disciplines show their true value when they craft beautiful artifacts that communicate their ideas visually. A gorgeous rendering gets anyone’s heart racing. But those artifacts are more like propaganda for the idea than they are representative of the idea itself. The real representation of the idea that industrial designers are working with is the engineering database. The real representation of the idea that visual designers are considering is a mix of code and assets called to a screen. But these disciplines spend a disproportionate amount of their time crafting artifacts to sell the ideas down the line. These are alignment tools, but they’re hard to produce. Meanwhile, an interaction designer’s major deliverable is a wireframe: the whole point of which is to be quick to generate and the least amount of effort required to communicate the idea. And no one’s heart skips a beat over a wireframe. The result is that other design disciplines can get trapped into falling in love with their deliverables, not their ideas.

But ideas- abstractions- are all interaction design needs.

Implementing Good Design

The text below was written in response to an internal effort to dissect the meaning behind the idea of “world class design” and begin steps to developing some actionable techniques to consistently generate this type of work within an agency.

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The term “world class” is inherently rooted in the notion of a larger perspective. A global perspective. When we talk about our work as being World Class, I think we’re talking about work that could be viewed from any angle, anywhere in the world, and be considered “good”.

WORK THAT HOLDS UP.

For work to withstand the test of time and place, it will need to be bigger than itself, larger than the immediate needs of the project. There are two things we’ll need to generate this kind of work:

-       AN OBJECTIVE GUIDE:  A set of criteria that is impervious to the needs of the moment to guide the work that we do.

-       A DYNAMIC GUIDE: A person who is a stakeholder in (and evaluated on) the longevity of the work, not the immediate need.

THE OBJECTIVE THINGS.

There are several things that must be a part of our criteria. Here are a few thoughts that try to combine company objectives, user-centered design, and some principles from the great Dieter Rams.

-       Does the work align with the company’s vision and priorities?

o   Not only overall, but we must track the different elements of the vision and make sure that the work we do is a balanced representation of all the aspects of our vision.

-       Are the end users represented in this work?

o   Insight and Need must come directly from the user, and the product’s adoption depends entirely on our ability to understand these.

-       How is this work innovative?

o   We must be able to identify the specific aspects of the design that are innovative. This is the work’s story and it’s key benefit.

-       Is this work aesthetically successful?

o   One of the fundamental values of design is to marry form with function. If we don’t think our work is beautiful, it shouldn’t go out the door.

-       Is this work thorough?

o   Have we thought of everything? Is it designed all the way around? We have to consider the tiny details that support the big ideas in order to deliver maximum value to our clients.

THE DYNAMIC THINGS

It takes a driven individual to ensure that we’re holding true to these criteria. But more than that, the execution of any doctrine is all in the interpretation of the text. The application of these ideas to our daily challenges takes some serious “customer support”. It’s the difference between an FAQ list on a website and getting someone on the phone to discuss your unique circumstances.

There’s a natural tension between the chaos of a projects immediate needs (client requests, budgets, timeframes) and the stoic tranquility of these timeless guidelines. In order for them to be useful to us, we’ll need this intermediary to pull these ideas down from their pedestal and become actionable in the mucky trenches of daily design work.