Design Without Designers
Design Without Designers: Donald Norman on the limitations of data-driven and user centered design where radical innovation is concerned. He makes a compelling argument, i’m just not entirely convinced that innovation truly happens in a way where it could be so easily threatened by marginalizing the mythical lone genius designer.
See also this earlier column by Norman for interactions magazine, this response by Nicolas Nova and this recent piece by Wired on the nature and mechanisms of innovation and why our romanticized notion of lone genius inventors is removed from reality.
Chris Clark interviewed by Lukas Mathis
I only just got around to reading this interview with Chris Clark by Lukas Mathis from back in September. It’s a great interview with insight into Chris’ design process and many great tips.
So You Want To Be A Designer
Our identity crisis means learning our field is like trying to inhabit the mind of a multiple personality disorder sufferer. For an aspiring interaction designer, figuring it all out is daunting. For anyone, it’s daunting.
This is my top-five list of what I’ve found to be most important to do and master if you want to get into design.
What you should know: Negotiation, cognitive psychology, programming, graphic design. What you should do: Create, create, create. Good advice.
Finishing a Game
Derek Yu (of Spelunky fame) shares 15 tips on how to finish a game. Sound advice, and many of his tips are not limited to games development in their applicability:
We’ve all had that feeling about at least one game, comic book, movie, etc., that comes out: “Gee, I could do better than this! This is overrated.” But it’s important to take a step back and realize that, hey, they put in the time to finish a project and I haven’t. That’s at least one thing they might be better than me at, and it’s probably why they have the recognition I don’t! If you treat finishing like a skill, rather than simply a step in the process, you can acknowledge not only that it’s something you can get better at, but also what habits and thought processes get in your way.
All of our engineers are designers and our designers are engineers. When you separate the two, you get the designers doing things for marketing purposes rather than functional reasons.
James Dyson, in a New Yorker article which i can’t access because it’s stuck behind a paywall. Thus, nicked from here.
