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.
Vertical Rhythm
A project to link the aesthetic and discipline of modernist poster designs to the world of digital and dynamic grids, manifested by a series of WordPress themes, adapted from typographical posters.
Vertical Rhythm. Pretty.
Films by BERG
BERG has made two new beautiful films:
Following iPad light painting, we’ve made two films of alternative futures for media. These continue our collaboration with Dentsu London and Timo Arnall. We look at the near future, a universe next door in which media travels freely onto surfaces in everyday life. A world of media that speaks more often, and more quietly.
Incidental Media is the first of two films:
Media surfaces: Incidental Media from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
And The Journey is the other film:
Media surfaces: The Journey from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
They’re both great. I appreciate the humility in BERG’s design approach, their idea of polite media, where so many these days try to garner attention by being louder and shriller. You should read the aforelinked introductory blog posts where they highlight some of the more easily overlooked details from the films.
russell davies: designing behaviour and robospam:
This seems like a potential darkside in waiting. Aside from all the surveillance concerns you’ve suddenly got objects that can swarm in three dimensions and might get cheap enough for the economics of spam to apply. Never mind walking past a Starbucks gets you a coffee voucher on your phone – we’ll just soak the area with robovouchers that’ll get in your hair until you buy a cappucino.
I like his pre-wired-deadline ruminations.
Design for the First World
And the winner is… Realtime Chat!
Using social media’s vocabulary my proposal is to make people start real-time conversations.
My project consists of a simple “add-on” patch that can be placed on your head-phones. Each patch consists of a instant message status such as Online, Free for Chat and Busy. These patches are made of magnet and can be easily changed.
Imagine you are on the subway going home, while you are listening to your own music you can also be “Available” this is an opportunity to get to know people around you. It is also a great way to integrate the immigrant population because immigrants will have a opportunity to find out who is “Free for chat”.
The Meaning of UX Design
Oliver Reichenstein posted an interesting article on user experience design. It makes the assertion that a user’s experience cannot be determined, but shaped at best (an argument more pointedly expressed in this earlier piece).
It also addresses the question of what constitutes user experience design. Unfortunately it didn’t help much with my own qualms about the definition of user experience design as a discipline, as the article seemingly muddles various disciplines like interaction design, web design and, of course, user experience design.
The more i keep reading about user experience design, the more i get this uneasy feeling that the term itself and the concept it represents have been stretched and warped to a point where they can encompass any kind of design activities and goals whatsoever. It seems to have swallowed graphic design, interface design, interaction design, game design, industrial design, product design and web design as a whole, with a dash of marketing, architecture, psychology, anthropology, sociology, software engineering and cognitive science thrown in for good measure. I’m getting wary of using the term because i’m less and less sure of what it’s supposed to mean aside from some vague, grandiose notion of a hollistic design discipline and it thus seems impossible to me to convey anything meaningful or accurate by using it. In that sense i increasingly subscribe to the tautological definition of UX, which renders the term meaningless:
The design of a product-voluntarily or involuntarily-defines the interaction between human and artefact. Interaction leads to experience. From this point of view, all design is experience design. Used like this, the term “user experience design” doesn’t mean anything.
Every user interface designer needs to be a UX designer. Every web designer needs to be a UX designer. Every industrial designer needs to be a UX designer. Every graphic designer needs to be a UX designer. Every architect needs to be a UX designer. The list could go on. If you design something that people engage or interact with, you need to be a UX designer, because otherwise you are probably not very good at your job.
Designing Obama
The book Designing Obama offers a comprehensive look into the design and visual branding of Obama’s presidential campaign, written by its design director Scott Thomas. Aside from the book and iPad app, there’s also a free digital pdf edition available for download. (via)
