In a new world

Design as Art

In a recent Fast Company article, artist Olafur Eliasson proclaims that architects are not artists. “I think architects are much too sophisticated to be artists, and they are trained in the great art of making compromises to keep the client happy.”

The subtle dance of the designer/client relationship makes completing a great work of architecture an incredible challenge. Eliasson designed the exquisite glass facade of Reykjavic’s new concert hall with shimmering geometric glass “quasi-bricks”. He has 12-14 architects working for him at any time, so he does have deep understanding of the subtleties of the two fields, however I don’t think its quite as black and white.

Take a look at the work of Sottsass Associati, for example.

Ettore Sottsass, Casa Olabuenaga in Maui, Hawaii Image via Design Milk

When I see architecture such as this designed by Ettore Sottsass, the hard line between art and architecture fades. Starting in 1989 he worked closely with the owners of the property, Adrian Olabuenaga and Lesley Bailey of ACME Studio, to design the space according to their needs. The architectural colors were chosen by Sottsass and reminiscent of a work of abstract modern art. According to many including Eliasson, this is not art because the vision of the architect is compromised by the needs of the people who will be using the space. Working closely with clients to deliver a service is a characteristic of design professions and separates these fields from art, but there are many examples which blur the two.

Eliasson is an artist who finds it fulfililng to collaborate with architects. He describes the art world as self-obsessed, and it’s refreshing for him to work with people who “build real buildings for real people”. Art may not have the same aspect of co-creation as architecture that works within a community with its own social values and problems to solve. Designing architecture requires a sense of pragmatism that the creation of art is liberated from.

In 1970’s London, artist Stephen Willats was on a quest to redefine the role of the art gallery in society. He studied the neighborhoods surrounding Whitechapel Gallery and conducted interviews with local residents. He wanted to find out how they imagined that their world could be different in order to reflect this vision in his work. He maintained these relationships throughout the life cycle of the exhibition at the gallery and community feedback continued to inform the work.

It was quite unusual at the time for an artist to co-create a work with the community themselves, but the idea was to express another model of society, so who better to create that than the society itself?

Willat’s process is an example of what we now know as human-centered design – delving deep into a community to find out their pain points and real needs. The only difference is that the outcome of Willat’s work currently on display at the Whitechapel Gallery, seems inconclusive. Although the process set a precedent at the time, I didn’t get a coherent sense of what was gained from the vision of the community that he had painstakingly documented. Check it out for yourself – the exhibition is on until September 14th.

Design is design is design

When i was working in spain with Base Madrid my mentor David Cano offered to refer me for another freelance gig with a friend of his. It was mobile design for a telecom.

I told him I had never done that before and he said, “Design is design.” If you can design large-scale (we had been working on a wayfinding system for a large building), you can design small-scale for a screen. The skills you develop as a graphic designer will serve you no matter what field of design you are working in.

Here I am a little more than two years later and I’m designing mobile screens for every project. I would like my independent project, Storywalls, to be compatible with all future technologies, especially wearables. If not Google glass then whatever is next.

Designing across multiple disciplines reminds me of an incredible branding project for Russ & Daughters I discovered today via Dribbble. Graphic designer Kelli Anderson was tasked with rebranding everything for the company from the menu placemats to interior elements to neon outdoor signage. Her entertaining blog post details all of the thinking and process behind her design decisions, and she expresses the excitement when asked to tackle an area of design that she had never tried before.

Kelli did her homework on the history of Russ & Daughters and delved deep into the old New York roots of their visual identity. She created a strong creative direction, which carried over into the various design forms, which she describes as, “pleasingly rythmic disorder”… and “playful, but mostly direct, straightforward and pragmatic.” The discovery of an original paper bag design from the restaurant provided a strong base to guide design for everything from wallpaper to postcards.

In Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman writes, “How can one person work across so many different domains? Because the fundamental principles of designing for people are the same across all domains. People are the same, and so the design principles are the same.” If you have a deep understanding of the task at hand and the people who will be in contact with the work, thoughtful design is possible no matter what the function will be.

One more gem of design advice that my mentor in Spain left me with is from John Morgan’s Vow of Chastity: Design nothing that is not worth reading. Adhere to the rules below and you’ll be in good shape in any area of design.

Neomodernism in product design

There is a fascinating correlation between the underlying principles of the lean startup movement and the underlying principles of modernism, regarding both process and theory.

Living in the heart of Shoreditch I have come across many startups and agencies using lean and agile methodologies, and worked for a few. The uncontested bible that these fast-paced companies live by is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Nick Marsh, co-founder of Makeshift, arguably the leader of the London startup pack, describes the moment when everything clicked after The Lean Startup was published in 2011: “While there was nothing unique about it, it was such a powerful book because it pulled everything I’d already been doing together into this single understanding of how to make new things.”

PROCESS

The lean startup manifesto aims to eliminate waste in the business life-cycle by learning how to solve the customers problem with an experimental “Build, Measure, Learn” feedback loop using a minimum viable product. So instead of spending a year creating a finished product with all the bells and whistles, then rolling it out to customers and discovering they won’t use it, this tactic encourages the introduction of a simplified product to the marketplace in order to test the company’s assumptions with customers and learn how they would use it, if at all.

Lean process looks at design and development as a series of experiments. Interestingly, this is exactly the approach that the original Modernist designers took with regard to their work early in the 20th century, beginning in the Bauhaus and extending the many decades until Post-Modernism reared it’s ugly head.

Bruno Munari was an artist, industrial designer and futurist whose original ideas on modernism and the creative process were seminal works in the mid-20th century. The following description of Munari’s process could easily correlate with the path of an ambitious startup business:

“Munari’s creative process intentionally merged a multiplicity of ideas, techniques and materials. All of his works involve an approach that is never sequential, and hence difficult to describe through linear explanations or reductive definitions, but is rooted in a parallel perspective that manifests itself through the reworking of an idea a kaleidoscope of forms.” –Dr. Margherita Zanoletti

I’m reminded of the work of prolific Cranbrook-trained artist Keetra Dean Dixon, whose work spawns from a process of brazen experimentation. “Urging unexpected response via improper material application is simple curiosity in action; it’s learning, and we love to learn. We begin many studies by posing a simple question: “What happens if…?” and gain knowledge from the results.”

“Slitscan Type”, 2006, using Javascript, Illustrator and every font installed on the computer

Similarly, experimentation is at the heart of the lean startup methodology. Each assumption within the startup’s vision is an experiment that must be tested in order to learn more about your customers and build a sustainable business. The experiment is your first product.

THEORY

We are currently in a phase of neo-modernism, in which designers have returned their focus to the purity of form guided by the principle “form follows function”. iOS7 is probably the strongest example of neo-modernism in digital design. Embellishment is altogether eliminated and forms are stripped back to their basic necessities – a style that is now dubbed “flat design”. This new design direction is a reaction to the skeuomorphism of the past, which was trying to make the digital space look and feel like the physical world around us.

Modernism in design allows materials to be what they are, bringing content and function as close as possible to the user. In digital design, we are beginning to explore the possibilities of natural user interfaces based on human gestures. This correlates and complements the work that industrial designers have developed for decades.

Bruno Munari studied the form of bamboo and its various uses and meanings to the Japanese. “They always pay attention to the nature and structure of the ‘tube with knots in it’, and discover in it a great variety of proportions.” When creating tubing or vases from this material, they maximize the capabilities of the natural form.

In 1964, Munari designed the Falkland hanging lamp, which is now in the permanent collection at the MOMA in New York, using two materials: aluminum for the rings and elasticized fabric for the shell. The lamp is five feet high when hanging but placed on a flat surface it collapses to about one inch. There are no struts or rings or other stylistic embellishments; to achieve the form one simply needs to hang the lamp up. In this case the product emerged spontaneously from Munari’s fascination with the minimalism of Japanese craftsmanship and his experiments with materials and tensions.

PRACTICE

In the same way that Munari took the core element of bamboo to create a functioning lamp, or takes a basic square of wood to make a complex modular shelving unit, product designers need to find the core idea that will create the most value for customers.

Finding the core element that makes up the whole is essential to create a minimum viable product. Once it is tested, any further complexity can be built around this core feature.

I recently worked with a fashion B2B startup to create an MVP for their Techstars Demo Day, and early on in the process I interviewed a group of potential customers to understand their needs and working process. It was revealed through a number of conversations that they wanted a platform that would “put it all together”, so trends, news and product search and discovery in one place. This led to a simplified design which related trends straight from the runway and fashion blogs leading directly to a product search on the site. Hopefully this core feature will test positively with users and lead to a successful product down the road – will be really interesting learning over the next few months.

Applying modernist principles during the product design process will provide theory and framework for preventing the all too common problem of feature creep, as well as eliminating waste and unnecessary complexity. The benefit of creating a simplified product based on a core idea is well worth the challenge to focus, prioritize, and reduce up front.

A New Perspective

Over past two years I’ve had a major pendulum swing from design based on cultural immersion to design based on technological immersion, also from a process guided by a creative director to a process guided by a lean methodology. Even though all of my work is built in code now, my inspiration still comes from architecture and fine art, pop culture and urban design. I’m a graphic designer at heart and my background is in print and branding, but I now call myself an interaction designer.

Interaction design is a discipline with little to no pedagogy. We rely on works by Moggridge, Papanek and Norman – all industrial designers – for intellectual foundations. Digital product designers are not necessarily graphic designers – they are a different breed that grew up immersed in digital, and are well versed in every aspect of technology.

When I think about my approach to work before my foray into product design and user experience, it was governed entirely by the traditional notion of creative direction, originally from the advertising world.

It is essential to have creative pillars to guide the overall concept of a project, however I understand more now about digital agencies and the service we provide to clients. I know what they need to survive and the kind of designers they want on their team. We need to have reasoning beyond aesthetics – thinking about how information has been prioritized, how the design is helping users understand the problem, and how the design is solving the business problem. And confidently answering these questions in the work and when presenting the work is essential.

All of these factors need to be considered when designing a new product, service or website, however it’s the designer’s job to push the creative direction where they feel appropriate. Otherwise we will have millions of websites that look exactly the same (hm we kind of already do).

My process hasn’t changed that much, but this new perspective has elevated my level of thought around my work to think about the organization, stakeholders and strategy. Designers constantly need to be solving a problem, and there is no shortage of problems in the tech world.

My biggest beef with working in an agile frame of mind is with the friction between speed and quality. Quite simply, agile doesn’t put quality first. I’m reading Eric Ries and I get it – I believe in the build/measure/learn feedback loop, but I’d like to see that mentality folded into a strong and thoughtful concept. We need both to create successful products, because there will be enough time up front devoted to research and creative direction to guide the process.

Possibly the biggest takeaway from working in an agile environment, and one that will effect my day to day work forever is that it’s essential to talk to every single person who is involved in the work you’re doing in the early stages and as much as possible throughout the timespan of the project. Know every stakeholder and team member, and cultivate a great relationship with the developers. The devotion and skill of the developer is critical to the success of a project, but if they aren’t brought into the early stages of planning it only makes their job harder.

Working fast with constant iterations has the potential to produce loads of shit work, and some people just aren’t wired to work in that way. Perfectionists, for one. Or creative introverts. Susan Cain has a great TED talk on the power of introverts, and she pleads with people to stop the madness of group work. Introverts need time to work on their own in order to be most productive. I’ve found this to be true – not that I’m entirely an introvert, but with constant meetings and interruptions, my work suffers. It’s best to have long stretches where designers can focus on the task at hand.

Agile gets it done in the end doesn’t it? Things get made, instead of spinning around in the eddies of conceptualization and quality control. My question is how can we marry the rapid iterative approach with strong creative direction to produce even better work?

Defining roles that defy definition

I went to an Ada’s list event a few days ago and someone asked me what kind of design I do. For a moment I had no idea what to say. I told her that my background is in graphic design and nowadays I eat and excrete digital. Working on a team in an agile environment definitely makes me stop to think about how I would classify myself as a designer now. If I even need to.

There is no creative director. There is no project manager. Everyone on the team has relatively equal responsibility and is expected to pick up the slack of anyone else’s parts. There is a non-linear flow that I started to click into this week – you connect with the person you need whenever a block arises.

Every project begins with strategy. In my MFA program at Pratt we spent so much studio time talking talking talking talking talking about our projects and their implications in larger contexts. At the time I wanted to spend more time making but I suppose it has prepared me for what’s next. I’m comfortable with living in conceptual space but at a certain point decisions need to be made and a strong direction needs to take shape. Things need to get made.

Friday night I went out with a friend who works as a fashion designer and he reminded me of the traditional notion of the creative director who ideates and dictates their vision in service of the brand. This model was passed down to many other disciplines including advertising, and in my experience that’s the structure I’ve worked within.

One of my freelance projects recently was for a startup creating a scientific discovery platform, where my role was user experience and design. I also provided creative direction for the brand, looking at Mailchimp as an example of friendly and engaging tone of voice. In our case with Sparrho, the more the user interacts with the site by saving and sharing the more accurate the results will be, so the tone of voice of the site needed to be friendly and attractive to encourage interaction and extended use. Voice and tone is a great site created by Mailchimp to provide creative direction for their content creators. It provides a template for every type of messaging on the site, how to relay the service’s personality and make people feel “at home”.

I find that there’s a feeling of rootlessness and ambivalence in a design solution when there isn’t a strong creative direction. But in the digital product world there are many other factors that take priority, including user experience, service design, business objectives and technological feasibility. The “brand” is not necessarily prioritized before any of these things, and design direction is not prioritized either.

This seems to be the direction that our world is going in, no longer the one-sided advertising model with the brand as dictator convincing you of its greatness. Now all power is shifting to the hands of the consumer. The brand is simply a vessel to meet the needs of the people who will use it. There was a link going around from the Harvard Law blogs – a concept called vendor relationship management is being anointed as the new customer relationship management (CRM). The idea is that instead of getting people to talk about a product, you’re giving them the power to create and price it themselves.

On my team we rely heavily on something called service design, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what that is lately. I find it interesting that every time I ask someone to define service design I get a different answer. I asked someone the other day and they wedged it in between two other disciplines – “above” interaction design, and “below” strategy. Ok, well… Here’s wikipedia’s definition: “Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers.” I like this definition but I think the job description changes for every project.

With web projects at large organizations there’s a whole ecosystem of stakeholders and wide array of networks that could help or hinder the project. The organizational work is almost more important than the actual project you are doing. If you can’t get past the most critical people it doesn’t matter how amazing your product is.

That’s also why the incremental approach works really well. If you release prototypes in tiny increments you reduce the size of a potential failure. It helps to bypass large bureaucratic structures, and is also healthy for scrappy startups because there is little investment needed for each stage. I just started reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, which forms the intellectual roots of this kind of approach.

Designers in an agile workflow have a huge responsibility. We need to think at three zoom levels: All the way out for strategy to pitch our work, medium zoom for creative direction and user experience, and zoomed all the way in for graphic design and details. When I’m really deep into a project and doing creative work my brain shuts off in a way, so it takes a moment and some strategic thinking to explain it to my colleagues and clients. I’ve never thought of our job as sales, but it so so so is and I’m trying to get better at it. We also – somehow – need to keep in mind everything that we’ve learned along the way from our users through the prototyping phases.

This job is going to be a much needed change of pace from my lone ranger lifestyle as an independent contractor, but I need to rework the idea of creative director passing along their genius for everyone to follow and fit it into my current process. The true design challenge will be working cohesively as a multi-disciplinary team and getting the job done.

Designers of the signs that guide you

I’m starting a new full-time (freelance) job in two weeks here in London. It’s with a digital product agency called Made by Many and I can’t wait to be one of the Many… who makes web things. My transition to the new job is making me pause and reflect on some of the experiences I’ve had.

I came across this article today when I randomly looked up Glen Cummings on Twitter – an oldie but goodie. Quite possibly the only NY Times article, ever, to bring attention to designers of signage and wayfinding systems. The Ruedi Baur-designed Vienna airport is probably the most famous example of a graphic system with character in an airport.

The large bold letters are slightly fuzzy but still legible and I love how the green exit signs pop out against the grays and whites. Unfortunately most airports don’t give quite as much attention to the graphic quality of their signs. And this is to the detriment of all of us, as the loudest visual component are the advertisements on every imaginable surface. In fact, I’m surprised they haven’t figured out a way to advertise on the side of airplanes.

When I was living in Spain early last year I worked with Base Design on a signage system for a recently renovated building in Madrid, and my contribution to the proposal helped us win the contest by the government of Madrid and architecture organization COAM.

Our concept was really minimal. Since the building has so many different types of materials – three different woods, metal and floor to ceiling glass – we wanted to let the building “speak” to guide people on their way around. So all of the text and icons would be in relief, raised from the walls of the building. Another aspect was that all of the arrows would bend around the columns and corners, literally folding itself around the building structure.

The super modern renovation in the historic neighborhood of Malasaña

I spent a lot of time creating databases like this, which would explain how the signage system works to the client and also the production team. For every floor we determined a code and placement for the sign, then mocked up a panel to show what the sign would look like.

The concept for the parking garage was a bit more lively. We chose vibrant but dark shades of four different colors, then divided the five levels of the parking garage into four color-coded sections based on the exits. As you drive down into the garage, the stripe on the columns gets slightly lower, so you have a visual cue as to what level you’re on in addition to the number. Continuing the concept of using the building materials from the upstairs, the numbers fold around the square columns so that you read it in full on a diagonal.

I was really looking forward to seeing this in action, but unfortunately the Spanish economy ate this project and I won’t ever see the fruits of my labor. And especially now that Base doesn’t even operate in Spain anymore! At least I learned a little Spanish.

Having fun

Sometimes I have no idea where it’s all going but my sketches are an attempt to make sense of and organize my thoughts. Maybe it’s a way of looking at the world around me. Most of the time I think about logical outcomes though – that side of me took over for a while and I created a proposal for a new app. These are one set of wireframes so far (above). Now I’ve oscillated back to exploration phase, almost comfortable not knowing what it’s going to be.

In the process I’ve realized that design projects have no soul without a client. In order to activate the project it needs someone who the service will be for. A user, or audience. But with art that’s not the case. So I think that’s where I am right now with this project, closer to art than design. Anni Albers once said, “We come to know in art that we do not clearly know where we will arrive in our work, although we set the compass, our vision, we are led by material and work process. We have plans and blueprints, but the finished work is still a surprise.”

It all started after I discovered the work of the Situationists a few years ago. I created a book – a psychogeography of New York City with a protagonist named Ella.

Ella is searching for something all over the city, then wakes from her dreamlike state and discovers that what she’s looking for is actually within herself.

Shortly after creating Ella, I read Tony Hiss and began wandering the streets trying to decipher atmospheres and the factors that create one. I created a sound installation by recording ambient sounds in various New York City neighborhoods.

On top of the pedestals were abstractions of the form of an antique streetlamp. I challenged visitors to guess which of four neighborhood the sounds were recorded but I don’t think you could really tell the difference. An atmosphere is related to our “sense of place”, and while it’s relatively clear how elements in our physical environment create one, I’m trying to figure out how digital architecture can provide something similar.

I’m also interested in how behavior is affected by our architectural surroundings. And in digital architecture? I think more than anything it depends on your purpose. Just like my acting teacher used to use the metaphor of a canoe floating down a river – the canoe is the intention and the river is the script. The movement of the river guides your intention. In architecture (the river, in this drawn out metaphor), your intention has a strong effect on your experience of the place.

Liz Danzico writes about frameworks on 52 weeks of UX, and she relates designing them to creating opportunities, possibilities for action for the user. Just as in architectural space, if the frameworks are too strict it limits the possibilities for movement – there is less freedom. However, if there is no structure or organization, then it leaves open the possibility for chaos. Designers have the responsibility to create a balance between these two extremes.

Erving Goffman, who works in the field of framework analysis, describes the delicate balance: “Frameworks allow people to locate, identify, and label an infinite number of concrete occurrences. People can move through the complex framework of a city or a website, but they’re unlikely to be aware of it or even be able to describe it if asked. People fit their actions into the ongoing world that support a set of activities—the “anchoring of activities.” It gives them context and interpretation from their point of view. Be clear, but leave room for stories to be told and to flourish.”

On the web, the framework we provide is critical – the more engaging the site, the more people will be attracted and encouraged to be themselves and interact. The framework in digital architecture can be compared to the sense of place we have in physical architecture.

So, continuing the journey of how I got to this point… When I arrived in Madrid in 2011 I began blogging about secret stories hidden among the city walls (inspired by John Stilgoe), and continuing my work exploring the streetscape by drawing windows and minerals.

Album artwork for my brother's band — Album artwork for my brother’s band

In cities, windows comprise a large portion of our surroundings, and provide a viewpoint into the soul of the city – human and architectural. Interestingly, we enter digital space through windows – the frames of our monitors, browsers and webpages. I am obsessed with these comparisons, and my work explores the concept of viewports as windows into both worlds. I’m mainly interested in exploring the 3D aspects of digital space, hence the app idea, which plays with augmented reality.

When I arrived in London this summer I became fascinated by the space between architecture, the nothingness. I thought maybe if I focused on the empty space it would turn my experience inside-out. I drew streetscapes and wanted to create code for each piece of the city landscape and recreate the relationships in the digital world. In this way I’m creating order, priority, and simplicity from a complex landscape. Is this similar to what I do in my day job as an interaction designer – creating wireframes as blueprints for experience.

My space-between sketches are a map of my experience in a way, and I’m imposing my own order with shapes and figures. The one constant is always the outline of the skyline. There is always that break between sky and architecture. The other figures in the urban landscape have been built over centuries by various architects.

So that’s where I am now. I‘d like to take the city prism idea forward, to break apart elements in my environment, codify and re-engineer the fractured pieces into the shape of a mineral, incorporate story and poetry just like Ella, then experiment with this and the windows concept in code to see what I can create.

Spitalfields (first page of my new sketchbook)

Process and pedagogy

There’s a conference happening at the moment a few blocks away from me at the Barbican. It’s bringing together all of the biggest names in graphic design – Paula Scher, Kenya Hara, Tony Brook – for a couple days, to spark dialogue. The idea is that instead of designers pontificating at the audience, they will be interviewed and debate amongst themselves as the crowd watches in glee.

My job title a few years ago was graphic designer. I find it fascinating that my new job title is interaction designer as I’ve fully integrated myself in the web world with skills on either side of graphic design – user research and (some light) coding.

In my perspective everyone in the web world has an understanding of every discipline, from content strategy to native app development, but a deep knowledge well in their particular field. That field for me is graphic design.

Design for the web is soooooo different but there’s still no pedagogy, no intellectual foundation. Industrial design, yes, but that’s quite different from what I do. The human-computer interaction programs are looking at future technologies as 3-dimensional products, not necessarily screen design. Or if so, interface design is last priority. Maybe as it should be. The concept and interaction needs to be strong and bulletproof before a visual interface is designed.

Even graphic design is lacking depth of intellectual pillars. We were grasping at straws in my MFA – relying on Michael Rock, Tibor Kalman and Andrew Blauvelt – great thinkers but designers from recent generations, not historical ones. And most of my inspiration comes from other disciplines like architecture and industrial design anyways.

My experience before the masters degree was a branding, consumery-based approach. I knew I wanted something deeper and wanted to move away from the marketing perspective of design. I thought graphic design training would provide me with that foundation.

It did. My design education got me going on a unique path. My thesis began my life-long preoccupation with the relationship of humans to their environment, which grew entirely out of my fascination with psychogeography. Add a technology layer to that and that’s where I am right now.

I suppose everyone needs their own personal project. What is your work/life preoccupation? This is the lens from which you base all of your work and interests, discussions and writing.

What a contrasting way of life from places I’ve worked in the past. Large agencies where I’ve worked on a tiny superficial slice of a giant project, or where we’ve been more concerned about hours than actually creating a strong design solution. The agency model doesn’t empower designers. We are at the bottom of the chain of command. And often, I have not been expected to think about the work I’m doing at all.

Jenny Lam talks at length about this in her creative mornings presentation. She encourages designers to break free from the existing context where designers are near the bottom of the decision ladder.

http://vimeo.com/35395120

She also touches upon how the field of user experience is still in it’s infancy. She explains, “User experience is bleeding edge, and those curriculums are only beginning to be developed.” I would love to be one of those teachers creating the UX curriculum.

I participated in a conference yesterday that seemed to be a remnant from when “mobile” actually referred to the device. It seems and I hope that they are getting away from thinking of mobile as a noun and instead focusing the conference around the idea of mobile as an adjective.

I didn’t get a strong theme from the conference except that we were organized into workshops based on one of seven user modes: augment, explore, create, consume, control and communicate.

The workshop guided by Lennart Anderson of Veryday, based on the user mode of co-creation, was my favorite part. It was really nice how Lennart gently guided us and allowed space for lateral thinking. Some people in the group seemed frustrated but it reminded me of the teaching style of one of my favorite professors, Alex Leibergesell. He had a very strong spirit of experimentation and thought of each class as a design project in itself. Everything was wrapped up into a larger abstract concept, which provided meaning and direction to our work.

To become more sincere and thoughtful, the tech world needs to pry itself loose from the latest/best syndrome. We need to encourage inquiry from everyone involved – what are we really accomplishing here? I hope that as designers we are always thinking of the big picture. So clearly something needs to change in the halls of power and I think it is, but might take some time.

I’ve worked hard in the past 3 months to get experience in the startup world, and also to brush up on my coding skills. I’ve experienced what an agile workflow looks like, I’ve experienced the startup process firsthand and given value to the business with UX research, an identity and style guide. (The beta launch of sparrho.com expected in a few weeks)

As designers we have the perspective of craftspeople with specialized skills that we can offer as a service to clients. But I would encourage us to recognize the tremendous value we are offering the agencies and businesses we service.

Admittedly it’s super hard to think about the big picture when you’re faced with a mountain of design or code to work through. Maybe that’s the dilemma – in the need to make a living and how easy it is to get bogged down in detail.

This reminds me of this debate du jour over whether designers should code – talk about getting bogged down in detail. Loads of people are talking about it – like here and here and here. To me the point is not whether designers should code or not – it’s whether designers should think… Think about the platforms where our work lives, how it is developed and how it is deployed. And the answer to that couldn’t be more obvious.

Evolution of a designer’s process

I lost my Muji file folder with a notebook I used for my work with Base Madrid. Admittedly it made me nostalgic for those days. Most of the time I think nostalgia is useless, but it made me reflect on the evolution of my process – from that time when it was more conceptual and rooted in strong graphic principles, to something a bit more agile.

Not much has changed since then in terms of the kind of projects I want to work on. What has changed is that I’m fully immersed in technology, and that was exactly what was missing. I remember the time in my typography class at Pratt when I said “I didn’t want to create another printed thing”. Print work was already starting to bore me.

At Base, I worked for two full days researching and creating a strong concept for our proposal, which won a contest with the Madrid city government to design a signage system for a renovated historical building.

In the web space, working within an agile methodology you tend to skim over that part. In my experience, digital agencies tend to work fast and superficial.

I think there can be a balance. Research needs to happen but within a certain timeframe and depending on the complexity of the project. Concept and design thinking can be built in to an agile way of life.

If one discipline is ruling over the entire process then there is inevitably something missing. I’ve heard some visual designers complain that their role has been reduced to “hitting it with the pretty stick”. Visual design shouldn’t be superficial, it should be the component that elevates the concept. Things don’t have to be so literal. In fact, I’m drowning in the endless how-to reading material and practical hands-on conferences that populate the UX sphere.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working with a startup to create a scientific discovery app. Our concept defining the creative direction of the site is “a birds eye view”. This provides strong visual language that lends itself to the abstract canvas of our newsfeed with a grid of articles.

How-to books and conferences are quite useful but it’s crucial to expand a bit into the abstract realm. We are still talking about visual design, which is a close cousin to fine art.

Bruce Sterling gave quite harsh and inspiring closing remarks at SXSW earlier this year. He urged techies to own up to what we’ve done and what we continue to do every day. We aren’t just playing and experimenting – we’re killing. And the past is dead.

He asked how we can bring some level of inquiry, or moral seriousness to the latest technologies? My favorite idea he had was for evil Google glass. He explains that as-is the product is quite literal and not good fodder for a sci-fi novel. But if you reversed the four design principles that Google defined for developers working on Glass: 1. Design for Glass, 2. Don’t get in the way, 3. Keep it timely, and 4. Avoid the unexpected. Then things start to get interesting…

I recently interviewed with an agency that does beautiful work and they explained their process to me. They focus on content, and specifically what each piece of content is communicating and what may be the best way to edit and experience that content.

This is a very print-based approach but it seems thoughtful and sincere. They spend a lot of time up-front, in the research phase, defining and editing every piece of content as it own experience for the user, and an overall guiding principle for the design of the site.

The medium is the message – the form of the site and the user experience should communicate the message as much or more than the words itself.

With technology like google glass, the message is complete transparency and integration into our lives. As Sterling pointed out we’re already living a kind of Alan Kay world, where computing will vanish into our walls and ceiling.

We’ve moved on from high-horse, cold, modern architectural perspective to more user-centered design solutions. But you can’t be a slave to the user at the expense of good design. The designer needs to have a strong vision to use as a guide. It reminds me of a parable I heard a while ago – a ship with sails set firmly towards a goal is less affected by the directions of the wind.

The future is (almost) here

I’ve been to many conferences so far in my burgeoning life as a web designer. There are some that seem heavily used for PR efforts and some that are just an utter mess, so it’s nice when it feels like a really well-organized, sincere and thoughtful event. dConstruct is one of the good kind. I left Brighton on the speedy train back to London last night filled with loads of motivation, mind-bended by some of the incredible speakers. Yay, Jeremy Keith, best one yet, many people said afterwards.

My biggest overall takeaway from the conference is that we should think beyond the user interface, at least the concept of the UI as we know it. With the bajillion input types that Luke described, ubiquitous computing and ambient location, designers should be focusing ever more on user behavior than visual design. How and why is someone interacting with the web, at what time, and in what context? These will be the biggest questions in the near future. Web products will wrap themselves around our lives and customize themselves based on our behaviors, instead of us sitting at a desk visiting a static web page.

As (cyborg anthropologist) Amber Case was saying, the best technologies will get out of the way and let people live their lives, but when we need assistance to help us with a task, then that technology will become visible.

There are two more things that have stuck with me since the conference, besides Adam Buxton just being insanely funny. One is the shared Google doc that Maciej Ceglowski distributed to Pinboard fans for user research, and the other is the CCTV footage that Dan Williams demanded from his UK bus company.

The Pinboard google doc became something like 55 pages of self-regulated feedback that required intensive study by each user before adding a comment. It’s unbelievable to think about opening that can of worms but it’s actually not a bad idea. The community was already close-knit and passionate – they cared so much about the product that they would spend hours to make it better. Fervent fans provide all the accountability you will ever need. In his book Undercover User Experience Design, Cennyd Boyles recommends using the same technique for consolidated user feedback and I might use it for beta testing the web app I’m creating now for a startup in Cambridge.

Another good point from Maciej: building a website and adding some social media options does not a community make. It can’t be engineered; a thriving community develops organically over time.

Dan Williams was a great speaker, charismatic and passionate about the persistent surveillance infiltrating our lives. He brought detailed (and difficult to find) research to illustrate all of his points. I didn’t even know about the surveillance drones planned for NYC, although the Bloomberg quote “get used to it” sounds just like him. Bloomberg argues that we are already under surveillance from every building on practically every street corner – what’s the difference between that and unmanned aircraft snapping our candids?

Dan mentioned the hilarious CCTV filmmakers project, which uses footage from existing CCTV cameras to produce short films and performances. He thought he would try it out when he found out that his entire bus ride through the UK was filmed. However he could only get one photo (you can request footage through a freedom of information act – info on the UK government site here. CCTV is required to obscure everyone’s face except for the requesting party, so they would have had to manually black out (with what looked like a sharpie) everyone’s faces in every frame for the entire three hour ride.

Also didn’t know and was shocked to find out that there are cameras in some bars in the US tracking customers gender, age, and physical characteristics to pass along to services like dating apps or for advertising.

Besides being creeped out at times, what a great experience and I’m so glad I went. I‘m going to try to stay in that mind-expanded space as I work on web applications for clients, and develop my own product that will push the limits of augmented reality and ask how technology can provide a deeper connection to the world around us. I especially want to dive deeper into geolocation.

So often with web design we talk about conventions and staying within what users already know. I think that’s valuable advice, but let’s not be restricted by it so that we end up creating the same website over and over again. We can move beyond traditional interaction patterns as these new technologies become more accepted, slowly but surely.

However, none of the speakers were as titillating as the conversation I had with Jeremy Keith and Richard Rutter of Clearleft afterwards. At what point does a french fry become a “chip”? A question that has perplexed me ever since I moved to London three months ago. Where is that dividing line – what is maximum french fry size and what on earth pray tell is minimum chip size? Someone help, before I lose any more sleep over this.

Oh wait, one more big takeaway (and good note to end my epic blog post) that Nicole Sullivan brought to the table – don’t engage with the haters. Focus on the positive things that people are saying and give the negative, non-constructive (usually anonymous) feedback none of your time. In fact, sometimes we can even be our own worst enemy and troll ourselves – true fact. Cheers to a troll-free life for all. You heard me, drink up!