Month: January 2008

Purposes of design

Speaking to the values designers strive for, Buchanan articulates it this way, from the Governing Ideas white paper for CMU’s School of Design:

“As conceived by designers, the purposes of design are exceptionally diverse. Some designers pursue what is good for human beings and for society at large. Other pursue what is useful in supporting human activities and the quality of human interaction. Other pursue what is pleasurable and delightful in easing the burdens of everyday life. And, still others pursue what is just or fair in the distribution of products and services across all sectors of society.”

Core design abilities

Again from Dick Buchanan, in his Governing Ideas white paper for Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design:

1. Designers must be inventive in conceiving the possibilities of a product.

2. Designers must be able to judge which of their inventions are viable in the contingent circumstances of manufacture and human use.

3. Designers must be able to make connections among many fields of knowledge essential for the development of a product and, based on such connections, draw reasonable conclusions or make decisions about the plan of a product.

4. Designers must be able to evaluate the results of conception and planning and choose a final solution based on values, preferences, and goals before a product is carried forward to clients and, ultimately, to human users.

So it’s all about Creating, Judging, Deciding, Choosing:

“The real subjects of the new intellectual free trade among the many cultures are our own thought processes, our processes of judging, deciding, choosing, and creating.” — Herb Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

Update: Jamin Hegeman, MDes 2008, recently posted on Buchanan’s latest thoughts re: the core competencies of design: http://jamin.org/archives/2008/core-competencies-of-design/

Core ideas of design

Straight from Dick Buchanan, as worded in his Interaction Design class syllabus:

“Design is an art of conceiving and planning products that are useful in supporting the activities of human beings in all areas of experience. Except in the area of crafts, designers do not make final products. They make prototypes and other visualizations, usually with supporting documentation that subsequently serve to guide manufacture and production.”

Continuing further about the nature of the profession of design…

“Design cannot be reduced to a fine art, engineering, or the social sciences without a significant loss in the richness, value, and utility of products. There may be strategic reasons for specialized work in one or another of these areas, but designers draw knowledge and insight from all of these areas in order to conceive and plan effective products.”

“Design is an integrative discipline, independent of specialized subject-matter disciplines. The vision behind this development is perhaps less evident than the visions that have reduced design successively to the fine arts, engineering, and the social sciences. But in the long term, the vision of design as an integrative discipline is more significant. Alliances between design and other disciplines will change from time to time as exciting new knowledge emerges in one or another field due to the contingent circumstances of research. But the essential advance of design–its ability to retain an identity and to incorporate new knowledge in the broader enterprise of design practice–will come from better understanding of the integrative nature of design thinking.”

And finally, the closer…

“Our department’s approach to design is fundamentally rhetorical in nature, in the sense that we regard design as a discipline that is based on the situatedness of products. This is a recognition that all products are situated in concrete, particular circumstances of human use, and that design must be a communicative art directed towards planning shaping human experience. The task of the designer is to conceive and plan products that are appropriate to human situations, drawing whatever knowledge and ideas are needed from all of the arts and sciences. For this reason we have identified communication and the human experience in design as the fundamental theme of the department.”

And one more thing :-)

“Design is an art of practical deliberation oriented towards shaping the argument of all products. The core of design, therefore, is an argument that integrates logos, mythos, ethos, and pathos. This argument is not expressed in words…they are vividly embodied in images, objects, actions/services, and systems.”

Involution UI design guidelines

While re-organizing and cleaning out my laptop, I re-discovered the interface design guidelines document Andrei and Donna created at Involution for our major client, Agile Corp. This has proven to be a highly valuable document, which also served as the platform for the class Andrei and I taught at San Jose State University last fall on interface design. It also became a handy tool when speaking at the Silicon Valley Codecamp event last fall too, when audience members demanded to get an easy listing of “core principles” for constructing intuitive, compelling UI’s for software products.

The design guidelines are as follows, focused on the craft of creating elegant, useful interfaces for websites, software, etc.

1. Mental models: For your software product to seem “intuitive” it needs to correspond to the user’s understanding of the system, expressed commonly as a simple meaningful metaphor

2. Structure: Wireframes are an effective means of organizing content into tidy, clean structures of data and functionality, per a rational proportional grid system. Keep the grids flexible yet consistent.

3. Direct manipulation: Second-hand information is no match for first-hand contact and interaction. Consider the mouse and keyboard as extensions of the user’s hand, trying to grasp on-screen info and commands. Beware of performance, latency, and feedback issues.

4. Terminology: Just call things what they are, avoid clever or cute marketing labels which only confuse users. Stick to standard industry names when possible.

5. Remove visual clutter: Remove extraneous ornamentation or lines or other noise that distract and interfere with user’s reading of a screen.

6. Flatten complexity: Every icon or button or control represents an exponential growth in decisions and options the user has to consider. Reduce redundancy and inconsistencies. Consolidate and flatten the interface.

7. Emphasis: If every control and data element is given maximum visual treatment, then nothing is standing out. Use thoughtful contrast and embellishment to call out certain elements. Decide which are more priority than others. If everything is emphasized then nothing is clear.

8. Typography: Follow the rule of 3–First start with 3 font variations to keep things simple and stick to it as much as possible before introducing more fonts. A font variation is anything that varies the font: size, color, style, weight, and of course typeface itself. Most visual noise and clutter and overemphasis is due to having too many fonts.

9. Color: Color is used to create emotion, mood, and also punctuate/emphasize elements as needed in the interface. Stick to a base, a highlight, some complements and black/white. Use color judiciously!

Adobe XD design principles

I was cleaning my bedroom closet over the weekend and came across an item I’d received at an Adobe design team offsite back in 2006–a Timbuktu messenger bag with the Adobe XD (experience design) principles embroidered on it. It’s a very nice bag, trendy orange with black straps.

The principles are as follows:

1. Simplify the problem.

2. Trust your instincts.

3. Share everything.

4. Fail (really) fast.

5. We are all peers before the object.

6. Together we will build the experience.

(Sounds like something Tom Kelly of IDEO would say, doesn’t it?)

I gotta admit, It was nice to pause from cleaning for a moment and reflect upon these principles, which I think are valuable for any designer or design problem. It has been awhile since I’ve pondered them. They make a nice cultural statement overall. They’re succinctly stated as tidy axiomatic phrases you can easily refer to in a design jam. However, their true effectiveness primarily depends on the leadership team, project management, and overall cultural context–as well as the sincerity (by individual designers and the team overall) to support them in daily practice. Else what seem to be powerful principles become empty rhetoric…