principles for the working product designer

Principles for the Working Product DesignerPDX UX, November 6, 2014

@chrisrivard clearwired@gmail.com

1. Materials

2. Craft

3. People

4. Business

5. The Design Problem

Materials

Industrial Design

Silicon Anodized aluminium Stainless steel Glass

Musical Composition

Rhythm Melody Key Scale Consonance & Dissonance

Clint Mansell Leaving Earth or First Snow (The Fountain, Black Swan, Moon, ME3)

Hans Zimmer Jisas Yu Holem Hand Blong Mi (Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life)

Philip Glass Koyannisqatsi, Pruit Igoe & Prophecies (Koyannisqatsi, Watchmen)

“The author is not inclined to the sanguine belief that such a subtle and imaginative art as that of composition can be acquired by those not possessed of the innate faculty, by simply studying from books.”

- Percy Goetschius, Material Used in Musical Composition, 1913

Writing (prose) Corbett and Conners, Style and Statement

Antimetabole (repetition of words)

Chiasmus (reversal of structure)

Synecdoche (part for the whole)

Metonymy (substitution of attribution)

The Classic Style

Elegant Efficient Unadorned Truthful Confident Conversational (single reader vs. group)

“Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want.”

“It is the destiny of mint to be crushed.”

- The Food of France, Waverly Root

Design posture

The nonfiction essay Conversational Looks easy

Fashion and digital design

The business of design Language constrains the way we talk about design (design critique).

“One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

- T.S. Eliot

Passive (cognitive) vs.

Interactive (cognitive + physical)

Software Product Design

Pixels Algorithms Compute Behavior & Interactions Business Model

Software Product Designer

(Research, Interaction/Behavior, Business, Engineering, Marketing)

Craft

“[Form] is the combination of feelings and a function; shapes and things that come to one in connection with the discoveries made as one goes into the wood that pull it all together and give meaning to form.”

- James Krenov, A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook

Warm up away from a machine

Designing is defining

No instructions

“Practicing” my running

Importance of repetition and volume. Ira Glass: The Gap.

Be a generalist

(but an expert in something, T-shaped)

“In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

- Shunryu Suzuki

Know your habits

Cowboys, Ninjas and Unicorns. Multidimensional.

Just enough design process Guidelines to fall back on if things go pear-shaped Checklists and runbooks (Atul Gawande) Collaborate: succeed or fail together Quickly get your product to your users (quality/speed balance) Agency vs. In-house

People

“It requires a genuine fight to produce one well designed object of relatively permanent value.”

- George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree

“We’re in violent agreement.”

The buddy system

(suiting up)

Nonverbal behavior

(Power poses, physical barriers to collaboration)

Mentor & Protégé

(be both)

Find a design confidant

Design management

(we need more leaders)

Design +

Engineering ** (conspire to make it real) Product management Marketing Sales

“Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing”.

- Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication

Business

"You can start to use a design as a tool to spot where the problems are in a company.”

-Irene Au, Khosla Ventures

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

–Edward Deming

Sustainable software products

(let people pay you)

Product lifecyle

(inception to EOL)

Scale & complexity

(levers and switches)

Entropy & Incrementalism

(big ships turn slowly)

“Constraints are hard because they represent the bar, and the bar is high on existing, successful products.”

- Julie Zhuo, Product Design Director, Facebook

The Design Problem

Thank you for your attention.@chrisrivard clearwired@gmail.com

References / Resources / Attribution

Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Conners (1999). Style and Statement. London. Oxford University Press.

Krenov, James (1976). A Cabinet Maker’s Notebook. Fresno, CA. Linden Publishing

Nakashima, George (2012). The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections. Tokyo. Kodansha International.

Root, Waverly (1992). The Food of France. New York, NY, Vintage Books.

Goetschius, Percy (1882). Material Used in Musical Composition. New York, NY. G. Schirmer.

Rosenberg, Marshall (2003). Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Encinitas, CA. PuddleDancer Press.

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/

Icons from The Noun Project: T-shirt: Josh from Toronto, Food: Rodolfo Alvarez, Shelter: Public Domain.

Set in Raleway

The League of Moveable Type https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ @theleagueof