principles for the working product designer
TRANSCRIPT
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
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