Things I’ve Learned in Design

• The best a trend can be is a signpost. Eventually, you can’t keep up because trends trend away from the trend. Make your own trend.
• I like to listen. Sometimes this brings enlightenment, sometimes toxic self-doubt.
• The more I do visual design, the more I see the cold, unromantic math behind it. Align this, grid that. But, for something to be truly memorable, it needs a hook. A good hook is magic, can be found through process, but it can’t be taught.
• The more I think about “Design Thinking”, the more I think it’s not “Thinking”, but rather “Process”. Thinking is a bit like happiness–you can’t aim for it, it’s the fruit of other labors.
• The most perfectly designed thing is a blank sheet of paper. It communicates exactly what it is, nothing more can be taken away, anything can be added, and has been a part of every major movement in Western Civilization.
• Making a design “feel” right rhetorically is 90% done before you even start. The remaining 10% can destroy that 90%, though.
• There comes a point where you know the rules and break them willfully. So, don’t be offended if I ignore your feedback because I already knew what you’d say and didn’t care.
• If you show your in-process work to others, they will only see a fixed result—concrete, not fluid. They will critique it as such. Be dead-on specific about what you want feedback on and ignore everything else said or done.
• You will try to ignore what they say, but you won’t be able to. Have fun with that.
• There’s a pea underneath your mattress and you can’t sleep a wink. Sound familiar? A designer is innately sensitive to the most minute of details—don’t let them drive you crazy. Learn to let go.
• Go be analog. No computer, no cell phone, no nothing. Your thoughts, creativity, and insights are your capital. This takes time and reflection. You can’t do this being constantly interrupted.
• If you manage your time well and ignore those interruptions, people won’t be angry—they’ll be jealous.
• If you can’t work your way through a problem, it’s OK to close your eyes for 20 mins to let your brain filter the problem. It’s amazing what a little rest can do.
• Let nothing distract you in your interactions except dire emergencies.
• I’m convinced you can often get 80% of the design research value for 20% of the cost for 95% of your clients. Do that more of the time.
• Just because something costs more money doesn’t mean it has more value. Donuts cost more than broccoli.
• Respect is the hardest thing to earn and the easiest thing to lose. Integrity can pull you through.
• Difficult clients make you better. Too difficult of clients can make you bitter.
• Some people practice design. Some people schmooze design. Both have their place, but one of them sucks and the other doesn’t.
• Thinking is not a deliverable. If you don’t give it a form, it never happened.
• Design is not unlike songwriting. You listen to songs, get inspired, practice, and then write your own songs. It is impossible to escape influence. But, taking a song, changing the key, and playing it for a different audience doesn’t make it your song. Don’t act like it does.
• With that, standing on the shoulders of giants doesn’t mean their shoulders are yours. Acknowledge what you’ve learned and from where.
• Nobody knows what you left out unless it cripples the design. Even then, most won’t notice or care. They’ll just tell themselves a story.
• The more refined your design, the more people will start picking on the smallest unrefined parts that you don’t care about yet.
• Pull a string, unravel the sweater. Make sure it’s worth it.

An Election Result As Participatory Design

Is the result of an election a design?

I’ve been pondering this quite heavily for the past week or so since I took a couple days to travel to Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design graduate thesis presentations. What got me thinking about this was Kyle Vice’s thesis project where he created a website/program where people could vote on a series of posters and the winning poster was to be projected on a huge wall on campus. To achieve this, he designed and built software and various web applications for people to use to vote on the posters. Location-wise, he envisioned placing kiosks in public places as well as voting through a traditional website or iPhone app.

What this (very cool) project got me wondering is this: Is voting, and its ensuing results, a form of design? Specifically, is it participatory design? Now, in his project, the only thing people were voting on was a poster to be displayed, and no one person had any ability to massively affect the group’s collective choice outside of their own vote, but it begs the question: Does collective input equal “design”? Certainly each poster was designed, the software to manage the posters was designed, the interface and user experience was designed, even the physical means by which to vote was designed, but what about the process of choosing a design? Again, is that design?

Honestly, I’m not sure. Without getting into arguments about collective (un)consciousness, one could easily argue that we have elections all the time that hardly anyone would consider the outcome of as a “design”. However, in a sense, we are choosing a design in an election. How? In the case of a politician, he has ideas—or designs—on how best to run a community or society. A politician also has a carefully crafted persona that one could easily argue is a design. (It’s a design because there’s normally a carefully considered end-goal—no matter how unconscious—and measured actions to meet that end goal.) And then, voters vote based on that politician’s design of how to deal with various competing interests.

But, is the result of an election a design? Or is it the process that is designed to facilitate an acceptable outcome the “design”? Think of it this way: Is President Obama a design? Was President Bush? Clinton? Certainly their policies are designed and, in a sense, we choose a certain design to present ourselves both back to the U.S. and to the rest of world. But, we didn’t design them to do anything just like we wouldn’t say we designed a poster result through a blind voting process.

Or would we?

You might be wondering why I’m even bringing this up if I am so unsure one way or another. (I wonder myself.) I bring it up because this debate is a possible line in the sand in the debate about what is design and what isn’t design. It seems to me that you can design for something—a process, service, information, persuasion, experience—all for a higher cause of enabling action, learning, belief, emotion, or thought, but the end result of these designs, is, in itself, not a design. It’s not a design in the same way that a car driver is not a design, he is merely enabled to make certain choices, have a feeling about a car, and live his life how he sees fit.

In short, there is no reflection and where there is no reflection, there is no design, there is merely action enabled.

But, going back to the poster voters: if you give those poster voters a voice, a means to organize and wage campaigns to influence what poster gets on the ballot, then that begins to bear the mark of design.

How so? In the happiest accident of feedback loops (and one I didn’t realize until I got here), where design is driven by audience, the audience demand drives new designs until they don’t have to reflect any more and are contentedly enabled again. And so, in some strange way, a result of an election seems to be a design. But only if we are allowed to participate in the feedback loop. Which sometimes happens. And sometimes doesn’t (which is both good and bad).

Weird. This brings up so many questions.

What is Design? (Not Again!)

In high school, when I would get in trouble for skipping class or being late for curfew or (gulp) was pulled over by the police while driving, I would design excuses to get out of the worst part of trouble. In this case, my close friend and I (whom I was often in these situations with), would think about what the discipliner was thinking, then we would think about how to shape the information, however truthful, to fit their worldview. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this was probably my first foray into the world of design, a talent that, given my various successes, I honed quite well.

Thinking about it this way, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that children design all the time. They spill their brother’s drink and, when confronted, will make up a story about how it happened. Whether or not it works is a different matter, but nonetheless, it’s still a design. The lack of sophistication in thought process is actually their undoing here, not their desire for a well-designed story. They simply don’t yet have the mental processes in place to make a story that fits their audience.

And so we come to the crux: What is (effective) design? (Not again!)

Quite simply it’s: You + Your Desired Outcome ≥ Your audience’s wants/needs.

Now, there are many ways to achieve this. The ways, shall we say, are mediums and actions being greater than or equal to your audience’s reaction. The medium is whatever form you choose: Web, Print, TV, Movie, Product, Software, Furniture, Writing, Architecture, and so on. The action is making in your chosen medium to be greater than or equal to your audience’s reaction.

With that, effective design is ≥ your audience’s reaction and desired action. Less effective or ineffective design is ≤ your audience’s reaction and desired action.

How so? Design is merely moving your audience to your chosen destination through a medium. Yes, this is dangerous to say because you can take this all the way to those in obstructive and destructive power, like Hitler. Hitler was a great designer for a certain audience. Not so much for another audience (or two or three). Still, he anticipated his audience’s wants/needs and formed an entire ethos around that to unspeakably destructive ends.

But there are also good designs, those that foster life and love, independence and life-easing dependence. But it’s always a question of “Who is my audience?” Your audience needn’t even be human. Heck, it needn’t even be animated objects. Your audience could be trees and you design a way for trees to flourish.

Where design differs from strictly art is that oftentimes, the artist’s audience is him/herself. It is the audience’s responsibility, then, to come to the artist, not the other way around: The artist to the audience. Now, the artist can create baselines, guidelines, for the world of design, like the Bauhaus art, craft, and design movement. They broke things down to their simplest element, lending designers a baseline idea ever since. In this way, you could say they were artists for designers.

And who is a designer? Anyone who projects an audience’s needs and takes actions for a desired audience reaction and action. To me, anyway, it’s really that simple.

It’s just that some of us are better at anticipation than others. And some of us have better mastery over the making aspect in certain mediums. And judging effective or ineffective design is an extremely qualitative process and subject, but like the Supreme Court once famously said about pornography: I know it when I see it.

Throat-Clearing + Happy New Year

Some thoughts as we round up 2008:

• As some may have noticed, I have taken down nearly all my posts having to do with politics. While I greatly enjoyed writing about the election, in my current unemployed state, it seemed a tad reckless because, frankly, politics and work just don’t mix.

That said, I never really felt like I was “political”, per se, and yet, I’m still surprised at the reaction I got from some people. While I did have a candidate I personally supported more than the other, with my background in trial/courtroom communication and argumentation, my only real agenda was analyzing each candidates’ strategy and how it persuaded or affected the so-called moderate voter. Some of the reaction I got from people was pretty interesting, though. When I wrote something that I thought actually showed more support for one candidate, I got comments that suggested I was supporting the other. And vice versa.

I quickly realized that there’s no controlling how people will interpret your words, no matter how carefully you craft them, no matter how much you focus on the process of getting elected and ignore a hoped-for election outcome. Politics is just too hot-button of an issue. So, I took all those posts down except for one, because that post was about a personal experience regarding bigotry, hypocrisy, how we seek out those who agree with us and the collective need to challenge ourselves to be better. And if someone doesn’t want to hire me because of that post, then so be it.

•  In general, blogging has been tougher to keep up on than I thought it would be. I thought that, in my current state of unemployment, blogging would be fairly easy. But I’ve realized that you have to have experiences and conversations that make you want to blog about something on your mind. In this, my unemployed (read: broke) state, I don’t have a whole lot to write about. Most of my days involve either going to the public library to get out of the house, finding a corner of the house to get some privacy, or going for a run. My nights tend to be made up of going to the corner watering hole to play a few rounds of Golden Tee Golf. (The interaction design in that game is stupendous, by the way.)

In other words, I’m not visiting the richest of environments for new thoughts and experiences regarding designerly things. Quite the opposite of Carnegie Mellon, to be sure. For the most part, this is fine: It’s been healthy to not obsess too much over design, but it also means there’s not a whole to say, but when there is…

•  My posts tend to take longer to write than I mean for them to. I’m pretty obsessive about my thoughts and insights and writing and clarity. Basically, I don’t want to sound like a total schmuck and I’d rather be thorough and thoughtful than quick and controversial. For example, my Abilify post took a solid 14 hours of research and writing. (Yeah, I know, I need a job.) Why so long? I knew basically nothing about drug names, always had a curiousity about them, and had to get all my facts in line before spouting off about it (and I certainly had never thought about drug names as an ethos-pathos-logos thing. All that was made up on the fly, then hammered out, drawing on design school stuff that I never thought to apply in such a way.)

So, yes, this is why there are not as many posts as I’d like there to be. But hopefully, they have some quality to them, even if they sometimes verge on pedantry.

• I’m pleasantly surprised that I get any traffic at all and find myself intensely flattered when I get occasional unforeseen boosts in traffic. It’s like I’ve won an Emmy every time anyone reads a post. Thank you all for reading!

• If anyone knows of any design jobs you think I’d be good for, please let me know. The poor economy has made the job hunt much worse than it was, even as recently as early November.

Happy Holidays and Have A Wonderful 2009!

A Conglomeration of Relationships

Just so you all know that I’m not dead, I do have a post for you. Unfortunately for me, after taking a fair chunk of time writing this the past couple days, further research showed me that most of what I propose below is, in some way, already mostly a part of facebook’s profile privacy management. The problem is that facebook’s process for profile privacy management isn’t straightforward and could be much, much simpler with an easy re-design. So, all is definitely not lost with my post, as having a simple, satisfying, and useful user experience is still the name of the game. Also, because I realized my half-blunder after spending so much time already writing, I’m not going to proofread it very closely. ‘Tis what ’tis. Thank you and enjoy.

——

According to facebook, I have 246 friends. This is one of the most ego-flattering, preposterous lies that’s ever been told about me. If I really stretched the limits outside of facebook, I might have 18 friends, 5-6 of which are close friends, and 2-3 that I would consider “best friends”. Instead, what I really have on facebook is a conglomeration of relationships, made up of family members, close friends, friends, acquaintances, old flames, co-workers, classmates, colleagues and one person I’ve never met nor talked to, yet I admire his writing, so I friended him and lucky for me, he accepted (It seems he accepts everyone. Oh, this is not a “fan page” either, it’s his actual profile.)

My situation is not unique. Actually, it’s the norm for facebook. This is a problem. You see, for most of these relationships, I don’t mind these friends seeing my life and catching up a bit—it’s like a constant reunion—but I don’t want all of them in my private life. Yet, I can’t control what my conglomorees can see, to the point that I’ve considered deleting my facebook account. (I know, I know, I’m addicted to facebook, I know. But hear me out.)

To their credit, facebook does offer some semblance of privacy from exposing yourself, especially with things like photos. Facebook gives control to the user through allowing the easy creation and management of friend groups. Facebook also has ways for you to control what gets published in your friends’ news feeds and has ways for you to tailor what you get in your news feed as well. Lastly, there are also ways to protect your information from non-friends and you can always choose to show a limited profile to someone. But no one, I mean no one, keeps someone out in the cold with the barebones limited profile.

Why we don’t keep potential “friends” at the limited profile view is, mostly, out of guilt. We don’t want to be mean, shafting someone who wants to see some recent pics of us, some pics of our family, etc. But the problem is that this makes you make a choice: Heed the friend request or not.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that I’ve been denied facebook friendship, although I’ve never denied one friend request. I’ve cringed when accepting a friend request and later “defriended” some people, but I realize this is a choice that I make, whether to allow these people so far into my life. And I know I could just not be on facebook or limit what I put up or really prune back the old conglomeration of relationships. But the problem is that I even have to consider doing any of these moves. Facebook is a free site that wants users, users, and more users because the more users and friends we all have, the more entrenched facebook becomes in our lives, making it a bigger fixture, making it nearly indispensable.

Not to mention, part of what makes it fun is the public forum-ness of the whole mess, the free voyeurism, the, well, socializing. Openness keeps facebook from becoming “clique-y”, your friendships egalitarian. Exclusivity is for private messages.

However, I’m here to say that facebook has reached a threshold, a critical mass of societal penetration where facebook can now shift to overdrive, to the next level in friendship control. The next level includes a simple, pre-designed, user-friendly solution to allow for different levels of conversation between friends: A group called “Inner Circle” and the others, simply “Friends”.

These distinctions are made by you, the user about whom you deem a close friend, and they apply to your status updates, your photos, posted items, live feeds, etc. You can choose your Inner Circle who you want to get specific updates from and if your friend has chosen you back for Inner Circle status, you get their specific updates. This allows conversation among close friends, weeding out old acquaintances, co-workers, and yes, family members.

There would still be regular status updates to all of your friends if you so choose, but having an extra layer to be able to communicate with a handful of friends without email and not having to worry about what you’re writing about or posting would be priceless. After all, I don’t mind if my “friends” see innocuous pictures of me with my family, but what I want is to be able to have the same user-friendly experience of socializing among my close friends as it currently is for everyone.

Having this type of control is, I believe, the key to the next level of facebook membership and site usage. I say this because those who are not on facebook often cite the lack of information control as one of their top reasons for not joining up. Sure, these non-facebookers don’t want to connect with all those old friends, but more so, they don’t want their laundry aired to the whole world. Further driving my proposition that allowing more communication control will drive facebook usage is that the current lack of control is one of the main reasons that current facebookers don’t use it more: Everything’s too public, too out there. And most people aren’t that exhibitionistic.

The bad news is that facebook probably will never change their current set-up. Why?

Facebook’s entire platform, its entire service, is based on openness, its egalitarianism. Being so open limits how much amount a user has to think or act while limiting the social stress of choosing who is part of your “Inner Circle” and who is just a “Friend”. They’re all friends. By making everyone equal, it shifts the stress and guilt of deciding who is a friend-worthy instead to a question of what is socially acceptable in a public forum. In other words, the facebook society is its own policeman: If you’re ashamed to post it, you shouldn’t be posting it. This is happy times for facebook.

Next, keeping the communication channels wide open keeps facebook from becoming “clique-y”. If you all of a sudden have 300 million users choosing not only what does or doesn’t get published but also to whom something gets published, then you create pockets of friends and possibly mute the very thing that makes facebook so fun: its sociability-ness, its sense of open voyeurism, if you will.

These are definitely problems. But facebook has all the tools to manage two levels of friendship and they have reached the critical mass where such tools wouldn’t stunt their growth, it might actually turbocharge it. After all, I would be inclined to post more updates if I knew that my colleagues, my Mom, and that girl from my 8th grade science class weren’t going to read it. But please don’t make me de-friend them.