The Cosmonauts

I think of UCD (User-Centered Design) a little as I think of Christianism. The fact I’m an atheist today does not stop me from recognizing that some Christian values have shaped my worldview and my belief system in very positive ways.

César Astudillo

Ariel Guersenzvaig, who knows me well and understands my take on user-centered design, refered me to Apple’s Secret? It Tells Us What We Should Love, an article that questions UCD as a tool for radical innovation. I’ve been moving from true believer in UCD to these positions over time and, although I think it’s easy to use Apple as an example, I consider this article by Roberto Verganti full of true statements:

User-centered innovation is perfect to drive incremental innovation, but hardly generates breakthroughs. In fact, it does not question existing needs, but rather reinforces them, thanks to its powerful methods.

Firms that create radical innovations make proposals. They put forward a vision. In doing that, of course, they take greater risks.

Thanks to this process these companies are serial radical innovators. Their non-user-centered proposals are not dreams without a foundation. Sometimes they fail. But when they work, people love them even more than products that have been developed by scrutinizing their needs.

User centered-design (observation, interviews, user testing, etc. ) is for those who want to improve something existing, not for those who want to create something new. Those need to understand human nature but don’t need to microscope every little behavior and take it as a starting point.

Designing Design - Kenya Hara — The Designer’s Review of Books

Kanya Hara, art director of Muji, explains Japanese design taking knives as an example:

Japanese cooks who have special skills prefer knives without any ergonomic shape. A flat handle is not seen as raw or poorly crafted. On the contrary, its perfect plainness is meant to say, “You can use me whichever way suits your skills.” The Japanese knife adapts to the cook’s skill (not to the cook’s thumb). This is, in a nutshell, Japanese simplicity.

The piece, translated by Oliver Reichenstein is also part of a larger article about Japanese aesthetics published at the NYTimes under the title Beauty and the Bento Box where also John Maeda, Nick Currie and Denis Dutton go through the subject.

Worth reading.

A few quotes on design by our admired Massimo Vignelli:

I don’t think that type should be expressive at all. I can write the word ‘dog’ with any typeface and it doesn’t have to look like a dog. But there are people that [think that] when they write ‘dog’ it should bark.

Creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at its best.

There are no hierarchies when it comes to quality. Quality is there or is not there, and if is not there we have lost our time.

Any color works if you push it to the extreme.

There is no design without discipline, there is no discipline without intelligence.

We detest the demand of temporary solutions, the waste of energies and capital for the sake of novelty.

I like design to be semantically correct, syntactically consistent, pragmatically understandable.

I like it to be visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all timeless.

It’s not important to develop your own style but your own approach.

And finally a couple of videos of him, one explaining his hated/admired NYC Subway map of 1972 and the second one on his appearance on Helvetica (with Spanish subtitles):

This video just sums up to my obsession about form, figure and background in interterface design. Check it out, it’s plain amazing:

(via Ilustrae)

Taken from FastCompany’s Design Is a Point of View: Seven Truths in Designing by Breitt Lovelady:

3. EMPOWER individual creativity. We’ve all heard the term “design by committee” or possibly the old maxim that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. And I strongly agree. It’s very difficult to create groupthink around multiple points of view. It’s great to voice them, collect them and prioritize them, but to avoid camels, I recommend empowering one ultimate individual you trust to become the director and keeper of the vision. Empowering individual creativity also ensures a higher level of passion, focus, commitment and ownership for the results.

5. DESIGN is not a democracy. Democracies are fine, mainly for collecting diverse input. But they can kill design. Often too many opinions water down the clarity of the design intent. I’ve had many clients where there are way too many brilliant people involved in programs. They find it their duty to provide all the alternative solutions or insights to every program–always broadening the thinking–instead of focusing on decision-making. If not for the benevolent dictatorship of the program director in these programs, they would never reach the goal. Design requires focused leadership, not democratic consensus.

Lately I have seen what I consider a trend among design consultancies. Many of them jump in the wagon of selling their process (the “how”) and not their result (the “what”). The keywords could go like this:

Design strategy, post-it notes, ethnography, cocreation, design thinking, iteration, methodology, big boards, flowcharts, innovation, moodcharts, multidisciplinary, cardboard prototyping, deliverables, ideas, process.

instead of…

Portfolio. Results. Ratios. Agile. Deliver. Design. Product.

Sounds to me like a late echo of what we used to hear from IDEO back in the late nineties. It was amazing to most of us: new and interesting methodologies for designing smart products. You could be a sociologist and end up designing cool sunglasses or high-tech medical equipment. What a promise… huh? Apparently many design consultancies (and I say “consultancies” with a bit of sarcasm) kept the methodology part but forgot about the delivery/product part.

I am not saying that methodology, etnography and all that doesn´t matter. It does. We do so at Vostok (sometimes, only if necessary). What I am trying to say is that it’s the result that matters, not the methods, not the concepts. It’s the product of your work, not the work itself. Show me what you’ve done, not how you do it.

All the crafty wadus-wadus is cool, the fancy videos, the whiteboards, the multidisciplinary meetings in rooms with pencils, paper and all… But that doesn’t make you a designer. It’s the product that makes you a designer. And if the result is good (both for client and user) who cares about how you got there… It’s not what you say what matters, not what you blog or what you tweet, not what you report or what you put on a 99 slide powerpoint. It’s what you do, what you finally create what matters.

I’ve spent most of my time to study the basic shapes, this in order to focus on those meaningful details which give meaning to those qualities we live our daily lives with and —somehow— help define ourselves too.

The Context of Form is a short (therefore very good) essay by De Gregorio on how form can be function. Please, read it.

We like the definition of the game as “free movement on a rigid structure”. The more rules the game has, the funnier it is. These limitations -or explicit rules- encourage the creation of other implicit ones: for instance we now have groups of users setting the topic of the day and postng videos on that topic. That is much funnier and exciting than a user posting all the videos from his favorite band in a single day.

Alberto Romero on designing unvlog.com (Spanish)

Make sure to check Dorothy Silva’s post on the concept of Facerank. It’s pretty illustrative.

It left me thinking about its application to an online service of say… dating. Most of todays online dating websites are based on browsing or searching. In fact it’s a combination of the two, since it’s some sort of filtering (gender, age, location, etc.). But no one, or at least no one that I know, has implemented an online dating system based on recommendations: “Javier, I know you so much I bet this girl is definitely a good match for you”.

I am sooo thinking about it these days.
This will be Vostok’s next project.
Yeah!

I would say that Agustin Jiménez’s was the best talk we had at our recent “Desconferencia” (a gathering of professionals where everybody gives a small presentation).

He enlightened us on the convergence point between interaction design and biotechnology. The main point was that biological systems are being created with more and more levels of abstraction and that one day in the near future designers will be needed to determine how these systems will be used by people. The fact that DNA sequences and machine code have a very similar structure (I am simplifying here, I know) leads to the building of new levels of abstraction just as we did on machine code, making it possible to design biosystems that have sensory interfaces a person could interact with:

Have you ever think about a cell as a machine?. They really behave like it whether they are yeast or pluripotent cells in your bone marrow. In fact, as Drew Endy define them, they act as computational systems. They receive inputs, and behave accordingly as outputs. Cells have measurements tools, priorities to satisfy and self awareness of different kinds.

As interaction designers we can apply all the inherited knowledge in our discipline to new horizons like biotech. It’s just a new framework with new variables.

Agustín Jiménez is an interaction designer who always has one foot at the side of technology and another one on the biomedical edge. His post on the talk: Biotechnology and Interaction Design is worth a relaxed reading.

A few days ago I posted something about defining interaction design. Luis Villa replied with a comment that is one hundred times better than the original post. I don’t have his explicit permission to make a post out of it but since he made it public I assume I can. Here it goes:

Sometimes I see patterns…

Information Architecture: how it’s structured
Interaction Design: how it behaves
Information Design/Visual Design: how it looks

Front end
XHTML - How is structured
JS - How it behaves
CSS - How it looks

Backend
Model - Data and structure
Controller - Behaviour
View - the look, the skin of the system

Restaurant (I don’t know if I’m kidding here…)
Kitchen: data, ingredients, structure…
Waiter: behaviour, orders
Table: presentation, look

From my humble point of view, all of these layers in any of the domains (conceptual, logical, physical) has a lot to do with design. Maybe I live in a special place sorrounded by programmers and developers who act_as_designers ;-)

As a pattern, we’ve got three layers: a fundation, an intermediary which routes actions betwwen surface and fundation and a surface, the part that the user thinks is the system (because, from the user’s perspective, behind the surface there’s magic).

I’m not a philosopher, maybe I’m saying stupid things.

Luis Villa

I found Juan Leal’s post about Verplank’s definition on Interaction Desing very interesting, although I am no fan of definitions and compartimentations. I’ll jump to the train, however.

My favorite definition/description/whatever goes like this:

Information Architecture: how it’s structured
Interaction Design: how it behaves
Information Design/Visual Design: how it looks

These definitions are not mine and I cannot recall who wrote them first. I’d appreciate any feedback on it. I am also aware that the boudaries between concepts are not clear at all, especially between the last two. They tend to overlap a lot.

A propos of the old discussion on thinkers vs. doers, here’s one possible solution:

(seen on Danilocorci’s flickr)

I know, I know… only stupid jokes recently. I’ll post something serious soon, really.