Digital_Heirloom

We shape our tools and our tools shape us.” As more of the tools we live with every day become digital instead of physical, our opportunity – and responsibility – as designers is multiplying. We live in a world of screens, and we are the ones who decide what goes on them. We are in a unique position to have an impact – one that lasts longer than the next redesign or the latest technology. What happens when we stop thinking of ourselves not just as developers or experience designers, and take up the mantle as a new generation of product designers for a digital world?

Wilson Miner

Type is everywhere. Every print publication, website, movie, advertisement and public message involves the creation or selection of a fitting typeface. Online, a rich and artistic typographical culture exists, where typefaces are created and graphic design seeps in to every image.

In episode 2 of Off Book, typeface designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones outline the importance of selecting the right font to convey a particular feeling. Graphic designer Paula Scher talks about building identity in messaging, while Eddie Opara uses texture to create reaction. Infographic designers Julia Vakser and Deroy Peraza map complicated data sets into digestible imagery, mixing color, graphics and type. http://www.pbs.org/arts

How to think like a designer: don’t just observe the world, but draw upon what you know, interpret what you find, and look for unmet needs.

There’s a wonderful New Yorker article titled “The Eureka Hunt”. It’s the story of a firefighter named Wagner Dodge who survived an out-of-control fire in the Mann Gulch in Montana in 1949. Thirteen other smoke jumpers died in the fire, but Dodge was saved by a brilliant insight. Fleeing for his life, he suddenly stopped running and ignited the ground around him. He then lay down on the smoldering embers and inhaled the thin layer of oxygen clinging to the ground. The fire passed over him and, after several terrifying minutes, Dodge emerged from the ashes, virtually unscathed.

What sort of a crazy person stops running from a fire and starts another one? Well, if you know certain things about fire and oxygen—knowledge that may have taken years to acquire—it’s not as nutty as it sounds. Dodge had been a firefighter for many years and knew that fire needs three things to exist: fuel, air, and heat. By getting rid of the grass (i.e. fuel) around him, he took his chances with the fast moving fire and was able to save himself.

At first glance, insights like this one may seem to come out of nowhere. But in hindsight they make perfect, logical sense. What happens is that we (sometimes unconsciously) recognize patterns that enable us to see things in a new way. Albert Einstein put it succinctly when he said insight “comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

It’s important to recognize that observations and insights are not the same thing. Observations are raw data, the gradual accumulation of information that you have consciously and carefully recorded—exactly the way you saw or heard it, with no interpretation. Insights are the sudden realizations in which you interpret the observations and discover patterns. Patterns reveal gaps between where people are and where they’d ideally like to be. And, especially in the case of design, rifts between the way something is now and the way it should be…

The Key to Design Insights: See the World Differently

Mike Monteiro of the San Francisco design company Mule Design Studio gave an excellent talk at Creative Mornings on what to include in a contract and how to ensure you get paid for your work.

Professor Alan Penn describes the way that architects use space to sell you things, showing how space creates patterns of movement, bringing you into contact with goods. In IKEA though, the story gets more interesting, here the designers deliberately set out to confuse you, drawing you into buying things that are not on your shopping list.

“Design is the lens through which I see most of the world. But, there is a whole other set of interesting things to consider and to learn. This talk tries to understand the current position of design in the world better by considering other fields of thought, such as anthropology and philosophy, and maybe offers a modest proposal as to where our profession should head. It’s not only the Shape of Design and its qualities, but also what I consider to be the state of design at this very interesting juncture in time.” 

Frank Chimero

How can we let users guide design? frog Creative Director Thomas Sutton spoke on Open Innovation on the main stage at the Lift conference in Geneva, Switzerland. As opposed to focusing on tests and techniques to research and define exact consumer needs, Sutton explores the importance of cultivating empty spaces where people can innovate for themselves in a guided yet unconstrained process.

Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, speaks with The Creator’s Project about her upcoming show Talk to Me, exploring the fundamentals of communication between people and objects.

Antonelli is one of the foremost authorities on the relationship between design, creativity, science and technology. Her 2008 show Design and the Elastic Mind forever changed the way we think about design’s place in our world and our lives, and deepened our understanding of the symbiotic relationship between science and design. In Talk to Me, Antonelli seeks to explore how technology is redefining the ever-evolving relationship between people and objects. Technology is humanizing objects, and designers are acting as intermediaries, helping us interpret technology and translate it into a language that we can more intuitively understand.

The Creative Generalist  

View more presentations from Steve Clayton.

In a world of increasing complexity, our problems just seem to get worse and worse. While the activity we call “design” began at the dawn of civilization, “design thinking” has recently been proposed as a means to solve these “wicked problems”—as well as all but guarantee a path to innovation for organizations of all stripes. But what is “design thinking”?

In an unblinking assessment of where design is and where it could take us, Paul Pangaro offers a critique of design thinking grounded in a cybernetic perspective. He argues that conversations are the heart and substance of all design practice, and shows how a cadence of designed conversations is an effective means for us to comprehend, and perhaps even begin to tame, our wicked problems.

Video of ink on paper sketches showing the development of drawings for the Women series of works by Ryan McGinness.

“It’s not so much about analyzing something that has happened, but visualizing something that is happening.” - Eric Rodenbeck  

24 Hours of Flight Data [Aaron Koblin]