Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • Massive Change

    What is Massive Change? It’s Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries trying to wrap their arms around the whole thing.

    Engineered as an international discursive project, Massive Change: The Future of Design Culture, will map the new capacity, power and promise of design. We will explore paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, warfare, health, living, energy, markets, materials, the image, information, and software.

  • Stimulating mental models

    Yesterday my wife received a call from John Kerry, the American presidential candidate. She was pretty excited, but realized fairly quickly that it was a recording. When she was done listening, she tried to delete the message.

    ‘No honey,‘ I said, ‘it’s a phone call.‘

    ‘Which number do I use to delete again?‘

    ‘Honey, it’s not a message, it’s a phone call.‘

    ‘What do you mean? I’m listening to a recording.‘

    Fascinating. To her, listening to a recording (plus the reaction to the notoriety of the caller) was equal to listening to voice mail, a natural response. She was thrust into the mental model of listening to a voice mail by the characteristics, the stimuli, of the call.

    Examining the stimuli that activate certain mental models would be a nice complement to Indi Young’s mental model thingy. So we not only react to what people already understand but also stimulate them into using information in a certain way.

  • MIT Sloan discovers design

    The Evolution of the Design-Inspired Enterprise (abstract free, article not free) in MIT Sloan’s Management Review is another article in the avalanche of recent business publications discovering design…

    …companies such as Master Lock, Procter & Gamble, BMW and Cambridge SoundWorks have employed design research — including the use of multidisciplinary teams and a variety of ethnographic and psychophysiological techniques — to build organizationwide identification with the customers’ needs and aspirations, keeping everyone’s eyes on the same prize.

  • Narrow vs. board perspectives on business

    Steve Diller, who is collaborating with Nathan Shedroff on a book about Designing Meaningful Experiences, raises the issue of how writing for business differs from writing for academia (and, IMO, designers)…

    Most people I know who manage businesses complain about the simplistic nature of much of what’s available. At the heart of the “typical” business book appears to be an assumption that ideas are, essentially, opportunistically-applied tools, rather than frameworks for broadening one’s perspective on the world. Academia, in contrast, focuses on the broadening of perspective, but frequently at the expense of usefulness.

    He’ll be writing more on the Cheskin blog, which incidentally has a cool photoblog.

  • The cure for the common cold

    I’m home today suffering the apex of a head cold and thinking, ‘This would be a great design challenge, curing the common cold.‘ I’m way out of my area here, but it’ll make me feel better to look at the problem.

    In What causes the common cold? HowStuffWorks tells us, ‘There are many different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, but about half of the time a cold is caused by a class of viruses called rhinoviruses.‘ In their article on the immune system they say, ‘Many diseases cannot be cured by vaccines…. The common cold and Influenza are two good examples. These diseases either mutate so quickly or have so many different strains in the wild that it is impossible to inject all of them into your body.‘

    The trick in battling the cold virus seems to be quickly detecting and vaccinating it. The mutating virus problem is a tricky one, and the plethora of strains makes having the right vaccination on hand difficult. But what if we went for an 80/20 solution, something that allowed us to detect and vaccinate just the more common strains, say just the rhinoviruses.

    Let’s look at the patient’s experience. Here’s how my cold progressed:

    • Sunday I felt an annoying discomfort in my throat.
    • Monday I had a full-on sore throat
    • Tuesday brought a runny nose and sneezing, to the dismay of my co-workers.
    • Today, Wednesday, my head feels like it’s in a vise.

    Now I’ll go into pure exploration mode. What if, on Sunday, I swab my nose with a special strip that performed a litmus test just for the rhinoviruses. If the test is positive, I go to the pharmacy and the pharmacist slips the strip into a machine that reads the strip, telling the pharmacist which vaccine to dispense.

    Or, let’s say the vaccinations were still too varied for a pharmacist to have on hand. A positive test might enable medical associations to dictate specific recommendations to help your immune system fight the virus (zinc, rest, fluids, etc.). This litmus test plus the official recommendation could be recognized by employers, so one proactive day of rest would cure a cold instead of decreased productivity as the cold approaches plus a day off.

  • Stanley Cup

    Hockey player holding a giant silver cup over his head in victory

    I’m not a hockey fan, but I must say this sport has far and away the best trophy of any major sport, a giant silver cup that can be proudly hoisted over the head. Look at that thing gleam.

  • Widgetopia

    I knew Christina was moving Widgetopia to Drupal, but I didn’t realize the community had already jumped onboard and was contributing widgets. This is turning into the definitive gallery space.

  • Your job will be offshored

    In the next decade, many design jobs will move offshore. If you think I’m wrong, if you think this is preposterous, then talk to out-of-work programmers who thought the same thing only five years ago. But Victor, you protest, someone can’t do user research from 4000 miles away. To this I’d say, most companies aren’t doing user research anyway. Good-enough design is good-enough to most companies, and good-enough design can be done offshore.

    Paul Ford, in Outsourcing, Etc., says, ‘I’m struck by the irony that the tools, networks, and protocols built over the last 40 years by programmers are the exact mechanism that allows these jobs to move overseas.‘ The same is true for design, as we write about design, critique each other’s work, and release our tools for those overseas to learn from. Furthermore, when we offshore our programming work, we send them our designs, we explain our designs, and in doing so we educate offshore workers in design. They’re probably getting a better case study-based education than many of us have had.

    India, for example, has a new, growing middle class that will absorb the jobs that we won’t be able to fill in the coming years. Already firms right here in New York City have difficulty finding entry-level web design workers. You’d think recent college graduates would love a job in this industry, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

    Mind you, I don’t think this is a bad thing, it is simply the ways things are. If we recognize this now and prepare our skills accordingly (i.e. move up in the problem-solving food chain) we’ll protect our ability to earn a living. Brett Lider has some good ideas along these lines.

  • Backslider continued

    Brett volleys with an expansion of my backslider idea for enhancing the browser back button.

    Browsing recently seen pages is very frequent behavior, so this is important functionality to improve.

  • Balanced design

    In the past I’ve said that design is a conversation, a dialog that should be enjoyable for all parties. Last night at the NYC IA Salon we discussed a similar idea, where the designer creates something that either benefits the client, the customer, or both.

    For example, Bella mentioned how some desks at the U.S. Library of Congress are slanted, with glass over the wood and no ledge at the bottom. This keeps anything harmful from being placed or spilled on the wood. It also keeps books from staying on the desks. James calls this slanty, design that purposefully reduces functionality. An even-handed solution would have protected the wood and provided an enjoyable surface to work on.

    Statements of design goals like usable, useful, and desirable only describe the user’s experience. Return on investment only describes the business benefits. Design is a conversation that should benefit all parties. If a slanty design only benefits one party, then a balanced design benefits all parties.

    Of course, people will have different understandings of what is balanced. But having a term makes it easier to discuss where the balance lies. ‘Well Bob, this design isn’t as slanty as before, but it’s still unbalanced. How about a revised handle that fits the hand better but is still inexpensive to assemble because it’s all one piece?‘

  • Flash for planning design

    Someone – not sure who – makes a compelling argument for using Flash for planning designs rather than Visio. It might also help collapse some of the distance between direct and indirect design; the planning tool is also the prototyping tool. This is a good thing for at least two reasons:

    • Interactive media are dynamic; it’s difficult to use paper to plan designs
    • Indirect design in some firms has gone too far. Work that should be prototyped and iterated is analyzed instead, which can be less effective in finding what works and mitigating risks

  • Behavior Design v2.0

    Chris Fahey and friends launch their firm’s v2.0 site. I’ll admit to disliking the previous version, and for all that lacked the new version more than makes up for it, in what is one of the purtiest-funktional designs for a design shop. They include their own original Venn diagram, and the nav bar is just plain fun.

  • readability.info writing analyzer

    Henrik Olsen points to readability.info which uses a variety of measurements to judge how complex your documents or Web pages are to read. It says my site is too complex for most people to read easily. I’m tempted to take that as a compliment, and if you’re a regular reader, so should you.

  • Conversational Design

    Peterme-the-guru created a drum to beat, ‘Through my work, what I’ve observed is that the web is all about managing expectations . Setting expectations, and then fulfilling them. That’s it. You do that right, and you’re golden. The term I have right now for dealing with this is Explicit Design’

    An excellent drum, one that needs beating. Jess chimes in with complementary thoughts and a great experience cycle model.

    Everyone should have a drum, as Peter says it reflects your perspective on the world and reveals new ways of seeing situations. Currently mine is Conversational Design. Not too long ago I wrote about IA as Conversation which explains it, and recently wrote this:

    Converse with Customers
    Navigation is a way of conversing with customers, as if the interface were saying, “We sell designer fashions at affordable prices. I can show them to you, or if you like you can learn more about the company…” We speak with our parents, children, friends and colleagues all in different ways. To a child we are patient and instructional, and when we’re flirting we’re attractive and coy. We should similarly tailor our interaction with our customers. Conversing consists of two qualities: conveying information and saying it with a certain style…

    Much more soon.

  • Backslider

    Riffing with Brett about how richer interaction could be used for navigation, I thought it’d be nice to have browser back button functionality that’s as fast as scrolling. Imagine you have a little slider in (for example) the upper left of the window, and sliding the handle horizontally scrolled by the pages in your history. There’d be indents so it wouldn’t stop in-between pages, but you’d see the pages scroll by for the sake of visual confirmation.

    Technically it would mean keeping more pages in active memory and not just cached on the hard drive, but hey, RAM is cheap these days… what’s a few more megs?

    cartoon