My name is
Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to
Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.
DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
My blog tends to be rather light reading. I enjoy making observations about my environment and experiences more so than knuckling down on theoretical essays. My original intent for DesignAday was to provide a short, tasty design snack every day that wouldn’t take long to read, but would still be informative, inspirational, or entertaining. I think I’ve stayed true to that for the most part. My “In the Details” posts are probably the most enjoyable to write.
If you are interested in sinking your teeth into some juicier content—deep, thought-provoking analysis of Design with a capital D—stop by Ghost in the Pixel. From the About Me page:
Uday Gajendar is a UI Designer in Silicon Valley. His work has included enterprise software, desktop tools, Web applications, and phone devices at a range of companies—Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, and Involution, a boutique studio. Holding degrees in both interaction design (Carnegie Mellon) and industrial design (Michigan), Uday continues to evolve his place within industry.
I knew Uday while he was a student at CMU, and it is obvious he was able to digest Dick Buchanan’s lectures much better than I. Uday’s writing is academic, very much rooted in his courses at CMU, yet tempered by his own extensive experience in the field. It spurs critical thinking while at the same time being directly applicable to a career in industry. Take, for instance, his most recent post, On becoming a design leader…
Coroflot is a web service for designers that allows publishing of web portfolios and provides a design-centric job board. They also facilitate a community of designers through special-interest groups that share images of their work. Supplementing these core features are a bi-monthly magazine and blog that feature the members of their community. Coroflot takes pride in the fact that it serves all of the design disciplines, with Industrial, Interaction, and Graphic being the most popular.
Toward that end, they have been publishing a design salary survey for the past eight years, the results of which are available to everyone. They’ve been a little light this year on Interaction Design participants, so if you haven’t already, head over and fill out the survey. It only takes a minute, and the more of us that participate, the more accurate and useful the results will be.
There are a lot of design blogs out there. The majority of them are the blogs of individuals like myself who feel the need to personally contribute to the ongoing global discussion. A few of them are published by firms. This is a perfect vehicle for self-promotion, both within the design community and in the public-facing media. IDEO, one of the premiere design firms in the world, has been strangely absent from the blogosphere… until now.
On July 15th, IDEO Labs posted their “Hello World”. Since then, they’ve shared with us their forays into DIY multi-touch. Their most recent post is awe-inspiring. They created the king of all Rube Goldberg machines, spanning the globe and running nearly twenty minutes. The creativity, ingenuity, and engineering prowess displayed in the video is not only a savvy bit of self-marketing, but truly inspiring.
I don’t know what to expect next, but you can bet it will be worth a look. There’s one more RSS feed added to my list.
Viveka Weiley, a user experience design consultant based in Sydney, Australia, has started a new blog titled Chartjunk after Tufte’s name for all of the unnecessary and distracting elements people tend to throw into data visualizations.
Viveka doesn’t just call attention to visualizations—he critiques them in detail, pointing out flaws that misrepresent the data. Many would stop right there. That is plenty enough to offer on a blog. Viveka, however, takes it a step further, redesigning the visualization to correct all of the deficiencies. Further, he encourages his readers to do the same.
The upcoming election is giving Viveka a lot of fodder. I hope he continues the blog after the election, as it is of real value to students and practitioners alike.
David Malouf’s blog, Engage!, was one of the first design-related blogs I started reading on a regular basis. Of course, he was David Heller at the time. I can’t remember now if I found Dave’s blog before IxDA, or if IxDA lead me to it. Regardless, he was one of the organizers of the organization and its first Vice President.
Just this past Friday, Dave announced that he is leaving Motorola to take a faculty position at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). He’ll be picking up where John Kolko left off with the goal of turning their minor in Interaction Design into a complete program. That sounds like a delicious challenge, and I know Dave is going to sink his teeth into it. Much like myself, Dave has been drawn to teaching, leading workshops on rich internet applications (RIAs) and sketching for Interaction Design.
I’m very much looking forward to learning how Dave shapes the curriculum at SCAD, and I expect he’ll be sharing many of the details on Engage!
I’m teaching Information Design and Visualization again this semester—this time to seniors. They are working through a series of data visualization projects based on the types described by Tufte in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It helps to provide the students with a wide array of examples for inspiration at the start of each project.
Information Aesthetics has been my best source for such examples. Run by Andrew Vande Moere, the blog presents several examples of visualizations every week.
Inspired by Manovich’s definition of information aesthetics, this weblog explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization, in an emergent multidisciplinary field what could be coined as ‘creative information visualization’.
What with the upcoming election, the war, and, the credit crisis, there are a lot of interesting visualizations popping up. Those happen to be the topics of the three most recent posts.
91 days ago, Rachel Hinman of Adaptive Path set out on an endeavor she referred to as “creative recovery”. After working for eight months on concepts for future mobile interfaces, Rachel felt a hollow, emotional loss as the project ended. After being completely consumed by the topic, she was like a drug addict needing her next fix. So she looked to Alcoholics Anonymous for inspiration and developed her own ninety day recovery program. For ninety days, she posted her thoughts, sketches, and photos related to mobile design on the blog 90 Mobiles in 90 Days.
She didn’t know what it would lead to. Now it’s time to find out. Yesterday was the ninetieth day. Her co-worker, Kate Rutter, has some excellent suggestions for the near term:
There are other meta-activities that can happen outside the actual project, now that it’s done. Rachel can extend the experience by speaking about it at meetings, events and conferences. She can write about it on other blogs, in articles, and be interviewed about it. She could write a CHI paper. There’s a lot of space for talking about the thing when the thing is done. Maybe others will take up the meme and do projects for 90 chairs in 90 days, or 90 smiles in 90 days. There is a lot of space for the idea to expand.
I have some appreciation for her experience, having committed myself to posting here every weekday, but whereas I have given myself the freedom to explore Design with a capital D, she set herself a path by which she could dive deep into a specific topic. My blog is an invigorating exercise, but it isn’t really something I could speak about at a conference; at least, not yet.
Congratulations Rachel, and thanks for taking us along for the ride.
Dan Saffer has made quite a name for himself over the past few years. He graduated from my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, with a masters degree in Interaction Design. Since that time, he has been working at Adaptive Path. He has published an excellent introductory book to the field and has another book on the way. He has been speaking at conferences regularly and co-chaired the first IxDA conference. Now he’s up to something new.
Dan is leaving Adaptive Path to start Kicker, a new product design firm. The corresponding blog has only two posts, but then it has only been two days since it went public. I’m betting we can expect good things.
So, here’s to you, Dan. Congratulations on your fine years at Adaptive Path and best of luck in your new venture. I’m looking forward to reading all about it.
Dan Lockton is working towards a Ph.D. at Brunel University on the topic of Design for Sustainable Behavior. His blog is full of interesting examples of “Architectures of Control”, such as park benches designed for sitting, but also designed to keep the homeless from sleeping on them. As he describes it:
Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.
I was thinking about Dan’s blog when I took this photo. It was taken just below a small, man-made lake (more a pond, really). The log is sticking up out of a bucket sunken into the road. Inside the bucket is a padlock that keeps the log from being removed. The intent was to keep vehicles from driving up onto the dam. The log can be removed by the caretaker in case he needs access for maintenance purposes. You can see by the tracks worn through the grass how effective it is.
