DesignAday

Learn to Create!

I’ve been enjoying Discovery’s new show, Unchained Reaction, quite a bit. It’s a fantastic showcase of creativity, ingenuity, and prototyping. I just watched the most recent episode, which pitted a team of construction contractors against a team of “designers”. They didn’t say what types of designers they were, but the show’s editors made a point of communicating that the team members specified designs for other people to implement; they didn’t know how to build anything themselves. Much of this exposition came from the designers’ own mouths. Meanwhile, the manly men of the opposing team bragged about how efficient they are at building things. They would build big, playing on their strengths.

Of course, this was a dramatic setup, but being a designer, it really struck home for me. I was immediately on the defensive, routing for my team “against all odds”. The cameras portrayed the designers standing around a whiteboard, planning out an elaborate narrative, while the contractors got to work building stuff. During the first test of their opening mechanism, one of the designers loudly proclaimed their success at failing, clearly branding himself as a member of our tribe. In the end, both teams did outstanding jobs, demonstrating admirable creativity and inventiveness. I’m happy to say that the designers were quite capable of building what they designed, and they won, but that’s beside the point.

Designers have accrued a formidable stigma. We’re armchair generals in fancy clothes. There may have always been a little of this perception, but I think it is on the rise. Graphic designers created things with their own hands. Sure, it had to go to a printer for mass production, but there was a craft, materials, and specialized tools. Industrial designers still have the physical component of materials, but most graphic designers are working entirely digitally now. Interaction designers are in an even worse position, because most of us don’t have the skills necessary to realize our designs.

There has been a push lately for designers to learn to code. That’s certainly one approach, and I’m all for it, assuming you have mastered design, but I propose a less-specific movement:

Learn to create!

The Real Challenge

My career as a designer has been all about solving other people’s problems. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s something I quite enjoy, and I seem to be good at it. At the same time, however, I am more than a problem-solver—I am a creative. I have a desire to invent, to innovate, to create something that didn’t exist before. Sir Jonathan Ive’s comment in an interview with Mark Prigg of the London Evening Standard really resonates with me.

There are different approaches - sometimes things can irritate you so you become aware of a problem, which is a very pragmatic approach and the least challenging.

What is more difficult is when you are intrigued by an opportunity. That, I think, really exercises the skills of a designer. It’s not a problem you’re aware of, nobody has articulated a need. But you start asking questions, what if we do this, combine it with that, would that be useful? This creates opportunities that could replace entire categories of device, rather than tactically responding to an individual problem. That’s the real challenge, and that’s what is exciting.

Treasure the positions and clients that enable you to do such work. They are not as common as they should be.

Working with Developers Survey: Job Situation

As a point of comparison, I asked survey participants some questions about their work context.

What is your current work situation?

If you are employed by a company, are you:

How would you classify your company?

Are you:

I was actually surprised by the high percentage of designers working in software development firms, and the comparatively low percentage working in UX/design firms. I’m still analyzing the data, but I’m expecting this to lead to some interesting comparisons in the answers to the questions that are the meat of the survey.

The Wrong Questions

I’ve been seeing a lot of questions recently along the lines of “Should Interaction Designers know how to do visual design?” and “Should Interaction Designers know how to code?” My opinion on both questions is that they are the wrong questions.

There are very talented, successful, and influential IxDers that can do neither, so it is already proven that a good IxDer doesn’t have to. The question we should be asking is, “What skills will make me a better Interaction Designer?” The answer will vary greatly depending on the context of your work. The type of company you work for, the makeup of your team, the types of projects you work on, and even what you want to be doing in the future all have a bearing on the skill set that will make you most effective.

I have a hard time imagining being an Interaction Designer without being a visual designer, because that is my background. I have a degree in Graphic Design. CMU, where I got my masters degree in IxD, teaches it with an emphasis on visual design. I consider the majority of IxD to be visual communication, and I draw the most from my visual design skill set. But that’s me, and I’m not about to say that it is the only way, or even the best way, to do it. I have too much respect for others in the industry that are not visual designers. In fact, I make a point of impressing on my design students the importance of the multidisciplinary makeup of the design disciplines.

So, I will strongly disagree with anyone that makes broad claims like “Interaction Designers should not be developers,” or “Interaction Designers without visual design chops are inferior.” IxDers don’t have to be visual designers or developers, but both skill sets have much potential to make us better Interaction Designers.

If you really press me, I will probably argue that a designer with skills in both areas has the most potential, but realization of that potential is dependent upon the context in which one practices.

Working with Developers Survey: Titles

My survey was open from December 13, 2011 to January 14th. I advertised it through many channels, including the IxDA forums, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and DesignAday. I had 308 people view my survey, but only 90 actually responded. 82 completed it, giving me a 91% completion rate. On average, people spent 11 minutes answering the questions.

I created a Wordle rendering of the job titles. It’s not a particularly attractive one, due to the dominance of a very few words contrasted with single use of a lot of words. You’ll have to view it at full size to see any of the smaller words. I did convert abbreviations, such as UX, UI, and Sr. to full words to get an accurate word count. One respondent in particular did not like his/her title: Web Experience Specialist. You can see their unique contribution within the counter of the “g” in Designer.

I was a little surprised by the relatively even distribution of years of experience. I guess I was expecting a higher percentage of designers with 1 to 5 years of experience and a lower percentage of respondents in the 16 to 20 year range.

Mapping the Design Landscape

Lindsey Estep started out with a simple venn diagram as the basis of her map and built out from there. The initial three circles forming the diagram are:

• Creative Research: primarily focused on conceptual and visual consideration
• Engineering Research: significant testing and study, frequently requires prototypes, pragmatic
• Social Research: centered around research about the audience/user, including emotions

There are color-coded areas that contain the cross-over domains, and then the gray center is made up of the four domains that significantly utilize all three, with labels placed on the side they are weighted towards. Listed around the outside can be found organizations, journals, and luminaries for each area within the diagram.

I must say, of all of the diagrams I’ve encountered that try to map the design landscape, this is one of the most elegant. The categorizations and relationships depicted are accurate, and nothing seems forced. I’m extremely pleased with the way it turned out.

Design Definitions and Relationships Realized by Visual Data

Aaron Geiger is one of my graduate students this semester, but he is actually a Master of Journalism student. He’s been taking the course because he needed an elective outside of his department, and he is very interested in design. This was actually the perfect course for him, as it was primarily reading, writing, and discussion.

It is no surprise, then, that Aaron took a much different approach to mapping the design landscape than did the rest of my students. Here is the process he followed:

1. Collected data using snowball effect on established, credible websites that define different areas of design. For instance, after selecting “Industrial Design”, there were options (links, suggested views) to “Peter Behrens”.
2. Selected three different definitions of each area of design, and weighed amount of times each word was used.
3. Word usage was coded with a number depending on amount of times each word was used.
4. Data entered into a spreadsheet, then visualized using Gephi.
5. In Gephi, data was plotted and then visualized by algorithm.

The map is organized by the major disciplines, each assigned its own color. Every entity in the map (e.g. person, school, subject) is represented by a circle. The size of the circle corresponds to the number of times each word connected with the original discipline definition. Font size matches circle size. Lines show connections between circles, and the thickness of the line represents the number of threads connected with the snowball sample.

The design of the final artifact needs some work, as it was generated by software, and Aaron doesn’t have the design chops to redraw it. The results are interesting, none-the-less. I’m particularly surprised by the seeming insularity between the disciplines.