DesignAday

Seat Feature Creep?

Prior to my trip to Ireland for Interaction 12, my last trip across the Atlantic was nearly a decade ago, and that was the last time I had been on a plane as big as the Aer Lingus jet that carried us home from Dublin. They pack a lot of functionality into airplane seats—they’re rather impressive. I’m very curious, however, about this little doohickey.

The icon makes its purpose obvious. The knob pulls out about three quarters of an inch and is tensioned with a spring. Are there really that many people traveling with loose clothing on hangers? How many articles can you count as a single carry-on? I’ve never heard a flight attendant say to stow your luggage in a bin, under the seat in front of you, or on the seat-back hook. I jest, but I will give them credit, it appears to have been placed such that a standard hanger won’t obstruct the screen.

Design Issues

There’s one week left in the masters-level class I’ve been teaching. It is mainly a seminar-style course with a few complimentary projects. The semester was organized into seven units. These are the readings that my students were required to write responses to and then discuss in class. This is a good survey of the current state of design theory.

Defining Design
Beautiful Diversion - NextD Journal
Are Designers The Enemy Of Design? - BusinessWeek
In which design is subjected to Lakovian analysis - greenonions.com
Defining Design - jamin.org

Design Leadership
Design Vision
Managing is Designing? Exploring the Reinvention of Management - NextD
Design Vs. Design Thinking. - BusinessWeek
Leadership Is THE Strategic Issue - AIGA

The Design Landscape
What is graphic design? - AIGA
What is Industrial Design? - IDSA
What is IA? - IAI
Definition of IxD - IxDA
Designing for Interaction - Dan Saffer (pages 2-8 and 20-22)
Ladder of Fire: Unpacking Advocacies - NextD
IA Summit 09 - Plenary - Jesse James Garrett
What is Design? (Yes, all 10 definitions!) - Demystifying Usability
Why Does Interaction Design Matter? Let’s Look At The Evolving Subway Experience - FastCompany
10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design - Mashable
What is service design? - Design Council
Engine Service Design
Richard Buchanan Keynote – Emergence 2007 « Design for Service
An Evolving Map of Design Practice and Design Research - Dubberly

Design Methods
The students researched specific methods individually and presented them to the class, rather than having assigned readings, but I did provide the following resources as starting points.
Stories - Boxes and Arrows
NASA - Process: User Centered Design Methods
Use our methods - Stanford d.school 
Design methods - Design Council

Design & Business
AIGA Center for Practice Management - Trademark Basics for Graphic Designers
AIGA | Aquent Survey of Design Salaries
Intellectual Property: What does “Work for Hire” mean for designers? - AIGA
Why Does My Firm Own Everything I Do? Intellectual Property & You - Core77
The State of our Contracts - AIGA
American Firms Now Embrace Design, But They’re Aging Fast. What’s Next? - Co. Design
The Cost of Frustration - UIE
No Accounting For Design? - Fast Company
Dos and Don’ts for Designers Dealing with Business - Core77
On Being T-Shaped - Core77
Ten Ways to Measure Design’s Success - BusinessWeek

Social & Organizational Change
Hourschool: Learn from your network, one hour at a time. - AC4D
AIGA | Design for Good
Redesigning America’s Future
Introduction: Design and Organizational Change - Richard Buchanan
Marc Rettig - How to Change Complicated Stuff - IxDA Library
RED Paper 02: Transformation Design
The Designers Accord
Navigating a Sea Change - Lauralee Alben

Design Ethics
AIGA | Ethics and Social Responsibility 
AIGA | Logo Warehouses, Crowdsourcing, and a Lack of Understanding 
AIGA | What’s the harm in crowdsourcing? 
AIGA | AIGA position on spec work 
AIGA | Design Business and Ethics 
AIGA | AIGA urges the Obama 2012 campaign to reconsider its jobs poster contest 
What is AIGA’s position on spec work? And how are ethical standards determined?
AIGA Standards of professional practice
Ethics in the Design Field - Webdesigner Depot
The Politics of Desire and Looting - Design Observer
“This is what I have learned” by Milton Glaser
First Things First 2000
First Things First 1964
In Search of Ethics in Graphic Design — AIGA

Design Education
Design Research and Education: A Failure of Imagination? - Core77 
Why Design Education Must Change - Core77 
Teaching Social Innovation - Austin Center for Design
What this Country Needs is a Good Five-Year Design Program - AIGA

Another Norman Door

We all know about Norman doors. If you don’t, stop reading my blog, and get yourself a copy of The Design of Everyday Things. Do it now!

My company moved into a new office building this morning. Our restrooms are single-use, so there are locks on the doors. In one day, there were multiple cases of the restrooms being locked while nobody was using them. The following memo had to be sent out to all employees.

This was something discovered today, so I thought I’d share it as it might affect restroom access.

1. If you push the lock button in, the door locks. Turning the handle opens the door and unlocks it.
2. If you turn the lock button, the door locks. Turning the handle opens the door, but it remains locked.

If option 2 happens and the door gets shut from the outside, a key will be required to enter the room again.

The lock visually affords twisting, behaving as locks I’ve encountered repeatedly in the past. Some door handle designer must have thought that this two-stage lock was a great idea. I can’t think of a good use case for it. A public restroom certainly isn’t one.

IDEA 2011

IDSA announced the winners of IDEA 2011 at the end of June. I’m finally getting around to perusing the gallery. There are a lot of great designs, of course, but one in particular immediately caught my eye due to it’s similarity in concept to one of my student’s projects.

Pure is a water bottle designed for adventure tourists and world travelers that filters and sterilizes water from any source within two minutes. Pure contains two chambers. Dirty water is scooped up from a lake, stream or dirty puddle by the outer chamber. The inner chamber is then plunged through it, filtering water particles as small as four microns. Once filtered, the water is sterilized by a wind-up ultraviolet bulb.

Having used finicky water pumps on backpacking trips, I love this design. My student had a similar idea, but unfortunately didn’t take the time to research the science and technology behind water filtration. The end result was a concept and form study with nothing real to back it up. Timothy Whitehead of Loughborough University, on the other hand, has a working prototype that is proven to filter out 99.9% of impurities. It was also the recipient of a 2010 James Dyson Award. A more detailed write-up can be found on Inhabitat.

Let’s see some I.D.

I.D. was America’s premier magazine about contemporary product design and material culture from 1954 through 2009.

To be honest, I didn’t realize the magazine had closed shop, but this is the introduction to the new I.D… not-a-magazine. Yes, the URL is www.id-mag.com, and the page title is “ID Magazine Served”, but there is no magazine here, or at least, not what I consider to be one. It’s a gallery displaying industrial design projects from the Behance Network. Now, I’m not too familiar with Behance—it hasn’t been on my radar—but it seems to me it is lacking curation. There at first appears to be no categorization, so it is a random jumble of projects ranging from fantastical concept explorations to actual, name-brand products. Once you view a particular project, however, you will find keywords that can be clicked to view a filtered gallery. It’s mostly images with very little description. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d say it’s just a showcase for people’s portfolios. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think it’s misleading to give it the “I.D.” moniker and call it a magazine. I’ll stick with the likes of Core77, Design Observer, and Johnny Holland.

The one thing I am pleased about is the continuation of the I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review. It has an esteemed panel of judges and looks to be a class act.

Form Over Function

I prefer SoftSoap brand shower gel over any other body wash I’ve tried, but I despise their bottles. Sure, they are beautiful forms and I’m sure their appearance boosts sales, but they are not functional. When full, they are top-heavy and easy to knock over. When near empty, they are impossible to stand upside down to get the last dribbles out. I continue to buy it, because the contents of the bottle are more important to me than the bottle itself.

This is a perfect example of form over function. The designer who conceived this packaging was not thinking about people—he or she was thinking about consumers. The design is the result of focusing on eyes in the store rather than building brand value with satisfied users of the product.

Distractive Dell

Each of our developers has two Dell displays on his/her desk. I noticed that the guy in the cube beside me had the Dell logos covered with Post-it notes. He had been distracted regularly while working as he would see motion at the bottom of his monitor. As it turned out, the logos are reflective, and he was seeing the reflection of his fingers typing on the keyboard. Other Dell displays that we have in the office don’t have this problem since the logos, while in the same place, have the appearance of brushed metal rather than a mirror finish.

Watch Out

Back in December, my company showed its appreciation to all of the employees that have been with the company ten or more years by recognizing us at a holiday lunch and presenting us each with a watch. That may sound a little cliché, but it was heartfelt, and it is a very nice watch. It’s an Ebel model—very expensive. Apparently, the cost doesn’t come from an investment in Interaction Design.

When I went to Boulder, I was in a different time zone, but I couldn’t figure out how to set the watch. There is a knob on the side, as most analog watches have, but it wouldn’t turn, and I could pull it out. The watch hadn’t come with a manual. Google wasn’t able to turn up any useful information on the subject. I ended up not wearing the watch during the conference. When I got home, the watch was again the right time, of course, so I forgot about it.

The watch also displays the day of the month. Well, on Tuesday, March 1st, it said that it was the 29th. Once again, I went to work trying to figure out what to do with that knob, chipping my fingernails in the process. I asked my coworkers, and none of them knew either. The next morning, the other designer I work with triumphantly proclaimed he had figured it out. You had to turn the knob counter-clockwise to unlock it. Then the knob could be pulled out into two different positions to control the time and date.

There were a number of problems that kept me from discovering the solution. First of all, the lack of instructions, both in the box and online, is utter lunacy. Even so, I should have been able to figure out. Why couldn’t I? The knob was very tight. I tried turning it both directions, but I didn’t want to force it. I tried harder to turn it clockwise, as I have had watches that would only let you turn the hands forward. And it requires you to rotate it quite a bit before it unlocks, so even once you get it to turn, you may not turn it far enough before deciding that you are “doing it wrong.” Finally, I’ve never had a watch that required the knob to be unscrewed before it could be pulled out. It was unfamiliar, unintuitive, and uninformative: a triple threat.

VADS

The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is an outstanding online resource for educators, students, researchers, and anyone with an interest in art and design. The site provides access to 47 collections of photography, paintings, posters, and other imagery. Some are relatively small, such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Northern Italian Sketchbook, containing 94 pages of his architectural drawings, while others are massive, like the Design Council’s Slide Collection of 13,202 images. It’s all searchable, of course. Search for “chair” and you’ll get everything from a black and white of a Charles Eames chair to a color photo of an antique from the Frederick Parker Chair Collection at London Metropolitan University. There are posters from the Imperial War Museum, several collections from the London College of Fashion, and one from the Museum of Design in Plastics. To accompany the collections, VADS provides a series of learning and teaching resources, such as Calligraphy: an education in letter form, Fabrics forming society, and The Life and Work of Bernard Leach. From their About page:

VADS is the online resource for visual arts. It has provided services to the academic community for 12 years and has built up a considerable portfolio of visual art collections comprising over 100,000 images that are freely available and copyright cleared for use in learning, teaching and research in the UK.

Of course, there is a blog as well, so you can keep up on additions to the collections. Especially for teachers of art and design, it’s a bookmark you’ll want to keep handy.

Design Matters

Of all the design-related podcasts I listen to, Design Matters with Debbie Millman is my favorite. Debbie’s manner with her guests is warm and inviting—alluring even. She takes a very personable approach to her interviews that makes it seem more like you are listening in on a private conversation. I had been enjoying the show late last year as she spoke with Tim Brown and Stefan Sagmeister, but as 2010 started, iTunes reported no new episodes. Fortunately, Debbie kicked things off again in September with Massimo Vignelli, and there have been three interviews this month, including Bill Moggridge.

The podcast is hosted by Design Observer, one of many august design publications Debbie contributes to.

Debbie Millman is a partner and president of the design division at Sterling Brands, one of the leading brand identity firms in the country. Millman is president of AIGA, and chair of the School of Visual Arts’ master’s program in Branding. She is a contributing editor to Print magazine and host of the podcast “Design Matters.” She is the author of How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer (Allworth Press, 2007), The Essential Principles of Graphic Design (Rotovision, 2008) and Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design (How Books, 2009).

The complete archives, dating back to 2005, are available at Design Observer. You’ll find interviews with such luminaries as Steven Heller, Michael Bierut, Paula Scher, Chip Kidd, Ellen Lupton, Art Chantry, Paola Antonelli, John Maeda, Milton Glaser—over 100 episodes. This is quality content made freely available. They cover the gamut from graphic design and typography to industrial and interaction design. I highly recommend checking it out.