DesignAday

Summit 09

The U.S. National Design Policy Initiative (NDPI) held its second summit in Washington D.C. this past Tuesday. There were around 30 people in attendance from professional design organizations, education, and government including:

AIGA, the professional association for design
Interaction Design Association (IxDA)
American Architectural Foundation (AAF)
American Institute of Architects (AIA)
American Society of Interior Designers (ASID)
Design Management Institute (DMI)
Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)
International Interior Design Association (IIDA)
Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD)
Association for Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA)
Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD)
Interior Design Educators Council (IDEC)
National Association for Schools of Art and Design (NASAD)
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
National Park Service (NPS)
U.S. General Services Administration (GSA)
U.S. Government Printing Office

They had five objectives for the summit, four of which they accomplished (#2 must be completed).

1. Develop the 2010 strategic priorities for the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative
2. Finalize membership of an “American Design Council”
3. Gain a sense of the priorities for design from the Department of Commerce, USPTO
4. Engage the wider design community in national design policy decision making
5. Develop a set of case studies that demonstrate the value of design for publication

Prior to the summit, the NDPI posted a poll on its website, allowing people to vote on what they felt should be the organization’s top priority for 2010. Out of 324 votes, 75 (23%) voted for the introduction of design creativity and innovation learning modules into K-12 educational curriculum. This was almost twice as many votes as the second-place priority. I concur.

Design education is currently in a tricky position. There is more interest in the field then ever before, and the scope of problems that design can be applied to continues to grow. This means that there are more students applying to design programs than can be accepted, and that a designer must be trained in a wider range of skills, from traditional, visual design to technology and business. There isn’t enough time to cover it all in the typical undergraduate degree program. Introducing design education even at the high school level would significantly improve the quality of design education in this country.

Map of the Design Landscape in Full Resolution

Before the holiday, I posted a visualization of the major design disciplines created by one of my graduate students, Forrest Conroy. I included several screenshots of various areas of the map, but they were all too small to read much of the detail. I had some requests from people that would like to see the whole thing, so I asked Forrest for permission to post the file. You can download the full-resolution PDF here. I believe he intends to continue working on it, so feel free to leave any feedback you have for him in the comments. I’ll make sure he sees it.

Map of the Design Landscape Through Recent History

I’d like to feature the work of one of my graduate students. I gave an assignment in which each student was to design a map of the design landscape depicting major disciplines, organizations, educational institutions, firms, luminaries, and methods. They didn’t necessarily have to include all of this information, nor were they limited to it. Forrest Conroy incorporated everything just mentioned, and then added conferences, related companies, and example products. He mapped everything over time, showing relationships between them. The resulting chart is a beautiful piece of work.

Forrest used three major categories: communications in yellow, which is equivalent to Graphic Design, interactions + activities in blue, which includes Interaction Design, Information Architecture, and Service Design, and products in red, which is basically Industrial Design. You can watch these intertwine as digital products like computers and mobile phones incorporate hardware and software design.

Lines track the careers of prominent designers along the horizontal axis of time, while vertical lines make connections between people, organizations, and methods.

Insets on the right-hand side list all NASAD approved design programs.

Page Mess-up

The very first project I was assigned in Visual Interface Design during my first semester of graduate school at CMU in 1996 was to redesign the QuarkXpress print dialogs. There were several different dialogs that were accessed individually from the File menu. My solution combined them all in a single dialog where options were grouped based on whether they applied to the page, the printer, or were specific to offset printing. You could choose Print from the File menu and have access to all of the options, rather than having to change a few settings in one dialog, close it, and open another to specify something else.

It still aggravates me today every time I use an application that doesn’t allow me to change the page orientation in the Print dialog. Sometimes a button will be provided that will open the Page Setup dialog where you can do this, but sometimes I still have to cancel out of the Print dialog and select Page Setup in the File menu. Take the Print dialog from the most recent version of Adobe Reader, for example.

It does have an option to “Auto-Rotate and Center”, which orientates the page based on the orientation of the document you are printing—and this is typically what I want to do—but it doesn’t allow me to specify the page orientation otherwise. To do that, it’s another trip to the File menu.

You would think that in 13 years this little problem could be solved.

Real-World Research

This month, Gist Design will be hosting IxDA Pittsburgh and leading us in a unique, fun, and educational event.

Real-World Research

Designers know the benefits that design research provides in shaping good user experiences for products and services. But practicing effective design research for technology products  in the corporate environment (whether for start-ups or for international corporations), requires ingenuity, flexibility, and a sense of humor. Want to try your hand at it? Join Gist Design and other design colleagues for a collaborative game of “Real-World Research.” 

Date: Wednesday, October 21.
Time: 6:00pm
Location: Gist Design
33 Terminal Street, Suite 425B
(South Side)

Gist was founded in 2002 by John Beck and Shelley Moertel, two graduates of the masters programs at CMU. More recently, another CMU grad, Daniel Gloyd, who also happens to be an alumnus of the same undergraduate graphic design program that I hail from, joined them to open an office in Fort Worth, Texas. The firm specializes in design research, product and service planning, and user interface design, working with prominent clients in the mobile and medical markets.

If you’re in the area, you should plan to attend. It promises to be a worthwhile evening.

Let Teachers Teach

There are serious problems with our current educational system, and this week’s mailing from my children’s school is an excellent example.

The president of the United States is planning to address the nation’s children during a televised speech on the importance of education, work ethic, and goal setting on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009.

We understand that some families feel strongly in favor of allowing and not allowing their son/daughter to view this speech. In an attempt to respect differing viewpoints, we would like to accommodate the wishes of all families. Therefore, we will tape the President’s speech for re-broadcast and make it available to fourth and fifth grade students only. Kindergarten, first, second, and third grade students will not see the speech at school.

We will rebroadcast the President’s speech during the afternoon on Wednesday, September 9, 2009. This is an optional event; so if you choose for your child not to participate, please send a note with your child Wednesday morning. Children, who are not permitted to participate, will have an alternate learning activity.

Following the speech, the teachers may ask students to share their opinion of President Obama’s message. We will not be using any of the Internet-published materials.

It is the district’s wish to accommodate the needs and wishes of all families. We thank you for your understanding and support of this important and delicate situation.

Since when do parents specify what the teachers will and won’t teach in their classrooms? I don’t have any say over whether or not my daughter is required to write her spelling words in cursive or what method of division she will be taught. I’m not asked for permission to let her read any of the books they are assigned. I have no influence over which operating system she is exposed to in her classroom. I am not consulted on the content of the standardized tests used for her evaluation, nor am I allowed to vote on which areas of history they will focus on.

I would never expect any of this. I trust the school faculty and administration to know what should be taught and how. That is their job. They have been trained to do it.

I realize that there are a number of controversial issues about what should or shouldn’t be taught in schools. Most of them have to do with religion. I have my opinion about Intelligent Design and the inclusion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. But Obama’s address is not a religious matter. He is the President of the United States, for crying out loud. He is our elected leader, holding the highest office in our country. Whether or not you agree with his position on health care or anything else, he should be given respect. If he is addressing the children of our nation, and the school wants to show it and discuss it, why should any parent keep their child from seeing it? A few points:

1. If you are afraid that the President of the United States is going to in some way subvert your child with political messages, I feel sorry for you.
2. Our country is in bad enough shape without us teaching our children to be hard-line, uncompromising, non-thinkers with conspiratorial pessimism on either side of the political spectrum. Let’s first teach our youth to have some respect for their country.
3. Have you listened to Obama’s speech? Can anybody disagree that it was a positive message that students should hear? Success isn’t easy. Stay in school. Work hard. Even people who grow up under tough social and economic conditions can become important contributors to our society. Can you honestly tell me that you are fundamentally against those notions to the point of disallowing your children from hearing the message? Well, what did you think he was going to talk about?
4. If you have valid concerns about a particular teacher or curriculum, there are reasonable ways to address them.

Teachers are already overloaded with requirements laid on them by the government. Rather than teaching what they know their students need based on their own training and experience, they are required to build lesson plans around tests forced upon them by legislators. That’s bad enough, and doesn’t even mention the current problems with punishment for misbehavior. They don’t need to be further compromised by the uninformed opinions of parents. I’ve heard from many teacher friends that the hardest part of their job is dealing with parents. Leave classroom teaching to teachers.

And for the love of our country, show some respect to its leadership.

4 Years Later

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I was planning my course for the Fall semester. Well, tonight was the first class, and I must say it is good to be back. It’s rewarding to be able to open students’ eyes to a greater potential for design and the opportunities their degrees can present them.

When I wrote that post, I was trying to decide what topics I should cover. I thought I would share what I decided on. I ended up organizing the course into seven two-week units:

1. Defining Design & Design Leadership
2. The Design Landscape - includes disciplines, organizations, firms, schools, conferences, luminaries, and resources.
3. Design Methods
4. Design & Business
5. Social & Organizational Change
6. Design Ethics
7. Design Education

There will be three projects woven through these topics, and I’ll be taking the class on a field trip to Fitt Associates here in Pittsburgh. I’m excited about the semester, which is always a good sign.

I included a quote by Steve Jobs in my syllabus that I just love:

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But, of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. To design something really well, you have to ‘get it.’ You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something…. Most people don’t take the time to do that.

Current Design Issues

I’m planning my course for the Fall semester, when I will finally be able to reuse the material I first taught in 2005. It will be a seminar—that is, it will be much more reading, writing, and discussion about design than the act of designing, although we’ll do some of that too. When I taught the course four years ago, I assigned readings on the following topics:

Design Certification
Offshore Outsourcing
Design & Business
Formal Education vs. Self-taught
Design Ethics
Design Leadership
Making a Business Case for Design
Experience Design

Some of these are still relevant topics for discussion, while others may not be quite as en vogue. What do you consider to be current design topics of importance? Please let me know in the comments.

Designer’s Toolbelt: The Typography Manual

There are a very few iPhone applications I have paid for so far. The most recent is a resource specifically of interest to designers. The Typography Manual combines, as the name implies, a typography manual with a conversion table, em calculator, rulers, and a number of references.

The manual is 60 pages covering type basics, history, typesetting, and web typography. It also includes a style guide, type anatomy glossary, and a handful of typeface specimens. From the little that I have perused, it appears to be accurate and well written. It includes photos and illustrations, especially effective for the type anatomy. It is fairly basic and shouldn’t be thought of as a replacement for a good typography book, but it seems appropriate for what it is—a pocket reference. It is missing one important feature, however. While some sections, such as type anatomy, provide a search field, there isn’t a manual-wide search capability.

There are a number of useful references that are provided under “Resources”, rather than as part of the manual. A conversion table lists inches (in fractions and decimals), millimeters, and points. Another table presents HTML character codes. There is a table of standard paper sizes and one for web banner dimensions. There are also lists of periodicals, organizations, type foundries, blogs, and other web resources.

I question the usefulness of the font size ruler, which lets you drag a slider to resize a line of text between 5 and 47 points. You can display the sentence in either Georgia or Helvetica. I have trouble getting it to recognize that I’m trying to drag the slider. The standard ruler also seems relatively useless. It displays an image of two rulers with markings for inches, centimeters, points, and picas, but I can’t imagine using it for any practical purpose.

The Mac keyboard characters utility is a bit more functional, displaying a keyboard on which you can tap the modifier keys to see what characters become available on the regular keys. The em calculator works as expected, allowing you to enter pixel values for font size, line height, and element size, and displaying the corresponding em values based on your setting for the browser default.

My biggest complaint is that the UI doesn’t behave as it should. When you scroll to the end of a page, it doesn’t bounce. Flicking a page doesn’t have the same momentum as standard apps. Scrolling lists don’t have the alphabet shortcuts on the right edge. Rotating the phone doesn’t have any effect on the content display.

All things considered, it is a robust app. The visual design and organization is quite good. It will be particularly useful to a student, or a designer that wants to brush up on their type knowledge. And the developer has promised additional functionality in the future, so there is even more type goodness to come.

An Appeal to English Teachers

Once upon a time, the only way to imprint type on a page was with a press. This was done by typesetters—expert professionals that understood the rules of typography. Then along came the typewriter. Yes, typewriters were convenient, but due to technical constraints, they could not duplicate the detailed craftsmanship of set type. They employed monospace fonts, in which every letter takes up exactly the same amount of space on the page. The Roman alphabet was not designed to be displayed in such a fashion, and as such, readability suffered. Due to the uniform letter spacing, a single space was not enough to sufficiently separate one sentence from another. For this reason, the practice of double-spacing after a period was introduced. People were taught to type that way. High School students were required to double-space their sentences when they turned in essays. The technique became ingrained in several generations of the populace.

In the mean time, technology advanced. Typewriters have been replaced by computers and high resolution printers. We now have more control over type and the printed page than ever before. In fact, our software now takes care of most of the fine points of typography automatically, from kerning and leading to ligatures and en dashes. What’s that? You don’t know what an en dash is? Don’t worry, Microsoft Word does. We have a large selection of quality typefaces, and monospaced fonts have been relegated to programming code editors.

And yet, everyone still dutifully enters the double-space after every period. They do so because that is the way they were taught. They don’t know that the extra spaces create holes, turning text blocks into swiss cheese. They don’t realize that it hinders readability. The teachers continue teaching the practice because they don’t know any better either. That’s what they were taught too. Graphic Designers are the only ones that are taught about this, and it doesn’t happen until they are in college.

I know this blog is not read by English teachers—I’m preaching to the choir, and likely some other ministers. So you, reader, have a duty. If you know an English teacher, please send this to them, or point them to this passage from The Elements of Typographic Style. It’s high time we all give our thumbs a break and lay off the space bar. If we are going to break this bad habit, it has to start with them.