Let’s talk about design

First of all, thanks to the people out there who’ve said nice things about this blog. It’s good to have friends with a decent sense of humor. For those who couldn’t finish War and Peace but still like to know things, then this blog is for you! Grammar, idioms, parsing, making sense…that’s all for real writers! That’s why blogging is so fun for us —we’ve relaxed the rules. I’ve always enjoyed writing, so I won’t let something like proper English keep me from tapping away. Who wins? We all do!

Some simple rules to blogging: Sentences relate to other sentences (paragraphs too), don’t be redundant, keep it short, edit many many times…as many times as you please, and lastly develop a personality. See how easy this is?

So, how is this blog funny and where’s the design? Well, funny is debatable and true I haven’t shown any pictures. Understand though that design is not as subjective as you might think. Design isn’t about pretty pictures on a poster. Design is about understanding your environment then communicating unambiguous information. IDEO designer Tim Brown, says, “Design is the interface between the user and the innovation.” One might go on to say that good design is responsible for the success of every cultural artifact ever invented.

Some examples of why design is important.

There are visual principles to making sure we get it right. Information must be displayed properly. Maps, signs, charts, instructions, buildings, dishwashers, bridges, books, magazines, computers, databases, websites, cinema, products… All continue through space and time because of good design. Simply put, users need to know how to use things.

In her work, Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray, suggests that there are four affordances to describing the design space in a digital age. Encyclopedic, spatial, procedural, and participatory. This is the context for all of our design choices today. “Thinking of the potential for any project to more fully exploit each of the four properties can help us to discover new directions that we may have previously overlooked.” These four affordances, can help us better understand agency and communicate the objects for which we are designing.

Encyclopedic: Understand that the computer has become its own medium through the convergence of media. Cinema, photography, text, image have made the designer’s job significantly more complex by the sheer amount of information available.

Spatial: An evolution in information organization has caused us to rethink our ideas of real-world spaces. For example, graphical user interface (GUI) has taken our real-world ideas to one that occupies a world not just printed but also include computer bytes, phones and websites.

Procedural: Procedural design is what makes up the rules of behavior. The media represents a procedural property and its ability is to represent and execute conditional behaviors. An application of this would be; how we represent complexity through abstractions.

Participatory: What is the relationship between the participator and the artifact? This can be a complex factor. The designer must script the action of the user and the artifact so that both are meaningful to each other. Is the user experience frustrating, or is it pleasant?

Good design integrates the aesthetic elements that support the artifact while not-so-good design takes away from the desired interaction. Bad design can interfere with agency and cause the artifact to exist no longer.

In the next post we’ll wrap this up with an awesome idea of how to create good design through coherent spaces.