When I glanced over “Google Equates “Design” With Endless Testing. They’re Wrong” by Co.Design editor Cliff Kuang, my immediate reaction was, does the editorial team at Fast Company’s Co.Design know what they are talking about? I had to re-read it just to be sure, and both times I concluded that they were overly harsh.
You probably would have read a very rare Jonathan Ive interview on Core 77 by now. If you have not, do check it out? I would say a lot of the interview was generally not surprising, however the last few paragraphs jumped out at me. What I noticed was that despite Apple’s very digital playing field, their industrial design process was, and is, still very old school analogue.
I think there is a lot more to this discussion, more than about “just making things simple and easy to use”. Why are some objects simple and easy to use but end up limited and boring? Why are some objects, like the iPhone, simple to use but somehow able to have many layers of more complex functions? Is this what they call simplexity, or an “emerging theory that proposes a possible complementary relationship between complexity and simplicity”? (via Wikipedia)
Joe Duffy’s “Demystifying Design: An Argument for Simplicity” is a great little piece that calls out Design like it should be. Here is my favorite bit:
What is design? It begins with ideas–ideas based in purpose. It requires a plan or a process. It yields innovation, invention or creation. It is successful if it elicits response–attention, desire, interaction or purchase.
Many of us have been taught in design school to be very user focused when seeking design solutions. However if you have been in the industry as long as I have, there is this insidious sickness that tends to influence this fundamental approach we have with design.
A while ago I worked with a colleague that was a huge fan of Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a set of statistical and analytical tools use to measure and track the efficiency of a business or operations. My colleague was fanatical in improving the quality control of the organization and introduced all kinds of Six Sigma control points, or “gates” into the development process. He succeeded in creating a firmer structure in the process, but unfortunately, this new system created a lot of drag in the small organization.
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by: Iqbal Mohammed
Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh points to an interesting study that estimates that we may be missing as much as 15 minutes of a 150-minute movie through the very act of blinking. What's even more interesting however, is the discovery that most movie-watchers tend to blink in unison - at non-critical moments of plot or action.