Notes Design

Two great reads for the designer, student, and client alike--you might even want to print these out (heavens!) On Design Observer, Julie Lasky publishes her recent commencement speech at Cranbrook. There are way too many paragraphs to pull, but the blogosphere will like these two:

Nike's "Just do it" may have been good for our sense of empowerment, but it's been terrible for the earth. We're suffering from a glut of products, many tossed onto the market with a breezy heedlessness that probably has been mistaken for courage. You can imagine how a manufacturer, even after hiring consultants, doing research, and convening focus groups that challenged an idea for new product, said, "Aw, fuck it." Which is another way of saying "Just do it." How else can we explain a Procter & Gamble room deodorizer called ScentStories that "plays" like a compact disk, rotating in a heating device that releases a different smell every 15 minutes. "Just do it" is mindless. In fact, it militates against thought. It suggests that if Hamlet played extreme sports or ran a marathon or two, he'd have been a lot happier. The verb is truly active: "Do." And the "Just" preceding it is a split-second sigh of impatience, a paper-thin slice of temporality before you're supposed to get off your ass and onto that snowboard.

"Make it work," on the other hand, is about deliberation; "make it work" recognizes the unlikelihood of perfection and the strong possibility of flawed performance. It's based firmly in time; it represents limits. Most telling of all, it comes out of an age when remarkable athletes have been exposed as steroid users. This directive connects to a process, and the verb is constructive: "Make." The items it alludes to are idiosyncratic and frequently lumpy articles of clothing--not perfectly machined Nike models or shoes. Sure, "Project Runway" is all about craft, but Tim Gunn could have used any number of catchphrases. This one really captures the ethos of craft, in both its material and mindful dimensions.

In the Harvard Business Review, Tim Brown (finally) goes on record with what, exactly, Design Thinking is. Tim said that this piece was a long time coming, and with equal parts pragmatics and philosophy, it's probably just what the doctor ordered. Here's a sweet spot:

I argued earlier that design thinking can lead to innovation that goes beyond aesthetics, but that doesn't mean that form and aesthetics are unimportant. Magazines like to publish photographs of the newest, coolest products for a reason: They are sexy and appeal to our emotions. Great design satisfies both our needs and our desires. Often the emotional connection to a product or an image is what engages us in the first place. Time and again we see successful products that were not necessarily the first to market but were the first to appeal to us emotionally and functionally. In other words, they do the job and we love them. The iPod was not the first MP3 player, but it was the first to be delightful. Target's products appeal emotionally through design and functionally through price--simultaneously.

This idea will grow ever more important in the future. As Daniel Pink writes in his book A Whole New Mind, "Abundance has satisfied, and even over-satisfied, the material needs of millions--boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating individuals' search for meaning." As more of our basic needs are met, we increasingly expect sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful. These experiences will not be simple products. They will be complex combinations of products, services, spaces, and information. They will be the ways we get educated, the ways we are entertained, the ways we stay healthy, the ways we share and communicate. Design thinking is a tool for imagining these experiences as well as giving them a desirable form.