paper & pencil

Yahoo! Pattern Library

From the 2005 IA Summit: Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Yahoo! Case Study

This presentation will discuss the realization of the need for a pattern and standards library at Yahoo!, the process for defining the requirements of a repository and how the library would be implemented and stored, the building of the CMS tool and the process for defining the lifecycle of a pattern. We will also discuss the organizational challenges, the process for evangelization, for authorship and consensus for use in the lifecycle of the patterns themselves.

moll on creativity

Cameron Moll has this to say on creativity, from an interview in Digital Web magazine:

My take? Creativity knows no borders. It often ignores mediums. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if most Web designers are also talented in the fine art of paper airplane folding. Continuing with Brian’s language analogy, I’ve found that once you learn a second language, learning a third comes much easier, as you become familiar with the intricacies of language patterns and sentence structure. But you’re still challenged to understand the how to turn all that into meaningful communication. It’s much the same with music and Web design. There are notes you follow, practices you adhere to. But then there’s the blue note—the unconventional layout. Things that require an innate sense of creativity. Things, dare I say, that require thought.

running the company

Victor Lombardi created an excellent presentation, Can we run the company? (pdf), on the career paths available to designers. Lombardi establishes that our goal is to "empower people" and to do so we must have greater influence and that requires holding higher positions in organizations.

After interviewing several leaders Lombardi noticed that they all shared these 3 things:

Positive attitudes
Doing something they love
Willing to let go of old roles and grow into new ones

The presentation then goes on to outline three potential paths for designers: 1) Design Management, 2) General Management, and 3) Designing Organizations; with the most influence occurring in the third path. Lombardi then provides some insights into how to get to these higher positions and identifies some good books to read.

He also introduces the new term - Business Design:

Business Design is using the skills you have to “design” the business

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
- Herbert Simon

Throughout the presentation, Lombardi references Designers as Leaders, an essay by Richard Farson.

Of course, having one’s way is hardly the ideal manner in which to conduct a professional relationship. Nevertheless, design judgment, even in matters of social responsibility such as health and safety, let alone matters of esthetics, efficiency, productivity and visual impact, is often subordinated to the client’s or employer’s wishes.

That is such an old story among designers that perhaps it is small wonder that designers tend not see themselves as leaders. If they have learned not to expect their professional judgements to sway clients or employers, how can they imagine leading corporations or communities, to say nothing of exercising leadership in the developing global arena? It is simply impossible for most designers to think of themselves as having a place in high councils of decision making.

But that is where designers are most needed—at the top. It is a travesty that the only professionals close to the CEO’s are lawyers and accountants. Designers have more to offer, because increasingly our organizations need to be design driven, not just market driven. To truly prosper, our global society must have its needs met, not just its wants.

Essentially, designers need to learn to see the world as the CEO does. Lombardi's presentation offers several books to help learn the language of business.

The presentation also pointed to an interview with Brad Nemer who oursued the dual degrees of Master of Design and Master of Business Administration.

"I chose the dual-degree path for two reasons. After working in several high-tech startups, where the product essentially is the company, it became clear that no matter how grand the vision, design is managed in the context of business." He said as he explained his choice of degrees, "So it is critical to understand the basic forces of accounting, marketing, and organizational management, because otherwise even the best designs in the world will go nowhere. The much-celebrated divide between "designers" and "suits" is not only counter-productive to success all around, it's inaccurate. Once you demystify business fundamentals, they become just like any other design constraint, and are no more insurmountable."

Farson again on designers as leaders:

Designers have even better preparation than most to assume leadership. They are especially qualified. Designers are already good at seeing things in context, already understand the sweep of history, already are conversant in the arts, sciences and humanities (as are the best leaders), already are good at working in ensembles, already are environmentally aware, already understand the limits of technology, its backfiring nature, already are capable of a high level of creative thinking, already can appreciate the esthetic dimensions of leadership. The first step, then, is for designers to begin to imagine themselves as leaders—of design firms, of communities, of cultural organizations, of corporations—and beyond.

The next 50 years will determine the survival of our civilization. We will succeed only if design becomes the organizing discipline of the future, and that will only happen when designers become leaders. The world needs what designers have to offer—not just on the drawing board, but on the board of directors.

10 things Milton Glaser has learned

In early 2002, Milton Glaser published 10 Things I Have Learned, from a presentation he gave at the AIGA Voice Conference. IT is his respone to 9/11 and contains a summary of the bits and pieces he knows about the practice of design.

Some of my favorites:

Number 1 YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.
It took me a long time to learn this rule because at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism inferred that you didn’t necessarily have to like the people that you worked for, and should maintain an arms length relationship to them. As a result, I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Some years ago I realised that I was deluded. In looking back, I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. Affection, trust and sharing some common ground is the only way good work can be achieved. Otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.

Number 3 SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.
This is a subtext of number one. There was in the sixties an old geezer named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible.

Number 5 LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’

Number 8 DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.
Everyone always talks about confidence and believing in what you do. I remember once going to a class in Kundalini yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a more practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being sceptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins.

Cooper event review: Getting Your Design Built

A thorough review of Getting Your Design Built, presented by Kim Goodwin at the February IxDG Face to Face Silicon Valley event, has been posted to the BayDUX site. The event took place at Cooper, was co-sponsored by Cooper, the Interaction Design Group (IxDG), and BayDUX and organized by Pabini Gabriel-Petit and Frank Ramirez.

Getting buy-in:

In describing how Cooper gets buy-in, Kim said that the interaction designer is responsible for presenting the design framework to the product team. He or she has to be prepared “to defend the design on the spot. … This is the most terrifying step for stakeholders. You have to build the rationale. Use scenarios to explain your design. Talk about how you got there and why it’s good. Use personas and human factors studies to justify your design ideas. ‘Because it’s cool’ or ‘because I say so’ are never acceptable justifications. Ask engineers, ‘Does anything in here terrify you? Is any of this impossible to build in the timeframe?’ Engineers will accept it when you have a thorough design rationale. … If you’re confident about the design, that’s going to show.”

Right level of detail:

The right level of detail in your design and deliverables varies depending on the needs of a specific project. Kim elaborated, “For experienced developers familiar with the domain, you may get away with a few holes. For offshore development, distributed teams, or less experienced teams, you won’t. The bigger the development team, the more detailed you want the specifications to be.” Kim thinks designers should ideally draw every screen “down to the pixel,” draw and document every state of every widget, and document detailed error handling. However, it usually suffices to draw “every archetype screen … in its most common state … down to the pixel,” draw “every non-standard widget … in every state,” document all “non-standard behaviors,” and provide “a set of principles and guidelines for extrapolating the design, plus its rationale.”

Kim emphasized the need to explain design rationale. “Sell the design. If someone understands why this is good, they’re more likely to stick to it.”

History of the Tab

A Technology Review article, Keeping Tabs, provides a brief history of the tab to organize information.

It took decades to add tabs to cards. In 1876, Melvil Dewey, inventor of decimal classification, helped organize a company called the Library Bureau, which sold both cards and wooden cases. An aca­demic entrepreneur, Dewey was a perfectionist supplier. His cards were made to last, made from linen recycled from the shirt factories of Troy, NY. His card cabi­nets were so sturdy that I have found at least one set still in use, in excellent order. Dewey also standardized the dimension of the catalogue card, at three inches by five inches, or rather 75 millimeters by 125 millimeters. (He was a tireless advocate of the metric system.)

Even the Library Bureau did not offer a convenient way to separate groups of cards, apart from thin metal partitions that wrapped around them, or taller cards. The tab was the idea of a young man named James Newton Gunn (18671927), who started using file cards to achieve savings in cost accounting while working for a manufacturer of portable forges. After further experience as a railroad cashier, Gunn developed a new way to access the contents of a set of index cards, separating them with other cards distinguished by projections marked with letters of the alphabet, dates, or other information.

(via dave heller)