Design

In this blog post I share how stories help people connect with the products they use.

Not Quite Past trains AI to produce specific kinds of art and ornament. Our first project explores Delftware tiles. We use AI to allow you to design beautiful tile designs and then work with a high-quality British producer to make them real. The result: a revolutionary approach to design. Rapidly create highly personalised, one-of-a-kind artwork that plays with the rich cultural traditions of the past. Make old things new and new things old.

Hello, I just wanted to say that if you want your web app to feel Cool and Modern, one of the easiest things you can do is make it so that Mac users can hit…

C77DA Student Winner Pyri is a bio-inspired, low-cost wildfire detection system for remote communities

tldr: I have rearranged my internet homestead into three sections — the front of the book (blog posts), the feature well (essays, long analysis & interviews), and the back of the book (my podca…

Turquoise “Both a modern & ancient color classic?” No color palette from the Mid Century Modern era would be complete without some shade of Turquoise. Often confused with it’s bluer brothers aqua and teal, turquoise reflects light in a strong … Continued

Imagine unlocking the secrets of mid-century modern color palettes and discovering how to create stunning, timeless spaces. Explore the vibrant hues, bold designs, and sleek lines that define this iconic style, and learn how to infuse your home with a touch of retro charm and sophistication.

The concepts in modern operating systems — apps, windows, desktops, notifications, and so on — have so permeated our understanding of personal computing, it’s hard to imagine anything else, let alone believe there could be anything better.

Kawa designs and makes outdoor equipment for bikepacking, bike-touring, commuting, hiking, and everyday use. Our gear is designed to be clean and...

Synthetic users are fake users generated by AI. While there may be a few use cases for them, user research needs real users.

A new survey reveals what people prefer from EV sounds.

A progress report on the new 'D85 Johnny.Decimal business' system, and the 'creative' pattern, which we're using.

Article Zhiyong Fu1, Qing Xia2* 1Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 2School of Humanities (Dalian), LuXun Academy of Fine Arts, Dalian, Liaoning, China Abstract Corresponding to the two methodologies of dealing with the future in the field of sociology, future-oriented design can also be divided into two categories: one pursues the exploration

Online portfolio of Campbell Orme, interaction designer and creative director.

People rely on menus to find content and use features. Use this checklist to make sure your menus do their job.

Digging into older notes, this week's paper is Systemic Design Principles in Social Innovation: A Study of Expert Practices and Design Rationales [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872620300447] by Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer and Bridget Malcolm. This is a follow-up paper from a previous one they had written (and that I hadn't read) where they looked at 5 organizations doing design and had various interviews to understand how they tried to do systemic design to influence various parts of society. In this paper, they look at them to find commonalities in their approaches. The 5 agencies included worked on projects like balancing time vs. quality investments in Danish schoolteachers following a reform, Netherlands cities and partnering organizations trying to make life better for younger people, a group of 3 Canadian non-profits trying to find ways to reduce social isolation in adults with cognitive disabilities, Australian child protective services helping to improve the rate of children moving from foster care to their original family, and a Canadian provincial government trying to have better open data policies and more valuable data. So that's very varied stuff, and the paper has been written by people who didn't necessarily have a deep knowledge of systems theory, but were given a lot of literature recommendations, did a literature review, and iteratively went back to their systems theory experts to validate and re-deepen the research every time. The paper starts with a neat opener where they cover high-level systems theory concepts, and tie them to design work. I'm quoting long sections of it because it's a really nice intro for people less familiar with the concepts: The move of traditional design to the domain of social innovation means that traditional design practice needs to be adapted to this field. [...] One such adaptation is visible in design practices that have become increasingly systemic. This includes designers gaining a deep understanding of the complexity and wickedness of problems and societal systems, and developing new practices to design for these systems. [G]rowing complexity and increasing strain on societal systems has reignited an interest in integrating systems thinking and design practices to build on the analytical strengths of systems thinking and the action-oriented strengths of design.15 This unified field of systemic design is emerging as a new area of practice and academic study. [...] Systems thinking is the understanding of a phenomenon within the context of the larger whole. This process is referred to as synthesis, which is opposed to, and complements, the reductionist process of analysis. Russell Ackoff explains that “in analytical thinking, the thing to be explained is treated as a whole to be taken apart. In synthetic thinking, the thing to be explained is treated as part of a containing whole. Systems thinking emerged in response to the limitations of analytical and reductionist thinking as presented within the scientific viewpoint that has prevailed since the age initiated by the Renaissance. This viewpoint is based on the belief that the behavior of the whole can be understood entirely from the properties of its parts. This reductionist thinking and approach is core to many disciplines and professions—for example in Western medicine, which is organized into specializations based on parts of human bodies. Although science and analysis have had an immense and positive impact on society, a limitation of reductionist thinking is [...] that “improvement in the performance of parts of a system taken separately may not, and usually does not, improve performance of the system as a whole.” [...] The domain of sociotechnical systems targeted by social innovation practitioners is characterized by high levels of complexity and unpredictability and cannot be sufficiently described or controlled through a pre-determined design solution. While we can design and engineer technical systems within a sociotechnical domain, we can only aim to influence or intervene in the broader complex systems they are part of. This covers good bases, the paper explains a few broader currents in the rest of the intro, but they're not necessarily relevant to their main point about commonalities in approaches when designing with systems in mind so I'm eliding them here. They identified a bunch of principles ("a rule or heuristic established through experience that guides a practitioner towards a successful solution") that were used over and over. They warn that these were found by qualitative analysis—which they don't mention rating the reliability for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-rater_reliability]—and that different analysts would find different patterns, which was a bit of a methodological bummer when I read it. But let's look at the principles, because I found them interesting and still refer to them months later. OPENING UP AND ACKNOWLEDGING THE INTERRELATEDNESS OF PROBLEMS This basically says that you can't necessarily identify a bunch of problems and solve them independently to end up with no problems. Sometimes problems are owned by multiple people, or solving a problem requires inconveniencing other people, so they're all connected. To address this, people had to adequately consider various perspectives to frame problems and which one they'd choose. By deliberately developing multiple perspectives, various solution pathways opened up. They refer to this as taking "an expansionist" view, often with the aid of mapping mechanism, visualization tools, etc. Some of them were also careful in the choice of vocabulary: calling something a "problem" or a "solution" tends to force a narrowing of perspectives. Calling things "situations," "challenges," "systemic intervention" or "prototypes" tended to keep their visions more flexible. DEVELOPING EMPATHY WITH THE SYSTEM This is related to all the various perspectives they can have on systems they study. Acknowledging the various perspectives can reveal tensions between people and stakeholders of the system, and surfacing these tensions is key to be finding useful ways forwards: We don’t just collect stories of [citizens] and hang them on the wall, but we engage with them politically. So we take these stories and go to the police, or to school, or to whoever is mentioned in these stories, and we collect the counter-stories, because also the system is trying its best when tackling societal challenges, and has its own stories about what does and does not work well. Contrary to regular design (which is often about desires and goals of stakeholders), the systemic design approach tends to focus on the relationships between stakeholders. STRENGTHENING HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS TO ENABLE LEARNING AND CREATIVITY Continuing the trend of perspectives and relationships, they found that one of the best intervention courses was to focus on learning and creativity within these relationships. This focus means that you can't come up with a recipe book. You may have known intervention patterns, but they'll always need to be adjusted and adapted to current contexts. New behaviours, learnings, and experiences arose from improving the relationships, not as something you just told people to do. To couch this in systems theory terms, they are aiming for self-organization of elements in a system such that new emergent behaviours and adaptation can take place to meet overall system objectives. This means designers need to let go of the ambition to control the relationships, and instead must focus on creating conditions, infrastructure, or platforms that promote new behaviours and learnings of people evolving within the system. INFLUENCING MENTAL MODELS TO ENABLE CHANGE People work from mental models: All of the practitioners in our case studies identified dominant mental models either held by the client organization, or by users or other stakeholders that held the system back from enabling more positive outcomes. This included the belief that restoration of a child to their birth family is the best outcome in child protection in the TACSI case study, and that it is more important for adults with a disability to be safe than to learn in the InWithForward case study. Because mental models are socially learned ways of perceiving and organizing information, they can be changed. They can challenge people to see things differently by: * Introducing new language to change public narratives * focusing on stakeholders that already held enabling mental models * making mental models explicit to facilitate discussion and change They generally consider mental models as one of the most effective lever points in a system since it's the basis of action from people in it. This isn't necessarily a common usage in regular design, but is worth a lot according to this study. ADOPTING AN EVOLUTIONARY DESIGN APPROACH This resembles the evolutionary process of “vary, select, and amplify” described in living systems theory; what they do is that designers take an incremental approach where they prototype various interventions ("making a portfolio"), see which of these get traction, and then refine and improve them based on whatever shows most promise, while always keeping them aligned with overall goals. Figure 1, A representation of how a portfolio of problem frames and accompanying designed interventions evolves over time. This shows a graph where a Frame (A) is divided in three other frames (X,Y,Z), each tied to an idea. The ideas point to prototypes (X.1, Y.1, Z.1) which are paired with new frames (X.1, Y.1, Z.1) [https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/ferd.ca/cohost/htFWQ1P.png] When coming up with a prototype, it's not even always known who will own it and implement it, but they show them to various stakeholders, see what gets traction, and react based on buy-in. The idea is that in complex systems, peopl

How can user experience researchers make sure their voices are heard and their work is valued? By telling a good story. Gerry Duffy guides us through the thickets of research as storytelling by sho…

In philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in relation to a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple — this particular apple now".

An auto-updating baseball statistics dashboard that answers the question: How are the Dodgers doing?

To get better results from generative-AI chatbots, write CAREful prompts. Include context, what you’re asking the system to do, rules for how to do it, and examples of what you want.

Design systems are a set of standards (like Google’s Material Design or IBM’s Carbon Design System) needed to manage design at scale. Style guides (like content or visual style guides) are just one piece in a design system.

Thoughtful, data-driven sports journalism.

PerThirtySix made a communal plot that asks for your opinion via scatterplot and you can see how you compare against the aggregates. A new poll goes up every day. The inspiration for this comes fro…

Consistent, engaging design can help to cut through internal communications “noise”—and increase productivity

Schraubensymbole

Search+recs+open-ended text boxes

This incredibly ambitious and thoroughly-executed project is by Charlie Humble-Thomas, done while pursuing his Masters in the Design Products program at the RCA. Called Conditional Longevity, it asks the question: "How long should objects last?" Seeking the answer, Humble-Thomas tackles an oft-discarded object, the umbrella, and designs three variants: Recyclable,