I have never, ever, had an original song or melody pop into my head. I frankly think it would take me a lifetime to become a one-hit maker; let alone a one-hit wonder. I have however, had numerous occasions when I’ve heard a song and then imagined a movie scene play out. For me, the inspiration needs to first come in the way of a soundtrack. I can then fill in the blanks with a storyline.

In becoming mindful of my own personal nature, I’ve recently started paying more attention to how others around me think as well; and more specifically, how they approach design problems. It’s been my experience that many of my non-designer colleagues – typically stakeholders such as executives, product managers, and developers – don’t visualize like designers do. Their strengths generally lie elsewhere. That’s not to say that non-designers can’t be imaginative or creative, but chances are that their day-to-day responsibilities have shaped their thinking to be more matter-of-fact. Put another way, you’re generally better at what you do often; and to some degree, you also have to factor in how you are hard-wired neurologically. Some folks are just better suited to visualize stuff than others.

In thinking about the differences between these types of personal attributes, I’ve also started noticing that we designers sometimes leap from nascent ideas to interfaces far too quickly when faced with a design problem. By jumping right into our typical design process and favorite tools, we squander golden opportunities for enhancing experiences through more systemic thinking. When that happens, we deny ourselves a critical period for both incubation and ideation – which can potentially limit real innovation. In other words, once you show wireframes or mockups to stakeholders, you’ve already impressed upon them a specific direction, which is almost impossible to erase. And chances are that by showing design documents, you’re more than likely committed yourself. That’s just a natural position to take as you pitch your design rationale.

So what can we do to better communicate experience design vision during that window of opportunity between raw ideas and design deliverables? How can we use our abilities to visualize for the greater good? Enter experience modeling.

What? A means for communicating design vision.

What exactly is an experience model? I’ll define it as a vehicle for communicating systems-level experience design concepts. Granted, that’s a little abstract, so let’s break it down a bit.

Experience modeling should first and foremost be rooted in user research. This ensures that a designer has the necessary foundational knowledge to make educated design decisions. Upfront research should include an understanding of the current journeys a user goes through to accomplish their intended goals. Once you have an understanding of the steps involved in the process – ideally from observing and interviewing real users – you’re armed with invaluable information about the lifecycle and its stages.

To illustrate, let’s take the simple example of paying household bills online. The model should initially capture what the process of bill paying looks like from the point a user receives their bills to when they’re paid in full. You can’t improve an experience unless you fully understand its current flow and workarounds.

The next aspect of the model is actually rethinking the experience in the way of redesign. By having done the legwork with research and then breaking down an existing process, designers are in a position to uncover opportunity gaps and latent needs – in this case, ideas for streamlining and consolidating online bill paying options.

And so this is where representations of the new-and-improved experience needs to illustrate how a new model might work; and more importantly, how the proposed paradigm is better! It should convey big-picture design intent and serve as the roadmap for where you want to go; the design destination, if you will. It should also highlight how users will interact with a system and how the system will behave in return.

There are many ways to represent experience models, so more on that later. The key takeaway here is that this is essentially an intermediary step so you don’t get bogged-down in the details just yet – most notably around the actual interface and technological constraints. You simply want to frame your vision and gain alignment with your stakeholders.

In short, experience models serve to communicate design direction for getting team members to, at the very least, be talking about the same thing. (Whether they agree however, is something else entirely!) Having a stake in the ground early on is incredibly important to avoid confusion and divergent opinions when the user interface is being designed later on.

Why? People, *ahem* stakeholders, are strange.

Experience modeling is especially valuable early in a project when it is common to have a great deal of ambiguity. At this point in the process, designers should strive for alignment and buy-in on a general direction so as to begin working on the actual details.

To illustrate how this might come into play with the aforementioned stakeholders, let’s imagine our earlier scenario in which your product department has identified a market opportunity for consolidating online bill pay options. What generally happens next is that the business communicates the opportunity to the individuals who will be doing the actual work. At this point in the process, the evolution of a concept has already begun to take shape in people’s minds. The product folks are thinking about one thing, architects another, and the marketing team perhaps something else entirely different. The bottom line is that everyone is visualizing and the idea is inevitably taking on a life of its own.

In simply scratching the surface on some neurological research out there, it’s widely thought that the left brain is more rational, analytical, and requires sequential information, which means it has to first process bits of information in order to get a holistic view. The right brain, on the other hand, is more visual, intuitive, and able to see the bigger picture first – filling in details afterwards. I’d be willing to bet that most product folks are in the left brain camp and that designers tend to be slightly more right brain oriented.

And so our techniques for communicating design concepts should therefore adapt to meet these potential discrepancies much earlier. Far too often at this stage however, we tend to gravitate back to our comfort zones. By going directly to the design of screens, we may miss the proverbial forest for the trees. Early brainstorming input from stakeholders is stunted because it bypasses their own opportunity to do some systems-level thinking. Social scientists have also shown that abstract thinking can enhance creativity in all types of individuals. Again, what we need at this point is a direction for the team to agree upon (i.e., a model); not a precise solution (i.e., mockups of specific screens.)

In keeping with our imaginary product example, you wouldn’t want to show independent bill pay screens. That’s much too detailed. Instead, you’d want to focus on the benefits of having it all consolidated and displayed in one place. It’s that overarching value proposition of having everything integrated into one view that’s at the heart of the experience we should be championing at this stage in the game.

When? Well ahead of the typical design process.

There isn’t a whole lot to say with respect to timing. Whether you’re creating new products, or making significant changes to existing ones, getting in on those initial conversations with decision-makers is incredibly important. That’s when a designer can make the most significant contributions to the overall vision of a product.

Thankfully, getting user experience designers involved earlier in the product design lifecycle is happening much more often as companies are begin to recognize the value they deliver.

How? Make it your own.

There’s no one, optimal way to represent an experience model. What’s appropriate and relevant depends on your particular situation. You ultimately want the medium you choose to communicate your ideas in the most effective way possible.

I’ve seen models represented as paper drawings on poster-size paper, storyboards, videos, and even as a series of comic strips – which are a surprisingly powerful way to illustrate key interactions. (For some additional examples, check out an archived piece from AIGA’s Journal of Interaction Design).

I’ve also seen designers act out scenarios of how a system is intended to work. This is more common in the service design industry where interpersonal contact is remarkably important (e.g., checking into a hotel.) With digital product experiences, designers can of course play the role of users, but they can also anthropomorphically convey how a product responds. Acting out a few, important sequences is a fun way to communicate and it generally leaves a lasting impression on observers.

Whatever approach you choose, here are a few tips to keep in mind. Good experience models should:

1. Tell a story. You should, at the very least, have a point of view. Having a story also implies a beginning, middle, and an ending. As we’ve seen, you don’t want to leave important aspects of your vision at the mercy of stakeholders’ imaginations.
2. Showcase the talent wisely. You want to focus the spotlight on the most important aspects of your design vision. If a system is incredibly complex, consider chunking it into a series of sequential segments. Or, highlight the most critical paths a user might take. Whichever route you choose, always be sure that the key interactions stand out.
3. Avoid interfaces for now. Unless they are truly meaningful, focusing on the details at this stage can be a distraction. Again, what we’re after here is alignment on a general direction; not the color and placement of screen elements. If you do find yourself needing page-level design, keep it fairly conceptual and lightweight.
4. Use points of reference and metaphors. Providing context and background information is always a good idea. And think of creative ways to describe your offerings with references that your audience can identify with (e.g., “It’s like Mint.com for household bills.”)
5. Be engaging, sharable, and fun! Short videos are a fantastic medium for representing models and high-level interactions. Think about how a movie trailer needs to be all encompassing: it summarizes the plot, sets the tone, and generates some excitement. There’s nothing better than the buzz associated with a clip like this going viral within your company!

Scoring the ending

As the saying goes, knowing thy users is incredibly important; but so is knowing your stakeholders. Understanding how they view the world gives you insight on how to better craft a more compelling design argument. These opportunities also ultimately give us a chance to showcase our design thinking skills. And it’s generally at this stage of the process that real innovation gets a fighting chance.

In short, you need to know where you’re going before you decide how to get there. Experience models can make what you envision a little more real and help chart the course during that window of opportunity between ideas and interfaces.

And so with great powers to visualize comes great responsibility to communicate that vision. Use it wisely, folks.

Time to picture some closing credits… Cue the musical score, because I surely can’t come up with a tune.

In my years of reading requirements, I’ve come to loathe the genre. As a written statement, the “requirement” is a somewhat strange and antiquated way to capture what a software system is supposed to do. I have no desire to discuss new and better ways to write requirements in this article, since others have written powerfully and persuasively about transforming this oddity into more useful forms such as user stories, use cases, and “minimum viable product” specifications.Learning how to deal with badly written requirements is part of our job, but they can be a trap for the designer. How can the user experience designer handle the inevitable dysfunction that badly written requirements create in his or her relationship with the business analyst? In this article I’ll offer some practical advice on how to deal with this dysfunction and position the designer as someone who needs to be included early in the project–before requirements are written.

The Dysfunction of Requirements

The causes of the dysfunction are at least twofold.

First, large internal IT projects are scoped by the two roles least equipped to come up with great user experiences: the business analyst and the stakeholder. Neither typically has any formal training for envisioning highly intuitive and usable systems, and the stakeholders are typically pulled in multiple directions. As a result, the requirements usually are incomplete and written in haste.

Second, project-budgets and timelines often are defined with the hastily written requirements as the primary input. This puts designers into a difficult position as our work inevitably leads to new features and requirements that may greatly improve the outcome but not fit into the budget. What is worse, you are often stuck designing a system that can never be usable, but you’ll get blamed nevertheless.

I suspect that the reason for these dysfunctions dates back to a time when software systems were largely about automating internal processes. The 1990’s drove an acceleration of this approach mainly in response to “Y2K” and ideas like “business process re-engineering.” A lot of IT spending and hiring was driven by the removal of home-grown systems and replacing them with big packaged systems from SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and the like. Many of the business analysts writing requirements today got their first jobs then. They became skilled at decomposing and diagramming processes – swim lane diagrams, workflows, and, yes, spreadsheets full of requirements.

At the heart of this approach is a key assumption – the users will be trained. For this reason, there is no need to think seriously about a high quality user experience. Any difficulties in the UI will be addressed in training. The users are also assumed to be frequent, repetitive users: they’ll eventually learn how to overcome the idiosyncrasies of the system.

As the ‘user experience’ has become essential to the success of many systems, the relationship between the stakeholder and the business analyst has not been kept up to date. Many projects still start with the same approach – quickly make a list of requirements and establish a budget under the assumption that the requirements are comprehensive and complete. This creates problems for designers. How do we break into this relationship and get an early seat at the table?

Respect the Situation and the Work

The first thing we need to do in these situations is respect the requirements and reference them in our deliverables to make clear that we are paying attention. Be prepared to recognize when your design introduces new requirements or significantly expands existing ones. We need to be up front about this and call these situations out as part of our design process.

Here’s an example from a recent project, typos and grammatical and spelling errors intact:

Some business analysts reading this will say, “These are terribly written requirements.” And I agree, but unfortunately, this is typical of large-scale projects. They are desperately trying to be complete, but what a terrible way to describe the scheduling of an appointment. There is nothing that explains the context of use and the goals of the system. You could certainly design a system to meet the requirements, but without additional context, it wouldn’t likely meet larger business objectives. Our design turned the requirements into design patterns for a calendar day that includes an interaction model, design justification, guidance for the visual designer, reference to specific requirements, and relevant source systems.

In these patterns, our design defined a new requirement that would automatically select the first available appointment. (We usually assume that fewer clicks in a call center application has direct financial benefits, so why make the CSR search and find the first available appointment?)

As written, BR95 said:
Available Scheduling Message Box
Once the User has selected an Appt Time Slot the following message box will be displayed :
Appointment Scheduling:
The Date you have selected is:
Day, Month, Date, Year (Ex: Wednesday, February 9, 2011)

This requirement implies that a user always has to select an appointment. We didn’t just let it slide, hoping that it would just get through. We called the business analyst and the architect to openly discuss it with them before a formal review with stakeholders. They were fine with it, and even appreciated being brought into the process.

A big win for the designer. But the bigger win happens when it opens the door for getting involved before budgeting in the next project. We just have to have the courage to take that step.

Collaborative Clarification

In another situation we were given the following vague requirements:

We used this as an opportunity to introduce user stories as a way to clarify and unpack all the functionality necessary to make sense of these.

We presented this to the business analyst and stakeholders to solicit additional detail before we tried to design anything. This gave us an opportunity to steer the conversation toward method and introduce an alternative way of formulating requirements in the future. As the designer, your challenge is to be ready to have methodology conversations for the next project that brings these realities to light.

Final Thoughts

As traditionally written, requirements are designed to produce conflict. It is an item for IT and “the business” (to use the common IT term) to negotiate when money and timelines take center stage. That they were hastily written in the first place only makes the conflict more likely. It also sets the designer up to be the fall guy for a poorly conceived system. Recognizing their inherently conflict-driving nature, the designer can work to diffuse the situation and get a seat at the table when the next project starts.

I very rarely write about what I do. My work is germane and practical; my writings, reflective and theoretical. But I would like to pen a few thoughts about my work as a freelance and independent contractor, both for the benefit of clients and for other freelancers out there.

As service providers, we are in the business of facilitating change. Some of this is concrete, and takes the form of deliverables and “works.” But some of it is more ineffable — is process, communication, relationships, and understanding.

The contractor, faced with a new client opportunity, occupies a unique position. We are outside the organization yet soon to become a temporary resident. We are tasked with responsibilities (for which we are paid) and yet given a greater freedom of movement than employees. We have the capacity for driving change but our success is contingent on the organization’s flexibility. We have been hired based on reputation but are, in each and every new situation, given an opportunity to shape and move the client according to our own skills and abilities.

I choose independence because I enjoy it. I prefer the new and the fresh to the long-standing and ongoing. I am turned on by the challenge of unfamiliar people and problems, and I am drawn into the world when it is rich and complex. For me, contracting delivers the possibilities of the open, of the future, and of the ability to act as an agent of change.

But I recognize that this is not a conventional position, and my methods may be unconventional. The business of independents, and in our industry particularly, attracts “experts,” leaders, and consultants whose knowledge and ability is often attached to personal brand, to ego, and to a self-centered basket of self-promotional practices, online as well as off.

I just want to say a few words about this, for I want to offer some tips and advice from the other side.

Try to disappear

I seek the invisible. I aim to disappear. When I have done my job well, and with impact, I have unemployed myself and become irrelevant. My knowledge belongs now to the company; my insights, to the stakeholders who make them actionable; my change agency has transferred to restructured relationships among employees and management; and my recommendations, now absorbed into the client’s mission and roadmap. If I begin by leading, by the time I am done I am a bystander.

We sell the invisible. We are hired for an engagement. We may attract work on the basis of reputation, but it is not about us — our egos, brands, or business. For that, we are paid. I think too many self-appointed experts make the job about themselves. Seeking to impress, the job or contract becomes an extension of their business. It accrues value to them, where it should be accruing value to the client.

We sell the invisible. We are hired for an engagement.

It’s only understandable that our business culture is biased in favor of branded independents and self-acclaimed experts. But the true expert has no need of self-aggrandizing engagements. The true expert knows what and how, and back burners his or her own ego in order to be effective and impactful. The true expert becomes the client, embeds with the organization, uses his or her skills in observation, listening, and understanding to find and leverage opportunities for change.

We are change agents

Change is dynamic. It is unstable. It involves risks and unknowns. It unfolds when the organization flexes, and when its employees are in motion. When functionalities and business processes are malleable, reconfigurable, and adaptable. As change agent, the independent becomes a hinge.

This comes with experience, and takes time as well as success. The newly independent expert and contractor still seeks confirmation and proof. His or her professional engagements still involve a deep personal investment. And for this reason, occasionally (or frequently), their observations and recommendations are colored. Colored by the tint of the lenses through which they see the job. That is to say, as an extension of their skills and value.

But the greater impact and more lasting effectiveness in contracting is never that which centers on the expert’s knowledge and know-how. It is that which works from within — from within the organization, in between employee positions, and amidst organizational dynamics. To mediate the latent and intrinsic strengths and capabilities of a client’s people and processes: that is the method of the artful independent.

The greater impact and more lasting effectiveness in contracting is [...] that which works from within

It’s all about the people

It’s all about people, always has been and always will be. It is we who act, who see, who spin our observations and work to realize our efforts. Rules, roles, positions, tasks, functions — sure, they belong to organizational definitions and to the nature of business. But employees are just people organized by the structural requirements of the company.

To create change, you have to get into and behind the structure, and in and among the people whose individual personalities and character carry the load. This is why the expert cannot succeed on the basis of expertise and knowledge alone. Every client is a new structure — its capabilities and opportunities defined not by the org chart or by job descriptions, but by the relationships of its people.

To create change, you have to get into and behind the structure, and in and among the people whose individual personalities and character carry the load

The deepest change comes from knowledge transfer. Transfer not only to those who need it, but to those who can use it effectively. That means a transfer of insight and learning to individuals whose own individual talents will make the most of that knowledge, and whose realtionships with colleagues will extend and leverage it with the greatest internal organizational impact.

This takes skill on the part of the independent, and a willingness to subordinate ego to the subtle art of intervention. An art that is martial, albeit in the Eastern sense, not the military sense. Art whereby the independent’s ideas become those of the organization, whereby communication is not ego-centric but client-centric, whereby the proud disposition of the teacher-expert is exchanged for empowerment of client learning.

Insights should feel to the client that they are and have been their own. They should befit the client, should be such that the client’s abilities and potential are enhanced and augmented, in ways that strengthen the client — not the independent. The independent is friend, not expert. The expertise is in the skill and talent that the independent uses to always become other, become the client, join and collaborate with ever new and different organizations.

These are my thoughts on the matter. A good musician can play many styles.

You and I are different. It’s obvious, but has a profound impact on fulfilling the needs of disparate users. Not only do you and I have different accents, hairstyles, and musical tastes, but even our cognitive processes — the very building blocks of being human — are substantially different. I recently wrote about individual differences in expertise and cognitive style, but there is a third dimension: learning style. Understanding how people learn is fundamental to delivering desirable content, a prerequisite of any good user experience.

From 5 senses to 3 modalities

We experience the world through our senses. While we know from grade school that there are 5 senses, psychologists have distilled these into 3 “sensory modalities” relevant to learning: verbal, visual, and kinesthetic. Though everyone learns through all three modes, we each favor one over the others, resulting in three different styles of learning:

• Verbal learners are best at absorbing written and spoken information. Since most learning is either text-based (reading a book, searching online) or auditory (a classroom lecture or personal conversation), verbal learners have ready access to content in their preferred medium.
• Visual learners, on the other hand, digest information from charts, diagrams, timelines, maps, and other concrete images more easily than from the written or spoken word. In contrast to their verbal counterparts, visual learners are relatively underserved with appropriate content.
• Kinesthetic learners enjoy hands-on activities involving movement (think dancing, pottery, woodwork). While kinesthetic learning is minimally involved in desktop computing, it plays a much more significant role in gestural and mobile interfaces, a discussion best saved for another article.

Dual Coding Theory

While our sensory modes courier outside stimuli into our brains, their role is much more pervasive than simple conduits. Once we acquire new knowledge, our brains encode that information onto our long-term memory in the vernacular of our sensory modes. In other words, our brains use two different formats for text and images, just like a computer.

Dual Coding Theory

But because verbal and visual concepts are stored separately, translating a semantic idea into a visual concept is a taxing, though ubiquitous process. When someone tells you driving directions, for instance, you probably construct a simple visual map in your mind. If you’re putting together a bookshelf using Ikea’s pictogram instructions, on the other hand, your mind works to decode those images into verbal steps of what to do next.

A parody on the infamous Ikea instruction manual.

Dual Coding Theory, developed by Allan Paivio in the 1970s, unearthed an important discovery: people learn best when information is presented in two modalities at the same time. That is, providing a verbal and a visual explanation in parallel enables the mind to encode information in both modes as well as to build referential links (similar to hyperlinks on the web) between the two representations. Paivio’s research has profound implications upon designing websites that maximize learning.

Creating content for verbal and visual learners

Long-form articles are back in vogue. UXers love advocating calmer reading experiences while services like Instapaper and Readability help us compile and consume our own digital magazines. But as you read these words on your Kindle from the comfort of your favorite chair, millions of people around the world are frantically looking for information at this very instant, and they want it now! Learning styles and dual coding theory deliver a resounding message: pithy content is more important than ever before.

Use text and images

While we each have a preferred learning style, we all benefit when information is presented both textually and visually. A study by the University of California found a 30% rise in effective problem solving when verbal and visual instruction were given at the same time (compared with providing one followed by the other). An eyetracking study by Jakob Nielsen validated that users spend a significant amount of time looking at information-carrying images. For best results, invest in both textual and visual content.

Pottery barn eyetracking

A photograph can sometimes be more important than the text, such as in this product list from Pottery Barn studied by Jakob Nielsen.

Visualize complex information

Presenting aggregate data in visual form helps the user understand the information landscape more quickly and intuitively than could text. The UK Treasury, for instance, releases a yearly summary of government spending, presented to the public as data tables within a PDF. When The Guardian designed an infographic visualizing the proportion of one department’s spending to the others, it was so incisive that the Treasury themselves requested printed copies to hang within their office. Does your website have information that could be made more powerful by visualizing it?

Guardian Infographic

Use concrete language

Words can also be visual. Concrete language (“juicy watermelon”, for example) evokes a much stronger sensory response than does abstract language (like “agricultural produce”). A study by Sadoski et al asserts: “Concrete words, phrases, sentences, and texts have been found to be more imageable, comprehensible, memorable, and interesting than abstract language units.” So, there you have it: use concrete language.

Sagrada Familia

While these words on the door of the Sagrada Família are literally concrete, using vivid rather than abstract language makes for better writing.

Be concise

English teachers, editors, and experienced writers alike often give out a single piece of advice: be concise. Clearly expressed, succinct content increases comprehension and enhances usability. A study by Riding and Sadler-Smith found that together, a 40% reduction in word count, when combined with an increased use of visual illustrations, improved student’s test scores from 67% to 82% (out of 100). Take the time to make content concise.

Put it into practice: write a style guide

Now that you’ve learned a bit about how people learn, what are you going to do about it? Enter content strategy, the discipline of planning the purpose, message, and style of content. One tool from the content strategist’s toolbox is particularly useful in applying the implications of learning styles to your own content: the style guide.

A simple document casting a comprehensive vision of a website’s (or an entire organization’s) content, the style guide establishes a consistent point of reference for content creators. When writing or revising your style guide, consider these implications of learning styles:

• Is your audience more likely to be verbal or visual learners?
• Is there currently enough visual content on your website?
• Are there parts of your website that would be more useful if better data visualization were used?
• How should writers be expected to work with designers, illustrators, and photographers to pair text with communicative images?
• Is your website’s style of language concrete and sensory, or is it too abstract?
• Is your website content concise, or is there fluff that needs to disappear?

Conclusion

We learn through our verbal, visual, and kinesthetic senses, and our memories are encoded in these different formats. Each of us likely favors one style of learning over the others, but pithy, concrete text coupled with informative images is a potent content cocktail for people of all learning styles.
The author would like to thank Jonathan Kahn for his helpful input on this article.

——

Sagrada Familia photo by joelrbrandt

What would the world look like if your brain was wired to perceive the world as if through a graphic design lens? That’s what I would like to find out. Let’s explore.

I am not a graphic designer. At least that’s not on my business card. What I am is somebody whose way of looking at the world is easily augmented by extreme focus on a particular visual schema. To be more specific, once, after a 20+ hour stint of 3D modeling in Solidworks, I began to think of the trash can at my desk as merely an extruded circle and my desk itself as the top plane. In fact, for days afterward, I couldn’t help but think about the entire world around me as if I had modeled it in Solidworks using some kind of augmented reality world builder tool. Chalk it up to the plasticity of the brain enhanced by lack of sleep, but its a sensation I’ve never been able to forget. And I have always been curious if people in other design fields have experienced a similar feeling. Graphic designers perhaps, begin to see everything around them for the fonts, the colors, the composition, the negative space. The following is a bit of history, mixed with a dash of fantasy, and a splash of theory for good measure, about what it would be like if your brain was wired to perceive the world as if through graphic design goggles. If you or anyone you know has ever experienced anything like what is described here, please don’t panic. Instead, calmly ask them to come forward and share their experiences in the comments section below.

“Design is a way of life, a point of view.” – Paul Rand

It should come as no surprise that graphic design, in one sense or another, spans the history of humankind. From cave paintings to roman carvings to freeway billboards to iPhone apps, people have been enhancing the transfer of knowledge for centuries. But the concept of graphic design as a way of life is a relatively modern vision. For most designers, design is a way of life and a way of thinking about things, not just a job. For me, every problem I set my mind to can be broken down into distinct parts of pieces of a design process. I am of the opinion that everything on earth can be designed, even nature, as frightening a thought as that may be. As I explore the world around me, I consciously (or subconsciously) take note of products, services, or interactions that work better than others, or that completely fail. If I could afford it, I would only surround myself with things that I consider to be perfectly designed. I also happen to have a design job which occupies much of my daily thought process. So if those anecdotes can be taken as a microcosm of what its like to live your life as an industrial designer, what is the graphic design antithesis?

Graphic design as a way of life

I am intrigued by a notion of graphic design as a way of life. Not working as a graphic designer per se (although that may often be the case), but applying a graphic design lens on all aspects of life. From how people keep track of their friends, to how they organize their silverware, individual lives are visually graphic places and there are often overlooked moments where they are beautifully designed.

To loosely borrow an idea from Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things, the things one owns and the relationships one cultivates, together, form a sort of personal aesthetic that defines who we are. Taken altogether, the parts and pieces of ones life form a multifaceted patchwork of memories, experiences, possessions, friendships, accomplishments. While this patchwork is a blend of visual and emotional parts, for the sake of this conversation, it can be imagined as a purely visual representation of a person.

the things one owns and the relationships one cultivates, together, form a sort of personal aesthetic that defines who we are

If you drill down just the right path you can find beautifully designed graphic moments in just about anybody’s life. If you’re having a hard time imagining how your grandma’s living room could possibly be an example of beautiful graphic design: consider the emotional value of the family heirlooms distributed around the room, the memories captured in all the photos, the system of organization that ensures she can find what she is looking for. All of these disparate elements fuse together into a graphic masterpiece when looked at through the right lens.

But just in case you don’t have one of these lenses handy, here are a few examples of everyday moments that bleed brilliant graphic design sensibilities.

Symmetry from Everynone on Vimeo.

DanseDance from Julien Vallée on Vimeo.

Charles Schiller Domestic Kitchen Planning, 2010

Imagine…

Ok, time for some fantasy. I want you to imagine you are a super hero. No, not that kind of super hero. You are Super Graphic Designer and the world relies on you to transform mundane and poorly designed graphics into design gold. Your only weakness? Being too obsessed with your job. You live and breathe graphic design. When you look at a poster, you can instantly identify the fonts, the character spacing, the colors, stroke thicknesses, the composition style, what works and what doesn’t. You instantly sketch an improved version in your head but have more important tasks to address. As you go about your day, improving websites, diagrams, billboards, street signs, posters you adeptly utilize your graphic design goggles that overlay Adobe InDesign tools onto your field of vision. Just as Batman uses his body armor and grappling hooks to fight crime, you use your design goggles to fight bad graphic design. But, although your goggles provide guides, x-heights, color pickers, and type identifiers, you don’t rely on them alone. Your brain is uniquely wired to solve complex graphic design problems. In fact, its virtually impossible for you to do much else, which becomes problematic in social situations. But never mind that. Your goggles have an Insta-Icon-maker tool that lets you look at an object and tap a button on the goggles to initiate an algorithmically generated vector icon. Alright, that’s quite enough of that.

this line of thought that interests me the most is how graphic design could be a really interesting framework to place around the rules we live by

Now back to some (somewhat) serious discussion. The aspect of this line of thought that interests me the most is how graphic design could be a really interesting framework to place around the rules we live by. What would life be like if we had to live our lives according to graphic design principles? A sort of moral code dictated by the visual laws of graphic design but translated into behavioural requirements. What if physics, biology, chemistry, psychology were all turned upside down and rethought according to graphic design principles? What if democratically chosen laws and governments at large were redesigned according to graphic design principles? Here are a few possibilities:

• The Pixel Grid: In graphic design, the grid reigns. Dictating the placement of elements to ensure a balanced, consistent, and usable composition, the grid must be obeyed. Grids exist outside of graphic realms of pixels of course, in the design of cities, in the layout of homes in a housing community, in the construction of our buildings, in the organizing of our closets, in the patterns of our clothes, in the weave of our fabrics. What then, would the rule of the Pixel Grid be like if it was applied to life? Perhaps everything in the physical world had to fit into a massive invisible grid, such that when you put an object down it would shift to its proper position within the grid, as if pulled by a gravitational force.

• Color Contrast: The difference between two colors, contrast is what makes it possible for you to be reading these words on this screen right now. When it comes to text on a background, the more different the text color is from the background color the more legible the text becomes – hence the popularity of black text on a white background. In terms of the color wheel, the further away the colors are from each other, the higher the color contrast. Incidentally, this also creates complementary pairs of color. Now, what if we lived in a world in which our closest and most compatible relationships were with people who lived the furthest away from us geographically? Or if the strength of our bonds to others was based solely on how different they were to us?

• Legibility: In addition to color contrast, legibility is critical in order to read words on a screen, in a scroll, or on a sign. While there are a number of steadfast universal rules that ensure proper legibility, it can be more subjective than the others. Some people may be more adept at reading characters carved in stone that others would deem illegible. What then, would the rule of legibility be like if it was applied to life? A low hanging idea is if all of humanity were born with the ability to write with perfect handwriting in every language on earth, and the ability to read them all, guaranteeing 100% worldwide legibility.

• Negative/Positive Space: Positive space refers to places where visual information is, and negative space refers to where it isn’t. It is common, and often desirable, to end up with a design that contains more negative space than positive space. Balance can still be achieved if the positive elements are properly “grounded” and not freely floating in a sea of negative space. Speaking of balance, what if your emotional balance tweaked the way you perceived the world such that when you are in a good mood, you see the world for it’s positive space and vice versa when you’re in a bad mood.

• The Wrong Theory: Slightly more esoteric than the previous rules, the Wrong Theory involves designing everything perfectly then purposefully messing something up for visual excitement and intrigue. Perhaps, in this graphic design-driven society it is the norm to genetically engineer humans to all be perfect and beautiful and then it is up to them to figure out how to become unique by messing up one aspect of their visual perfection? The error becomes the beauty; the flaw is seen as the prize.

• Wabi Sabi: Similar in many ways to the Wrong Theory, Wabi Sabi is a key philosophy of Japanese beauty. Something that is Wabi Sabi is “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete”… nurtur[ing] all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.” In this radical, graphic design-driven world, everything, from architecture to relationships, to personal tastes might be ephemeral and constantly transforming. In this way, nothing would ever be allowed to achieve completeness, let alone perfecting. As frustrating as this may sound, I think it could be beautiful in many ways.

Paul Rand says, “To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.” So put on your graphic design goggles and look around. You just might see the world a bit differently.

February of this year saw the IxDA’s fourth Interaction conference, held in Boulder, Colorado. And a couple of months back, the IxDA published the recordings from the conference, including all seven keynote presentations.

If you couldn’t make it to the conference itself, these videos give a great flavor of the event. They give us a chance to take a step back from the day-to-day reality of what it is that we do, and to immerse ourselves in some different big-picture perspectives. They provide plenty of food for thought, and not a little inspiration. So for your enjoyment, here they are.

Bill Verplank—Opening Keynote

Bill Verplank is one of the fathers of interaction design. He worked at Xerox PARC on the first desktop interfaces and went on to do interaction design at IDEO, and at Interval Research, he worked on haptics and innovative design methods. More recently he has been lecturing in human factors, UI design, and new music controllers.

In this talk (the entire duration of which he sketches what he is talking about), Bill covers a lot of ground, and gives us several ways of looking at and thinking about things. For example:

• Asking “How do you…?” questions (do, feel, know)
• Should a control be a button or a handle?
• Should an interface be more like a path or more like a map?
• Different types of thinking: enactive (doing), iconic (seeing), and symbolic (knowing)
• Is software a tool, a medium, or a vehicle?
• Machines as part of evolution

Watch the video

Erik Hersman

In the West, there is a general perception of Africa as a basket-case continent—poor, corrupt, backward, and perhaps doomed to remain so. Erik Hersman paints a very different picture. His is a new Africa, an Africa of entrepreneurship- and technology-fuelled hope and optimism.

He talks about some of the innovative projects that he is involved in, including Ushahidi, an open-source web application created to map the reported incidents of violence happening during Kenya’s post-election crisis, and subsequently used for election monitoring and to support disaster relief efforts around the world.

Watch the video

Lisa Strausfeld

Pentagram’s Lisa Strausfeld works at the intersection of the physical and the virtual, where the navigation of information and the navigation of buildings come together in a unified experience. In this talk, she showcases many of the inspiring projects she has worked on.

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Richard Buchanan

Richard Buchanan is a huge name in our field, arguably best known for inaugurating the postgraduate interaction design programs at Carnegie Mellon. His talk runs the gamut—from design’s subject matter (“Design has no subject matter … We MAKE our subject matter.”) through defining interaction design and through his four orders of design (which define the types of interaction that we design) to the importance of knowing the history of the field.

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Brenda Laurel

Brenda Laurel has had a long and distinguished career in the design field. Through the lens of the innovations that she helped conceive, she illustrates a number of important “hinges”—turning points if you like—that were important enablers of subsequent innovations. This talk reminded me of what author Steven Johnson calls “the adjacent possible”, whereby all new ideas are new combinations of existing ideas.

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Jason Bruges

Jason Bruges shows off some of the brilliant installations (pun intended) that his studio has created. I can’t help but think that this stuff is a bit frivolous. But on the other hand, if they make people think and help to make our cities nicer places, what’s wrong with that?

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Bruce Sterling: Closing Keynote

This is the icing on the cake. Bruce Sterling delivers the smackdown. But he does it with such humor and empathy that we can’t help being taken in. And he really does give us some meaty stuff to chew on. Morality in design, user Stockholm Syndrome, and so much more that I can’t begin to go into here. Expect to see the themes he brought up being discussed a lot in the near future.

Watch the video

You can find lots more great videos like these over at Johnny TV.