What’s peculiar about the relationship between design and innovation? Why are they so related in the rhetorics of the past decades? How does design lead to innovation (if at all)? When and where do design and innovation overlap? The clues might just be here, right in the understanding of design and the perspective on innovation….
Category: Design Diary
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180809
Although a bit hyped, design systems signals the dawn of automation in design. As principles, best practices, patterns, and libraries stabilize and evolve (far more often than revolutionizing), tactical and functional design tasks will by operated by AI machines (only curated by humans) and become highly automated. Design as a human profession naturally shifts to…
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180808
Not verifying assumptions is as bad as not having them. Not identifying assumptions is as bad as luck.
Designerly Quote of the Day #20180808
“Real designers surround themselves with evidence. You really gotta have the evidence and you really gotta have crit[icism] in order to make the world better.” — Natasha Jen, Design Thinking is Bullsh*t
What’s Driving Design in Your Org?
Design is driven by data, insight, and creativity. Each of the three could drive the design practice alone, while it’s often a dynamic synthesis of the three that leads to real change based on business success. The relative strength of each in that synthesis reflects the design culture, and to a broader sense, work culture,…
Thoughts on Business Intelligence
Notes: I came by this bunch of slides I did for an internal presentation on business intelligence. Although dated and ugly, the points still hold: Always look beyond the buzzword and try to understand the roots of problems; the most difficult challenge in business intelligence is, time and again, not about technology, tools, cost, management,…
Does Analytics Generate Insights?
The tricky thing about analytics is that, it doesn’t really generate insights, and insights are largely irrelevant to the goal of analytics. Insight is a human diet, cooked with human judgement. The goal of analytics is to support decision making. If the analytics doesn’t support decision making, then it doesn’t have to be. When the…
Design in Business and Business in Design
What’s the relationship between business and design? How shall we think of the two in one big picture? Do designers need to understand business more? Should businesspeople understand design more? Those are tricky questions. And then Alan Cooper started a thread (in his characteristic fashion not so different from that of “And that’s when the…
How Designers and Businesspeople Think of Design: A Joke
How Naive Designers Think of Design Design, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. De-sign: the tip of the tongue taking a shot down the palate to tap on the teeth and then refrain to liberate the vowel chamber that follows. De. Sign. As in: awe-some. How Naive Businesspeople Think…
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180606
Design thinking takes the buzz, design doing takes time. Thinking is free. Doing is priceless.
Designerly Quote of the Day #20180513
“…I don’t think design involves that much creativity. It involves creativity in the way doing a crossword puzzle involves creativity. You need some imagination and knowledge. I think of artists as creative because they have to invent something out of nothing. I think designers design because they can’t invent something out of nothing. Or at…
The OK DESIGN Manifesto
Note: Inspired by the OK manifesto in the context of a fascinating story (Everything Is Going to Be OK: What a 1994 Branding Fiasco Can Teach Us About Counterculture and Commerce), the OK DESIGN Manifesto tried. So here it is. The OK DESIGN Manifesto* 1. What’s the point of design? Well, what’s the point of…
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180321
Maybe you don’t need more designers, but more managers and employees who understand design, so that they know when to bring in more designers, how to collaborate with them, what makes good design, and who are good designers.
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180302
All designers bring about their personal design cultures. Only good designers’ cultures challenge your own work culture for the better. Bad designers’ cultures merely hinder your business wellbeing.
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180301
The second step to understand design is to acknowledge that your way of designing is tightly coupled with your work culture and its subcultures. There is no universal process/method that “just works”, unless by “it just works” you mean “it works but”. Your work culture and the way of designing form a dynamic synergy of…
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180226
The peak-end rule is essential to designing experiences. When in doubt, ask an experience designer if he knows it. When in trouble, secure the end.
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180223
The first step to understand design is to know that the act of designing doesn’t quite fit into the traditional, analytical approach of problem solving ubiquitously seen in business. Design goes beyond deduction, inference, to the realm of abduction. Design abduction is the source of creativity in business.
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180221
There’s nothing wrong in thinking that certain things in business are immeasurable or intangible, until it becomes an unfortunately habit that facilitates indifference to creative problem solving or creativity itself. Don NOT ask “what have we been measuring lately?” Instead, ask “what haven’t we been measuring lately?”
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180214
In the business world, creativity in design is first and foremost creativity in solving business problems. It’s creative problem solving, at least initially. There are no dull scenarios in business, because there are always ways to be creative if you try hard enough.
The Painted Veil of Hiring, Recruiting, and Job Seeking
Notes: Presented below is a long overdue article originally planned to be the first part of a three-part treatment on the problems and solutions that are mission-critical to three parties: the hiring company, the recruiter, and the job seeker. My focus has since switched to some other stuff, such as writing a couple of books….
Thoughts on Constraints in Design
A Constraint That Hinders Creative Freedom In both art and design, we can identify three dimensions of constraint: material, functional, and cultural. The beauty of art often lies in the freedom of expression where a constant, self-indulging or self-induced struggle over the constraints by those dimensions. All three pose fascinating challenges to an artist, who…
UX: The Trouble of a Term
The term UX (user experience) has probably come to the point where it’s becoming more misleading rather than encouraging, aspiring, or clarifying. “…the term [User Experience] has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose it’s meaning. …user experience, human centered design, usability; all those things, even affordances. They just sort of…
What Designers Want: A Monologue
Designers think they should be doing more. They are not.
Physicality for Digital Ritual
The Lost Ritual of the Physical Social ritual is largely lost in the digital scenarios. For example, the ritual of lending/borrowing physical books is lost in the digital scenario. So are the resulting mutual appreciation and social intimacy. When you lend an eBook to me, the act of kindness or friendship is barely visible. The very…
Ethics of The Wow Factor in Design
There’s another side of the matter, and that side only comes to trouble us when we ask the fundamental questions. Good Design Is Like Good Sex, Wow Is Like Porn Good design is like good sex. A lot more things than physicality or emotion contribute to a pleasurable or rewarding experience. The wants, needs, as…
