Good questions don’t often lead to good, definitive answers. They often lead to better questions that derive better definition of our problems. Innovation derives more from asking than from answering.
Do Not Go Gentle into Good Design
Do not go gentle into good design, Solution should burn and live another day; Rage, rage against the problem we define. Though the means to their end ain’t no benign, Because their words had forked no action they Do not go gentle into good design. Lame designers wave by, crying how bright Their designs might…
Are Immeasurable Things Measurable? A Brief Thought
The most important things in life are impossible to measure. The other important things are very hard to measure, or impossible to attribute success to. We keep replacing judgement with data, when we should use data to augment judgment — Tom Goodwin (@tomfgoodwin) September 17, 2018 Don’t totally agree but also can’t agree more with…
Culture Thought of the Day
Encouraging people to take risks, although critical, is not enough for people to make informed decisions and take elaborated actions. Helping them explore where, when, and how to draw the line is perhaps far more important. The former is inspiring, the latter is leading.
Designerly Quote of the Day #20180912
…design is not a midpoint between the applied arts and sciences. Design is a third culture with its own founding postulates and axioms, with its own approach to learning and inquiry. Design is inclusive of things found in science such as reason and in the arts such as creativity. But just as science is inclusive…
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180906
Design is purposeful. Interaction is intentional. Intention is full of influences, which designers are responsible for. A decent interaction design always goes with elaborate planning of the chain of intentions. And when done well, the experience delights the users with senses of achievement and meaning.
The Chain of Intentions in Interaction Design
Design is purposeful. Interaction is intentional. There’s a chain of intentions in Design. They are connected by interactions and justified by purpose. Structuring the flow of those intentions is a critical part of design. Intention Vs. Purpose For clarity, let’s first differentiate intention from purpose. We can loosely define intention in design as the goal…
Priorities in a Flummoxing World
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal-that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow,…
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180829
Solution is the incarnation of a believable vision. Vision is the incarnation of relatable meaning. Meaning is the incarnation of creative exploration.
Designerly Quote of the Day #20180828
When you get far enough along the spectrum that you really know the difference between bad and good, and how much there is to know, and that you will always be surprised, and are convinced you’re nothing more than mediocre— that’s when you’re at your best. That’s when you get the best results. You’ve put…
Designerly Quote of the Day #20180827
Companies don’t need full-time specialists most of the time… Instead, companies need overlap. They need a group of people who have a range of skills. People who can do user research and strategy definition, swing into interaction design and content strategy, maybe kick up a prototype or two along the way (in one form or…
Designerly Quote of the Day #20180823
“A fundamental assertion established for wicked problems is that any attempt to think them through completely before acting is doomed to fail. They cannot be solved, since their fundamental tradeoffs prevent any solution from addressing them as a whole. They have to be approached differently, by envisioning a positive outcome for a change, ensuring its…
Designerly Quote of the Day #20180822
These violent designs have violent ends, And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they please consume. The trickiest design Is loathsome in its own moral weakness, And in the greed confounds the ethics: Therefore design responsibly, good design doth so: Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow. — Fanz Hugo
Thoughts on Waterfall, Design Culture, and Beyond
Notes: a recent great chat made me think about the waterfall model. My thoughts walked from there. It’s pretty much a designerly thought of the day (DToD) post. Diagram: By Peter Kemp / Paul Smith (Adapted from Paul Smith’s work at wikipedia) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons Although it has often been antagonized or…
Culture Quote of the Day #20180820
Most companies have lots of people with different skills. The problem is, when you bring people together to work on the same problem, if all they have are those individual skills—if they are I-shaped—it’s very hard for them to collaborate. What tends to happen is that each individual discipline represents its own point of view….
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180817
Persistently thrive to become so good that people can’t ignore you. Share selflessly. Help responsibly. Learn endlessly. Think constantly. Do creatively.
Designerly Thought of the Day #20180816
There’s no need to be disappointed by our failure or the frustrating inertia that dampens progress. While we should be ashamed of our reluctance to learn or indifference to learning.
Design Reasoning and The Innovation of Meaning
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….
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…
