Design Thinking

Design story: The Decanter from Landor Associates on Vimeo.

For a wonderful “Mad Men” era video about design check out the decanter video from Landor. No doubt design was simpler back then but it is impressive to see the level of craft applied to such transient objects. I was also impressed by how big the budgets must have been to afford such lavish prototyping. It is great to hear the voice of one of the grandfathers of American design.

I came away from watching Avatar the other evening stunned by the ingenuity and beauty of the world that James Cameron and his team created. Like any design geek I loved the futuristic hardware and the user interfaces that were even more seductive than those in Minority Report. What really blew me away though was the biology of Pandora. The design of the eco-system was  both visually seductive and functionally believable, at least for the most part. I was particularly enamored with the little ‘helicopter lizards’. One only needs to watch an episode of Planet Earth to know that some of these weird creatures created by Cameron could be quite plausible and I couldn’t help wondering how much of a leap is it to go from representing the plants and creatures of Pandora in cinematic 3D to bringing them to life in real life 3D?

Avatar makes the idea of designers creating new life forms that much easier to believe. I am sure there is much that is technologically challenging about going from software models to flesh and blood but personally I found many of the biological ‘inventions’ of the movie just as desirable and interesting as futuristic inventions of the past like the Star Trek communicator or the light saber from Star Wars.

There is a discussion going on amongst some of my colleagues about the merits of minimalism versus simplicity.

My own view is that minimalism has come to represent a style and as such is limited in its usefulness. It represents a reaction to complexity whereas simplicity relies on an understanding of the complex. This is an important difference. One is about the surface, about the stuff. The other is about our experience and requires a deep appreciation of how things work so as to make them just simple enough.

Minimalism is often all too obvious while great simplicity can be practically invisible. John Maeda of course talks far more eloquently than I about simplicity in his book of the same name.

I often look back to design history to find the best examples of simplicity. Sometimes it is the result of great restraint on the part of designers but sometimes it is a result of the limitations of technology. One example of just such an historical example is one that I personally experience every time I drive my nearly fifty year old Porsche 356 in the dark. With any modern car I find night time driving a disembodied experience with a Times Square like display of instrument lighting acting as a barrier between me and the world through which I am driving. My ancient old Porsche has no such isolating display. Instead I can see two crescent shaped slivers of light emanating from the headlights on the front edges of the hood. These perfectly designed beacons help connect me to the world outside in an elegant and efficient way, as well as helping reassure me that both lights are functioning properly, and are a result of the careful positioning of the edge of the headlights. Simplicity at its best.

I couldn’t resist posting this link pointed out to me by my colleague Gabe Trionfi. These are a delightful example of the power of visualization to explore new possibilities. None of these famous car brands would necessarily think of themselves as likely sellers of micro-cars but these images show that perhaps they are not so unlikely after all. Plus they are kind of cute.

Nathan Shedroff has just written what is likely to become the sustainability manual for designers. Design Is The Problem is a thorough and informative survey of just about every aspect of sustainable design. It covers important frameworks, schools of thought and specific tools. It’s interspersed with good examples and case studies that reveal the complexity of the issue and that force the reader to engage with the topic rather than assume simple answers, which of course don’t exist. Design Is The Problem does not go into significant depth on each topic but it will give you a place to start on pretty much anything related to sustainability. Definitely an important book to have in your library.

I have just been given a fabulous new book created by a recent arrival at IDEO, Ferdi van Heerden for publishers Gestalten. It’s called Data Flow and takes a look at data visualization in graphic design. This has long been the domain of Edward Tufte and Richard Saul Wurman but Data Flow does a great job of showing a diverse range of work from designers worldwide. Some of the work wins more points for aesthetic elegance than for information clarity, which somewhat defeats the point, but there are plenty of examples of innovative and effective ways of communicating complex data. My favorites includes World Mapper which connects a world map to data such that each country is scaled to represent its true scale for whatever topic is being displayed. Jessica Hagy with her wonderful and humorous index card graphs shows how graphical information can represent humanity. Xavier Barrade makes sense of the concept often used describing the loss of Amazonian rainforest based on the number of football (soccer) pitch equivalents by literally drawing the pitches onto aerial photos of the Amazon. It’s worth checking out for some great visual inspiration.