What I like most about the whole story is Duarte’s search for information and history behind the posters. He’s a student in Steven Hellers’ D-Crit program, and his mission for this project was to seek to unearth historical facts about a design, without using Google.What luxury - to have the time and space to pick up a phone, make some calls, talk to the source, and engage in the construction of a story.
Scott Berkun has some deep thoughts on the plague of “not invented here.”
An executive might proclaim the wonders of the new (worse) thing to his division without encountering anyone willing to stand up for the old (better) thing. It’s harder to inflate the importance of one’s own work if the key decision was to buy or borrow from elsewhere.
Great organizations reuse, repurpose, and extend that which already works. By reusing that which already exists, and is known to work, time and effort can be better focused on that which is new and innovative. Within the context of the large organization, innovation is far easier when the ethos is not to reinvent, but to explore that which is new.
In between reading email on my laptop, checking craigslist postings on my iPad, and periodically interfacing Facebook on my iPhone, I managed to sit still enough to read this 5 (ugh) web page article in the NYTimes about the dangers of multi-tasking.Here’s a summary quote:
A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.
Information overload, my friends. It’s something I’m sure you all have experienced, even if you do yoga, eat your vegetables, or meditate like a monk It’s a symptom of many screens, everywhere, and the constant pulse of information through them, then mainlined straight into your behavior.I, for one, have taken a pledget to only compute when in the den, and always out of eye-shot of my baby daughter. I’ve also taken a pledge to not check my iPhone for updates, but only for text messages. I’m curious to see if this new pattern of behavior is sustainable, and whether the difference is enjoyable.
The graphic identity and environmental design for the show - by Bibliotheque Design - is inspired by the work, and an incredible design in its own right.
I couldn’t agree more with these twelve beliefs. As a manager of incredibly creative and talented designers, I have found that these beliefs are especially crucial.
Design Thinking is a great thing, especially when the end result is great design. This free primer on the topic, however, is simply a case for bad graphic design. Sure, the concepts within the package are good and useful but - please, please, please Stanford d.School - hire professionals to do your branding.In general, one of my complaints with design thinking is that it is too much about the process, the concept, the business and the engineering, and too little about aesthetics. Aesthetics is what is core and fundamental to great design - it’s part of the total experience that actually immediately touches people. For some strange reason, much of the propaganda around design thinking seems to consider aesthetics as an afterthought, or ignores it altogether. Perhaps it is because those who have established the notion of design thinking see aesthetics as so fundamental, that they fail to mention it?
The latest from Information Architects - it’s a map of the worlds 140 most influential Twitter users, over time, categorized by domain, in the form of a constellation. Very nicely done.
You can download a PDF of it here, and print it out at your local plotter. Alternatively, it’s makers have produced a limited run of the maps that can be purchased online.
I’m a sucker for behavioral economics, which means that Dan Ariely’s book the “Upside of Irrationality” most definitely makes my reading list. Today driving home from work I heard Dan interviewed on NPR. Here’s the audio of the interview:
The bit that stood out to me was an experiment that Dan conducted with legos. In this experiment, he used two scenarios involving lego robots. In the first scenario, people built robots, one after another, and were paid on a diminishing scale. It was up to the participants to decide when the benefit of building robots was not sufficient, and then they stopped.
The second scenario took place using the same conditions, but after each robot was created, the experimenters disassembled the robot before the eyes of the participants.
In the second scenario, participants stopped far sooner, and reported that they enjoyed the act of creation less. And when the experimenters asked how much people enjoyed legos in general, those who enjoyed legos in general persisted in their task longer. But in the second scenario there was no correlation.
Ariely postulates that the negative effects of the second scenario are due to the fact that when the creations of one’s labor are destroyed before their eyes, they joy of the task is choked out of it. As a result, people gave up much faster, and enjoyed the job less. In other words, when we destroy the meaning of a person’s job, we jeopardize both their satisfaction and their motivation.
This all seems obvious, but at work we are rarely building lego robots (darn). Instead, we are building a report, or a design, or a full fledged product. Not everything everyone does will be correct, or successful. But the key take-away that I received from Ariely’s research is that in order to support motivation, it is crucial for managers to recognize the hard work that people put into their creations. And if the work isn’t right, the next step is to provide a higher level meaning to the critique (or the destruction), in order to maintain motivation.
Ethan Eismann is an Experience Design Manager at Adobe Systems. This blog is about Flash, Flex, AIR, Flash Catalyst, RIAs, design management, and design writ large.
