Say you like Samsung’s low-cost texting wizard for MetroPCS, the Messager. In fact, you like it a lot. Problem is, you keep looking at it and saying “it’s missing something.” What could it be? 3G? A 5 megapixel camera? Naw, don’t be crazy — what this baby really needed was a glowing yellow angel on the back.
via MetroPCS intros Mister Cartoon-tweaked Samsung Messager.
check this out for more design pattern self-help guides.
The design patterns
The Design with Intent Toolkit aims to help designers faced with ‘design for behaviour change’ briefs. The poster* features 12 design patterns which recur across design fields (interaction, products, architecture), and there are also 35 more detailed here on the website. Some of the names will be unfamiliar, but we hope the patterns and examples will be understandable, and inspire your own concepts.
Think about how you might apply the ideas to your brief, and what could work given what you know about the problem. If you get stuck, try combining ideas from different patterns: many real examples can be thought of as using two or more patterns.
via Design with Intent | The Design with Intent Toolkit v.0.9.
This is the first in a series of tips, tricks and recipes for designers, artists and other visual thinkers working in meetings and other sessions where large amounts of complex information need to be collected and visualized. It’s a peek into how XPLANE approaches discovery and uses visual thinking to communicate key ideas.
Why we do it:
Live sketching gets people engaged in the discovery process and leads to ideas that may not have presented themselves via normal note-taking. The response to visuals being created before a clients’ or colleagues’ eyes is energetic, and that leads to a natural desire to fill in the picture, completely. The result: Understanding and alignment, quickly.
to know what are the steps? just click on the link below. and personally me, i don’t think “designers” is the right word to say anyone and everyone should be doing this. talking and writing is very leftside thinking. doodling and sketching is very rightside thinking. so to get the best energy out, people need to do both. again this goes back to my philosophy of talking vs doing.
via xBlog: The visual thinking weblog » 5 live sketching tips every designer should know.
I came across this article.
(excuse my writing, i just speed write cause i don’t have the time to proofread.)
It is a bit long but i found it to be very informative about how an organization like Apple works. I love their twist of words saying Apple = Innovation. Which could be true, but one thing they did not mention and this refers for most corporations is passion. Look at Nike, most of the people who work at Nike run as a way to relax. Nike looks for employees that are active because they are their best consumers of products. In theory, corporations need to hire people who love their activities that the company produce but are never satisfy with what current products are doing for their activities’ satisfaction. It is part of evolution, we can not make or design the perfect product without mistakes, errors, deadends. A product to become “perfect” will need to go through several stages to help designers and coworkers (personally i think everyone is a designer if they have passion) to understand their confusion and to realize a better vision.
Most people talk talk talk… for my background of german traits, we don’t talk…. we do… talking is a bit abstract to make into action. And talkers need designers cause designer does both. talk and do, or another words they talk and “doodle.” Sketching is way to bridge the talkers with the doers. As an artist starting in a school like risd, they love to “TALK” and it does not matter as a student – how unskilled their project looks, they want to see the idea in the project. They value talking with a twisted balance of doing. So for 18 years of “doing habits” i had to retrain my thinking to talk about the idea.
so for most organizations i feel they been in to many talking situations with no bridge between what they are talking about and what they are actually doing. Apple succeeds at this balance, and it does not matter if you the consumer love the product or hate it, as long as your employees love what they are producing that is most important, cause they will use viral marketing getting their friends to buy the product and their friends and their friends. etc etc.
This explains why our American auto industry sank… their employees never took pride in their work and get their friends to buy the products they built.
my rule of thumb, you should not look for smart people. you need to find passionate people with sharp minds.
they will have plenty of fuel to keep their energy going and they are sharp to pay attention to details with questions.
I found this article to be very direct and short to the point about the meaning and definition of storytelling by designers. Why it is needed and the value everyone can get from it. The link to the full article is below.
In my view, design is not just about making things. Design is a social, collaborative activity. The day when one person conceived, developed, produced, and sold a designed object is largely gone. Much design — particularly interaction design — occurs in the context of a large organization, or is distributed among a number of smaller organizations. Design is a distributed social process, and, as such, communication plays a vital role.Consider some examples. A key part of interaction design involves communicating effectively with the intended users. The more effectively the design team can elicit needs from users, get feedback on various prototypes, etc., the better the final design. Similarly, there is a requirement for effective communication within the design team. Team members must reflect on the state of the design, develop critiques of problems, suggest alternative solutions, and so forth. Particularly in interaction design, where team members may be drawn from a variety of backgrounds, good communication is vital. Finally, the design team must communicate effectively with the larger organization of which it is a part. No design can really be said to be successful if it doesn’t make it out the door. The team must succeed in convincing upper management of the design project’s validity a process which may be repeated throughout the life cycle of the design, and, if successful, the team must be able to communicate the key aspects of the design to those who will implement, manufacture, market, and distribute it.
via Storytelling.html.
This i have to say is the BEST brand logo remake I have seen today! this represents the 21st logo design. very sync with energy….
At the center of Avid’s brand identity is a new logo composed of simple geometric shapes derived from the buttons, icons and markers that consumers and professionals recognize as fundamental to the digital audio and video solutions they use every day to enable their creativity. The new logo forms a visual connection to iconic shapes that represent “volume up, volume down, play, pause, record and forward,” signaling a unification of the company’s core audio and video offerings. The distinctive mark also spells out the company’s name in abstract letterforms.
this is a mental note for myself about the issue with the terminology of design thinking and what it means for all of us who are desigeners, MBAs, and engineers, or any other words…. ALL OF US!
i run the issue with the word design, because it is a jargon terminology which can very much backfire in any discussion you have. Time and again i have to explain what this jargon means to many types of people because no one bothers to either explain it or state the meaning correctly.
And the inside secret about this jargon, as designers it means MANY DEFINITIONS so it matters to who you are talking too when they explain it.
I keep my definition very short but allow the person to ask more questions. “Design is the substance to which people are engaged.” So with that, it allows for the people to ask a question which helps me to define it further for their background.
Another words, i need to know who you are and where you fit into this world of process development. Allowing me to define the term design in your language for you to better understand.
The word design is soo mysterious because no one wish to define it for you. And mystery make you want it more…. that is a marketing gimic… in theory we are making you ache for “design”
….Indeed, this soul-searching by business — for literally a better soul — has lead to design, but robbing the soul of design by asserting an assumed control of Design Thinking will only lead to sugarcoating a fundamentally flawed system that is in serious need of criticism and modification.I do believe that the new model for business orientation is — in fact — Design Orientation on the road to customer value maximization, leading to repairing the damage done to our socioeconomic fabric and ultimately saving the soul of business.Design Orientation is the proper language to use when honestly admitting that business needs to orient itself toward a different direction of doing business.Design Orientation acknowledges the role of design in business and promotes collaboration between management and designers at the highest rungs of the decision making ladder, emoting a shift toward a new social and hierarchical order.
Okay, really i am not an expert in the field of UX design and many really have better grasp of what user experience design is about.
In the end, my simple explanation: it is about you the person doing an action with an object. We the “designers” analyze these events.
(and i have to say designer is not the right jargon for this terminology because today everyone associated with that word designer as someone who is artistic – or can draw! which is not really the case. engineers, business, mathematicians, etc etc who cares/empathize with humanity are in a way the designers)
but i saw this several days ago and you really have to go to the flickr page of iA to see how they split this diagram into different conversations of all the roles people play in this process of user experience design. If gives clarity to what we do, but also allows to make better questions to wonder if this is what we are doing or how we should improve ourselves.
Flickr Photo Download: The Spectrum of User Experience: Preparing the next blog entry.