This week’s links on design-thinking and design come right after I shared some observations made on a recent trip to India.
Apple is giving design a bad name, writes Don Norman, who established the User Experience Architect’s Office later becoming Vice President of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group. His co author is Bruce Tognazzini, a usability expert. A long read that Norman first said in August 2015 he was writing.
Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining people’s true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them. Design combines an understanding of people, technology, society, and business. The production of beautiful objects is only one small component of modern design: Designers today work on such problems as the design of cities, of transportation systems, of health care. Apple is reinforcing the old, discredited idea that the designer’s sole job is to make things beautiful, even at the expense of providing the right functions, aiding understandability, and ensuring ease of use.
So, what is the special sauce that makes one an exceptional designer?
Exceptional designers have strong human values such as empathy, respect, and honesty. These values not only influence a designer’s approach to developing products, but also their approach to working with colleagues. After all, building great products doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Here is another twist on design. Our desire to design humans has a long and peculiar history. With a presentist lens much of it is quite squirm-inducing. But a worthy read.
Not all Americans who supported eugenics were racist and nativist. To a first approximation, everyone was a eugenicist in the early 20th-century US. But for the core of the movement, the eugenic tenet that any disability was all in the genes also put scientific teeth into laws setting racial quotas for immigrants. Reformers pressed for mandated sexual sterilisation of those deemed unfit, including the feebleminded, the criminal, the deaf, the crippled, those with venereal disease and other conditions.
Finally this eclectic collection of one hundred quotes on design caught my eye. Here is one:
Design is thinking made visual. — Saul Bass