• A presentation and collection of resourcse on creative problem-solving and divergent thinking
• A related discussion on divergent thinking, as well as a whitepaper on website optimization for learners
• Thoughts on the flexibility of religious beliefs, which led to a short but interesting discussion in the comments

If you’d like to keep receiving updates, please subscribe at the new site.

I’m starting up a new blog, where I’m going to write about design and design theory, user experience, education, and philosophy, and perhaps enter new areas as well. I’m going to continue some of the themes I wrote about in DIDaily, but I’m going to focus on my original thinking and writing rather than links to other websites. If you prefer the format of DIDaily, though, there will still be a little of that here and there—I’ll seek a balance.

If you’d like, you can subscribe to IotB via RSS or email. If you’re already subscribed to this one, I don’t have the ability to transfer your subscription over to the new site, so please subscribe manually.

On a side note, I’m sorry to say that the “designdaily” email address associated with this blog has been defunct since March, and I didn’t realize it until recently. If you emailed me and I didn’t reply, I apologize. The “designdaily” address is now operational again, while you can also refer to the new site for my primary contact information.

I hope you enjoy what’s to come at IotB. Regardless of whether or not you follow the new site, thank you for being my reader for the past few months!

Carl DiSalvo recently commented on the Eames’ films, looking at the films as “meditations on objects.” Along with that, he posted the film “Lounge Chair Assembly” (1956).

Another film available online is this advertisement for the Polaroid SX-70, the landmark instant camera. The film is a beautiful example of the Eames’ style. Also worth noting is the way the film reflects a systems view of the camera, moving between user and manufacturer, presenting the camera as a technological object, as a useful object, and as a meaningful part of a user’s life.

Yesterday, I pointed to summaries of the talks from the first day of the conference. Johnny Holland Magazine also published summaries from the second and third days (their server was down last time I checked, so here are Google’s cached versions of the articles from day 2 and day 3).

On day 2, Ezio Manzini discussed the role of digital platforms in the economies and communities of the future. Christropher Fahey gave an even more fascinating (and perhaps bold) presentation about the humanization of technology, which implies that technology will become more human-like without replacing or replicating humans; in addition to the overview in the above article, take a look at his slides. From day 3, Dan Hill’s talk is interesting because he brings the subject of urban design into the context of interaction design—similar concepts applied to very different time frames.

Since I wrote yesterday’s post, I also found the slides from Nathan Shedroff’s talk about the forms and roles of meaning in experiences and designed experiences. The slides can be downloaded from Shedroff’s website.

I highly recommend Nicolas Nova’s reflections on the conference. He pieced together many of the theoretical elements of the talks and made an interesting comparison of the design models that appeared throughout the conference.

Sarah Mitchell traced a few of the core themes from the talks and posted photos of her notes.

Finally, Dave Malouf, interaction design professor at SCAD, wrote a compelling (if cryptic) piece about the importance of social responsibility and even activism in interaction design.

Johnny Holland Magazine published daily synopses of the conference sessions. Two notable talks were those given by Nicolas Nova and Jon Kolko, both towards the end of the article: “Live at Interaction’10: day 1.”

To go along with that, Nova’s slides can be viewed here; I think the compelling title speaks for itself: “Design and Designed Failures: From Observing Failures to Provoking Them.”

Jon Kolko followed up on the conference in Design Mind: “An Emerging Divide: Some Thoughts from the IxDA 2010 Conference.”

It’s time for architecture to do things again, not just represent things.

Back in November, I wrote about the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas, a 12-story, reconfigurable building, and I posted a TED talk with its architect, Joshua Prince-Ramus. Prince-Ramus recently gave another talk in which he discussed the same project in more detail. He makes it clear that the theatre, though fancy, was designed purely to meet the functional and artistic needs of the theatre company. The talk addresses the same issue that appears in graphic design and industrial design: the problematic view that the purpose of design is simply to make things pretty.

Joshua Prince-Ramus: Building a theater that remakes itself

Michael Bierut at CreativeMornings

This is a remarkable phenomenon. It shows that the framework for the usage of the system, which is, in this case, a traffic system, informs the way people use the system—but not through constraints, not through direct communication, and not through affordances. Users’ perception of the environment changes how they think they ought to drive, even though the surrounding town might have nothing to do with their intention to travel to a destination.

David Lindes writes about a similar pattern in a completely different environment. In the process of redesigning an application for a certain business process, he set out to learn about the clients’ workflow and found out that it was excessively complicated. This reflected a problem with the client’s old application. It wasn’t just that the old program was a bad match for the process, but that the program’s complicated workflow had actually changed the way the client understood the process. Even though the original business process was not to be driven by software, “user interfaces are one of the principal sources from which a person learns about his or her work.” The implication for our own design process is huge. “UIs that lie & the users who believe them.”

The Art of Editing: The New Old Skills for a Curated Life

Her article resonates with me as a blogger who (currently) focuses on filtering lots of content and sharing articles based on a certain editorial intent: to follow a theme and to provide value that goes both beyond and deeper than the daily buzz that you’d hear about even if you didn’t read my blog. That’s one reason why I intend not even to mention the iPad here. (Oops.) Of course, I’m not an editor in the strictest sense; I do inject my opinion into the blog once in a while.

I’ve discovered that curation is a difficult job: I’ve accumulated a massive collection of RSS subscriptions since I started reading this stuff eight months ago. I filter through one to two hundred posts per weekday—I certainly don’t read all of them—but in order to synthesize something each day, I have to read many of them closely, pick only the right items, and put them together with a fitting context and motive.

Unfortunately, I can’t do this every single day. Especially during school, when homework commands most of my waking hours throughout all seven days of the week, I have to forego this practice on many days (which explains the missed days over the past two weeks). As you know, I’m working on getting a system running at InsteadoftheBox.com. (I missed my deadline, but it’s coming soon.) I’ve decided that, although I plan to keep doing the same sort of thing indefinitely, I’m going to drop the “daily” part of this blog when I move over to the new site, at least for while I’m in school.

Meanwhile, some great stuff will be coming your way over the next couple weeks. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you have something interesting for me to post, send it over!

On a completely unrelated topic, Dan Brown republished a 2005 article in which he describes an unusual approach to software design. Instead of using functional specifications, information architecture, or user personas as the main drivers of the design process, Brown focused on the large and complex set of decisions that users must make while using the software; he treated the software as a system built primarily to support the users’ decision-making: “Decision-Based Design.”

(Found via Steve Portigal and Lost Garden.)

“What type are you?”

A font inspired partly by the “visual conceit in the work of the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher:” Priori Acute

Tyler Thompson challenges the lazy, low-quality visual design of airline boarding passes; the project has turned into a small movement over the past several weeks: Boarding Pass/FAIL

So, this blog will receive less attention this week. Soon after I get my site running, this blog will move over there, either in its current format or in some new format.

Meanwhile, here’s a talk from the Business of Software 2008 conference by Steve Krug, the author of the essential web usability book Don’t Make Me Think. The talk, as well as the book, is a must-see for anyone who does web or software work, but designers in other areas will learn a lot from what Krug has to say about how users approach and interact with the medium: Steve Krug on the least you can do about usability

Don Norman on 3 ways good design makes you happy

Niels Diffrient rethinks the way we sit down

Tim Brown on creativity and play

Recently, I linked to a piece by Uday Gajendar about designing for panic. That post, although great on its own, wasn’t a good representation of his blog as a whole. Often, he writes incredibly deep, insightful analyses of design theory and philosophy. He discusses challenging issues (with challenging responses), such as the definition of interaction, how a product conveys meaning, and the role of integrity in design. In this post, he reflects on some of the lessons he learned while he was a grad student at Carnegie Mellon, which include a few approaches to understanding design that are completely unconventional and different from what we read in most other places. Follow the links within the post to read some of his other writing, which is equally challenging and insightful. It’s well worth spending two or three hours reading his old posts.

Ghost in the Pixel: CMU grad seminar diagrams & lessons.

Another promising blog, which just began last week, will present weekly entries on user experience: 52 Weeks of UX: A discourse on the process of designing for real people.

In another video from The 99 Percent, Ji Lee talks about a personal experiment from 2002 in which he printed stickers of speech bubbles and placed them onto public advertisements in New York. “The masses responded and the project went viral;” people wrote all kinds of jokes and satirical comments onto the speech bubbles, and others eventually imitated the project by creating their own speech bubbles. “Ji Lee: The Transformative Power of Personal Projects.”

Continuing on yesterday’s theme of design thinking, Colin Raney and Ryan Jacoby, business designers at IDEO, recently published an article in Rotman Magazine about using design thinking in the process of decision-making in business. As I see it, the concept of design thinking doesn’t involve anything new with regard to the design process itself, but it’s new in that it’s an abstraction of the problem-solving processed used by designers. Along the same lines of what Roger Martin, Tim Brown, and others have been writing recently, this article provides a good overview of design thinking and how it can be applied in new contexts. “Decisions by Design: Stop Deciding, Start Designing.”

• A concept for a cell phone that could run on soda instead of a battery: “Eco-Friendly Nokia Phone by Daizi Zheng.”
• An umbrella with blunt (rather than pointed) tips that make the umbrella both safer and stronger. It seems like such an obvious solution—I think most of us have been poked by an umbrella at least once, and umbrellas do tend to tear at the tips—and most umbrella designs are incredibly short-sighted. “Greig Brebner’s better umbrella, ella, ella.”

Roger Martin, the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and one of the popular advocates of the “design thinking” movement, wrote a short piece at the Harvard Business Review explaining that, in a good business strategy, “where-to-play and how-to-win choices fit together and reinforce one another.” This is a basic but often-missed principle of business strategy, but its relevance is not limited to business. A solution that is both innovative and effective must implement a carefully chosen method (how to win), while the method must be developed in concert with equally careful choices in users, culture, and physical environment, as well as the problem itself (where to play). “Why Most CEOs Are Bad at Strategy.”

The where-to-play and how-to-play questions are especially important in the design of competition robots—and speaking of which, this year’s FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) season began on Saturday with the release of the rules for the game “Breakaway.” High school teams participating in the program each have six and a half intense weeks to analyze the game and then design, build, program, and test a 120-pound robot that will play this game. Among FRC’s many challenges in engineering, problem-solving, and teamwork, the robot design process is interesting because teams must develop the same two elements of their game strategy. At first glance, the game rules seem to tell you “where to play,” leaving teams to decide “how to win.” The best teams, however, will design a strategy that aims for mutual reinforcement between their robot’s functions and operation (how) and considerations of which field structures to interact with, which area of the field to play on, and how to interact with other robots (where).

Watch the three-minute animation describing the game itself and check out the FRC home page for more information.

For your weekend viewing, here’s an interesting presentation from 2008: Jensen Harris, a user interface designer at Microsoft, talks about the process of developing the ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007. Back when Microsoft began developing the next version of Office in 2003, their team found that, while Office was fairly complete in its range of features, the user interface was insufficient for the software’s complexity: “The user interface was failing our users.” Harris and his team set out to reimagine, redesign, and evaluate the interface.

In the presentation, from the MIX conference in 2008, Harris describes the design process for the ribbon, including some of the team’s iterations, prototypes, and mistakes. Video, audio, and slides from the presentation are available on his blog. Although the video is a bit long, and even though “Microsoft” connotes “boring” for some, watch at least the first 4 minutes to get a taste; it contains valuable insights and design lessons.

Here’s the blog post: The Story of the Ribbon

Yesterday’s article on Johnny Holland—incidentally, also by Jared Spool—was a bit ironic because I’ve been writing website reviews and recommendations over the past couple weeks. Spool warns of the risks of making recommendations as a designer, suggesting that experimentation is a better way to arrive at decisions about a design. The lesson is also important when we, as designers, give each other feedback; a particular suggestion could be right or wrong, but our feedback is more valuable if we first aim for a better understanding of the problem. “My Recommendation: Stop Making Design Recommendations.”

Most companies (including web startups), he said, are looking to “wow” with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an “‘of course’ reaction from their users.”

The concept of user-centered design is now commonplace, but it is not so commonly understood that the ideal user experience is not made up of flashy features that capture one’s attention but of functions that seamlessly fall into the context of the user’s natural behavior. Malik, drawing from the documentary Objectified, discusses the importance of the “of course” factor: “User Experience Matters: What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From ‘Objectified.’”

Colin Raney extends this idea to customer experience and business design: “Of Course…”

Two of my favorites from the past week are:

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
Albert Einstein

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce

Speaking of RSS, I’m going to take this opportunity to recommend Google Reader, the web-based tool I use to keep track of 200 different feeds (which I really don’t have time to read). I’ve tried quite a few different feed readers, but only Google Reader is both easy to use, designed well, and complete in its range of functions.

Finally, watch this video of “The Most Useless Machine EVER!” If no other machine does, THIS machine has character.

Uday Gajendar wrote an article about designing for panic. How do you design for the infrequent situation in which the user is panicked, anxious, stressed, and in a hurry? Some suggested strategies: “Panic! at the user interface.”

Andy Rutledge republished his (perhaps contentious) article that challenges the common understanding of creativity: “On Creativity.”

On a similar vein, Scott Berkun challenges the doubtful idea that “creativity” is the secret of innovation: “The secret about innovation secrets.”

Nicolas Nova blogged about a paper from the International Journal of Design about how people interpret the movement of automatic doors as a gesture. The simple interaction pattern involved with automatic doors contains a rich set of challenges with regard to emotional design. The study described in the paper analyzed participants’ responses to different door “gestures.” The paper (by Ju and Takayama) can be downloaded here (PDF). The subject reminds me of the XKCD cartoon “Automatic Doors” as well as the Pizza Planet airlock in Toy Story (see below).

With that, I wish you a happy holiday and new year! DIDaily will return bright and early on January 4, 2010.

Citation for the paper: Ju and Takayama. “Approachability: How People Interpret Automatic Door Movement as Gesture.” International Journal of Design 3.2 (2009).

While catching up on Chipchase’ blog, I found a slideshow and a paper about Nokia Open Studios, a project his team ran in 2007. As an alternative method for design research, Nokia conducted public design contests in three “shantytown” communities in Ghana, India, and Brazil. The project was an innovative way for Nokia to engage these communities as well as a fascinating strategy for discovering the wants and needs of such distant (both geographically and culturally distant) communities. This slideshow summarizes the project and also contains interesting lessons about design research. For more detail, see the paper.

In a couple days this blog will go on a temporary hiatus for the holidays. Before then, I want to ask for your feedback:

• What do you think?
• In general, is DIDaily worth reading? From what I’ve written so far, which kind of content has been valuable, and which hasn’t?
• How often do you read DIDaily? If not every day, is that because you don’t have time to read it every day, or because the headlines don’t always look interesting?

I’d love to hear from you—feel free to leave a comment on the blog, or send an email to designdaily at insteadofthebox.com.

Now, for today’s promised links:

Saturday’s “Today” by Eric Baker presented a collection of cigarette cards, which were collectible cards that would come in cigarettes packages during the 19th and early 20th centuries. His article as well as the New York Public Library’s digital gallery of cigarette cards are an interesting window into the culture, marketing, and graphic design of the times.

Obviously, these objects aren’t alive. But on the other hand, personality can be a useful device for communication and usability. Cennydd Bowles writes about the forms of personality that appear in technology and their relevance to a product’s usability and effectiveness. “Does technology need personality?”

On a side note, here’s a funny idea: a pencil with a pencil on the other end, so you can celebrate your mistakes instead of erasing them—mistakes are, of course, an essential part of the process.

Jack Moffett wrote yesterday about the forces which affect the features that are included (and excluded) in a tool as simple as a note-taking application. This excerpt from an upcoming book by William Poundstone reveals how the layout and graphic design of a restaurant menu is determined by the way the restaurant wants the customers to perceive the prices.

On the other hand, Scott Berkun’s criticism of a particular interactive visualization shows us that the expectation for “whizzy fun visuals” sometimes competes with the effectiveness of the visualization as a communication tool.

Where else do these sorts of expectations conflict with each other?