| jerry lieveld
| founder and chief creative at dare.to.difr
| ux & design director at AppMachine
passionate about design craft and making human computer experiences matter.
Master strategists don’t choose or decide on a strategy; they design novel...
“Do the work, Be like water, Enjoy your craft.”
Recently we worked on an interesting project in which the goal was to improve the use (and experience) of a physical space. In this project the physical place was a train station but it just as easily could have been a store, hospital or an airport.
http://bit.ly/100U3nr
There are several ways to approach the design of interactive systems and an ever larger number of specialized products to help UX professionals do their work.
http://bit.ly/13OAuiH
In a post on his Scientific American blog, cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman writes about a study just published in Creativity Research Journal. Researchers Edward Necka and Teresa Hlawacz recruited 60 visual artists and 60 bank officers in Poland and gave both groups a variety of tests of temperament and of divergent thinking (a component of creativity involving the ability to generate many different possibilities).
How did the artists differ from the bank officers? Kaufman explains:
“Bank officers were about as good at divergent thinking as the general population, whereas artists were amazingly good at flexibly generating original pictures and words. In fact, they were almost at ceiling! What about temperament? This is where things get really interesting. On the whole, artists didn’t substantially differ from bank tellers in their temperament. To get to the bottom of this finding, the researchers looked at the relationships between the various measures within each group.
Surprisingly, consistent relationships between divergent thinking and temperament were found only in the sample of artists. Among bank tellers, temperament was not related to divergent thinking. But among the artists, those scoring higher on the tests of divergent thinking tended to display higher levels of the following:
• Briskness (“quick responding to stimuli, high tempo of activity, and the ability to switch between actions”)
• Endurance (“an ability to behave efficiently and appropriately in spite of intense external stimulation or regardless of the necessity to pay attention during prolonged periods of time”)
• Activity (“the generalized tendency to initiate numerous activities that lead to, or provoke, rich external stimulation; it is conceived as the basic regulator of the need for stimulation”)
What’s more, artists who scored higher in divergent thinking also scored lower in emotional reactivity. This might not be surprising, considering the ability to do well on a decontextualized, timed test requires a cool head. When all of the temperamental factors were considered at the same time, activity remained the best positive predictor of divergent thinking, and emotional reactivity remained the best negative predictor of divergent thinking.
I think these results highlight a more general point about creativity: the interconnectedness of temperament and creative production. As the researchers speculate:
‘ … temperament [is] the foundation for development and expression of one’s creative potential. People scoring high on activity tend to have many diverse experiences that may be used as a substrate for divergent thinking and creative activity.’”
Kaufman concludes that “a tolerance for ambiguity, complexity, engagement, openness to experience, and self-expression are all essential to creative production in any field of human endeavor.” (Read more here.)
Let’s go back for a moment to the trait that best predicted creativity in the artists: “the generalized tendency to initiate numerous activities that lead to, or provoke, rich external stimulation.” I wonder if this is where the stereotype of the “flaky” artist comes from: they’ve got a hand in a lot of different projects at once, instead of focusing in a linear fashion on one single task.
We often think that this latter approach is the only way to get things done, but it turns out that if you want to be creative—if you want to come up with new and different ideas—it’s a good idea to be a little scattered.
[shared from Annie Murphy Paul]
Music is a good thing. But what we did not know until we started with the research for this piece: Music is also a pretty damn complex thing. This experimental animation is about the attempt to understand all the parts and bits of it. Have a look. You might agree with our conclusion! Additional sound recordings http://bit.ly/11IbWVx http://bit.ly/14DKah9 http://bit.ly/11IbWVy http://bit.ly/14DKahc http://bit.ly/11IbWVz http://bit.ly/14DKahd http://bit.ly/11IbWVA http://bit.ly/14DKcFK
When the Museum of Modern Art’s senior curator of architecture and design announced the acquisition of 14 video games in 2012, “all hell broke loose.” In this far-ranging, entertaining, and deeply insightful talk, Paola Antonelli explains why she’s delighted to challenge preconceived ideas about art and galleries, and describes her burning wish to help establish a broader understanding of design.
http://bit.ly/16tYbhj
[shared from InfoDesign: Understanding by Design]
[shared from InfoDesign: Understanding by Design]
[shared from InfoDesign: Understanding by Design]
“Throughout my career, and especially as a designer at IDEO,” writes Nathan Waterhouse, “I’ve been a passionate believer of the value of placing people first, of designing from an end–user perspective. […] Perhaps it was the abundance of rhetoric about human needs [at the recent Skoll World Forum] that made me ask the question ‘But what about the rights of nature, other creatures, or of the planet itself?’”
“We are taught to think about the world in three lenses as designers: desirability – what people want, feasibility – the capabilities of a firm, and viability – its financial health. We are taught that we should start from the perspective of people’s needs first: desirability. This way of thinking, however, is selfish. It focuses on the needs of humans, but in doing so, ignores the needs of the rest of the 8.7M species that share planet Earth. What would be desirable, feasible, or viable if we took the perspective of planet Earth and ran it through the same venn diagram?” […]
“Although we don’t believe earth is the centre of the universe, we still behave as if humans are the most important species alive today.”
In the end, he says, “we need a new approach to design that takes into consideration what is important for the natural systems we depend upon and take for granted. Perhaps we should call it Holistic Design: designing with a frame that includes the natural and human systems in combination to ensure we consider the bigger picture.”
(Disclosure: Nathan Waterhouse studied at the renowned Interaction Design Institute Ivrea where he was a thesis student of Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels).
[shared from Putting people first]
A pair of “Visual Assets Guidelines,” posted by one of the company’s senior graphic designers, outline precisely how Google designers are supposed to sweat the small stuff.
In April 2011, Larry Page took the reins as Google’s CEO. He didn’t waste any time getting down to business. On his very first day on the job, Page launched an incredibly ambitious effort to redesign the company’s main products, including search, maps, and mail. He wanted them to be beautiful—Google had never been known for its visual polish—but he also wanted them to be cohesive, more like a true software suite than a jumble of disparate digital tools. In the years since, Google’s products have improved leaps and bounds, aesthetically speaking, largely while working within the same shared design language. Here’s how they’re doing it.
The rare glimpse into the company’s design process comes in the form of two documents—“Visual Assets guidelines”—freshly shared by Roger Oddone, a senior graphic designer. They focus on iconography, covering both broader principles and pixel-level details as they relate to both app icons and UI elements. The aim, an introductory blurb notes, is to set down the “solid, yet flexible, set of guidelines that have been helping Google’s designers and vendors to produce high-quality work that helps strengthen Google’s identity.”
The more exciting of the two covers product icons. Google’s, it tells us, are “simple, modern, friendly and sometimes quirky … highly simplified, exaggerated, and caricatured.” The following pages illustrate the main tenets of their design.
Google encourages its designers to take a “reductive approach” to product icons. Instead of a stylized map with an embossed pin on top, the guide encourages something more restrained: a simplified version of the pin itself. The next section establishes the importance of basing the icons on simple geometric shapes.
The next few parts deal with perspective. Icons should be front-facing, represented entirely on just two axes. Hard, straight shadows are encouraged over drop shadows, gradients, and lighting effects. The document then lays out the details on the precise color palette that should be used for all icons—the exact values for the blue, red, yellow, and green we now immediately read as Google. Next comes typography, a section showing a preferred “pixel perfect typeface for small sizes” as well as the company-wide default for product name text: Open Sans Semi Bold.
With the icon guidelines thus established, we move on to logo lockups, the icon and product name combos that serve as the “brand ambassadors” for the company’s products. Precise guidelines for the spacing, sizing, and typesetting are delineated for the three main components: the product icon, Google logotype, and product name. We learn, for example, that the designated typeface for the product name changes depending on the size at which the mark is being rendered. If the Google logotype is 60 pixels or larger, the product name gets Open Sans Light. If it’s smaller, the go-to is Open Sans Regular.
The second document, in addition to showing examples of the flat, Charley Harper-esque illustrations Google’s been using in its product videos, covers iconography as it relates to UI design, spelling out details like proportion, sizing, and padding.
These are small, dry details. But they’re precisely the sort of small, dry details that Google totally ignored, at least in terms of any sort of company-wide agreement, until just the last year or two. It’s not especially surprising that Google has documents like these. The company’s graphic designers, spread across heaps of products on several different platforms, have to have something to reference when they’re nailing down things like app icons. But it’s nice to actually see the guidelines laid out so clearly, if for no other reason than a bit of proof that Google’s continuing to sweat the details.
Checkout the guides in full here and here.
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[shared from Co.Design]
The Art of Data Visualization | Off Book | PBS by PBSoffbook
[shared from Jnd.org]
From a major VC firm’s recent $30 million investment in the industrial-grade 3-D printing space to the news that Staples will become the first major U.S. retailer to sell consumer-friendly 3-D printers, it’s clear that 3-D printing has reached its inflection point.
http://bit.ly/18FBAza
James Fallows of The Atlantic interviewed tech-industry veteran Linda Stone, coiner of the term “continuous partial attention,” on how to maintain sanity and focus in an insane, unfocused, always-on, hyperconnected world.
“We all have a capacity for relaxed presence, empathy, and luck. We stress about being distracted, needing to focus, and needing to disconnect. What if, instead, we cultivated our capacity for relaxed presence and actually, really connected, to each moment and to each other?”
[shared from Putting people first]
