Design Thought Leader

I have never properly regarded myself as an artist. In fact, I have been taught to scoff at the idea that anybody could make a living by doing what they like. Life, in my parents’ worldview, is a process of sustained suffering, whereby the successful reap the rewards of their anguish in the form of BMWs and Caribbean cruises. Artists suffer for their craft. Like Kafka’s archetype, they starve themselves to death in the pursuit of misbegotten visions of transcendence. Art is something you do to get yourself into college, not what you rely on to pay the bills.

During a year off from Princeton, I worked as a sales executive for a mass distributor of blank DVDs. You know that person you want to tell to go shoot themselves when they call trying to sell you something you don’t want? That was me. I had accounts ranging from a Brazilian bootlegger to a belligerent drunk who would yell at me for an hour before buying anything. Aside from teaching me how to sell a B-grade product, the job was quite meaningless. The only saving grace was that my boss wanted the company’s website redesigned. I went to Barnes & Noble, bought myself a book on web design and created what I thought was a masterpiece. In retrospect, it was terrible, but from that moment on, I’ve been hooked on graphic design. Unable to draw or paint to save my life, I found myself slowly capable of using Photoshop as my canvas and my laptop touchpad as my brush.

At Princeton, I spend about five nights a week making or editing posters for the Student Design Agency. Like Kafka’s hunger artist, I am a slave to graphic design because I do not know anything else more fulfilling. I know it may seem pathetic, but setting type on a poster in a perfectly aligned way or creating the ideal visual for an event poster seriously makes me happy. I work with artists and visionaries whose talents far exceed my own, and I despair when I realize how stunningly mediocre I am at something I love so much.

Andy Chen
Designer

Put simply, in order for ‘design thinking’ to be effective (i.e. make the transition from abstract theory or philosophy to a meaningful process of adding value), it has to be applied or limited to a specific relevant context. This might sound incredibly obvious, but my own experience and some of the intellectual discussions recently in the blogosphere indicate that a lot of designers are reluctant to pragmatically constrain the scope or ambition of their thinking. It is this reluctance and the spiralling intellectual gymnastics that follow that leads to ‘design thinking’ becoming esoteric or sounding overly ‘expert’ to novices or non-designers.

Design comes from the latin word ‘designato’—‘to mark out’, thus marking out the boundary or scope of a design problem. To focus creativity has always been a fundamental part of ‘design thinking’ or the design process, perhaps even the fundamental part.

Continued reflection and discussion on the design process and its terminology is particularly important in a new discipline such as service design, however, when it comes to engaging others we also have to contextualise how our ‘design thinking’ is actually going to make things better for people.

Fergus Bisset
Design Researcher

Morale is key in design. I’m surprised people don’t talk more about it. One of my first drawing teachers told me: if you’re bored when you’re drawing something, the drawing will look boring. For example, suppose you have to draw a building, and you decide to draw each brick individually. You can do this if you want, but if you get bored halfway through and start making the bricks mechanically instead of observing each one, the drawing will look worse than if you had merely suggested the bricks.

Building something by gradually refining a prototype is good for morale because it keeps you engaged. In software, my rule is: always have working code. If you’re writing something that you’ll be able to test in an hour, then you have the prospect of an immediate reward to motivate you. The same is true in the arts, and particularly in oil painting. Most painters start with a blurry sketch and gradually refine it. If you work this way, then in principle you never have to end the day with something that actually looks unfinished. Indeed, there is even a saying among painters: “A painting is never finished, you just stop working on it.” This idea will be familiar to anyone who has worked on software.

Morale is another reason that it’s hard to design something for an unsophisticated user. It’s hard to stay interested in something you don’t like yourself. To make something good, you have to be thinking, “wow, this is really great,” not “what a piece of shit; those fools will love it.”

Design means making things for humans. But it’s not just the user who’s human. The designer is human too.

Paul Graham
Essayist, Programmer, and Programming Language Designer

When we’re all put on this earth. We start out as visual people; language comes later, as a coding learned along the way. As you go through the education process, early on you’re more likely to look at pictures in books and learn visually—you take it all in, you see everything. Then as you begin to code things in words, it makes everything more linear and specific. At some point, within our education system, it seems like we shift from a balance of right and left hand brain, to being very left brain. The consequence of this is, if you go through all the important books they are really image free, they’re all words. But designers keep looking at the whole picture. I think this is the reason why designers are so welcome in the boardrooms of corporations. Businesspeople have been kind of brainwashed out of solving problems in anything other than a linear approach. But sometimes, we need both sides of the brain to solve problems. Which is why I find that there are times I can go into a boardroom with guys who have degrees from 12 universities I could never get into, and help them look at a problem in a new way. Once the problem is described, the designer is more likely to say, ‘Well, did you look at this? How about doing it this way?’ It’s about not adhering to a set of restrictions that have defined how you think in business. Designers don’t follow that same book of rules.

Kit Hinrichs
Partner, Pentagram

I would like to write a novel. I would like to write fiction about design. I am very interested in writing and exploring the medium of writing in relation to design. I think that would be my fantasy project. I love Maira Kalman. I love her book that just came out, The Principles of Uncertainty. It’s her beautiful paintings combined with her written memoirs and thoughts about the world. She’s an amazing artist. She’s a real hero to me. And I would love to do a book. I wouldn’t do something poetic like that, but I would do something more funny and about life. That would be a dream project.

At this point in my career, I could do such a book if I wanted, because I could always publish it myself. The challenge is doing these things and having them reach an audience. It’s very important to me not to do projects that are self indulgent, and I think often design authorship is very self indulgent. It’s whatever is somebody’s pet obsession, and for me it’s very important to connect to an audience.

Ellen Lupton
Designer, Writer, Curator, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

Be a continuous feedback loop. That means continuous input: reading books and blogs, attending talks and conferences, using the medium you design for. It also means continuous output: writing books and blogs, speaking at conferences, designing.

Luke Wroblewski
Interaction Designer and Writer

A while ago I was lucky enough to go and see Erik Spiekermann give a lecture. Part of his talk was about his redesign of The Economist magazine. He mentioned that one of the primary reasons for the redesign was that The Economist thought their design was too heavy. The content was difficult to read. In newspaper design, which has so many parallels with web design, information is dense. Sometimes, as in web design, it’s difficult to add white space because the content makes it hard to do so. Newspapers often deal with this by using a typeface for the body, which is quite light and has plenty of white space within, and around, the characters. This was part of Erik’s solution for the redesign of The Economist. He redesigned the typeface slightly, whilst retaining the quirkiness of the original. He added more whitespace to the individual characters. He set the type slightly smaller I believe, with more leading. All of this was adding micro white space to the design. The overall result was subtle. The content was more legible and the overall feeling of the magazine was lighter, yet there was still the same amount of content.

I learnt from Erik that day that, in order to achieve a lightness and an increase in legibility in a design, and this especially applies to the web, you don’t have to look at the design at a macro level. Looking at the space between the tiny stuff, at the micro level, can have a big impact on the effectiveness of a design.

Mark Boulton
Web Designer

In 1992 I made my first study tour to the educational project of Reggio Emilia, N.Italy. I thrilled to the way that this community had, over five decades, developed extraordinary schools for young children. Every aspect, including design, grows out of close observation of children and understanding about how we learn. They refer to their approach as ‘permanent research’ and I find this constantly inspiring and challenging. They also regularly collaborate with the Domus Academy in Milan.

For the past ten years I have collaborated with educators who are committed to re-conceptualising schools and schooling. Each design project becomes part of my ongoing action research to tease out the relationship between children, learning and design. One of the most enjoyable and rewarding aspects is working closely with young people of all ages—infants to secondary. Children can be so insightful and imaginative; they are also the harshest critics and the most appreciative ‘clients’.

Mary Featherston
Designer