Hasta La Ideas

Alan Cooper, Jon Kolko and Joe Stewart in Conversation

Design Extravaganza, presented by AC4D (Austin Center for Design), packed twelve extraordinary speakers into two mind-expanding days. The intimate gathering was a refreshing change of pace from the more established and larger scale design conferences. While there were numerous interesting themes that emerged from the presentations, and lively discussions that followed, a few topics really stood out.

Context Driven Design
Nearly every speaker at the event touched on the importance of user and environment centric design. Research has long played a critical role in driving the design process, but as designers are invited to take on increasingly complex and significant design challenges, we must greatly increase our role in the collection and analysis of contextual data. Several speakers specifically highlighted stories of design and client teams making poor decisions based on lack of practical contextual understanding. Additionally, we saw several examples of how frog Design and others have been able to find innovative solutions through contextual research by discovering that they might not even be asking the right questions. When we as designers put our egos and assumptions aside and truly open ourselves up to the realities of our target users and their environments, we can leverage local knowledge to make our projects more relevant and successful.

Systems Design
Increasingly, designers are being asked to solve for larger, more systematic challenges. The majority of design problems we are accustomed to addressing are finite, and have a definable and understandable set of components. Systems design often require teams to model potential future states of complex interrelationships which are exponentially more complex than simply understanding the sum of parts. Dave Cronin, Design Director for GE, encourages designers to look at these expansive initiatives as platforms rather than a series of spot solutions. When approaching expansive systems, there are likely to be more contributors and stakeholders increasing the importance of taking a more open and collaborative approach rather than applying rigid top down design restrictions. Finding success in systems design often means managing more through enablement and goal setting than prescriptive and formulaic approaches.

Dave Cronin, Design Director for GE

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