Hasta La Ideas

I was privileged to be interviewed by Steven Heller for piece just published on AIGA’s Voice called “To Design or Not to Design: A Conversation with Allan Chochinov. In the interview Steve and I talk about product design, design imperatives, and design education, and it was a great chance to flesh out some ideas around sustainability, responsibility, and pedagogy. Here’s my favorite exchange:

Heller: Students have the right to choose to be “citizen designers.” I believe my students should not be herded into a pen where all they do is follow the golden rule, but I believe I–we–have an obligation to teach them to design in a responsible manner for a realistic goal. I also believe that they must be taught to convince others of the rightness of what they are doing. Of course, this is a double-edged sword, so to speak: They can be too convincing and, like Bernie Madoff, be total scoundrels. How do we keep designers from pulling the wool over the client’s and the public’s eyes? I believe we must be diligent about our critiques and what we accept or not. Too often students are allowed to get away with things that would not be accepted by professionals, under the guise of allowing them to grow. Have you been affected by that conundrum?

Chochinov: This is something I talk a lot about in class, actually–the notion of what is “playing fair” and how these students have been manipulated and bullied by all the forces active in contemporary culture, and how they are now learning the skills to fight back, and how they can be used for good rather than evil. I don’t want to make too big a deal about this, but the art of design is very often the art of persuasion–whether it happens through a product or an ad campaign or a poster or a piece of interactive media. So preparing the practitioners of that art comes with an added responsibility–on top of the “training” and “educating” I alluded to before.

But when you offer that “too often students are allowed to get away with things that would not be accepted by professionals under the guise of allowing them to grow,” I’d like to propose a caution: Professionals are some of the worst offenders, of course, and preparing students for “professional practice” may be preparing them for the compromises, complicity and propagation of the same unsustainable values and outputs that we now understand to be the dark side of design, advertising, marketing and mass production. I think school is exactly the place where they should be getting away with an unbelievable amount–particularly grad school.

Read the whole thing here.

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Design Glut who recently wrote the Insiders Guide to the New York Gift Fair for core caught up with Jan van der Lande of Kikkerland to get the background on how they started and more importantly, how to get such a company to carry your design product.

How do you pick new products to represent?

It has to fit the Kikkerland image. What we really do is take ordinary products and utensils that people use and give a contemporary twist to them. Most of the time designers come to us with a design they’ve created. If it fits with what we’re doing in a certain section of the company (Home, Kitchen, Bar, Toy, etc…), and we think it’s something new and different, then we take it on.

What is your advice for designers that would like to approach you with an idea?

Learn as you go, and try to visit as many trade shows as possible. A lot of times designers just sit at home and get so wrapped up in their work. They don’t realize that they’re working on something that’s already been thought of, or maybe even already put into production. If they knew the market and saw what was already out there, they would be more cutting edge.

Read interview

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Are your photos worth thousands of words? Thousands of dollars? Thousands more photos? Pulitzer Prize-winning photo editor Stella Kramer will help you get the picture (and figure out where to sell it) at mediabistro.com’s one-night Photography Portfolio Review this Tuesday in New York City. Come to get your book critiqued and edited, stay to learn practical information and insider tips (the best kind!) on how to get coveted magazine jobs and build a career as an editorial freelancer. A more dynamic, lucrative portfolio is just a click away.

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Rob Tannen and Bressler Group unveiled their concept for the FieldCREW tablet — a data gathering system for design researchers — via Tannen’s excellent Designing for Humans blog last October. The project was notable for evoking memories of the Tricorder and the Speak & Spell, but also for provoking some thoughtful discussion about the physical manifestations of all this mostly-digital User Interface theory that gets bandied about.

Tannen has just taken another step, with an excellent and lengthy set of articles on Ergonomics for Interaction Designers. Published as a three-part series, the first post starts by pointing out the increasingly physical nature of the IxD field, especially as gestural and haptic interfaces are coaxing users to interact with their information in ways other than typing, pointing and clicking. The Driving Factors section alone makes the read worthwhile — here are the first two items:

1. The rapid proliferation of touch screen and other gestural interfaces which combine “direct” physical control with digital interface design. If you want to design for a finger, you have to know how a finger works.

2. The growth of ubiquitous computing leading to an increased range of scale and form factor in devices that contain interfaces, from traditional computers and laptops, to kiosks, tablets, phones, interactive video walls, electronic ink and consumer appliances (to name a few). As a result, people are interacting with interfaces in range of positions and contexts that go beyond simply standing or sitting in front of a screen. So beyond fingertips, knowing how people can reasonably user their bodies to hold, view, reach and interact is valuable.

Anyone tasked with designing any sort of touchscreen or physical motion-based UI would do well to give it a look. (Note to fans of the FieldCREW tablet — the version 2.0 concept was just unveiled last week).

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The Rotman School of Management dedicates its winter issue (pdf) to wicked problems, a concept not unknown to futuregazers. Jeff Conklin of the CogNexus Institute once characterized wicked problems as follows:

The problem is not understood until after formulation of a solution.
Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem.
Constraints and resources to solve the problem change over time.
The problem is never solved.

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