Hasta La Ideas

We’ve seen a rapid expansion of the title of designer in recent years, from interaction designers to social designers and beyond. A nice little conversation has popped up in the discussion boards around the modern definition of the term designer and what a baseline skill set that goes across our profession might be; including industrial/product, graphic, interior, landscape designers and even architects. Liking Venn diagrams as I do, I decided to make my answer a visual one.

Check out the full discussion and weigh in with your view point HERE
For those of you with less of a palette for diagrams and more of a taste for nostalgic 80’s cartoons, I’ve formatted a version for you as well below.

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frog design San Francisco hosted two days of California College of the Arts Industrial Design critiques this week for the course “Craft and the Hand Tool” which was co-taught by frog Executive Creative Director, Max Burton. Students were assigned a category of hand tool, such as kitchen, or garden, and, working in small teams, had to develop a brand and a collection of tools that would solve a system of problems. The final deliverable was a professional “pitch” style presentation highlighting functional models.

The final presentations were given to a panel of professionals including Sandrine Lebas, Creative Director of Lunar Design, Mike Simonian, founder of Mike & Maaike, Jonah Becker, founder of One & Co, Kyle Swen, founder of Astro, and myself, Michael DiTullo, Creative Director at frog. Throughout the semester a large emphasis was placed on prototyping, and the panel critics was impressed with seeing nicely crafted final models. We look at dozens of portfolios every week, largely filled with CAD models, and seeing presentations filed with real things was beyond refreshing.

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As designers, we often engage in many of what we call “future of…” programs, for both clients as well as for ourselves. These projects often remove some of the constraints that exist in our current product developments cycle to focus on larger macro trends in human behavior and technology to try to look forward into the future. Cynically this is sometimes called crystal ball gazing, but it often it can reveal insights that can help us to course correct more production oriented programs. Hollywood has picked up on how amazing these kinds of future explorations can be in many movies over the past 50 years, such as the way HMI is portrayed in Minority Report (UI which is already looking old) and Iron Man (CAD interface).

These types of explorations have been going on for a long time in R&D departments, the pages of magazines, and as part of promotions. Sometimes they were amazingly close, and sometimes they are hilariously off. They are our best educated guess of what comes next after next. For a look at the history of such predictions, check out one of my favorite blogs Paleofuture.com

In these kinds of projects we often abstract existing behaviors to manifest a vision of where we think technology can take us. I LOVE this new Dodge commercial shows how that abstraction can quickly become irrelevance, annoyance, and even cause an outright backlash.

There are a lot of things that technology could do for us, but the question is, what do we WANT it to do for us and HOW. As software becomes ever more advanced, will it manifest itself in ways that feel genuinely mechanical? A nice example of this are the fly-by-wire systems in commercial aircraft that work hard to reproduce the feedback of mechanical linkages to pilots. Another example are tunnel mounted stick shifts in automatic cars. The gear selection in an automatic car could be a dial, a switch, or a touch screen, but we seem to prefer the large mechanical lever that emulates the mechanical shifter on a sports car. Is this longing for the more understandable what is behind retro styling and Steam Punk? Is the embrace of mechanical interfaces merely a transitional affordance or is it how human’s prefer to interface?

I don’t have the answers to any of those questions, but continue reading to see the bonus “Slippery Slope” commercial that pokes fun at Google’s attempt to drive your car.

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Dexter from Stéphan Angoulvant on Vimeo.

I’ve been following Stephan’s work since he started a blog about his experiences at Art Center a few years ago. He recently posted a great video of his Dexter Work Bench prototype in action. I love the straightforward honesty and timelessness of this design. Check out the full process HERE.

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above: invite and DiTullo’s sketches from one-on-one student reviews (click to enlarge all images)

Over the past 15 years or so, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many University of Cincinnati DAAP (Design, Architecture, Art, & Planning) grads, in fact I work with at least four right now at frog design. On Feb 28th I finally had the opportunity to visit when Emmanuel Carrillo, chair of the student IDSA chapter, worked with the school to fly me out to give a lecture. I agreed on two conditions, first that it would be a conversation instead of a lecture, and second that I would get to spend one-on-one critique time with as many students as possible… I didn’t want to talk to the students, but talk with them.

While I tend to like the controversial 90’s aesthetic of the massive DAAP building, there is no denying it is kitted out fairly well with great shops and equipment. After touring the facilities the industrial design student body settled into one of the larger lecture halls. With the lights up and no powerpoint presentation, I shared a few of my more personal stories about being in difficult situations in our profession and how I dealt with them. This quickly moved into a conversation about where we as a group felt design had been, where it is, and where it is going. I candidly shared my opinions, as did students and professors, not to find a consensus, but instead to celebrate the differences.

above: shop facilities at UC DAAP

There is no path to follow was the thrust of the conversation. Our field was founded by a diverse array of illustrators, engineers, and architects, and it will continue to be diverse. There will be no one right way to be a designer. It will be what we make it. This chaos will continue to be the beauty of our profession, as our motley band of creatives who are not artists, nor scientists, continue to solve problems and impact culture in unpredictable ways. We use non-linear thinking explained through stunningly visual and tactile media to convince linear thinkers to take risks they never would other wise. Our thinking is not easily understood but our solutions seem obvious afterward. Through chaos comes the auto-evangelical. This is our value.

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