Design, Citizenship and the City
First came the guerilla gardeners, sowing seeds and planting plants in public places without permission.
Then there were the guerilla benchers, installing street seats where the local authority had been too poor or too mean to do it themselves.
On the web, a growing community of civic hackers has been building sites on top of public information to mash it up in new ways that the publishers hadn’t imagined or didn’t have the means or motive to build.
Getting to Less is all about helping designers decide what to keep and what to throw out of their designs. Whether you’re designing software, websites, products or cities, you need to choose what to include and what to omit. But how?
Continue reading ‘Getting to Less part 2: Critically refocus’
Simplicity is becoming an increasingly important trend in design. As life becomes faster-paced and we’re deluged with more choices, more information and more stuff, users and consumers are demanding that designers do the heavy lifting of making things more focussed, easier to learn, more refined.
The question for designers is “How?” How do we know when something is just right, and when it’s too much or not enough? How do we separate the essential from the peripheral? When do we stop?
Continue reading ‘Getting to Less part 1: How to keep what you need and chuck what you don’t’