Design theory

Design theory — 2 Comments
3
Feb 10

How ebooks will replace printed books

Do you remember when film photography was ubiquitous and consumer digital cameras were just starting to come onto the market? (Worryingly, there will be readers of this blog that won’t.)

At the time, there was any amount of commentary from the tech boosters who said that of course digital photography would supplant film soon enough. Meanwhile the naysayers trotted out a list of reasons why they wouldn’t be trading in their “real” cameras for these second-class substitutes and couldn’t see why anyone would.

I don’t need to tell you how that one worked out, but let’s look at the process by which this happened.

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Design theory / Product design / Simplicity — 1 Comment
28
Jan 10

Why wouldn’t you want an Apple iPad on your coffee table?

Apple iPad
The long-awaited and much-hyped Apple iPad is out, receiving a fairly upbeat response in the media and a much cooler, going on hostile reaction among bloggers and commenters.

Spec-obsessed techies bemoan the lack of hardware features and the relatively modest screen resolution, processor power and storage space. But the iPad isn’t about any of those things. It’s about providing a great user experience for the things it does, not beating the competition on points.

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Design theory / Software design / Sutton / Urban design — 7 Comments
17
Dec 09

What’s the point of a tweeting mobile library?

@SutMobLib Twitter screenshot

Last week I launched @SutMobLib, a Twitter account that tweets the location of Sutton’s mobile library in real time. No, I’m not sitting here all day sending messages. A program does that automatically. Every time the library gets to a new stop it posts up its location.

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Design theory / Product design — 2 Comments
17
Sep 08

Parsimonious design (or not)

Perhaps ironically, parsimonious design suffers from the lack of a clear definition. For some it’s practically synonymous with simplicity. For others it takes a narrower meaning that’s nearer to frugal.

Parisimonious design is when you’ve got enough, but no more. It prefers simple solutions to complex ones and conserves scarce resources wisely. We might think of these resources in economic or environmental terms and design products that are both cheap and don’t consume an excess of material or energy. We might consider the user and reject designs that squander their time, attention, energy and space.

Many bad designs offend against the principle of parsimony by being too big, too wasteful, too expensive, too complex, too high maintenance. Such designs are the metaphorical sledgehammer to crack a nut. We find ourselves thinking, “Do we really need all this just to do that?”

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Design theory / Product design / Simplicity / Uncategorized — No Comments
12
Sep 08

The features you have vs. the features you use

As my own small contribution to the literature on featuritis, here’s a personal illustration. My mobile phone isn’t anything fancy. It’s cheap and very basic by today’s standards. No internet, no camera, no MP3 player. I bought it because all I wanted to do was to make calls and send texts.

So here’s a list of what my “simple” Nokia 1100 can do, and what I actually do with it.

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Design theory / Software design / Uncategorized / Usability / Web design — No Comments
9
Sep 08

Estimated date of birth — an interaction design pattern

Context

You want to collect the dates of birth of a group of people so that you can analyse and segment the group by age, but asking for a date of birth isn’t necessary for any specific reason and many people in the group may balk at giving you this private information.

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Design theory / Product design / Software design / Urban design — 1 Comment
16
Aug 08

Hack your world

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.

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Design theory / Simplicity — 2 Comments
24
Nov 07

Getting to Less part 2: Critically refocus

(Back to part 1)

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?

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Design theory / Simplicity — 1 Comment
21
Nov 07

Getting to Less part 1: How to keep what you need and chuck what you don’t

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?

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