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Good Design is a Leap of Faith. It surprises people when we say it; apparently, it’s not what an architect is expected to assert. It usually comes up at the very first meeting with potential clients and it’s always a great test of compatibility. We don’t know what your project is going to look like. And it’s true. Architecture is an adventure; it requires research, investigation, exploration and discovery. To some potential clients, this is very exciting: the idea of going on an adventure is engaging and fosters a true creative design process. The notion that an architect should have a premeditated vision of what a new project should look like from the get-go might be the fault of folklore. For us, form is rediscovered with each project. So today’s post is an appreciative nod to the adventure of architecture and a grateful cheers to the clients who are always up for the leap of faith into good design.

Exposing The Creative Process: A Lesson From Charles And Ray Eames. Thinking Like a Designer. Thinking like a designer can transform the way you approach the world when imagining and creating new solutions for the future. It’s about being aware of the world around you, believing that you play a role in shaping that world, and taking action toward a more desirable future.

In my new book ‘The Innovation Expedition’ I describe the five characteristics necessary to think like a designer. Empathy. The empathic thinker can imagine the world from multiple perspectives – those of colleagues, clients, end users, and customers. By taking a “people first” approach, design thinkers can imagine solutions that are inherently desirable and meet explicit or latent needs. I love to inspire you with a wonderful quote of Bill Burnett, Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford’s d.school: “To invent a future that doesn’t exist, you really have to understand what people are doing today and completely re-imagine it.” By Gijs van Wulfen About the author Sources: Dieter Rams - Ten Principles of Good Design. Good design is innovative The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design.

But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself. Good design makes a product useful A product is bought to be used. Good design is æsthetic The æsthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. Good design makes a product understandable It clarifies the product’s structure.

Good design is unobtrusive Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. Good design is honest It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. Good design is long-lasting It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Good design is environmentally friendly. Dieter Rams On Good Design As A Key Business Advantage. Dieter Rams is best-known for his work at Braun--where he revolutionized the design of electronics--and his indelible influence on Apple’s Jony Ive.

But he has had a decisive hand in another, much smaller company: Vitsœ, a British manufacturer that has been producing Rams’s modular shelving system for 50 years. To mark his 80th birthday, the German master has allowed Vitsœ to release the transcript of the speech he delivered in New York in 1976, in which he articulates his ethos of user-centered design and some of his famous 10 commandments. In 2012, they feel as if they were written yesterday. Enjoy--Ed. Here’s the speech in its entirety: Ladies and gentlemen, design is a popular subject today. The introduction of good design is needed for a company to be successful. Unwavering emphasis on functionality The ideas behind my work as a designer have to match with a company’s objectives. [/figure] I am convinced that a well-thought-out design is decisive to the quality of a product.

Is There A Scientific Definition Of "Design"? What is design? What makes it distinct from art, science, or engineering? The editors of this site decide dozens of times a day what is or isn’t "design. " But is it ultimately subjective, or can it be rigorously defined? Charles Eames offered up a string of impishly oversimplified answers to this question in 1972. Now a pair of Canadian academics have taken the opposite approach: They’ve attempted to formulate analytically a rigorous definition of "the design concept.

" Should we take it seriously? Paul Ralph was preparing his Ph.D. dissertation on "the nature of software design" when his thesis adviser, Yair Wand, suggested that "clearly defining what we meant by design was a good way to begin," Ralph tells Co.Design. Ralph and Wand’s paper is dense reading, but that’s just because they took a serious stab at puncturing common assumptions about what the practice of design is. And in the end, what good is it? [Read the paper here.] Design Is Hacking How We Learn. Don Norman - The Design of Everyday Things. The Design of Everyday Thingsby Donald Norman Norman, D. A. (1988). The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Doubleday. A popular book that will motivate the importance of human factors in the design of everything we use. Jump To: About the author: Donald Norman wrote this book and “The Invisible Computer”.

Reason for writing the book: Donald Norman wrote the book for many reasons. (top) Summary of the Book: Chapter 1: The Psychopathology of Everyday Things Chapter 2: The Psychology of Everyday Actions People feel bad, sorry, frustrated, stupid for not knowing how to operate mechanical things, especially if the task appears to be trivial The world, and everyday things, are filled with misconceptions Aristotle's naive physics - our 'naive' way of explaining the phenomenon we witness in everyday life - often very practical but incorrect. Chapter 3: Knowledge in the Head and in the World (Memory) Chapter 4: Knowing What to Do Chapter 5: To Err Is Human Chapter 6: The Design Challenge. 10 points I always keep in mind while designing. Google finds its design voice on iOS.

From the beginning, Google’s design sensibilities on the web and Android have been unique. Whether you were a fan of the spare, utilitarian feel of products like Search or not, you knew when you were looking at something built by Google. To a degree, that’s still very true. Android apps built by the company have taken on the trappings of overarching design shifts like those introduced with Ice Cream Sandwich.

But you still know that they’re Android apps. The same goes for the web apps, which retain many similar traits to the company’s first efforts. Use of primary or off-primary colors, white space, text prominence and brusque attempts at user interface chrome. And there’s something to be said for maintaining that sense of self. But Google doesn’t just make apps for Android and the web. It all began with the release of a startlingly good iOS app for Google+. The string of well designed, if not exactly perfect, app updates continued.

The difference is evident. The Desirability Factor Human. Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution. By Dieter Bohn and Ellis Hamburger Something strange and remarkable started happening at Google immediately after Larry Page took full control as CEO in 2011: it started designing good-looking apps. Great design is not something anybody has traditionally expected from Google. Infamously, the company used to focus on A/B testing tiny, incremental changes like 41 different shades of blue for links instead of trusting its designers to create and execute on an overall vision. The “design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data” led its very first visual designer, Douglas Bowman, to leave in 2009. More recently, however, it’s been impossible to ignore a series of thoughtfully designed apps — especially on iOS, a platform that doesn’t belong to Google.

Google+, YouTube, Gmail, and Maps are consistent and beautiful — in stark contrast both to Google’s previous efforts and even Apple’s own increasingly staid offerings. They’re talking to each other. Sticky TOC engaged! Google’s No. 1 Asset Is Its Ability To Empathize With Its Users Through Design And Product Development. As your Internet use has evolved, Google has evolved with you. And for you. Its ability to make the right decisions about what to work on and at what time is a testament to the leadership at the company. The latest wave in its evolution comes from Sergey Brin and its new CEO Larry Page, the people who started Google back in 1998. If you’ve thought that all of Google’s products looked cobbled together, or are different from one another, it’s because they were. It was a public view into how siloed the company was as far as its product-management and design teams were concerned. Everyone worked in a vacuum, so when a new version of Google Calendar came out, it looked nothing like the user experience of, say, Gmail.

What I’ve also learned while covering Google over the past two years is that it has an uncanny ability to put itself in the shoes of its users, almost to the point where they can leverage data and feedback to build, in essence, the perfect product. The Legacy The Now Human? How Google Unified Its Products With A Humble Index Card. If you hadn’t noticed, every Google service has been trending toward a certain understated elegance. The company’s infamous era of championing 41 shades of blue is long over, as the company has learned to embrace clean lines, airy typography, and liberal white space across their platforms.

But amidst implementing these long-established good design practices, Google rediscovered an old idea: index cards. Just like index and business cards of yore (or at least the late '90s), Google’s cards are plain, white rectangles peppered with nothing more than a little bit of type and maybe a photo. Are cards the epitome of flat modernism, or are they subconscious skeuomorphism? Even Google’s designers debated this point when I posed the question. We first saw cards returning results through Search’s Knowledge Graph, as Google began summarizing Wikipedia entries into condensed blurbs. Yes, Google is even developing cards on cards. Are Cards Good Design, Or A Foregone Conclusion? Why cards are the future of the web. Cards are fast becoming the best design pattern for mobile devices. We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content.

Content being broken down into individual components and re-aggregated is the result of the rise of mobile technologies, billions of screens of all shapes and sizes, and unprecedented access to data from all kinds of sources through APIs and SDKs. This is driving the web away from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated together into one experience. The aggregation depends on: The person consuming the content and their interests, preferences, behaviour.Their location and environmental context.Their friends’ interests, preferences and behaviour.The targeting advertising eco-system. Twitter is moving to cards Google is moving to cards Everyone is moving to cards The list goes on. Notes. A Rare Peek At The Guidelines That Dictate Google's Graphic Design. In April 2011, Larry Page took the reins as Google’s CEO. He didn’t waste any time getting down to business.

On his very first day on the job, Page launched an incredibly ambitious effort to redesign the company’s main products, including search, maps, and mail. He wanted them to be beautiful--Google had never been known for its visual polish--but he also wanted them to be cohesive, more like a true software suite than a jumble of disparate digital tools. The rare glimpse into the company’s design process comes in the form of two documents--"Visual Assets guidelines"--freshly shared on Behance.

The more exciting of the two covers product icons. Google encourages its designers to take a "reductive approach" to product icons. The next few parts deal with perspective. With the icon guidelines thus established, we move on to logo lockups, the icon and product name combos that serve as the "brand ambassadors" for the company’s products. These are small, dry details. Design Details of Google Maps for iOS. I don’t have a car, so the lack of public transportation in Apple’s Maps app pretty much makes it useless to me.

This is why I carefully avoided updating to iOS6 up to now. This all changed a couple hours ago when Google Maps for iOS came out. Playing around with the app, I was impressed by the design, and I thought it would be interesting to highlight a couple things. (Note that these remarks apply to the iPhone version) The Google Style The “Google Style” of UI design is a sub-style of flat design where everything is white or very light grey, icons don’t have text labels, and typography looks like it’s been through Weight Watchers. I can’t say I’m a big fan of that style on the web (Google Reader looks awful in my opinion) but it works pretty well on mobile, especially for a maps app. The white UI gets out of the way and puts the focus back on the content, and unlike on the web you don’t get that empty feeling that makes you think the page’s CSS has stopped loading halfway. The Side Menu. Design guidance for Windows Store apps.

Why Prototyping is Essential to Your Design Process. Whether it’s just a quick sketch in your notebook or a post-it note, a wireframe made using your favorite graphics software, or a high-fidelity mockup created by a web app — incorporating some form of prototyping within your workflow is a critical step. I’d like to share some reasons why I believe prototyping is an integral part of the design process. Find Design Issues Early Things we conceptualize in our heads that seem awesome regularly turn out to be terrible ideas when we put them in a more concrete, visual medium such as a piece of paper or a computer screen.

Imagine this situation: You’re designing a web form. You’ve been given the input fields that need to be included. Maybe you can do away with some parts of the design. First paper sketch of a web form. A simple prototype can instantly reveal flaws in our design concepts. Iterate More Quickly on a Design Concept Creating prototypes allows you to improve a design concept quickly. Let’s look back at my previous example. Building a Design-Driven Culture. Lately, it seems like every company is presenting themselves as design-driven. They tout accomplishments like hiring a designer as part of the first set of employees, striving for simple and straightforward user experiences and deploying visually beautiful sites and apps that garner first-glance kudos from Dribbble and the tech press.

This promise of design-led culture is pushed with high frequency on design job boards and recruiting emails. Join our team, they say, we really care about design. The problem is that being design-driven doesn’t simply mean caring about user experience or stunning look-and-feels. It doesn’t mean hiring as many designers as possible. It doesn’t mean more wireframes or user research or having a design blog. Being design-driven means treating design as a partner (and a leader) in the product creation process. The reality is that many companies hire designers, but still treat that part of their product as a resource instead of a thought-leader. Kudos. Going For “Pretty First” Is Wrong: A Designer’s Take On App Development. Why Focus Groups Kill Innovation, From The Designer Behind Swiffer.

16 Of My Essential Design Resources. Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society.