Comments on Fear of Design

udanium — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

I have to speak up as well…First, as an interaction designer who does IA, UI, and ID, am NOT afraid of “design” and in fact welcome it as a process of exploring and solving problems from a human perspective, vested with values like usable, useful, and desirable. I agree with erin and whbardel totally…design is a broad term encompassing many activities, much of which involves organizing, structuring, researching, analyzing, and sometimes digital production, too (the most commonly visible expression of design, though not the totality of it) for a wide range of artifacts: logos to parking garages to restaurant menus to cell phones.

Second, I believe IA is design and deeply involves design thinking at multiple levels, including for artifacts like those I just mentioned. I’d encourage people to read RSWurman, Shedroff, Clement Mok for further insight.

Third, to respond to jjg: creative problem solving is manifest in a variety of professional domains and may be regarded as “design thinking”, whether it be business strategy, engineering, software, etc. See Herb Simon for further discussion on how design, interpreted as a “science of the artificial”, may be critical and evident in all human endeavors featuring intentional planning and creation of artifacts/services for use.

Fourth, usability engineers typically should have a bilateral dialogue with designers, informing the process with their evaluations and maintaining a presence throughout from begin to end. I hardly think there’s a time for them to “leave the room”, even in stages of early innovation and brainstorming.

Simply put, design (thinking) is quite broad and embodies varieties of interpretations, in IA and elsewhere and should be respected as a pervasive and influential discipline with (symbiotic) ties to other domains; not feared because of blase pop cultural suggestsions of what “design” connotes or being mocked as “designer”.

W.H. Bardel — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 03:40:05 GMT

I also disagree with jjg. It’s not clear-cut.

Design is a truly broad term. Abstract dictionary-speak it’s anything involving the conception and construction of something according to plan. Which inherently includes problem solving as part of that process. In contrast, the common everyday-person perception of design is that it involves making things “pretty.” With such a range, it really depends on what you think design is and involves. To some particularly usability-minded IA people, I think “designer” is a dirty word they fear to be associated with because of the perception of “designer” as “artist.” That latter word grates against their methodical, user-centered sensibilities. (No offense to usability people, without which a lot of things would be worse off).

I can only speak for myself. I work as both an IA and as an Information Designer. From these vantage points I’ve seen similarities between what most call IA (with its various applied methods, including usability testing, modeling, etc) and its cousin Information Design, which is really a form of visual design based on many of the methods & principles of IA.

Both IA and Information Design involve using problem solving to crafting usable structures for communication & interaction, with the key difference being the hierarchy level (macro or micro) at which the planning & shaping is taking place. Typical IA crafts macro-structures (like a web site, system organization, etc.), typical Information Design crafts on a more micro-level (page layouts, tables, charts, forms etc…. Hmmm, that sounds pretty “designer”-like to me). They may use different skills and work at different levels, BUT both IA and InfoDesign. involve creating organized “structures or maps of information that allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge” (oops, isn’t that the first definition of IA by Wurman?).

Which really illustrates my original point that it’s not a clear-cut issue, so don’t fall for an absolute statement either way. The skills, tools, and means involved in IA and “design” can vary or differ completely (making them by all appearances seem totally different), but at the same time there can be significant overlap (as in the case of Information Design), where the means, goals and methods can be nearly identical.

If you surveyed everyone you know, you’d find “design” is broad and vague. So to for “IA.”

erin — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

I have to jump in here – as a designer turned IA turned product designer – I must say that in all my work – whether it be designing a logo or organizing a set of content in a way that makes sense – DESIGN – is happening. The act of solving the problem and then putting things in an order and stating that this is the way that makes sense is Design. Whether it has color or a certain font is beside the point. An IA is crafting a path, a way of looking at things – information or process that inherently is not the natural way things fell out. It is designed. It bears the leftover marks – scent – of the person who created it and their experiences and biases. Other people may come along and add to the experience which often masks th initial work that the IA did in terms of what is often accepted as design, but their work is still design.

jjg — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: IA IS NOT DESIGN.

Design involves creative problem solving; however, this does not mean all creative problem solving is therefore Design. Amazingly, I have never met a Designer who was able to grasp this distinction.

Designers see Design everywhere. Every time they have to exercise a little creativity to solve a problem they say, “Look at me! I’m Designing!”

Don’t fall for it. There’s no such thing as Designing a route to the post office, there’s no such thing as Designing the arrangement of books on a shelf, and there’s no such thing as Designing an information architecture.

However, your main point, about being willing to stand behind our work, is totally valid.

Seth Gordon — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

Am I afraid to place _my_ work out in the open for review, compliment, and complaint? Nope, not at all. As long as I am completely responsible for it.

But, when working on large projects, rarely is the work that I present my pure vision. When that’s the case, I am the spokesperson and whipping boy for what amounts to a team effort.
Even though I’m presenting the work, what’s on display is usually a compromise of my original vision, smeared with input from just about everywhere, including my own team members and client feedback. It is not uncommon for me to have to incorporate suggestions for reasons other than the fact that they improve the user experience.

Getting to a presentable IA/design is almost always a reconcilliation and a negotiation process.Just as I wouldn’t take full credit if everybody loved it, I don’t eagerly accept full-blame for any shortcomings (but for the sake of professionalism, I grin and bear it).

So, unless I become a one-person show or work in a vacuum, I don’t ever expect to have 100% control over my final deliverable – which means that on an internal and personal level, I won’t ever accept 100% responsibility for it.

George Olsen — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

Creation/evaluation—This parallels Scott Berkum’s argument about the need to both prove/disprove your design.

Whether it’s done by different people depends on the temperment of the people involved and the context.

In “traditional” graphic design, one of the things that elevates you to senior designer or art director is developing the ability to look dispassionately at your own designs, which is something that generally only comes through experience.

christina — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

Thanks, Steve, for the distinction between *roles* and *people.* Information architecture is design, Usability (testing evaluating, etc) is evaluation. Usability people may design (though it may also lessen their famed objectivity) and Information Architects may evaluate (also potentially biased). Design is always “dangerous” and takes courage no matter who does it.

Also, please understand that when I say IA, I also wish to include all the structural design professions that may wish to hide behind a scientific objectivity, including Interaction design, interface design and information design. It’s all design.

Elmi van der Dussen — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

The usability issue:

I found that often usability engineering is equited to a compliance audit. It might be the way it is sold and practiced. This might be a result of the emerging nature of this discipline, and opportunists climbing on the bandwagon after they’ve read three sets of guidelines.

To design (structure) an information space, or web space, and the nvaigation within this space, as well as the look-and-feel of ti, is multi-dimensional, and requires a combined skill-set. The most visible result is the look-and-feel – so graphic designers can sell themselves more easily as being required in the design process.

David Heller — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

The Usability Issue:
Christina is right. I’m sorry I don’t know how you cut it, the heart and soul of Usability Engineering is to guide design, but not to design. They work with designers and they help them out, but in the end they are not designing. Their methods don’t employ a design process, but are much more analytically and data driven. This is a necessary piece of product development, it is invaluable, but it is NOT design.

Christina (and myself) might be alienating a group of people in the BIG ia world, but lets please focus people about what IA is and isn’t instead of trying to fit everywhere, especially in places that have long been filled by good people doing amazing work.

David Heller — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

Congrats Christina for kicking us in the butt a bit. I think one of the reasons we are afraid of the design, is b/c our work isn’t considered design.

I was just in one of those meetings with my boss telling him what I really want to do, and I said “I want to design. I’m sick of intuiting my wireframes. I want to use the design process to create informed designs.” Something that there is currently no time in the design process to do. Even when I was at an agency where I controlled the consulting gigs the best design process I was able to conjour was just doing wireframes.

How many of us out there are in positions where doing interfaces is just about doing it? How often do we supply a client 3 versions of wireframes? I would sit in awe at how the visual designers get 3 weeks to not even come up with a final product and I would work my ass off to finish wireframes at 50 wireframes in 2 days.

This mentality that interface design is a chore, and visual design is an artform is what we are fighting against.

Ralph Brandi — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

I spent years feeling that the word “design” was so loaded that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I took any number of circumlocutions to avoid the word; adopting the title “Web Architect” in 1996 was one of my early attempts to get across the idea that I create web sites without being associated with the baggage that the term “design” carries. I spent a lot of time considering fields that provided an analogous experience to what I was doing.

I had a conversation with Nick Ragouzis at CHI in 1998 about design. I denied that what I did was design, for exactly this reason. Call me a web architect, web cinematographer, webmaster, even a web engineer, anything but a web designer.

I still have a hard time explaining what I do. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s a creative endeavor. I make web sites (gee, that wasn’t hard). When I’m done, there’s something there that wasn’t there before, or there’s something there that’s better than what was there before. Is it design? I don’t know. I suppose so, especially if you define “design” the way Dave Parker does above. But I still have a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach knowing that the term is most often used to describe an approach to web site creation that, in my experience, has most often resulted in unusable sites that I’m then asked to tinker with to make them more able to meet the objectives laid out by my clients.

dave parker — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

Of course IA is design, in the same way that many things we do throughout the day are design.

Design is seeing a problem to be solved or a task to be accomplished and figuring out (or borrowing from established practice) the best way to solve that problem or accomplish that task.

When you cook dinner—whether you make the dishes up yourself or follow someone else’s directions—you are designing. When you decide whether you will mow your lawn in rows or in a circular pattern, you are designing. When you drive to work, choosing the best route based on traffic and other factors, you are designing. When you take a shower and decide to put the shampoo on your hair before scrubbing your face, you are designing. And when you organize a Web site’s information and provide for a computer user the optimum path to get to that information, you are definitely designing.

keith bishop — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

I think IA can either be “design” or “not design”.

As Edward de Bono once stated,

“You can analyse the past, but you have to design the future”

This relates to IA very clearly, on one hand we can come up with the deliverables for IA in a project by applying rules learn’t from past experiences (be it our own or other people’s). This approach would give us a technically correct solution based on tried and tested principles.

But, that solution will not likely be very ground breaking or serve to push the development of IA (as a whole) forward.

To do that we need to design, to use our intuition, to take risks, to discover new ways of doing things and perhaps be a bit crazy.

So my boring conclusion is that there will always be room for both the “non designer” IA person and the “designer” IA person, just as some projects need a “standard” level of usability where as other projects may need a more “innovative” approach.

The sad thing is, for me, is that the majority of people I have worked with in software development or web design, fail to recogonise the importance of IA or indeed how far it can (and must) develop.

George Olsen — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

Back when I was in journalism there was an apropos phrase for the stage when you had to shear away all that beautiful prose that wasn’t necessary to the story. It was called “killing your babies”—and it _is_ hard to do.

But it’s a skill the best writers, and designers, have to learn how to do. It’s the flip side of having the courage to make the creative leap.

The biggest difficulty I’ve had with younger designers (both print and web) is getting them to understand it that’s its not personal, since as John says, they’ve got their egos invested in it.

However the same might be said of usablity folks as well. Sometimes usability concerns need to be balanced against other concerns, for example as Dan Shaffer talks about in “Building Brand into Structure.” But too often, I hear usability results presented as an all-or-nothing proposition.

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

(eesh…you’ve just summarized my book. Do I still have to write it?)

Yes, IA IS DESIGN.
And guess what? Increasingly, design is IA. Last year, this was the “5,000 foot view,” but it gets closer to earth every day.

What do I mean? I mean that the methodologies we kludged together to account for a situation of explicit informational flow – a user interacting with the Web – also happens to be very useful for situations of implicit informational flow. Such as the interaction of a user with, say, a citrus juicer.

You think I’m kidding? I drew up a persona, developed a (admittedly barebones) scenario bringing that persona into contact with a citrus juicer, elaborated a use case specifying each point of informational flow between object and user…the results were illuminating.

If designers don’t learn to think this way, I’m betting they’ll be swept aside by those who do.