Interview number ten is with Kars Alfrink. How’s that for a cool name? On his own site, leapfrog.nl, he describes his work so: “I design the dialogue between people and the products & services they use, with the help of a broad range of sketching and prototyping techniques.”
Kars’ answer went in an interesting direction, quite different from any other answers I got in the interviews:
The unique thing about design, as opposed to other disciplines such as engineering, is the capacity to imagine things that are not actually here yet, and imagine them in such a way that they can be experienced. [snip] The designer has the capacity to make them tangible in some way, for other people, without them needing to be built.
As you’d imagine from this quote, Kars does a lot of prototyping, which he explains in some detail. He also said some pretty interesting, and uncoventional, things about the relationship between design and understanding of, and involvement in, the technologies of implementation.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the next-to-last and tenth video in the series. The last interview with Thomas Vander Wal will be up shortly.
The video series is almost at an end, and it’s approrpriate that we’ve finally gotten to Stowe. The seed of these interviews was a post I wrote a while back, which came from hearing Stowe and Leisa Reichelt both talk about designing sites. Neither of them are designers in the traditional “graphic design” sense, so there was a bit of a definition question there for me.
Stowe’s pretty well known online, but if you haven’t read his blog or seen him speak yet: he’s a consultant, blogger and thinker, so far over “the edge” of social tools that he often sounds a little crazy (and I mean that in the most admiring way). He writes about social tool developments on /message, and earns his money by helping companies think through (or design) their tools.
Funnily enough, a number of people at Reboot asked me, “what exactly does Stowe do?” Admittedly, I didn’t really know exactly either. He explains it pretty good in the interview.
And what’s Stowe’s take on design?
It’s the laying out of processes or models that represent some thing that’s going to be built or manufactured.
Unfortunately we got cut short by the rain. I’ll see if I can’t squeeze some more out of him next time we see each other.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the ninth video in the series. The last two, Kars Alfrink and Thomas Vander Wal, should be up tomorrow.
After seeing Cennydd’s presentation at Reboot 10, “Beauty in Web Design”, I knew I had to interview him as well. So in the ten minutes he waited on his taxi to the airport, we had a chat.
When I asked what design means to him, Cennydd said it was a “bloody hard” question, but judging by his definitive and certain answer, I reckon he was just playing coy.
Design is art within constraints. The primary one will be that it has to be functional, it has to do something. Design has to be for a purpose, it has to meet some kind of need, it has to achieve some kind of goal.
We then veered off into a discussion of canonical works of web design, and web design and beauty, which is maybe more interesting than my original question. I look forward to having another chat with Cennydd at the upcming dConstruct in September!
This is also my first test of viddler, which allows you to add a comment directly on the video itself. If you’ve got something to say, roll over the playback head on the timeline and then click the green + that appears.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? There are currently eight videos in the series, and more coming soon. Next up is Stowe Boyd.
On the first day at Reboot 10, rumours started circulating that, although he was nowhere to be seen on the schedule, Howard Rheingold would be delivering a talk. I read his books “Virtual Reality” in uni, and “The Virtual Community” when it came out, and I have to say they both had quite a bit to do with me becoming what I am today. So I screwed up my courage and almost (but hopefully not quite) embarrassed myself with the whole gushing fanboi schtick, and had a chat with him after his lecture. He was of course as friendly and open as you’d expect, and happily agreed to this interview.
At work I jokingly call myself the “Internet Opa” (Opa is “grandpa” in German), simply because I’m older than most of my colleagues and I’ve been online longer than most. Howard’s the real Internet Opa if ever there was one. Summing up Howard Rheingold in a sentence is beyond me, but right now he describes himself as a writer who founded the Social Media Classroom, an online educational tool to help students learn to use social media. He just announced that they’re taking on the first students.
A little bit of Howard’s take on design:
In the broad sense it means thinking about what the function or purpose of things or processes are, and translating that into action.
I asked eleven smart people what design means to them at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark. There are currently seven videos in the series, with more coming soon. Next up is Cenydd Bowles.
The sixth video in the series is Marston Alfred, 17 year type 1 diabetic and founder of Sugar Stats, an online tool that helps diabetics track their own bloodsugar levels.
I took a very short and simple quote away from Marsten’s interview. Design is:
The experience put into context.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? There are currently six videos in the series, and more coming soon. Next up is Howard Rheingold.
Interview number five is with Tobias van Veen, a visual designer at info.nl, a web design agency in Amsterdam.
I’ve been busy working on a shinier, happier mattbalara.com, so I’ve been a little slow in getting all of these video interviews online. Today I’ll put up at least two, maybe three, more interviews, so sit back and enjoy some smart thoughts from smart people.
What’s design to Tobias?
Design for me is to create a total user experience in a product that customers should use very easily, and enjoy!
This is the fifth of a series of interviews I did with eleven very different people at Reboot 10 in Copenhagen, Denmark. You can see all interviews here.
I quite liked his view on analysis vs. synthesis and the role it plays in design:
Design is one of the professions that bridges the analytical way of doing things with the synthetical way of doing things. If you consider analysis to be breaking a thing down into finite elements, and looking at relationhips inside it and making sense out of it, you can say that synthesis is about the interrelationships and the combinations of things. I think that designers have this unusual intuition for what could be meaningful in this analytical [information]. It’s less rational, and more emotional in its approach.
The third in this series is Julian Bleecker, a member of Nokia’s Design Strategic Projects Studio and co-founder with Nicolas Nova of the Near Future Laboratory.
My favourite quote, answering the question, “What is design?”
It’s close to being able to create things for people … understanding people as social entities, not just as masses of tendon, meat and bone.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the third video in the series.
The second in this series is Andy Budd, user experience director at clearleft in Brighton, England.
The microphone on my flip video camera could be better, so I apologise for the windy sound quality. And I was still getting used to video interviews, so I apologise also to Andy for cutting half his face off through much of the interview.
It’s totally off-topic, but I have to admit my favourite quote was this one:
People have suggested that being able to wrangle sharks is actually quite good when dealing with clients…
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the second video in the series. The last two, Kars Alfrink and Thomas Vander Wal, should be up tomorrow.
A while back I asked here on the blog “What’s Design Mean to You?” Just before reboot I had the idea to ask the smart people at the conference the same question. The result is eleven videos. I’ll be posting them here as I get them cut and uploaded.
The first is Eckhard Rotte, developer at Neuland in Bremen, Germany.
My favourite quote:
When engineers and designers really work together, that’s good design.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the first video in the series.
