One of my favourite aspects of the Information Architecture Summit earlier this year was meeting and getting to know Dan Willis. He’s a consultant for Sapient (yawn) but far more importantly, he’s super smart, super funny, and scribbles like a demon. He also looks pretty suave wearing my hat.
My favourite bit is what Dan has to say about defining the problem that design is there to solve:
I don’t think it’s served design or designers well to run away from that part. I think designers need to step up their game. If they’re not able to step it up to where they’re really good at that, they should at least not be satisfied with being told what it is at the end of the day.
Thanks for the interview Dan!
Click here to see all “What’s Design Mean to You?” interviews.
As I mentioned previously, it’s been quite a while since the IA Summit. The recent surge of inspiration and energy caused by UX Australia reminded me that I had a number of video interviews with some very smart people, just sitting around waiting to be uploaded.
So here’s the interview with Steve Baty, user experience strategist, one of the organisers of UX Australia, and an awfully nice man.
Thanks Steve!
Click here to see all “What’s Design Mean to You?” interviews.
Can I ask a favour? Can you please ignore the fact that South by Southwest (SxSW) and the IA Summit were about five months ago? You can? Thanks, how kind of you!
At SxSW and the IA Summit this year, I continued a little project I started around this time last year when I was at Reboot — I sat down with smart people who use the word “design” to describe at least some of what they do, and asked them what the word means to them.
Like a fool, I missed both of Thomas Vander Wal’s presentations at Reboot 10. I heard they were good. So it was only coincidentally (and after the conference was over) that I managed to get this interview with him a the funky Fox Hotel where he was staying.
So what’s design mean to you, Thomas?
It’s the layer on top of things that are used, that makes them comfortable and gives them more ease of use. It’s adding experience but taking away the hard edges, and allow people to embrace the tool or service in a closer interaction.
Other than that, his explanation of “the four foundation layers” for developing social tools gave me plenty to think about.
After the interview, Thomas and I coincidentally discovered a shared love of typography, and spent an afternoon in Copenhagen, a beautifully designed city, hunting interesting type with our cameras (his booty and mine). It was a blast to spend time with Thomas: he spit out interesting stuff the whole time, and I wish I’d written it all down.
I’ll be seeing Thomas again soon, and would love to do another interview. What would you ask him if you could? If you’re as interested as I am in what he’s got to say, leave a comment with your questions, and I’ll gather them up and me and my camera will ask him next week.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the last video in the series.
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.
