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.
I don’t mean to suggest for even a second that Leisa, Stowe, Ryan and Jeffrey aren’t designers. They’re just four people who, although they all work in the indernetz, do wildly different things. Talking and listening to them, and my discussion with Mathew Patterson the other day, got me thinking about how the folks who call themselves “designer” define what they do.
The web has exploded the concept of design. Once was the day that a designer was someone who made aesthetically pleasing things (that’s right, objects you could hold in your very own hands) which solved a problem. Sometimes the problem was a selling a new car, sometimes it was selling concert tickets, sometimes it was earning points for taste with your neighbours, and the list goes on and on. Although these are very different endeavours, all are called design, and there are also fancy, well-designed drawers for all of them: industrial design, graphic design, furniture design, and so on.
Now we’ve got “web design”, a drawer that’s full of folks who do funky stuff in photoshop, some who think and scribble, others who write HTML and CSS and quite a few mash-ups of the above.
Do you call yourself a designer? Think about design for a minute, and write a comment below and let me know:
What do you do every day?
How do you define “design”?
What parts of what you do are essential to your definition of design?
The more answers, the more interesting the comparisons, so even you lurkers and off-chance one-time-only visitors are encouraged to chime in.
