Back to School

By Nate | September 21, 2011

I started this blog exactly 6 years ago. Oh, how things change.

I graduated university, worked for the top design website in the world, travelled to four more continents and now I’m here. At the beginning of September I headed back to school, studying in the Advanced Digital Design program at George Brown College. Enrolling in the program was kind of a last minute thing for me, I only applied in July and got accepted in late August. Now that things are in full swing, I’m very glad I took the leap.

The class is quite small with only 15 students, each with a different background and specialty. I decided to enroll to give myself some technical skills to help me transition from traditional Industrial Design into Interaction Design. While OCAD gave me a solid foundation in design process, User Centred Design practices and creative thinking: technical skills in the area was not in their purview. So far the ADD program has been very software heavy, but we are also about to launch a massive project with the school’s Institute Without Boundries, which should be a lot of intense and fun work. To balance the more technical side of the curriculum, I put together a collection of reading materials from my library, which I hope will influence my projects.

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Design Goggles

By Nate | May 13, 2009


Earlier this week I started thinking about what makes a designer. The question had crossed my mind many times, but hearing it discussed by a design outsider gave me a different perspective on the idea. The design outsider in question was film director Gary Hustwit, being interviewed on the Spark podcast about his new film “Objectified”. The film is, as Gary describes “a documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them”.

Early in the interview, Hustwit is asked what he learned about designers from making the film. He responds by describing some common traits among the designers he interviewed; “Obsessive…In tune with things that are inefficiently done or that don’t work right…Hyper-aware of the world around them”. While I would absolutely agree with Gary’s verdict, his perspective forced me to think about designers, and design as a whole, from an outside perspective.

It is no secret that designers view their profession as essential to society, but outsiders aren’t as generous to design. This difference is however a key opportunity. Designers need to wake up and realize that their often pretentious view of design is actually doing them a disservice. We are at a critical point in time where design is entering the consciousness of the masses. Films like “Objectified” go to show that there is a real interest in design and designers. It is at this critical point that we have an opportunity to educate outsiders about design.

One of the key aspects of design that I feel would help outsiders understand the industry better, is the designer perspective. Rather than touting the latest gadget or furniture design, we should be sharing the ideas of design, the thinking behind the products and how design helps improve things. While I know the market for this type of design coverage isn’t as flashy as glossy pictures, it disheartens me to see so little, even within the design community. I do think that this will begin to change, as Gary’s film suggests, there is an interest in learning about the process of design.

Rather than quarreling between designers about job titles, the industry should take this time to think about how the world sees design. We don’t have to prove ourselves to each other, but to the public

photo by Zlatko Unger

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Towards A New Aggregator

By Nate | April 20, 2009

One of the most intriguing things about the web is spotting connections between disparate sources. Every once in a while, I will find a subject or idea crop up in a bunch of different places in an oddly organic way. This very phenomenon happened a few weeks ago when I spotted a few stories discussing the problems of web aggregators. Both stories made a lot of good points that I wanted to explore and expand since I think they speak to larger trends in the media.

The first story was a blog post by Noah Brier linking to an article by Matt Thompson on Snarkmarket. Matt’s post describes coming to grips with the information overload that eventually comes from using an aggregator like Google Reader. Noah was quick to highlight the key point in Matt’s piece, “Here’s what I’ve come to realize about myself: I fully accept that there’s not a particular link in that ridiculous heap that will change my life. It’s been a while since I worried about missing a single killer post or app or XKCD or whatever; if it’s valuable enough, it’ll find me, I got it.” Like Matt I have slowly come around to accepting the inconsequential nature of missing something online. I also fully agree that if something is important enough it will eventually find you. Matt later proposes the concept of a function labelled “Compress into diamonds”, that would effectively data mine your aggregator to pick the key stories and posts.

Confronted with a similar overload of information is Grant McCracken, who only five days later also wrote about his aggregator woes. Grant rightly points out that this information overload isn’t really the fault of the aggregators but of the users themselves, or as he dubs them “data gluttons”. Hungry for the best news and information we seek to cover every corner of the web, soon finding ourselves up to our necks in data. Grant explains his own coping mechanism is to transform from a “data glutton” to a “data pauper”, choosing to turn off the aggregator. Like Matt, Grant makes some proposals for new features, but goes when step further by explaining, ‘The upshot of this conversation for me was that a market in the information space is emerging.’ I couldn’t agree more and this is where I wanted to expand the conversation by discussing some more.

After reading these two articles and seeing their link, I couldn’t help but draw a line to the plight of the newspaper industry. Grant perhaps led me a little when he points out, “We just don’t want to pay for the editing now made available to us by the market place. Again, the New York Times is a grand institution, but it doesn’t capture or treat the things I need to know about in the ways I need to know about them.” Before the web we relied on newspapers, magazines and other forms of media for our information. These outlets were each able to aggregate information pretty well and provide a fairly good view of what was important for most people. However the web both exposed and created so much more information. The few number of media outlets pre-web was manageable enough that there was little fear of missing out on something. With a growing number of web outlets combined with existing media, the playing field has grown beyond anyone’s management or control. Until now we have been using the paradigms of the past to try and keep up, but in my experience and that of others, this isn’t working.

Matt’s concept of “Compress into diamonds” comes close to what I think is needed right now, but as Grant alludes to, this problem has room for plenty more than one solution. I think one of the key considerations for this is the social dimension of information. While it is a good start to let Google work its algorithmic magic, information is social and needs to be treated as such. I want to know the reading trends of similar users, what my friends are looking at, what influential people are looking at online and how these are all connected. I have a feeling that Facebook is trying to figure some of this out (as I alluded to in my previous post Facebook Connect & Interaction Utility), but they aren’t quite there. These systems are available online in various forms from twitter to del.icio.us, but they have yet to be connected in ways that free up time and attention rather than demand more. In the end this is really what we want. It isn’t about editing and curating information for the sake of it, but doing it in a meaningful way to enrich our experiences online and off.

Photo by Stefano Corso

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Design And The City

By Nate | February 11, 2009

Reading the reports on this year’s proposed city of Toronto budget is kind of frustrating. But I’m not frustrated by the budget itself, rather the slew of city councillors who feel the need to criticize the plan without offering any suggestions or alternative solutions. However the whole situation did get me thinking about how design can play a role in helping improve city services and hopefully put an end to this brand of unhelpful critique.

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Listening Room

By Nate | February 9, 2009

Next to design, my most passionate interest has to be music. I listen to music as much as I can and always enjoy recommending new music to others. In the last month or so I have been hearing some great new stuff that I wanted to share, so I thought I would assemble a list of my favourites. The first thing I need to preface this with is the fact that I am an album person, not in the sense that I listen to physical albums, but I listen to music as an album not as singles. I know that I must seem old fashioned in the world of mp3’s, but I still think music is best enjoyed in the traditional album format. All that aside, here are some of my favourite albums from the last month (some of which are soon to be released).

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Experience Matters

By Nate | February 4, 2009

Last weekend’s ChangeCamp kicked off a week full of intellectual stimulation. After Saturday’s intense one-day session, I attended a User Experience Design workshop at Ryerson on Wednesday and went to the Jane Fulton Surri Lecture at OCAD on Thursday. Obviously enough the week was really inspiring and got me thinking a lot about design and my career.

I wanted to focus specifically on the Ryerson event, which featured three speakers from the User Experience field Tedde van Gelderen, Steve Mast and Ilona Posner. While the last two speakers gave good talks, Tedde van Gelderen’s talk on “The Importance of Experience Design” was the most insightful in my opinion. The talk gave a good overview of the field and really backed up a lot of my own thinking with more concrete examples and explanations.

The talk emphasized the importance of emotion in experience design and even more so in business. Tedde rightly made the distinction that experience design needs to be defined as a holistic approach, rather than by its isolated elements. I am a firm believer in this definition since it is truly where experience design can make the largest impact. It is no longer enough to design good product experiences, customer experiences and others; the real innovators understand that experience covers absolutely every aspect of a business. This definition is also important because it shows that experience design isn’t something you can bolt on, it lies directly at the core and all through the periphery of a business.

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Change Is Good

By Nate | January 29, 2009

Around 140 people gathered at Toronto’s MaRS Centre early Saturday morning to answer the question, “How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?” The question was the impetus for ChangeCamp, an un-conference event. Being my first un-conference, I approached ChangeCamp with a little apprehension. While the democratic intent of the event seems like a good idea, it could falter without the right amount of direction.

The full group assembled in the large auditorium in the basement of MaRS, listening to the organizers’ introductions and instructions. From there, we all broke out into smaller groups, introducing ourselves and discussing our interest in the event. It soon became clear that the people attending the event were from a diverse set of backgrounds: business and politics to technology and design. The discussion wandered as people contributed their two cents. Commonalities were formed and core issues emerged. After this process, each group dispersed, hoping around from conversation to conversation.

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Entering Phase Two

By Nate | December 5, 2008

Regular readers will remember that in October I mentioned I was going to be making some changes to my blog. Since then I have been thinking about and exploring some options and am now pretty close to moving into this so-called “new phase”. Without further ado, I present you with some ideas I hope will be valuable to readers. I would love to get feedback so tell me what you think or if you have some ideas of your own, send them my way.

Design Review
Everyday I come across interesting products and services that I think merit discussion. Whether good or bad, I think deconstructing these designs can lead to some interesting ideas and some healthy debate. I hope to look at these designs from an experience perspective, offering my opinion and possible ideas for improvement.

Interviews
One of the most rewarding aspects of my job at designboom is interviewing artists, designers and architects about their life and work. For my own site, I want to approach who I interview differently. I would like to gather interviews with friends and people I admire in the design industry, exposing interesting people of all sorts. Instead of just focusing on the established professionals, I hope to give the avant-garde a chance to share their experiences too.

Sketching
As a visual thinker, sketching is an intricate part of my process. I have previously relied on my photos to illustrate the blog, but I hope to incorporate more sketching in its place. This could be to visualize a post or simple share something I have been drawing. Sketching is a powerful medium and doing more of it can only help improve my skills.

I decided to post these up, hoping that making them public will motivate me to actually follow through. Secondly, I have been seeing a lot of great design experiences I want to share, so I thought I would introduce you to the concept before I began.

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Facebook Connect & Interaction Utility

By Nate | December 3, 2008

I just finished watching the hour long video of PSFK’s “Good Ideas in Digital” discussion panel. If you have a spare hour and are interested in advertising, design and/or marketing in the digital realm, it is time well spent. Piers Fawkes moderated the panel discussion between Claire Hyland, Johanna Beyenbach, Mike Arauz and Noah Brier. In it they discussed a broad range of topics including issues related to online identity and Facebook’s new Connect service. While listening to the discussion, I was compelled to jot down some notes and ideas, which I thought I would share here.

One of the subjects discussed was Facebook Connect, which began rolling out this week. For those of you who haven’t heard of Connect, it is a service that allows Facebook users to sign into outside sites using their Facebook ID. This would allow them to share their activities outside Facebook with their friends, if they so choose. It is very similar to their earlier failed Beacon effort, which has since been removed after negative reaction from users concerned with privacy issues. With Connect, Facebook is hoping to tweak the idea of Beacon by expanding it and concentrating on privacy concerns. The hope is that by encouraging users to share more information, Facebook can create more targeted advertising for their own site and affiliates.

I have mixed feelings about the idea of Facebook Connect. On the one hand, the service is headed in the direction that OpenID and OpenSocial hint towards, where everyone has a single online identity that they can take all over the web. However, I think their motivation is flawed. As the New York Times mentions in their overview, “just 57 percent of all users of social networks clicked on an ad in the last year, and only 11 percent of those clicks led to a purchase, IDC said. And it turns out that marketers are not so interested in advertising on pages filled with personal trivia and relationship updates.” Advertising is driving the web at the moment, but I don’t think it will remain at the top for long, or at least not in its current form. Reading the comments in Noah Bier’s post on the subject, Ryan Catbird makes a good point about the future of digital advertising, “The position you want to be in is sitting WITH the people and their friends, not BETWEEN them.” Facebook needs to understand that people aren’t responding to traditional advertising, as the above IDC study clearly shows. People want utility from digital products and service, which opens a stream of business models not based on advertising.
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An Idea A Day

By Nate | November 14, 2008

Journeys allow us to explore, they allow us to discover; they can be arduous at times, and full of surprises and fun at other times. Most importantly, journeys provide us with an understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world. The journeys themselves are often the least difficult part; more often it’s finding the courage to start.

- Rachel Hinman

I first heard about Rachel Hinman’s project 90 Mobiles in 90 Days, when she first began this past June. For 90 days, she posted sketches, prototypes and ideas about mobile design and user experience on her blog each and every day. The experiment ended in September and Rachel has since posted an extensive wrap-up of her experience.

When I read over her findings, I immediately thought about an article I read this week by Mike Arauz that recounts an anecdote from Bill Buxton’s new book Sketching User Experience (which I also happen to be reading).

A ceramics professor comes in on the first day of class and divides the students into two sections. He tells one half of the class that their final grade will be based exclusively on the volume of their production; the more they make, the better their grade. The professor tells the other half of the class that they will be graded more traditionally, based solely on the quality of their best piece. At the end of the semester, the professor discovered that the students who were focused on making as many pots as possible also ended up creating the best pots, much better than the pots made by the students who spent all semester trying to create that one perfect pot.

This story shares a number of parallels with Rachel’s experience and bears a similarity to one of her painting professors who undertook a similar approach as the ceramics professor. Drawing this connection made me also think back to my once a day photography project. This interconnection solidified some things in my mind.

  • Creative outlets outside of work are essential. While creative workers have the luxury of being creative at work, there are often constraints and project parameters that prevent you from fully exploring ideas. Finding your own unrestricted creative outlet allows a free flow of ideas that would come out in more restricted environments.
  • Forcing creativity isn’t ideal, but it works. Creative people usually work best when ideas aren’t forced. However adhering to a strict regime of repetitive creation always produces at least one good outcome, if not more. Plus, more practice never hurts.
  • Ideas can’t evolve until they are brought to life. Putting things on paper, words or simply building them is essential to exploring ideas. Forcing oneself to record things is a key aspect of almost every creative field and a richly rewarding practice, if you can get in the habit.

Reading about Rachel’s project has giving me lots of motivation and encouraged me to think about my own creative practice. I have been thinking of a lot of new things recently and I hope to apply what I learned here to these ideas.

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