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

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

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.

While I am no financial expert, the budget seems fairy justified in the current economic climate. Nonetheless, plenty of councillors disagree, criticizing the increase in taxes and fees. Councillor Karen Stintz of Eglinton Lawrence was quoted as saying, “The frustration is bubbling, because since I’ve been a councillor, the budget has grown by $1.7-billion and the residents in the city cannot point to a material improvement in their life for that money…” This statement got me thinking about the visible changes in the city. I think councilor Stintz is a little off base with her comment, but I also think she represents a large portion of citizens who want to see progress.

While not every city service will affect an individual citizen, some do. When an individual interacts with a service they want to know that it is meeting their needs, since they are in effect funding it. When funding for a service is increased, it is only natural to expect an improvement. In reality, this isn’t always the case because a majority of the funds are typically allocated to invisible costs like staff salaries or maintenance. This is where design comes in.

People not only want the city progress, they expect it too. But how is this possible with dwindling budgets and a tough economy? I believe design is part of the answer. Thinking about this issue gave me the idea for a city of Toronto design team. This team wouldn’t be redesigning street furniture or creating a new tourism campaign, but instead be focused on the experience design of the city’s services. I would imagine this team would tackle issues in every sector of the municipal government, shifting their focus from public transit to waste collection. The purpose of this group would be to look at the issues and generate iterative changes from the users’ perspective. Not only would this help to improve the experience of these services, it would also help demonstrate to city’s commitment to progress.

Perhaps I have had too much of the design thinking kool-aid, but I think that government is one of the most prime candidates to benefit from the practice. England has already had success with this type of thinking, but even they aren’t fully leveraging it. The Canadian government is in a prime position to step up and support design thinking, showing its capabilities and setting a model for other governments. We have to start slow though, and the city is the perfect place to do it.

Photo by wvs

Bishop Allen - Grrr…
While this album won’t be out until March 10, my girlfriend and I were lucky enough to see them perform a bunch of their new songs last month at the El Mocambo. If you haven’t already hear of Bishop Allen, they are a great band that has a very pop driven sound that is catchy and complex. From what I know the band came together when the two main members met while studying at Harvard. Their previous two full length albums are also great and worth checking out. This new album is really tight and filled with really well crafted songs. Seeing them live added a whole new dimension to their music, something I hope to see integrated into their future records.

Here We Go Magic - Here We Go Magic
This is a new band that made a big impression on me with their debut album and unique sound. The band is lead by a guy named Luke Temple whose voice bears a real similarity to Paul Simon. However this fact soon fades away after the first track. The album has a kind of dreamy trance quality to it that reminds me a lot of Deerhunter. The album has a some instrumental tracks, but the majority feature some vocal elements.

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Like Here We Go Magic, Animal Collective definitely has a unique sound. I have followed the band for their past three albums, but for anyone who hasn’t heard them before, Merriweather Post Pavilion is a really accessible first listen. However in that same light, their music is completely different from anything else. Sounds and voices surround you as you listen to this album. Lush, is the best word I can think of to describe the rich sounds that fill this amazing record.

Antony & The Johnsons – The Crying Light
Antony Hegarty is the lead singer for this band. The reason I love their music so much is because of his completely unusual voice. There really is no description that does it justice so please just give it a listen. This new album continues in the same vein as their earlier work, but also takes it in some new directions. It is always encouraging when an artist gets better over time, transforming their music along the way.

Various Artists - Dark Was The Night
This complication album was assembled to support the Red Hot Organization, a charity dedicated to raising funds and awareness for HIV and AIDS. The album features 32 exclusive songs featuring a huge array of artist from the Indie music scene. It will be released on February 17. I have been lucky enough to hear a few of the songs and would highly recommend it. One of the standout tracks is an epic ten minute track by Sufjan Stevens, which hopefully gives a glimpse of his next record.

M. Ward – Hold Time
I have never really been a huge fan of M. Ward until this release. While I liked his sound, I was never captivated. Hold Time is a really varied record that bounces around stylistically but is well connected by M. Ward’s rich voice. The instrumentals backing him are just as rich, reminding me a bit of old film scores. Some covers and lots of references to music of the past enhance an overall nostalgic feeling. It will surely receive critical acclaim when it is released on February 17th.

Honourable Mentions

A.C. Newman – Get Guilty

The Whitest Boy Alive – Rules

The Phantom Band – Checkmate Savage

Andrew Bird – Noble Beasts

Handsome Furs – Face Control

Phosphorescent – To Willie

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.

However despite the design community’s understanding, the success of experience design lies partly in the hands of businesses. In this light, Tedde highlighted some of the difficulties that occur when collaborating with businesses. Beside the obvious, one of the main points he alluded to was business’ uneasiness with the converging and diverging methodology, also known as the design process. While designers are fairly adept at focusing and expanding throughout a project, from the outside this process can seem counter-intuitive. And he is right. Without knowing the methodologies of designers, this could really be troublesome to business types. I think the key lesson here is education and understanding. Designers and business people are beginning to communicate, understanding more about each other everyday. This has helped bridge the divide between these two worlds, but we can’t forget that there is still a gap. We need to make sure we can explain design methodology to business and business needs to embrace the qualitative nature of design thinking.

To continue this same point, Tedde explained that organizational structures are one of the key things that makes bridging this gap so difficult. To cope with issues of scale, departmentalization is a necessary evil for most businesses, but it also makes it hard to implement a company wide experience strategy. To illustrate this Tedde used a simple metaphor; a business sees itself as a set of silos, while their user sees them as a long red thread. The user has a long journey of experiences with a company, moving around and changing roles throughout, indifferent to what department handles each aspect. To the user, all their experiences with a business are connected. This simple little analogy is a great way to understand the user’s perspective and gives businesses a clear visualization of why experience design is so crucial to how they should operate.

This interplay between experience design and business is something that seems to be a key issue in the evolution of the field. The two rely on each other as I pointed out above. So while some businesses may not see the need to focus on their users’ experience now, they will miss out on a huge opportunity. Near the end of his presentation Tedde astutely pointed out that expectations are always rising. So if you aren’t focused on experience now, you will have to be soon in order to keep up.

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.

When everyone reconvened in the auditorium, the direction of the afternoon sessions were decided. In traditional un-conference form, individuals announced their topics and posted them on the wall in a giant grid from A-R. These topics ranged from broad ideas around government transparency to specific ones like Facebook groups affecting vehicle licensing. At this point I was beginning to feel a little out of sync with the whole event. As a designer I am used to tackling problems through discussion, brainstorming analysis and creation. However, although there was plenty of discussion, it never really led to much else. Now don’t get me wrong discussion is important, but it is only the first step. So when I examined the big grid of topics, I became a little disheartened by the lack of actionable themes. However I reserved judgment, hoping for the best.

After returning from lunch I approached the grid, hoping to find a session I could identify with. No such luck. However the ChangeCamp organizers added something they called ChangeLabs. These sessions were longer and focused more on producing things rather than discussion. One ChangeLab focused itself on the idea of “social API” a tool to disseminate the ChangeCamp idea and help “changemakers” make change

The group was exactly what I needed, a collection of people focusing on a problem and taking action. The intensive session was really motivating and really reiterated the power of the collective in my mind. By the time the session was over, we were eager for more. We left the session with ideas floating around, ready to take the project further. The entire ChangeCamp group met up in the auditorium once again to wrap up the event. But rather than a closing, the moment felt more like a beginning; the beginning of something bigger.

(Photo via Karen Quinn)

While ChangeCamp had its faults, I know it can only get better through constructive criticism. To begin with, the morning sessions were good at getting people’s brains working and mouths talking, but a little more guidance could help to make them really useful. As for the grid of sessions, I feel it has its place. In all honesty, I think it comes down to the fact that it isn’t really my style. I am someone who needs to take action and begin to think about solutions. Perhaps this can be done in an hour, but I prefer to take some more time. As for the ChangeLabs, I am very eager to see how this evolves. The idea is great and a really good way to spark project around a given theme or idea. Getting so many smart and talented people focused on a single idea is really powerful and really where I believe change can begin to happen.

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.

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.

Expanding on the idea of digital utility, I began thinking about it in the analogue, offline sense. Before the Internet or e-mail, we had a plethora of ways to interact. Technologies such as the telephone or letter writing each have their own unique utility value. Going back even further, smoke signals served as a technology to send messages from a distance. As time has advanced, technologies have evolved to allow communication at progressively richer levels, bringing us closer to in person, one-on-one communication. In a sense, communication in the analogue world is only limited by the constraints of technology. this is still true in the digital world.

Even if we want the digital world to be the most uninhibited flow of interaction possible, technology imposes its constraints. As I see it, the Internet has actually created bigger constraints than in the analogue world. For instance, if I wanted to tell a friend about something before the Internet, I simply had to write them a letter and send it to them. The most apparent constraint to this would be the presence of an address to send the letter to, The same holds true on the Internet, but having somewhere to send the letter is no longer such a given. For example, if I used twitter, the recipient would also need to use twitter and if I wrote an email the recipient would need an email address for me to send it to. My somewhat convoluted point is that the web has fragmented communication to a new extreme. In the old days, the pervasiveness of the postal service provided a higher level of utility than online communication services like twitter. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The beauty of digital content is that everything is just a combination of 1’s and 0’s: the digital world is an information democracy. In this case, a twitter message can be boiled down to a string of digits just like a youtube clip can and a blog post can too. However despite the commonality between all this information the constraints imposed by the technologies prevent them from interacting. While this may sound naïve, this is true at a basic level. Projects like OpenID and OpenSocial are trying to change this and make all information able to be translated back and forth, providing new utility. In this sense, these services are returning us to a world where it didn’t matter what instant messaging client you used: a message was a message. I would categorize this utility as a form of “virtual reality”. As Noah Brier mentioned in the panel discussion, the “virtual reality” aspect the Wiimote allows users to interact with games more naturally. This obliterates the constraints of previous technologies and brings us closer to the interaction we seek. As Mike Arauz pointed out near the end of the discussion, we aren’t becoming more like computers, computers are becoming more like us. As a designer, this validates the ideas of user-centred design, proving that technology is best utilized to enhance our behaviours not create new ones.

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.

The second half of October was a pretty busy one for me. I ploughed through three articles for designboom, two of which are up now. I have also been twittering more, thanks to twitterific and I haven’t really had much to talk about here. One of the reasons I have been at a loss for words is because I have become mildly obsessed with tumblr. So I thought I would use this opportunity to expand on the subject and also discuss the intended versus their actual use of products and services.

The first thing that I wanted to mention about tumblr is the stages of use. Since I first opened up my account earlier this year, I wasn’t quite sure what tumblr was for. My first impression was that it culminated different feeds in one spot, a la FriendFeed. So I hooked up my last.fm, flickr, delicious and every other feed I had. I soon faced a giant list of songs that I listened to, without the value-added features of last.fm, itself. then, a few months ago I started over. I had seen a few more tumblr pages in the wild and wanted to approach the platform differently. I deleted my account and started fresh. At this point I wanted to begin experimenting with using tumblr as a micro-blogging platform, something more akin to its intended use. I soon became addicted to this approach, adding multiple things everyday. One of the key reasons this worked better for me was the bookmarklet that allows you to quickly add to your tumblr. Simply adding a photo or quote to my tumblr is a breeze with this tool. My tumblr is now looking like a record of what occupies my time online, creating a digital scrapbook or timeline if you will. I haven’t looked back since.

Except the truth is that I have, thanks to tumblr’s archive. With a blog, you can go back in time and look at what you were thinking about a particular point in time. the tumblr archive allows you to look back at what you were seeing online at a given point in time. you can now go back in time to see when you first saw that blog that you now read everyday or the website that you forwarded to all your friends. The continual pace of the web makes it hard to keep track of all this information, but using tumblr to track this provides an interesting perspective on your web history; a digital memory perhaps or maybe a form of internet nostalgia?

The reason I think that this little story is so interesting is because it demonstrates that products, and even more so services, are what their users make them. Much like brands, products and service in the digital age are what their users make them. Twitter jumps to mind as the perfect example. While it originated as one thing, it quickly morphed to suit the needs and desires of its users. One of the reasons I enjoy looking at other tumblr pages so much is that each one is different; each one uses the system in a different way with a different approach. While this is true of blogging, it is immensely evident with tumblr.

As a designer I wonder how this can integrate into the process of designing products and services. Can you truly anticipate how users will use your products? I think that this uncertainty has always and will always be there, but the web has accelerated it, making it more obvious. So is it worth fighting or embracing?