Interaction Designer from PlainSimple Design LLC - Gilbert Lee, Salt Lake City, Utah

Interaction Designer from PlainSimple Design LLC - Gilbert Lee, Salt Lake City, Utah: "I love this quote from Christopher Alexander, which I got from the latest Getting Real workshop by 37signals: “When a group of different people set out to try and find out what is harmonious...their opinions about it will tend to converge if they are mocking up full-scale, real stuff. Of course, if they’re making sketches or throwing out ideas, they won’t agree. But, if you start making the real thing, one tends to reach agreement.”"

Simplicity

Simplify, simplify, simplify
-Henry David Thoreau

Seek simplicity and distrust it.
-Alfred North Whitehead

Perceptual Edge

Constraints and Creativity

Humanized > Weblog: Web 2.0: Is Converging Towards the Desktop Good?: "Marissa Mayer, the Google VP for User Experience, said it well: 'When people think about creativity, they think about artistic work -- unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. But if you look deeper, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms, such as haikus, sonatas, and religious paintings, are fraught with constraints. They are beautiful because creativity triumphed over the 'rules.' Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome. Creativity thrives best when constrained.'"

landscape that feeds his soul

I just watched this show on KUED. I really enjoyed it. The images and the phrase "landscape that feed his soul" from the following paragraph stuck with me. They reminded me of fall drives in Southern Utah.

"There were many, many artists who at that time, responded in one way or another to the war. Some turned to modernism because they didn’t want to paint anything that resembled in any way the world, this corrupt world that we lived in. Dixon, however, that’s when he becomes all the more determined to go back into that landscape that feeds his soul."

"Maynard Dixon: To the Desert Again," To see more of Dixon's paintings go to Maynard Dixon Collection at the BYU Museum of Art.

not trying to do too much

"Steve made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content," Ive told The New York Times. "It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device -- which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren't obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff."

Ive told the Times that the key to the iPod wasn't sudden flashes of genius, but the design process. His design group collaborated closely with manufacturers and engineers, constantly tweaking and refining the design. "It's not serial," he told the Times. "It's not one person passing something on to the next."

Robert Brunner, a partner at design firm Pentagram and former head of Apple's design group, said Apple's designers mimic the manufacturing process as they crank out prototypes.

"Apple's designers spend 10 percent of their time doing traditional industrial design: coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, brainstorming," he said. "They spend 90 percent of their time working with manufacturing, figuring out how to implement their ideas."

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"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like," Jobs told the Times. "That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

Leander Kahney, "Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth," Wired News, 17 Oct 2006 via signal vs noise

Orbiting the Giant Hairball

Just finished this book that Rich Running lent to me. An excellent read. I went out to try and buy a copy and used ones are running in the $40 to $50 dollar range. Not bad for a book that at one point could be purchased on Amazon for $15.

Chapter 19

Orville Wright did not have a pilot's license.

That's the whole chapter. Its the shortest chapter, but it gives you a bit of the feel of the book. For me it was a fun and insightful read. Highly recommended. (posted to another blog page on 3/300/2005)

keep going

Other companies had already tried to make a hard disk drive music player. Why did Apple get it right?

We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.

What was the design lesson of the iPod?

Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they're really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.

Steven Levy, "Good for the Soul -- Q&A: Jobs on iPod's Cultural Impact," Newsweek - MSNBC.com, 16 Oct 2006.

makes the future tangible today

'Design helps us to bridge the gap between the present and the future,' says Philips CEO Gerard Kleisterlee, 'and makes the future tangible today.'

Jennifer Reingold, "Design Intervention, Fast Company, Oct 2006, p. 88."

Iteration

In the end we had done 64 different iterations of how Google News could look even before it launched.

"Twenty Top Women on Leadership - Marissa Mayer - Google," Newsweek - MSNBC.com, 25 Sep 2006.

Good design is timeless

"Good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death." NPR : Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence':